1. States of Consciousness
“No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”
Albert Einstein

2. What is consciousness?
Awareness of one’s own mental activity & environment
Personal
Can be selective
Consciousness is continuous and ever-changing
Phenomenal consciousness (P-consciousness) simply experience
Subconscious-part of mind below level of conscious perception
Preconscious-memories or feelings not part of one's immediate awareness but recalled through conscious effort.
Consciousness is simply being aware of something – within the realm of psychology, we talk about consciousness as being an awareness of one’s sensations, thoughts, and feelings (your mental activity) at any given moment.
Everybody’s consciousness is unique and personal, just like you are. What you are aware of about yourself is obviously something that only you are aware of.
We are capable of paying attention to certain things, which involves selective attention, which we’ll talk about in a little bit.
Consciousness is continuous – similar to the stream-of-consciousness line of research that was popular at the turn of the century.
In an interesting study from 1978.

3. Unconscious involves complete or near-complete lack of responsiveness
Fainting
Coma
PVS
Sleep
Persistent vegetative state (PVS) condition in which individual loses higher cerebral powers of brain,
but maintains sleep-wake cycles with full or partial autonomic functions.

6. Attentional Processes
Selective Attention
ability to focus awareness on single stimulus to exclusion of other stimuli
Cocktail party phenomenon
Divided attention
ability to distribute one’s attention and simultaneously engage in two or more activities
Multi-tasking

7. Mental Control & Thought Suppression
Wegner and colleagues (1987)
Can we at suppress our thoughts?
IV: 2 (order:expression/suppression X suppression/expression)
DV: # of rings of bell (to indicate thinking of ‘white bear’) and mentions of ‘white bear’
Rebound effect
Stereotypes, dieting
participants who suppressed anxious or depressing personal thoughts showed significant rebound effect compared to those who expressed thoughts from outset
Generally good control but
sometimes we fail
So how good are we at controlling our thoughts?? It turns out that we’re actually not very good at it…for a couple of reasons.
But first let’s talk about what is involved in studying thought suppression. In a series of ingenious studies, Daniel Wegner and his colleagues created a task that sounds a little ridiculous but works really well. They brought participants and randomly divided them into two groups. Both groups took part in two five-minute ‘stream of consciousness activities’ – one where they just say (out loud) everything that comes to mind but to try and think of a white bear (the expression condition) and in the other five-minute session, they were asked to suppress any thoughts or to not talk about a ‘white bear’ (the suppression condition). They reverse ordered the order in which they took part in the expression vs. suppression conditions such that half the participants did the expression (where they could say anything they wanted) session first, and then the suppression condition and the other half of the participants did the suppression condition and then the expression condition.
So the independent variable is what order they do the activities in. The dependent variable is the number of times that they ring the bell – indicating that they have either thought of and/or mentioned a white bear in their ‘stream of consciousness’ activity.
What they found was that if you were in the expression and then suppression condition, you thought of or mentioned a ‘white bear’ fewer times in the suppression activity than in the expression activity. Well, that makes sense. In one condition, you are told to think about something, so you do. In the next activity, you are told not to think about something, so you don’t. Well, listen to this…in the suppression and then expression condition, participants thought of or mentioned a white bear fewer times in the suppression activity BUT they thought of or mentioned them MORE in the expression activity than did the group who did expression than suppression.
What is happening is that after you have expended mental energy not thinking about something, you are then so worn out that you think about it more than if you hadn’t tried not thinking about it to begin with. So suppressing a thought means that you actually rebound and become preoccupied with the suppressed thought.

8. Carl Jung collective unconscious
Analytical psychology, part of unconscious mind, shared by society, people, or all humankind, product of ancestral experience, contains concepts such as science, religion, and morality.
later changed to objective psyche.
common to everyone; has better sense of self's ideal than ego or conscious self

