Psychology Chapter 9 Lectures (Lecture 35-36)
Slide 2: Consciousness is the closest thing to the soul
Working memory is part of consciousness we have already learned.
Ex: ‘How many windows are there in your house?’ You will image the house and count the windows
inside your head, and you use your working memory. However, who counts the windows?
We think ourselves as relatively constant, but that isn’t fully the case- for example, you are different
from when you were 12, but both today and then are part of your self.
Materialists have considered control with consciousness, meaning that behavior is part of our own. Ex:
Criminals say that their behavior was caused by their upbringing, but not everyone believes that.
Freud talks about unconscious/consciousness. Most don’t believe the Freudian view.
Many of our behavior is considered habitual and becomes subconscious, but it’s not devious.
Slide 3: Conscious vs. unconsciousness-
The battle between coke and pepsi; when you buy pepsi time after time, you build a strong habit in
which your muscle memory will get you the pepsi without thinking about it. However, you have a
resolution to get coke from now on, but at the moment where you press the pepsi button, you should
remember the resolution or else you get captured by the habit.
Slide 4: sleep is in the altered state. All of these are consciousness
Slide 5: We can measure neural impulse, and compared to computer impulses, they are slower.
However, human are capable of doing more than the computer. Many question why that is, and some
answer that we have parallel distributing- the brain sends functions to multiple parts of the body at the
same time, while the computer does it one at a time. Except for the working memory (You can think
about anything at a given time, but you can only selectively attend to them).
Selective attention example- the professor looks at the student as people. People from the back of the
class would fully see laptops though, and those are distractions. How do you selectively attend to them?
Slide 6: Two words are intertwined, one word is written in grey, the other in red. Try to read only the red
words. When you do a bunch of trials, you will start attending to one word and ignore the other ones
and the other coloured word will disappear. This does not involve the visual system but the selective
attention system.
Ex: you can listen to red hot chili pepper, and you can listen to only the frequency and remove the bass.
Slide 7: Mental resources are like financial resources, in which you make decision on what to spend your
attention to. You will devote energy on thinking, but can’t focus on every sensation. The idea of thinking
only one at a time is linked to sleeping. Ex: if you spend your day on calculus, you’ll be exhausted at the evening. Sleep is needed to recharge
the cognitive ‘battery’.
Slide 8: dichotic listening task- you have a attending channel and an unattending channel, where you
ignore one auditory signal, and pay attention to other things. So what happens to the part where you
don’t listen?
So you make them listen from one side of the ear and ignore the other side of the ear. The unattended
side will play weird sounds (like backward sounds) or different language in the same frequency, you
don’t realize that. That’s because it was thought that the frequency was filtered out, therefore when
these are used with different voices, you would notice them.
There seems to be more though.
Homophones are played on both ears. Ex: right on left, and write on right. They are asked on what they
remember on the unattended and attended word. The attended word is remembered right, but the
unattended word is spelled out. They will spell out the word based on the unattended word. We
perceive unattended things and it affects what we see at what we attend to.
Ex: Hugh Grant was with a beautiful lady as a partner. Then he was found out he was with a trashy
hooker and his reputation was almost broken. He went to the Lenno show and apologized. Right after
that the psychologists analyzed his actions and showed his dress. His suit was too small, and when you
close it too tight, you will be squirming away which makes you look like a low-life. This was manipulated
and outfitted to make him appear apologetic. This is an example to attention and how it affects us.
Slide 10: Split brain- people who had epilepsy early on agreed to have their corpus collossum severed.
Nobody knew in the past what this caused. Afterwards, the patients are talked to, and weird reports
come out, like where they grab the nurse or throw stuff around. It was discovered that the left hand
would be the one that starts these. The patients are presented information to just the left or right
hemisphere. When presenting it just to the right hemisphere
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