PSYCH 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Electrical Energy, Mind

• School: UMASS-Amherst
• Department: Psychology & Brain Sciences
• Course: PSYCH 100
• Professor: John Bickford

Document Summary

Dreams for survival: dreams represent the responses the reprocessing od important information from daily life, possibly an artifact from a time when people had limited brainpower, dreams are inherently meaningful, criticisms. Reverse learning thory: dreams have no meaning at all, mental housekeeping. Flushing away unnecessary information accumulated throughout the day: un-learning of material that serves no purpose and could end up being confusing. Thereby making the search for meaning in the dream content pointless: criticisms. Activation synthesis: brain produces random electrical energy during sleep, electrical energy randomly stimulates mental content, the brain excels at making meaning out of ambiguous or fragmentary stimuli. Prese(cid:374)t or re(cid:272)e(cid:374)t fears, e(cid:373)otio(cid:374)s, (cid:272)o(cid:374)(cid:272)er(cid:374)s, or e(cid:454)perie(cid:374)(cid:272)es (cid:373)a(cid:455) guide the (cid:271)rai(cid:374)"s interpretation. What starts out as random ends in something meaningful. Attention: a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information. Selective attention: choosing the stimuli in the environment that will enter awareness, goal directed selection, purposeful attention, stimulus-driven capture, stimulus captures attention.