How real is our

sense of reality?
Consciousness and altered states
Chapter 7: States of Consciousness
 Life is made up of many kinds of conscious
awareness
 When you say, “I am” what are you referring to?
Who is the “you?” What is the “you” you are
talking about?
 What is consciousness?
 Slippery and difficult to define but we say that
it is our awareness of ourselves and our
environment
 The aware part of dual processing
 We change between different states of consciousness

Psych AP Chapter 7 3
Wide Awake:
Normal waking consciousness
 Three varieties of normal waking consciousness:
 directed consciousness
 flowing consciousness
 daydreaming

 Directed consciousness
 a focused and orderly “one tracked” awareness
 centered on a specific stimulus
 Ex. First learning to drive
Psych AP Chapter 7 4
Normal waking consciousness
 Flowing consciousness
a drifting, unfocused awareness
 your awareness (attention) moves at
random from attention to one stimulus
to another

Psych AP Chapter 7 5
 Daydreaming!!!
 Daydreams
 focused and directed thinking, like directed consciousness, but
these involve fantasies (and not stimuli immediately at hand)

Psych AP Chapter 7 6
Circadian rhythms
 Sleep is one of the cycles that the body does daily.
These cycles are called “circadian rhythms” (from
the Latin circa “about” and diem “day”) and the
body typically operates on a cycle of about 24 hours
 Consider it your internal biological clock

 Other circadian body cycles include:

 body temperature (rises in the a.m. peaks during the day,
dips in the early afternoon and drops again in the evening)
 urine production
 metabolism
 Details:
 Suprachiasmatic nucleus in the Hypothalamus
 deep within the hypothalamus; the internal clock that
tells people when to wake up and when to fall asleep.
Tells pineal gland when to secrete melatonin, which
makes a person feel sleepy.

Psych AP Chapter 7 8
 Sleeping

 We cycle through four distinct stages approximately

every 90 minutes
 (based on EEG measures of brainwave activity during sleep
that reveal different brain-wave patterns)
 REM

 NREM 1
 NREM 2
 NREM 3

9
 Brain Waves & Sleep Stages

Psych AP Chapter 7 10
 States of light and deep sleep

NREM 1 sleep:
the brain is slowing down from calm awake,
alpha waves
May experience:
hypnagogic images – vivid visual events
resembling hallucinations – sensory
experiences without a sensory stimulus
hypnic jerk – knees, legs, or whole body
jerks
Nobody knows for sure what causes them, but
some feel they represent the side effects of a
‘battle for control’
States of light and deep sleep
 NREM 2 sleep:
the brain is slowing further
Sleep spindles – periodic bursts of rapid, rhythmic
brain-wave activity
Approximately 20 minutes
(but half the night)

 NREM 3:
 Slow wave sleep – brain emits large, slow delta waves
 You are hard to wake up
 At the end of the deep, slow-wave NREM 3 sleep that
children might wet the bed
 Approx 30 minutes
REM sleep
 Rapid Eye Movement
 Dream Sleep
 Emergent sleep: the brain begins to be more active;
returns to beta wave pattern of wakefulness though
you are still asleep
 Approximately an hour after first falling asleep
 Motor cortex is active but brainstem blocks the
messages – muscles are relaxed
 Heart rate rises, breathing is rapid and irregular and
every half minute your eyes dart around (announce
the beginning of a dream)
Psych AP Chapter 7 13
Sleeping and dreaming

 Dream Sleep
 beta-wave brain activity (like when you are
wide awake) is present and REM (rapid eye
movement) activity is present
 most people generally dream more than
once in a single night; virtually everyone
dreams every night
Psych AP Chapter 7 15
 Over the years…

Psych AP Chapter 7 16
Sleeping and dreaming
 Why do we sleep and dream?
 What good is it to sleep and dream anyway?
Isn’t it a waste of about 33% of your life?
NO! Sleep and dreaming is important to
maintain normal psychological functioning
Sleep deprivation studies show that going
more than 40 hours without sleep leads to
forgetting, irritation, poor judgment, and
other symptoms
 Sleeping and dreaming

