Understanding Consciousness: Awareness, Sleep, and Brain Waves Explained

the topic of this lecture is what is consciousness so as when we're thinking about the idea

of Consciousness what just what this really refers to is our awareness of both internal and external stimuli when

we're thinking about this idea of external stimuli it's things that are going on in the environment around us

when we're thinking about internal stimuli it's things like our thoughts our emotions our inner experiences

William James is going to be widely recognized as being one of the first psychologists really think carefully

about this idea of Consciousness one of the things that he contributed to this area was that he recognized the contents

of our Consciousness are constantly changing he referred to this as our stream of Consciousness so for example

if you've ever just kind of sat quietly on your couch in the evening and just kind of let your thoughts kind of wander

right what you'll notice is that there are all these sorts of chains with regard to one thought or memory kind of

leading to another one and this is the idea the sort of stream of Consciousness that James was interested in where he

recognized that we don't necessarily always kind of move in in a straight line when we're thinking about the sorts

of experiences and thoughts that are kind of running through our minds rather in some cases we kind of go off in

tangents where one thing may lead to another which leads to another which may take us in a very different direction

than we would have initially anticipated and this is that idea of stream of Consciousness that James was so

interested in another psychologist who contributed a great deal to our understanding of

Consciousness was Sigmund Freud around the same time that James was having his insights into this idea of stream of

Consciousness Freud was interested in exploring the depths of the stream of Consciousness by trying to get at our

unconscious needs wishes and conflicts so as we've mentioned previously Freud wasn't the first person to talk about

the idea that there may be an unconscious right this is an idea that had been around long before Freud

however what Freud did is he really popularized this idea and so what Freud was interested in in his psychoanalytic

theory was he was interested in trying to understand what role these unconscious needs and conflicts and

desires played in our everyday sorts of behaviors and mental processes so when we talk about psychoanalytic theory in

more detail later what we'll start seeing is that Floyd was interested in finding ways of

getting at this unconscious sort of material whether it's simply allowing people to talk about whatever it was

that came to mind if it's examining their dreams if it's looking at the the content of their humor any of those

things according to Freud were ways to get at this sort of unconscious content one of the things that we'll talk a fair

bit about in this chapter is the idea of sleep and dreaming part of the reason why this is such an important issue in

relation to Consciousness is that even when we're asleep we are still maintaining some uh level of awareness

of external stimuli so for example if you're a parent and you have a young child if there is a thunderstorm at

night it's very possible you will sleep soundly through the thunderstorm but if you're a relatively young child begins

crying out in the night even though objectively the sound may not be terribly uh the sound of your child cry

may not be much louder than the sound of thunder it's much more likely that you'll wake up if you hear your child

crying out in the middle of the night right part of the reason for this is that we maintain some level of awareness

of the external environment that's what allows us for example to wake up when our alarm clock goes off in the morning

is we're able to hear right while we're asleep it's just that for the most part we're kind of tuning a lot of that

information out now of course one of the interesting things that all of us have probably

experienced that multiple times in our lives is we sometimes will incorporate information from the external

environment into our dreams uh so for example it's not uncommon for people when they're asleep when their alarm

goes off they may suddenly in the dream start hearing Sirens or some other sort of loud sound

basically what that is is that our mind's taking into account the external stimulation right so we suddenly in the

real world we hear the sound going off we hear the sound of our alarm and then in our dream state we incorporate that

in some way that makes sense within the content of the dream so if you start hearing your uh your alarm from your

alarm clock going off in the dream maybe suddenly there's uh suddenly an alarm or a fire alarm or something going off in

your dream I've mentioned before that my wife and I have a number of cats and the cats will

sometimes roam around the bedroom while we're sleeping and so there have been times where I've had dreams where

suddenly there was like a tiger looming over me when in fact I'm pretty sure it was probably one of our house cats like

sitting on my pillow like breathing into my face or something of that sort right so that again that's an example of us

taking external information and incorporating that right into our dreaming state

um most you've probably heard of the old prank uh from high school and Junior High kids of it during a sleepover

