Biological Psychology Unit Two AG Mr. Cline Marshall High School Psychology
Consciousness Consciousness is your awareness of how and why you react to your surroundings. During this lesson, you may realize that you pass through multiple states of consciousness during any given day. Humans are self-aware. That is to say we realize that we are consciously thinking. Do you remember your first day of school? Walking through the halls, alone or maybe with a parent or sibling? Think back to that time, and think about how much you have changed from that small child. What you have just done is practiced your self-awareness. Self-awareness is also how we know that we are separate from other people.
Consciousness Through self-awareness, we maintain a sense of self separate from others around us. It might seem to make us separate, but, more than that, it allows us to communicate. Our awareness of ourselves is called consciousness; consciousness is a concept that refers both to our self-perception and to our responses to the world around us. We think. We make choices and consider our actions. We alter our behaviors based on what we know. We do not live our lives solely on instinct. We not only act, but we also reflect on our actions.
Consciousness What this means is when you're texting your friends, you're conscious that your message is being recorded, and you know how you express your opinions. Knowing your personal point of view and being mindful of how you communicate your beliefs to others is selfawareness. It is through consciousness that we choose to act, instead of just acting on the stimuli around us. Without consciousness, there would be no culture, no language and (most importantly) no reality TV. (sarcasm font ON.) Since consciousness is fundamental to the experience of being human, psychologists have studied it from several angles. For example, Freud focused on the power of the unconscious mind to influence our conscious behaviors.
Consciousness According to Freud, a central conflict in your mind is the one between your repressed, unconscious desires and your controlled, conscious behaviors. Of course, most people don't do everything that pops into their heads. Freud's theory makes this struggle the fundamental one of consciousness. Modern-day psychologists study conscious deliberate behaviors (like texting your friend to go to the movies) and unconscious automatic behaviors (like your unconscious anxiety about whether your friend likes you). Psychologists also consider the role of dreams and drugs in altering consciousness. It might seem obvious, or even trivial, but some psychologists follow in the footsteps of Freud and try to understand how we can use these altered states to understand the conscious and unconscious mind.
Consciousness Humanistic psychologists focus particular attention on our sense of self-awareness. Altered states of consciousness can be reached through sleeping, dreaming, being hypnotized, meditating and taking psychoactive drugs. You may text your friends when you're sleepy or after you've had a few drinks. When you see the text messages the next day, you may be surprised at what you texted while you were less conscious! Remember back when you were a child to the sheer thrill of spinning in circles until you were dizzy? This might have been your first venture into altered states of consciousness. The way you saw the world was changed, and that change was exciting.
Consciousness Altered states of consciousness sound exciting and maybe a little exotic, but we enter these states every day, whether from 'road hypnosis' on the commute to work, daydreaming on our coffee break or when we finally lie down to sleep. Sleep What happens when you sleep? Why are dreams typically more intense as morning approaches? Today we are going to try yo guide you through the stages of the sleep cycle that make up a full night's rest. You'll spend about one-third of your life sleeping. Added up, that's more than 9,000 days of sleep! The average time spent sleeping changes over your lifetime. As a newborn, you might have slept 18 hours a day, whereas as an adult, you may sleep about eight hours a night.
Sleep But what is sleep, and what goes on in your body when you're asleep? Your sleep-wake cycle is a biological rhythm, or a regularly recurring pattern. More specifically, it's a 24-hour cycle or circadian rhythm that's linked to daylight and darkness. Your circadian clock sets your internal functions like changes in blood pressure, body temperature and metabolism to the local time in predictable ways. For example, you may feel more and more awake as the morning progresses, but then feel less alert as the afternoon wears on, then continue to slow down in the evening as you prepare for sleep. If you've ever traveled to a different time zone, you know the effects that jet lag can have on your biological clock.
Sleep When you sleep, your body goes through five stages. Stage 1 Sleep During the first 5-minute stage, you transition from wakefulness to sleep. If you had electrodes on your forehead hooked up to an EEG (electroencephalogram), this machine could measure electrical activity in your brain. As you fall asleep, an EEG would show that your electrical brainwaves change from rapid beta waves when you are awake to slower alpha waves as you become drowsy, then finally to even longer theta waves as you drift off to sleep. During Stage 1 sleep, you might twitch or feel like you're falling as you begin to drop off to sleep.
