Dual Processing
A Quick Introduction & Brief Overview:
Consciousness can be a funny thing. It offers us weird experiences, as when entering sleep or leaving a dream, and sometimes it leaves us wondering who is really in control. After putting me under the influence of nitrous oxide, my dentist tells me to turn my head to the left.
My conscious mind resists: “No way,” I silently say. “You can’t boss me around!”
At its beginning, psychology was “the description and explanation of states of consciousness” (Ladd, 1887).
But during the first half of the twentieth century, the difficulty of scientifically studying consciousness led many psychologists-including those in the emerging school of behaviorism to turn to direct observations of behavior. By the 1960s, psychology had nearly lost consciousness and was defining itself as “the science of behavior.”
Consciousness was likened to a car’s speedometer: “It doesn’t make the car go, it just reflects what’s happening” (Seligman, 1991).
After 1960, mental concepts began to reemerge. Advances in neuroscience made it possible to relate brain activity to sleeping, dreaming, and other mental states.
Researchers began studying consciousness altered by hypnosis and drugs. Psychologists of all persuasions were affirming the importance of cognition, or mental processes. Psychology was regaining consciousness.
For most psychologists today, consciousness is our awareness of ourselves and our environment. Our spotlight of awareness allows us to assemble information from many sources as we reflect on our past and plan for our future. And it focuses our attention when we learn a complex concept or behavior.
IN TODAY’S SCIENCE, ONE OF THE MOST hotly pursued research quests is to understand the biology of consciousness.
Scientists assume, in the words of neuroscientist Marvin Minsky (1986, p. 287), that “the mind is what the brain does.”
We just don’t know how it does it.
For most psychologists today, consciousness is our awareness of ourselves and our environment.
Dual Processing
Many cognitive neuroscience discoveries tell us of a particular brain region that becomes active with a particular conscious experience. Such findings strike many people as interesting but not mind-blowing. (If everything psychological is simultaneously biological, then our ideas, emotions, and spirituality must all, somehow, be embodied.)
What is mind-blowing to many of us is the growing evidence that we have, so to speak, two minds, each supported by its own neural equipment.
At any moment, you and I are aware of little more than what’s on the screen of our consciousness. But one of the grand ideas of recent cognitive neuroscience is that much of our brain work occurs off stage, out of sight. We saw this in Chapter 2’s discussion of the conscious “left-brain” and more intuitive “right-brain” revealed by studies of split-brain patients. Later chapters will explore our hidden mind at work in research on unconscious priming, on conscious (explicit) and unconscious (implicit) memories, on conscious versus automatic prejudices, and on the out-of-sight processing that enables sudden insights and creative moments.
Perception, memory, thinking, language, and attitudes all operate on two levels–a conscious, deliberate “high road” and an unconscious, automatic “low road.” Today’s researchers call this dual processing. We know more than we know we know.
The Libet Experiment
The neurologist Benjamin Libet performed a sequence of remarkable experiments in the early 1980’s that were enthusiastically, if not mistakenly, adopted by determinists and compatibilists to show that human free will does not exist.
Answer the following 7 questions from the video about the Libet Experiment:
- The Libet experiment measured time it took to press a button (true/false)?
- The Libet experiment measured brain activity when a person was making a conscious decision (“when they felt like it”) to push a button (true/false)?
- Libet found brain activity that initiated pressing the button BEFORE the person said they decided to push the button (true/false)?
- Libet found the brain activity bringing about the hand/finger movement stated before the individual willed anything to happen (true/false)?
- Libet found the conscious decision did not cause the movement. (true/false)?
- Biologist Jerry Coyne says Libet’s experiments prove that people do not have free-will (true/false)?
- Libet believed his experiment proved that people have more free-won’t than free-will (true/false)?
CONSCIOUSNESS
Source: Crash Course: States of Consciousness
Altered States of Consciousness
Psychologists define altered states of consciousness–sometimes called non-ordinary states, include various mental states in which the mind can be aware but is not in its usual wakeful condition, such as during hypnosis, anesthetic, drugs, meditation, hallucination, trance, and the dream stage.
Altered states can occur anywhere from yoga class to the birth of a child. They allow us to see our lives and ourselves with a broader lens and from different angles of perception than the ordinary mind.
The Medical Definition of altered states of consciousness is: any of various states of awareness (as dreaming sleep, a drug-induced hallucinogenic state, or a trance) that deviate from and are usually clearly demarcated from ordinary waking consciousness.
The Evolutionary Argument AGAINST Reality
READ>> The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality (10 pg PDF) + Reading Guide & Questions
This article is a fascinating, and admittedly a complicated view for beginners, into the now current theories in psychology.
SLEEP
Questions to answer from the (original link) Crash Course Sleep video:
- Definition of Sleep & scientific importance
- Define & Explain the 4 Stages of Sleep & their associated brain wave types
- Definition & Stage of: Sleep Hypnagogic Jerk
- Definition & Stage of: Night Terrors
- Definition of: Insomnia
- Definition of: Narcolepsy
- Definition of: Sleep Apnea
- Definition of: Oneirology
- Explain mechanisms, importance, current scientific understanding, & importance of REM
HYPNOSIS
MEDITATION
ANESTHESIA
PSYCHEDELICS
NDE