Psy 120.3 Lecture 2025/10/08

Consciousness

The value of QEEG when exploring the mysteries of consciousness

When drugs are given that are given to induce unconsciousness (remifentanil is one) fail to do their job, the

patient with extremely relaxed muscles is unable to show or tell doctors that there is a problem. The

conscious patient could become alarmed and emotional during the operation, spiking blood pressure and

heart rate to dangerous levels. QEEG uses sensors attached to the patient's head and gives readings from 0

(no electrical activity) to 100 (fully alert). The recommended range during surgery is 40 to 60. Post-surgical

reports of consciousness and memory of the surgery are reduced (Myles et al. 2004). Falling below 45 risks

negative surgical outcomes and even death (Kertai et al. 2010).

Consciousness is the subjective experience of the world and the mind. Experience is

defined not only as 'being awake' but also during a vivid (lucid) dream.

One of the intellectual tools for understanding consciousness is phenomenology: how the world is structured

to the conscious person, with their present understanding of mind and behavior. Think of it as how we 'map

out' our reality. Now we know that map can be measured by using the technologies that define the default

network. This leads to phenomenological assessment, a real-world tool for diagnosticians (DSM-V). 

Key aspects of phenomenological assessment


Most people have come to trust each other in describing their inner lives, reaching the general

assumption that other human minds are like their own. Not all are, however, as brain structure and function

can differ in fundamental ways. We have learned this from the study of the Autistic Spectrum.

Gray et al. (2007) created an online survey, asking people to compare the minds of 13 different targets, such

as a baby, chimp, or robot on 18 different mental capacities, such as feeling hunger, pleasure, pain, or

consciousness. Using factor analysis, two different dimensions of mind perception were found: the

capacity for experience (eg: anger or fear), and the capacity for agency (eg: self-control or planning).

People appreciate that minds both have experiences and can lead us to perform actions.

But the minds of others are not directly observable, and that led behaviourists to remove the study of

consciousness completely from psychology for half a decade. That worked until rat researchers demonstrated

the existence of cognitive maps (Garcia & Koelling, 1966).

But it was the explosion of neuroscience that brought consciousness back as a serious study, for the brain was

no longer a 'black box'.

The Timing of Conscious Will: 

Benjamin Libet, 1985

First, the timing of conscious will (Fig 5.3) in the Libet experiment, the patient was asked to

move their fingers at will while watching a dot move around the face of a clock to mark the

moment at which the action was consciously willed. QEEG sensors timed the onset of brain

activation; EMG sensors timed muscle movement. QEEG precedes EMG.

So, not only aren't we sure where consciousness is, but also when it is.

Intentionality: the quality of being directed toward an object. Consciousness is limited, and

it fills in details rather than analyzing everything.

Unity: the ability to integrate all the body's senses into one coherent whole. Unity is mediated by the 40

Hertz component.

Selectivity: the capacity to include some subjects but not others. An example is inattentional blindness.

Dichotic listening: a task in which people wearing headphones hear different messages presented to each ear. 

They are asked to 'shadow' one of the messages by repeating it aloud. 

Consciousness filters out non-important information. Note that participant's noticed

a gender change in the voice, or if their name was spoken.

Selectivity is not only a pattern of waking consciousness; people are more sensitive to their

own names even during sleep.

Transience: the mind wanders incessantly. This 'stream of consciousness' may flow partly

because of the limited capacity of the conscious mind. When new information is selected,

some of what is currently 'loaded' must disappear. A good example is the Necker Cube. It

has the property of reversible perspective. The stream of consciousness flows even when

the target is a constant object.

Levels of Consciousness

Minimal Consciousness: a low-level kind of sensory awareness and responsiveness that

occurs when the mind inputs sensations and may output behaviour. (Armstrong, 1980).

In the case of humans, we can safely assume that there is something it feels like to be them, at least when

awake.

Full Consciousness: you know and are able to report your mental state. Since neither

babies nor animals can report their mental state through language, this was the 'deal-

breaker' for behaviourism.

Self-Consciousness: a distinct level of consciousness in which the person's attention is

drawn to the self as an object (Morin, 2006).

