PSYCH101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Circadian Clock, Rapid Eye Movement Sleep, Sleep Debt

• School: University of Waterloo
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYCH101
• Professor: Richard Ennis

Document Summary

Lecture 5 textbook notes: states of consciousness (modules 7-10) Consciousness: our awareness of ourselves and our environment. Some are physiologically induced: hallucinaions, orgasm, food or oxygen starvaion. Some are psychologically induced: sensory deprivaion, hypnosis, meditaion. Cogniive neuroscience: the interdisciplinary study of the brain acivity linked with cogniion (including percepion, thinking, memory, and language). If a simulus acivates enough brain wide coordinated neural acivity - with strong signals in one brain area triggering acivity elsewhere - it crosses a threshold for consciousness. A weaker simulus - a world lashed too briely to consciously perceive - may trigger localized visual cortex acivity that quickly dies out. A strong simulus will engage other brain areas, such as those involved with language, atenion, and memory. Dual processing: the principle that informaion is oten simultaneously processed on separate conscious and unconscious tracks. Blind sight: a condiion in which a person can respond to a visual simulus without consciously experiencing it.