9. “Daydream Believer” Imaginary scenes & events that occur while awake
Possible functions:
Mental rehearsal
Mental arousal when bored
Problem solving (practical & creative)
Pleasure
Has your reading ever been interrupted by daydreams? Why do we daydream? What do we know about daydreaming? In 1956, a psychological study was done to find out what college students daydream about. They found that most of their daydreams involved vocational success, sex and romance, money and possessions, achievement or physical attractiveness. Another study in 1958 found that students spend about one-fourth of lecture time daydreaming, mostly about sex. Essentially, daydreams tend to reflect areas of current interest or concern in a person's life. Two of the most common daydream "plots" are the "conquering hero" and the "suffering martyr" themes. In the conquering hero fantasy, the daydreamer is a famous, rich or powerful person - a star, athlete, musician, famous surgeon, brilliant lawyer or magnificent lover. Themes like these seem to reflect needs for mastery and escape from the frustrations and compromises of everyday life. Suffering martyr daydreams are built around feelings of being neglected, hurt or unappreciated by others. In suffering-martyr fantasies, some event occurs that causes others to regret their actions and realize what a wonderful person the daydreamer was all along. At one time or another, just about everyone has felt misunderstood and unappreciated. These feelings seem to underlie the suffering-martyr daydreams. Are daydreams good or bad? In 1974, a psychologist found three patterns in fantasy - two negative and one positive. Some people find that their daydreams are distracting. They have difficulty concentrating, their mind wanders, and their daydreams often make them anxious. A second pattern is represented by the person who has very negative daydreams filled with unpleasant emotions, guilt, self-torment, fears of failure, hostility, aggression and self-doubt. These people definitely do not enjoy their daydreams.
Most people fall into the third category - the "happy daydreamer." They have pleasant daydreams and enjoy them, using them for self-amusement, future panning, problem solving and so on. Daydreams serve many functions. They often fill a need for stimulation, when a person must perform a routine or monotonous task. They also improve the ability to delay immediate pleasures, so future goals can be achieved. Daydreams can help define future plans and aspirations by allowing the daydreamer to try out various roles, lifestyles and occupations. Fantasies often act as a substitute source of gratification at times of frustration or deprivation. For example, during World War II, psychologists studied 32 conscientious objectors, who all volunteered to go on a semi-starvation diet for six months. By the end of the twenty-fifth week, food dominated their thoughts, talk and daydreams.
Daydreams can be a valuable outlet for frustrated impulses. If you have a momentary urge to kill that fool in front of you on the highway, substituting fantasy for action may avert disaster. Psychological studies in the laboratory confirm that releasing hostility thorough daydreams can reduce the impulse to behave aggressively. Perhaps the greatest value of fantasy is its contribution to creativity. In your daydream, nothing is impossible - a quality allowing for a tremendous flexibility and fluency of thought. So - daydreaming is generally associated with positive emotional adjustment, lower levels of overt aggression and greater mental flexibility or creativity. There are, of course, limits to everything. If you spend so many waking hours in a dream world that you are unable to do your work, you are no longer having daydreams - you are being had by your daydreams!

10. Biological Rhythms Periodic fluctuations in physiological functioning
Four cycles:
Yearly
28-day
Circadian (24 hours)
90 minutes
Our bodies have periodic fluctuations in our physiological functioning. There are four main cycles – a yearly, 28-day, circadian (24 hour) and 90 minute cycles.
We’ll be focusing on the circadian rhythm.

11. Circadian Rhythm Influences sleep & wakefulness
Blood pressure
Hormones
Body temperature
Humans drift toward 25-hour cycle because of advances in technology
Syprachiasmatic nuclei (SCN)
Controls our timing device for circadian rhythm
There are many functions in virtually all living organisms that display an approximately 24-hour long rhythm.
The circadian rhythm synchronizes behavior and body states to changes in the environment.
Our circadian rhythm influences most strongly our sleep and wakefulness patterns, blood pressure, our hormones, and our body temperature. Humans tend to be most active and alert during the middle of the day, when body temperature peaks, and least active and alert at night, when body temperature drops to its low point.
Everyone is influenced by circadian rhythms, but everyone’s inner clock is set somewhat differently. Are you a morning person or a night person? Would you rather wake up at 6, 8 or 10am? How easy is it for you to work late into the night? Although morning types fall asleep 88 minutes earlier at night and wake up 72 minutes earlier in the morning, few people are very extreme in their preferences. Most fall somewhere in the middle and adapt as needed to the schedules they must keep. Most college students tend to be night people – though that changes as we age.
Is the circadian rhythm set by an inner clock or is the human body responsive to outside patterns of lightness and darkness? In January of 1989, an interior designer by the name of Stefania Follini, descended into a Plexiglass bunker that was buried in a cave in New Mexico. Sealed off from sunlight, outside noises, changes in temperature, schedules, and clocks, she lived alone in this underground home for 131 days – a ‘free-running’ period that allowed her body to establish its own rhythm. Her only link to the outside world was a personal computer. When Follini emerged from her isolation in May, she thought it was only March. Her ‘day’ had extended to 25 hours, then to 48. As time went on, she slept and woke up later and later. She also stopped menstruating, ate fewer meals, and lost 17 pounds.
Other volunteers have similarly been isolated for shorter periods of time (typically about two weeks). Some naturally settle into a ‘short’ day, but most free-ran on a longer cycled that averaged 25 hours. With each successive cycle, these subjects tended to go to sleep a little later and to wake up a little later. Body temperature and hormone levels tended to follow the same rhythm. Like Follini, these subjects drifted towards a longer day and then underestimated the amount of time they had been isolated. When reexposed to sunlight, the subjects readjusted their biological clocks.
Because of changes in our society and technology, people are starting to drift towards a 25 hour difference, with sleep being the activity we tend to cut back on. Before Thomas Edison invented the light bulb, people went to bed not long after it went dark and got up when it was light. It was too hard to try and keep a room lit well enough with a fire or oil lamp so they followed the natural light of the sun. Getting enough sleep wasn’t difficult as there wasn’t much to do once it got dark but get some sleep. Now, however, many factories and stores have people working 24 hours a day. It’s easier to adjust to stay up later and get up later than it is to adjust to getting to sleep earlier and getting up earlier.
So where is this timing device? Experiments have shown that the circadian rhythm is controlled in the brain’s hypothalamus, just above the optic nerves, by two pinhead-size clusters of neurons called the suprachiasmatic nuclei. As we saw earlier, light passing through the eye is converted to neural signals and sent to the cortex through the optic nerve. Apparently, some of these optic nerve axons – and the information they convey about light – are diverted to the SCN. Nestled in the center of the brain, the pea-shape pineal gland also plays an important role. As darkness falls, the pineal gland produces melatonin – a hormone that facilitates sleep by letting the body know that it’s dark outside. When light strikes the retina, melatonin secretion is slowed down. As we’ll see later, melatonin is often used to treat people with chronic insomnia.