 Extreme sleep deprivation

 studies of extreme sleep deprivation
have shown that at about 120 hours of
sleep deprivation individuals will
begin to behave in ways
indistinguishable from those
experiencing paranoid schizophrenia

18
Current understandings are of five
reasons why we sleep:
 Protection
 Safe to lie asleep in the cave instead of in harm’s way
(falling off cliffs)

 Recuperation
 Helpsto restore and repair brain tissue – high waking
metabolism creates free radicals which are toxic to
neurons
 Can also prune weak or unused connections

19
Current understandings are of five
reasons:
 Restoreand Build our fading memories of the
day’s experiences
 Consolidates our memories – strengthens and
stabilizes neural memory traces
 Better retention of material if you sleep after
training than if you continue awake

 Feeds Creative Thinking

 Dreams inspire literary, artistic and scientific
20
achievements
Current understandings are of five
reasons:

 Supports Growth
 Pituitarygland releases growth hormone
necessary for muscle development
 Regularfull night sleep dramatically
improves athletic ability

21
Psych AP Chapter 7 22
Sleeping and dreaming

 What important thing happens in sleep?

 Studies on sleep and REM deprivation show that
it is the REM (dreaming state) of sleep that is
the KEY reason why we sleep; sleeping without
dreaming is not useful in the big picture
Psych AP Chapter 7 24
 Sleeping and dreaming
 Night terrors
 very frightening event, typically in children, where the
person experiences extreme fear and may scream or run
around during deep sleep. It is difficult to wake them.
typically these are outgrown as the child gets older
Night terrors happen during deep non-REM sleep.
Unlike nightmares (which occur during REM sleep),
a night terror is not technically a dream, but more
like a sudden reaction of fear that happens during
the transition from one sleep phase to another
 Sleeping and dreaming
 Sleep walking and sleep talking
typically occur in NREM3 sleep (not in REM sleep)
about 15% of the population has experienced
these phenomena
the sleeper should be protected from hurting
themselves; individuals have been known to leave
their home driving their car while asleep
The episode can be very brief (a few seconds or
minutes) or it can last for 30+ minutes. Most
episodes last for less than 10 minutes.
If they are not disturbed, sleepwalkers will go
back to sleep. But they may fall asleep in a
different or even unusual place
Altered states of
consciousness
 Alteredstates involve several common
characteristics:
 Distortions of perception
 Intense emotions (positive or negative)
A sense of “unity”
 Altered states are often illogical, indescribable,
and transcendent; they may involve a sense of
“self-evident” reality
Altered states
 Meditation can produce an altered state of
consciousness
 extreme focused concentration away from
thoughts and feelings
 generates a sense of relaxation
 focusing on not thinking
 use of mantras, prayers, or other techniques may
be useful in meditating
Psych AP Chapter 7 29
 Hypnosis
- state of consciousness in which the person is especially
susceptible to suggestion.
 Four Elements of Hypnosis:
1. The hypnotist tells the person to focus on what is being
said.
2. The person is told to relax and feel tired.
3. The hypnotist tells the person to “let go” and accept
suggestions easily.
4. The person is told to use vivid imagination.

Hidden observer – the idea that some part

of you is aware of what is actually going
on.
Psych AP Chapter 7 31
Altered states
 Hypnosiscan produce an altered state of
consciousness
 characterized by relaxation, hypnotic hallucinations,
hypnotic analgesia, age regression, and hypnotic control
 is hypnotism real, fake, or role playing?
 about 15% of the population is easily hypnotized
 has been used to induce anesthesia in certain individuals,
e.g. helping to manage drug-free childbirth; there have
been surgeries carried out with the patient only under
hypnotic suggestion for pain control
33
Perception

 Perception involves deciphering

meaningful patterns in the jumble
of sensory information and is the
brain's process of organizing and
making sense of sensory information
Perception is so much
more than sensation
Selective Attention…
 Definition: the focusing of conscious awareness on a
particular stimulus.
 i.e. - our conscious attention is selective
 We may know that alternative interpretations are
possible, but are able to experience only one at a
time.
 When we focus our awareness on something, it is only
a limited aspect of all we experience
Selective Attention

