PSYCH101 Lecture Notes - Cognitive Neuroscience, Iceberg, Flashlight

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Colin Mac Leod

Document Summary

Consciousness: our awareness of ourselves and our environment: allows us to assemble information from many sources as we plan for our future and reflect on our past. Evolutionary psychologists speculate that consciousness must offer a reproductive advantage. Cognitive neuroscience- interdisciplinary study of the brain activity linked with our mental processes is taking the first small step by relating specific brain states to conscious experiences. Based on cortical activation patterns, cognitive neuroscientists can now in limited ways read your mind: can tell which of the 10 similar objects (hammer, drill, etc) you are viewing. Dual processing cognitive science tells us that particular brain regions become active with a particular conscious experience. We have evidence of two minds each supported by its own neural equipment. One grand ideas of recent cognitive neuroscience is that much of our brain work occurs off stage, out of sight ie. studies of split brain patients revealed a conscious left brain and a more intuitive.