This leads to the question: ”What is a self?” The answer to that came from (and continues to come) from

neuroscience research. To put it short, a 'self' is essentially a timing circuit in your brain, that cycles forty

times a second. This is what is meant by the 40 Hz component.

Self-consciousness brings with it a tendency to evaluate yourself and notice your

shortcomings.  People go out of their way to avoid mirrors when they have done something

they are ashamed of (Duval & Wicklund, 1972).

Because it makes us more self-critical, the perceived mirror image can also make us briefly

more helpful, more cooperative, and less aggressive.

The 'Self-In-The-Mirror' experiment (Gallup, 1977) Humans, chimpanzees, orangutans,

even elephants pass, gorillas do not. Infants below the age of 18 months also do not recognize themselves.

(Lewis & Brooks-Gunn, 1979)

To examine this self-awareness behaviour in chimpanzees, researchers in the Gallup experiment painted an

odourless red dye over the eyebrow of an anaesthetized chimp and then watched when the awakened chimp

was presented with a mirror. The chimp reached for its own eye as it looked into the mirror --not the mirror

image-- suggesting that it recognized the image as a reflection of itself.

Is the last word on animal self-awareness? No. One study showed that after training monkeys in how to use a

mirror to locate an object in space, they gained the ability to pass the mirror test (Chang et al., 2017).

Disorders of Consciousness

The following disorders may either be transient or permanent.

Coma: eyes closed; do not respond to their name or touch.

Vegetative State alternate between eyes-open and eyes closed; may move limbs, but none

of these behaviours can be reproduced reliably by external stimulation.

Locked-in Syndrome: fully aware, but cannot consciously move any voluntary muscles; they

can however blink their eyes.

Neuroscience to the rescue! We now know that for every 100 patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state

using traditional bedside assessments, between 10 and 40 will be conscious to some degree by using these

more sensitive measures (Monti et al., 2010) and a third of patients diagnosed as minimally conscious may be

fully conscious (Cruse et al., 2012).

The patient, previously diagnosed as being in a vegetative state, was able to follow commands such as

"imagine playing tennis" or "imagine moving around the rooms of your house" and generated the same patterns as

healthy controls.

Conscious Contents and Daydreaming

Experience-sampling technique: Ecological Momentary Assessment: one recent study

collected data from over 900 working women by asking them to reflect on the events of the

past day and record how they felt while engaging in each activity (Kahenman et. al. 2004).

See Table 5.2 (How Was Your Day?) Positive affect (emotion) was highest during intimate

relations (spouse, children).

Fig. 5.5 EMA of Situations and Activities associated with boredom.

Skin Conductance Level (SCL)( Nikula, Klinger & Larson-Gutman, 1993).SCL would rise

spontaneously, emotional moments that corresponded with a current concern popping into

mind. Table 5.1 (What Is On Your Mind?)



Daydreaming: (Mason et. al. 2007) During a fMRI study, when participants were not busy

with their cognitive tasks, they still showed a widespread pattern of activation in many areas

now known as the default network. These patterns are active while thinking about social

life, self, past and future–all the usual haunts of the daydreaming mind. Daydreaming can

be seen as a survival process based on 'what if' as contrasted to 'what is'.

An fMRI scan shows that many areas of the default network are

active when the person is not given a specific mental task during the

scan.

This is one possible answer to the question: "What is a self?"

For this class, we will assume that what we commonly think of as a 'self' is an area of the neodentate cortex, 

known as the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex. 

 from Google AI: 


The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is a region of the brain's prefrontal cortex crucial for executive functions like working memory, planning, attention, and cognitive flexibility. It acts as a central hub for cognitive control, helping to modulate and coordinate other brain regions to manage demanding tasks and deliberate decision-making. The DLPFC is vital for organizing goal-directed behavior and is considered a key component of the frontal-parietal network. 


Ruminating thoughts, or problem-solving attempts that never seem to succeed can come to

dominate consciousness. This may result in mental control, the attempt to change

conscious states of mind.