 We can only experience one

at a time.
 It is not possible to see both
the word and the face
simultaneously
Selective attention
 Change Blindness: When there are brief visual
interruptions (object goes away, colour of an object
changes) in our surroundings, they are often unnoticed.
 Stimuli that we do not notice can still affect us.  Perception
requires attention; however, unattended stimuli can have
subtle effects on our subconscious

 Inattentional blindness – failure to notice that which is

fully obvious when your attention is engaged with
someone or something else
Bottom up and Top Down

 Bottom Up: Processing that starts with

sensory analysis.
 Top Down: Processing by using
experiences/expectations to interpret
sensations.
 Sensation and perception blend into one
continuous process  going up from
specialized detector cells and down from
our assumptions.
Perceptual Illusions

 Visual Capture: If vision must compete

with the other senses, vision is dominant.
 e.g.:sounds at the movies comes from a
projector behind us, however we perceive it as
coming from the screen because we see the
actors speaking.
Perceptual Illusions…
 We see
illusions even
when we
know better
 Illusions can
come from
colour
contrasts and
shape
position
Perceptual Organization…
 Gestalt: German for “form” or “whole” that
emphasizes our tendency to integrate pieces
of information into meaningful wholes.
 “The whole may exceed the sum of its
parts,”
 Means several distinct individual pieces, when
correctly arranged, will be perceived as a single
complete object.
Form Perception…
 Figure-ground: the organization of the
visual field into objects (figures) that
stand out from their surroundings
(ground).
Form Perception: Grouping

 We use a number of rules to group

stimuli together.
 1) proximity
 2) similarity
 3) continuity
 4) connectedness
 5) closure
 These five rules help us to construct
reality.
Four Gestalt examples of grouping.
How do we perceive depth?

1. Binocular cues
 Depth cues that depend on the use
of two eyes
2. Monocular cues
 Depth cues that depend one eye
alone
Binocular Cues
Retinal disparity
 the difference between the images seen by each eye
 our brains combine the images from both eyes and
use the disparity to determine distance
 the larger the disparity the closer object
Convergence
 the more we turn our eyes inwards (towards our nose) to look
at an object, the closer it must be to us – brain notes the angle
of convergence
Monocular Cues

Relative size – When two objects are assumed to be

similar in size the smaller object is perceived as
farther away.
Interposition – If one object
blocks our view of another
we perceive it as closer

Relative clarity – We
perceive hazy objects
as farther away than
clear objects
Texture gradient – coarse
defined textures are
perceived as closer
than fine indistinct
textures.

Linear perspective – Lines are perceived as getting farther

away when they converge.
Relative height – areas that are higher up in your
visual field are perceived as farther away.
Relative Motion – objects that move faster are perceived as closer

Light and Shadow

– Objects that reflect
more light are
perceived as closer
 Motion Perception
Motion is perceived by using depth cues to sense when
an object is changing position.

Larger objects often appear to

move slowly than smaller objects.

Phi phenomenon – illusion of

movement created by two
or more adjacent lights
blinking on and off in
succession (e.g. “moving” sign boards, TV screens)
Perceptual Constancy
Perceiving objects as unchanging despite changes
in size, shape, brightness, and colour

Shape and size constancies:

- Familiar object remain
constant in size
- Size can indicate
distance, and distance
can indicate size
Perceptual Constancy
Perceiving objects as unchanging despite changes
in size, shape, brightness, and colour

Shape and size constancies:

- Familiar object remain
constant in size
- Size can indicate
distance, and distance
can indicate size
 Lightness Constancy
 We perceive an object
as having a constant
lightness despite
changes in illumination
 Relative luminance is
the amount of light an
object reflects relative
to its surroundings

 Perceived lightness
changes with context
and remember colour is
contextual
Old or young
woman?

Remember - you
can’t see both as
the same time