taking someone's a hand Who falls asleep early putting it in warm water with the idea that that might cause them to

urinate uh because of the stimulation from the warm water on their hand we want to talk about the different

levels of awareness and this will be an idea that will will permeate different uh issues as we go throughout the rest

of the chapter so let's start with higher levels of consciousness so when we're talking

about higher levels of consciousness what we're really focused on here is this idea of controlled processing this

is when individuals are actively focused on trying to attain some sort of goal this is our most Alert state of

consciousness so for example if you're actively trying to solve some sort of problem so let's say for example you're

let's say you're taking like like a calculus course and if you are sitting down to take a Calculus exam when you

are focused on solving the problems that are in front of you right that would be a higher level of Consciousness right

you are awake you are alert you are focused um if you're preparing for a debate if

you're playing baseball and if you're stepping up to the plate and you're getting ready to take a take a swing

right all of those times would be places where our attention to be very focused right we would be very aware of what's

going on around us lower level Consciousness and contrast is when we're engaged in a more

automatic sorts of processing these are situations that may require relatively little attention for example things like

if you're kind of sitting on your couch in the evening and you're kind of daydreaming right that would be kind of

lower level Consciousness if you're doing relatively automatic sorts of tasks for example if you're punching in

a number on a cell phone right that isn't something that usually requires a great deal of our attention and effort

if you're doing something like tying your shoes in the morning right if you've been doing that I'm I'm in my

late 40s so I've been tying my shoes for a long long time so when I'm doing that I don't have to spend a lot of time or

or cognitive resources focused on time my shoes right that comes relatively automatically right at this point in my

life typing if you type a lot like for example I spend a lot of time typing so

at this point like it doesn't take a lot of cognitive effort for me to type in most situations right um and so what you

do is this requires kind of lower level Consciousness so for example when I'm typing usually I'm more focused on the

words that I'm trying to formulate and the actual content not so much on the mechanical movements of my fingers on

the keyboard we'll also address issues of Altered States Of Consciousness as we move

through material so the these sorts of Altered States can be produced by things like drugs trauma fatigue we'll also

talk about hypnosis hypnosis is a is a tricky issue um and there's still a lot that we don't

really understand about hypnosis but we'll we'll talk about what what little we do know about hypnosis

um so when you're in this sort of altered state of consciousness uh such as for example if you've consumed too

much alcohol if you've consumed uh some sort of mood altering drug what we're getting at here with these Altered

States Consciousness are different ways of us kind of perceiving the world around us right thinking about things in

a way that's different than how we would normally think about them when people undergo hypnosis to stop smoking or to

lose weight the idea is that they may be experiencing Altered States of consciousness

meditation is another way that people can sometimes experience Altered States Of Consciousness and we'll talk a little

bit about meditation in a subsequent lecture there's also subconscious awareness

which is when this is when uh people are awake as well as when they're sleeping and dreaming and basically what What's

Happening Here is that things are are going on that aren't necessarily within our normal sort of conscious control

um the the easiest example of this is when we're dreaming and we'll we'll talk about uh dreams in more detail during a

follow-up lecture there's also no awareness Freud's belief that some unconscious thoughts are are

too Laden with anxiety and other sorts of negative emotions for us to be able to actually admit to them and so the

idea here is that we can have some unconscious thoughts right that are that are so far away from the surface that we

don't even know that they are happening and so when we talk about some of Freud's ideas what we'll see is that

he's postulating that these sorts of ideas these sorts of thoughts are happening these wishes desires thoughts

are happening so far below the surface of our mind that we don't have any direct access to them however we may see

some of the consequences of these unconscious thoughts kind of bubbling up in our behaviors and other sorts of

conscious thoughts um another example of something where we would have no awareness is if we're

knocked out by some sort of head injury or anesthesia right in those cases you may have pretty much literally zero

awareness of what's happening so for example if you've ever been in an automobile accident maybe you've

