PSY 1101 Chapter Notes - Chapter 7: Delta Wave, Sleep Spindle, Jet Lag

• School: University of Ottawa
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSY 1101
• Professor: Najwa Haddad

Document Summary

Consciousness: our awareness of ourselves and our environment. It brings varied information to the surface, enable us to reflect and plan; helps us focus our concentration on more important matters. It enables us to exert voluntary control and to communicate our mental states to others. We register and react to stimuli we do not consciously perceive. We change our attitudes an reconstruct our memories with no awareness of doing so. We instantly and unconsciously react to gender age, appearance when meeting new people. Unconscious information is processed simultaneously on parallel tracks we are not aware of out cognitive processing (or perception) of an object we perceive we just recognize it. One theory (2004): when reverberating brain activity among interconnected brain areas crosses a threshold of intensity, it triggers consciousness. Another theory (1992): consciousness emerges from interaction of individual brain events. Consciousness sometimes arrives late to the decision-making party. Consciousness seems to lag behind the brain events that evoke it.