PSYC 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Bispectral Index, Suprachiasmatic Nucleus, Chronobiology

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

Document Summary

A personal awareness of feelings, sensations, and thought. William james described consciousness like a stream it is continuous, can change, and has depth. The form of consciousness involving fantasy, and occurring while you are awake, is called daydreaming. We can become adept at using day dreams to solve problems, to rehearse a sequence of events, or to find new ideas. Daydreaming is an altered state of consciousness. Anesthetic awareness occurs when surgical patients are conscious during surgery (experienced by 1/1000 surgical patients) They can hear the conversations of the nurses and feel the pain of the surgical procedure but they can"t tell the doctors what they are experiencing because of powerful muscle relaxers that cause paralysis. This showed researchers that just because blood pressure and respiratory rates are lowered that doesn"t ensure that there is a corresponding decrease in awareness . Researchers have developed techniques to measure awareness more directly.