PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Autoimmune Disease, Reuptake, Codeine

• School: McGill University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 100
• Professor: Jens Pruessner

Document Summary

People can be conscious about their surroundings even when they appear not to be. People manipulate conscious experiences through natural methods meditation, as well as artificial methods drugs. You are conscious of only certain things that happen, for example, you are not conscious of the metabolic processes going on in your body. We can never know if people are experiencing the world similarly because each of us experiences consciousness subjectively. Conscious experience can be seen as unified and coherent. The mind is a continuous stream and thoughts float on that stream. Automatic tasks are done with little or no conscious effort. Unfamiliar or difficult tasks require greater conscious effort. Such controlled processing is slower than automatic processing, but it helps us perform in complex or novel situations. Between vegetative state and fully conscious state is the minimally conscious state where people make some deliberate movements, and may try to communicate.