12. Meditation
Procedure that uses mental exercises to achieve highly focused state of consciousness
TM transcendental meditation
Relaxation response
Effects include:
Increased self esteem & sense of control
Overcoming insomnia, preventing smoking
Meditation has been used for centuries, throughout a variety of cultures, as a means of controlling one’s consciousness.
Transcendental meditation is a form of meditation that involves repeating a ‘mantra’ or word during a 20 minute period of focused relaxation (where breathing and awareness of the body is the key concern). It was a movement begun by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, who has come under fire for turning meditation corporate – there is now a multi-million dollar industry that capitalizes on the ‘sacredness’ of meditation and claims that you can only learn to do it correctly by learning (and paying to learn) from a trained teacher. Since most religions have incorporated some form of meditation (whether it’s a solitary vigil or a more traditional meditational procedure), I would be skeptical of people now making money off of this procedure. Perhaps to become more advanced, it’s helpful but to get the basic health and mental benefits of meditation, it’s actually pretty easy to do yourself.
TM has been shown to help people reduce the activity of their autonomic nervous systems.
The Relaxation Response is a term that was coined by Dr. Herbert Bensen after studying people who practiced Transcendental Meditation. Bensen took the principles of TM and removed them from their Eastern religious context in order to make them more accessible for westerners.
The basic procedure is: 1. To sit comfortably with your eyes closed. 2. Pay attention to your breathing, and repeat a word or phrase or prayer silently to yourself as you exhale. If you find your mind wandering (and it most likely will), just notice it and passively bring your attention back to your breathing. 4. You should practice for approximately 20 minutes every day (or at least 3 to 4 times a week). Don’t set an alarm, but you can have a clock in view if you need to.
Practitioners of the relaxation response technique report and increased awareness of their body, being able to relax better when stressed, and better concentration.
Medically, it has been shown to lower blood pressure and reduce the risks of cardiovascular disease. Some have had success in dealing with insomnia or as a tool to aid those who want to quit smoking (i.e., helping to overcome cravings).

13. Near-Death Experiences (NDE)
altered state of consciousness reported after close brush with death
often similar to drug-induced hallucinations

14. Measuring (proving) NDEs
As NDE intensity increases according to Rasch scale* — peace, joy and harmony, followed by insight and mystical or religious experiences – increase.
Interest in NDE originally spurred by research of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (Swiss-born psychiatrist & author On Death and Dying) where she first discusssed what is known as Kübler-Ross model.
*(Rasch Scale – more credible person = more believable)

15. Near-Death Experiences
Dualism
presumption that mind and body are two distinct entities that interact
Monism
presumption that mind and body are different aspects of the same thing

16. simulate consciousness.AI
In the field of Artificial Intelligence, there is a movement to create digital computer programs that can
simulate consciousness.
Turing Test
Test to determine whether or not computer satisfied operational definition of "intelligent" (which is actually quite different from test for consciousness or self-awareness). This test is commonly cited in discussion of artificial intelligence.