This can lead to thought suppression, the conscious avoidance of a thought. Wegner et.

al. (1987) asked people not to think of a white bear for 5 minutes while they recorded all their

thoughts. What occurred was the rebound effect of thought suppression, the tendency of a

thought to return to consciousness with greater frequency following thought suppression.

The thought returned in a more robust way.

The Cognitive Unconscious

Anyone can offer a reasonable compelling explanation for an event after it has occurred, but the work of

science is to offer testable hypotheses that are evaluated based on reliable evidence. This leads to the

definition of the cognitive unconscious: all the mental processes that give rise to a person's thoughts,

choices, emotions and behaviour are not necessarily experience by the person.


One indication is subliminal perception: thought or behaviour that is influenced by stimuli that a person

cannot consciously perceive. Bargh et. al. (1996) had undergraduate students complete a survey that called

for them to make sentences with various words. They were not informed that these words are commonly

associated with aging. Participants were then clocked as they left the room and walked down the hall.

Compared to a control group, they walked more slowly.


Assigning godlike power to the unconscious is downright dumb. The unconscious processes that underlie

the perception of subliminal visual stimuli do not seem to be able to understand the combined meaning of

the paired words, although they can understand single words.


The Roomate Choosing Experiment (Dijksterhuis, 2004): Unconscious minds seem to be better able than

conscious minds to sort out complex information and arrive at the best choice. Fig 5.8


Can fMRI be used to detect signs of consciousness in brain-damaged patients. 39-year old Scott Routley

was considered to be in a vegetative state for 12 years. When asked to imagine swinging a tennis racquet

at a ball, brain imaging results showed that the areas of his brain that were activated during this task were

the same as for the control group.

Fast and Slow Thinking

Dual Process Theories suggest that we have two different systems in our brain for processing information:

one dedicated to fast, automatic, and unconscious processing (System One, Stanovich & West, 2000); the

other dedicated to slow, effortful, and conscious processing (Kahneman, 2011) . Dual Process Theories have

been used to understand the workings of different cognitive processes such as learning and memory. The

present working hypotheses are that Systems 1 and 2 are different neural pathways.

Sleep and Dreams

Dreams are the most commonly experienced altered state of consciousness, a form of

experience the departs significantly from the normal subjective experience of the world and

the mind. Changes in thinking, disturbances in the sense of time, feelings of loss of control,

changes in emotional expression, alterations in body image and 'sense of self', perceptual

distortions and changes in meaning or signficance of everyday experiences.


Sleep contains many signs and states: hypnic jerk (a sudden quiver or sensation of

dropping).  They are most likely to happen when you are in the first two stages of sleep, which are very light stages of sleep.After this, time and experience seem to stop, and there seems to be no 'you' to

have experiences.  This is because the DLPFC is inactive. Then there are dreams, interspersed with short and shorter periods of unconsciousness. Finally, glimmerings of waking consciousness return again as you enter

postsleep consciousness, known as the hypnopompic state.


Circadian rhythm: we have a 24-hour cycle built into us, but if allowed to live in 'time-free

environment' we naturally move to a 25.1-hour cycle (Aschoff, 1965). This evidence has led

some scientists to question if homo sapiens are native to this Earth, or if we have alien DNA

in us. For some intriguing answers, google: “alien DNA Kazahkstan


Memorize Fig. 5.9 Sleep stages: EEG Patterns During Stages of Sleep.

REM (Rapid Eye Movement) discovered by Aserinsky & Kleitman, 1953. The

pulse quickens, blood pressure rises, and sexual arousal occurs, both in males and females.

Big body muscles are paralyzed; only eye muscles move rapidly from side to side.

Dreams may occur in other sleep stages, but they are less vivid and emotional.

Delta wave sleep is radically different from REM; there is a general

synchronization of neural firing.


Fig 5.10 Stages of Sleep During the Night will be on the next exam.

A good example: 

https://www.catalystathletics.com/article/1845/Understanding-Sleep-for-Optimal-Recovery-Productivity/

Sleep Disorders

Insomnia is defined as difficulty on falling asleep or staying asleep. The desire to sleep initiates the

ironic process of mental control, a heightened sensitivity to signs of sleeplessness, which

interferes with sleep. Often patients will use sedatives to sleep, but there are severe drawbacks.

