PS101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Reticular Formation, Sleep Deprivation, Circadian Rhythm
Document Summary
Consciousness is the awareness of internal and external stimuli. Some of the thoughts entering your stream of consciousness are the result of intention: we seem to be easily able to shift our attention to things of importance or interest in our environment. Mind wandering refers to people"s experience of task-unrelated thoughts. The distinction between what we control about our mental processes and what just seems to happen is often referred to as the difference between controlled and automatic processes. According to the theory of unconscious thought, attention is the key to distinguishing between conscious and unconscious thought processes. Conscious thought is constrained by capacity limitations such as that you can only consider a small subject of all relevant information. The advantage to unconscious thought is that it doesn"t have the same limitations. Conscious thought is thought with attention; unconscious thought is thought without attention . The most commonly used indicator of variations in consciousness is the eeg (electrodes)
