Zusammenfassung der Ressource
State of Consciousness
- Consciousness
- The level of awareness of our internal state
and our external environment
- Attention
- Focused attention
- Concentrating on just 1 task
- Oridinary Wakefullness
- We are aware of our thoughts and the world around
us, but our attention can easily shift into internal
and external stimuli
- Normal waking consciousness
- Is a sate that is organised, clear and meaningful.
- Level of awareness
- Controlled processes
- Require conscious, alert
awareness and mental effort in
which the individual actviley
focuses their attention on
acheiving a particular goal
- Attention is prevented from being
focused on other tasks
- Automatic processes
- Require little conscious
awareness & mental effort. Allow
us to do two things as once.
- Attention is a concentration of mental actvity that involves
focusing on the specific stimuli, whilst ignoring the other
stimuli
- Selective Attention
- A focus on 1 stimulus to the
Exclusion of all others. Refers to the
limitation placed on how much we
can attend to at any given moment.
- Divided Attention
- Refers to our ability to perform two or
more activities at the same time.
- ASC
- Any state of consciousness which
is distinctly different in level of
awareness & experience from
NWC in terms of quality & intensity
of sensations, feeling, thoughts etc
- Natural occurring ASC
- Sleep/Dreaming
- Purposefully induced ASC
- Meditation, hypnosis, taking some types of drugs
- 5 major Psychological characteristics of ASC
- Perceptual distortions, cognition &
memory distortions
- Difficulty maintaining attention
- Distorted cognitive functioning
- causes us to lose touch with reality
- Pain thresholdds
- May be increased, we can
tolerate more paint as it has
less impacy on us
- Sensory thresholds or sensetivity
- Can lead to
heightened or
dulling senses
- Can make senses more
receptive to eternal stimuli
- Change in emotional feeling
- Emotions may be heightened
- Emotions may be numbed
- Change in self control
- Self controlled is lowered when
drunk/high, no slef control when
asleep
- Difficulty co-ordinating & controlling movements
- Hyponpsos may help
subjects gain greater
control over addictions
- Disturbed sense of time
- Distorted sense of time
when drunk or high
- During ASC perceived at a different
speed than during NWC
- Measuring physiological responses that can
indicate different stages of consciousness
- Electrical activity of the brain
- Brainwaves in EEG recordings vary in frequency
- Beta
- Alpha
- Theta
- Delta
- Heart rate
- Sleep/ unconscious decreases HR
- Some drugs which are stimulants increase HR
- Body temp
- During sleep decreaes
- Galvanic Skin Response
- Measures electrical conductivity of the skins surface
- Indicates change in resistance of the skin to electrical current as we
sweat more, electrical conductivity increases
- High arousal leads to increaes in sweating
hence higher electrical coductivity of the skins
surface, hence high GSR hence lower
resistance of the skins surface to electrical
current