Even in short-term use, sedatives can interfere with the sleep cycle. Although they promote

sleep, they can reduce the proportion of time spent in REM and slow-wave delta sleep.

Sleep quality deteriorates, resulting in grogginess and irritation during the day. Suddenly

stopping the use of sedatives can produce even worse insomnia.

Sleep Apnea is a disorder in which the person stops breathing during brief periods while

asleep. It occurs most often in middle-aged overweight men. Therapies that involve weight

loss, drugs, surgery or sleep masks that push air into the nasal passage may solve the

problem.

Somnambulism is most common in children between the ages of 4 to 8, with 15 to 40% of

children experiencing one episode. It usually happens during slow-wave delta sleep.

Narcolepsy is a disorder in which sudden sleep attacks occur in the middle of waking

activities. It involves the intrusion of REM in the waking state.

Sleep paralysis is the experience of waking up, but being unable to move, usually when

awakening from REM sleep, but before muscle control returns. It can be accompanied by

hynopompic illusions and may the source of alien abduction experiences.

Night terrors are abrupt awakenings with panic and intense emotional arousal, mostly in

children and 2% of adults. Occurring in non-REM sleep, early in the sleep cycle, without

dream content.

Sleep and Learning

Stickgold, 2000 found that when people learning a difficult perceptual task are kept up all

night after they had finished practicing, their learning of the task was wiped out. Even two

nights of catch-up sleep did not help. Sleep following learning is essential for memory

consolidation.

Rechtschaffen et. al. 1983 found that when rats are deprived of sleep, their bodily systems

break down and they die normally in 21 days.

REM sleep deprivation (Ellman et. al. 1991) increases memory problems and excessive

aggression. REM rebound (more REM) occurs the next night.

Theta sleep deprivation has more physical effects, such as fatigue, and hypersensitivity to

muscle and bone pain. (Lentz et al. 1999)

Why sleep? Herbivores that travel in herds need the least sleep, predators the most, big-

brained primates in the middle. Since sleep leaves one open to predation—a costly

evolutionary choice—then it must have other biological purposes that gain a Darwinian

advantage.

The Dreaming Brain

FMRI suggests that brain areas responsible for fear or emotion (amygdala pathway) work

overtime in dreams.

Visual experience is heightened, even overloaded, but there are fewer auditory sensations,

and even fewer tactile sensations, and almost no smells or tastes. The picture show is the

imagination of actual events. The occipital perception lobe is not activated; instead the

occipital visual association area is.

In REM the prefrontal cortex show relatively less arousal than during waking. Prefrontal

areas are associated with planning and executing actions. Dreams often seem unplanned

and rambling. For this class, focus on the role of the dLPFC.

During REM, the motor cortex is activated, but spinal neurons running through the brain

stem inhibit the expression of motor activation.

What is it like to be blind but still dream?

Those who are congenitally blind also have a

much higher frequency of nightmares.Hypnosis

Hypnosis (Greek for under knowledge) is a social interaction in which one person (the

hypnotist) makes suggestions that lead to a change in another person's (the subject's)

subjective experience of the world.

To induce hypnosis, the subject will ask to sit quietly and focus on some item (the swinging

pocket watch) and then make suggestions about what effects hypnosis will have. Not

everyone is equally hypnotizable.

Susceptibility varies greatly; one of the best indicators is a person's own judgment. People

with vivid imaginations, or easily drawn into a movie, are somewhat more prone to be

candidates for hypnosis.

Posthypnotic Amnesia: the failure to retrieve memories following hypnotic suggestions to

forget. Only memories that were lost under hypnosis can be retrieved with hypnosis.

Hypnotic Analgesia: measurable physical and behavioural changes in the body after

hypnotic treatment. (Stern et al. 1977)

Hypnosis and the activity of the anterior cingulate cortex. During hypnosis, the scientists

found, a region of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex became less active.

Studies have found that that region helps people stay vigilant about their external

environment. (Ploghaus, 2003)