Definitions - chap 5 Flashcards
(131 cards)
conscious meter
uses sensors attached to the patient’s head and gives reading on a scale of 0-100 (no electrical activity in the brain to fully alert). Anesthesiologists using this index deliver anesthetics to keep the patient in the recommended range of 40-60 for general anesthesia during surgery.
consciousness
a person’s subjective experience of the world and the mind. waking consciousness & altered consciousness.
psychologists
hope to understand what it’s like to be human. they seek to understand the subjective perspectives of the people whom they study
phenomenology
how things seem to the conscious person
problems of other minds
the fundamental difficulty we have in perceiving the consciousness of others.
zombie
what philosophers call someone who could talk about experiences and could even seem to react to them, but might not be having any inner experience at all. no clear way to distinguish a conscious person from someone who might do and say all the same things as a conscious person but who is not conscious.
people judge minds according to:
the capacity for experience and the capacity for agency.
experience
the ability to feel pain, pleasure, hunger, consciousness, or fear.
agency
the ability for self control, planning, memory, or thought
mind body problem
the issue of how the mind is related to the brain and body
mental events
intimately tired to brain events, such that every thought, perception, or feeling is associated with a particular pattern of activation of neurons in the brain. assumed by most psychologists.
brain activity may precede the activities of the conscious mind
one study suggests that the brain begins to show electrical activity around half a second before a voluntary action (535 milliseconds). brain also started to show electrical activity before the person reported a conscious decision to move.
consciousness has four basic properties
intentionality, unity, selectivity, and transience.
intentionality
quality of being directed/paying attention toward an object/stimulus.
unity
resistance to division. not easily divided, cannot focus on two stimuli.
selectivity
the capacity to include some objects but not others (filter). conscious of current stimuli and other stimuli are filtered.
transience
the tendency to change. focus of attention keep changing (shift from one stimuli to another).
cocktail-party phenomenon
people tune in one message while they filter out others nearby
diehotic listening
people wear headphones where they hear different messages in each ear.
minimal consciousness
low level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behavior.
full consciousness
occurs when you know and are able to report your mental state. means being aware of having a mental state while you are experiencing the mental state itself. involves thinking about things and thinking about the fact that you are thinking about things.
self consciousness
distant level of consciousness in which the person’s attention is drawn to the self as an object
experience sampling technique
in which people are asked to report their conscious experiences at a particular time. shows that consciousness is dominated by the immediate environment - what is seen, felt, heard, tasted, and smelled - and that all are at the forefront of the mind.
current concerns
what the person is thinking about repeatedly.