Sleep Stage 2 Sleep The next 20-minute stage is a deeper sleep. Your heart rate and breathing slow; your body temperature drops. Whereas, Stage 1 may feel like dozing off, if you were awakened from Stage 2 sleep, you'd actually feel like you'd been asleep. Stage 2 is characterized by sleep spindles, or short bursts of brain activity. Stage 3 and 4 Sleep The third and fourth stages combined consist of 30 minutes of deep sleep when your brain produces super slow delta waves. The difference between the two stages is the increased amount of delta waves in Stage 4.
Sleep Stage 3 and 4 Sleep During this stage of slow-wave sleep, your pituitary gland releases growth hormones, your muscles relax and your body rejuvenates. After Stage 4, the cycle repeats itself in reverse order - from Stage 4 to Stage 3 to Stage 2. And after about 90 minutes of sleep, you enter REM sleep. REM Sleep When REM, or rapid eye movement happens, your closed eyes move back and forth and you dream. Your breathing and heart rate increase, although on the outside you appear calm and asleep. After the REM stage, you return to Stage 2 sleep and the cycle continues.
Sleep You may complete up to six 90-minute sleep cycles in one night. Disorders The length of your REM sleep tends to increase from 10-20 minutes as the night progresses. Thus, dreaming tends to get more intense as night approaches morning. Sleep disorders can disrupt your sleep cycle. Many sleep disorders have biological causes, but some have psychological causes. For example, insomnia, or the inability to fall asleep, can be brought on by emotional stress. The exact functions of sleeping and dreaming are unknown, but psychologists have attempted to interpret what happens and why when we sleep.
So let s explore the importance of sleep and some of the more famous theories regarding why we dream. Sleeping & Dreaming Neither sleeping nor dreaming is fully understood by psychologists. What goes on when you sleep? Sleep is important to a well-functioning person. Your body restores itself while you sleep. Growth hormones are released more at night than they are during the day. The amount of sleep you get impacts your mood and ability to function. Lack of sleep negatively impacts your ability to process, and to forge, new memories.
Sleeping & Dreaming REM (Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, which is when you dream, is especially important for brain development. It's also something that psychologists find very interesting to study. If you were woken up from REM sleep, you'd likely report that you were dreaming. You probably dream more than once a night, but you don't always remember all of your dreams. Several attempts have been made at dream interpretation, or the placing of meaning related to psychological health to dreams. Theories range from suggestions that we workout our everyday problems in our dreams to dreams being a function of routine brain maintenance, where information is moved into long-term memory. Let's review some of the more famous theories.
Sleeping & Dreaming Psychoanalytic Theory Freud believed that dreams manifest our repressed sexual desires. He called the actual content of dreams, the manifest content, and the repressed desires, the latent content. Freud's book The Interpretation of Dreams attempted to translate the symbols of some common manifest content into hidden meanings, or latent content. However, there is little scientific support for Freud's theory that dreams are merely wish fulfillment. So if you dream that you're smoking a cigar while walking into a cave, well, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Sleeping & Dreaming Activation-Synthesis Theory The activation-synthesis theory suggests that brain activity during REM sleep activates certain areas of the brain, and the brain attempts to synthesize this activity into something meaningful, which results in dreams. While this theory suggests that we dream in an attempt to regulate internal activity, others suggest that we dream to regulate external stimuli, such as noises. Imagine your alarm clock goes off while you're deep in REM sleep. Instead of waking, you might dream about a fire alarm. Your brain interprets the noise as part of the dream and you continue sleeping.
Sleeping & Dreaming Psychotherapeutic Theory Psychotherapeutic theory suggests that we dream in order to confront our emotions in a safer and less defensive environment. According to some collected reports on the content of dreams, more dreams are bad than good. Have you ever had one of those dreams where someone's chasing you; you can't get away and you're scared. Well, psychotherapeutic theory would say that you're scared of something in your real life, and instead of being panicked and paralyzed while you're awake, you do it while you're asleep.