rear-ended someone you hit your head really hard on the steering wheel or on the windshield of the car if you hit

your head hard enough you may be knocked unconscious and you may have very very little memory of what was happening not

only at the time of the accident but even for a few minutes before the accident because the way our memory work

is works is it takes a few minutes for us to consolidate our memory so if you suffer some sort of head injury that

causes you to lose Consciousness it's very possible that you may not only not only fail to remember things right at

the time of the accident but even a little bit before in in cases thank you

I also want to briefly introduce the idea of an electroencephalography we've talked about

eegs previously but I want to talk about them in this context because one of the things that they are capable of doing is

to give us some idea of where people are in terms of their state of consciousness now this is a very rough approximation

but we'll we'll talk about how eegs work right so what an EEG does as we've talked about previously is they monitor

brain the electrical activity in the brain so as neurons are firing right there there are these electrochemical

processes that are taking place and what the electrodes on the scalp of our head can do with an EEG is they can detect

these tiny little bits of electrical bursts that are taking place and so what eegs do is they detect

electrical activity these are going to be referred to as brain waves right now when we're talking about brain waves

again what we're talking about are really just electrical patterns in the brain

these brain waves have amplitude which is the height of the wave and they also have frequency which is how many cycles

per second are are taking place what we're going to care about primarily will be the the way in which these uh

these electrical charges these brain waves are changing as our con level of Consciousness is changing

so for example if you look up here what we'll see is this is what an EEG looks like when

someone is awake so what we see are relatively low amplitude high frequency sorts of uh waves and so this is going

to be very this is going to be a very typical pattern for an EEG for someone who is awake and alert right now let's

say for example as you're listening to this lecture maybe it's making you a little drowsy or getting kind of tired

what you'll start seeing is that the uh the amplitude of the Waves right start being a little bit larger right so

things are starting the frequency starts to slow down a little bit the amplitude gets a little bit higher right this is

someone who is kind of drowsy um if you've ever been watching television late in the evening and you

start kind of nodding off a little bit right this is what we're talking about here if you were hooked up to an EEG at

that point it's likely that you would that your EEG pattern would look sort of similar to this

now when we actually start drifting off into sleep what we'll talk about soon will be different stages of sleep

so our first stage of sleep which is going to be the lightest stage is going to be stage one sleep

what's happening during stage one sleep is we're seeing this continuation of the amplitude of our brain waves getting

larger right so the amplitude is getting higher the frequency is also continuing to slow down right so what we're seeing

as we move from being fully awake to drowsy to now actually being asleep is the amplitude of the waves are getting

higher and the frequency is getting a bit slower right now as we'll talk about as we move into stage two sleep a little

bit deeper stage of sleep we start seeing these sleep spindles right these kind of bursts of activity which are

very characteristic of stage two sleep as we move into stage three and stage four sleep for our purposes we're going

to combine those together and what we're seeing here is very high amplitude very low frequency sleep right so what we're

seeing here is our brain activity is really slowing down now to be to be clear it's not stopping right if it

stopped we would be dead right so it's not stopping but rather it's changing right the nature of our brain activity

is changing during sleep basically the amount of electrical activity is changing in such a way that it's

producing High amplitude sorts of waves that are lower in frequency right so overall the brain activity is is slowing

down as we move to stages three and four there's another stage of sleep that we'll talk about in more detail later

called REM sleep REM sleep is going to be the stage of sleep REM stands for rapid eye movement that's where the REM

sleeps it comes from it's from rapid eye movement this is going to be the stage of sleep when we're most likely to be

dreaming and even though we can dream during other stages of sleep the sorts of dreams we have tend to be the most

Vivid during REM sleep so for our purposes we will be associating dreams primarily with REM sleep again they're

not exclusive to rim but they occur most often during Brim REM sleep if you look at the electrical

activity during Rim this is going to look a lot like when we're awake and so one of the things that we'll see is that

when we are experiencing dreams when we're in our rims episodes right our brainwave activity looks a lot like it's

awake so one of the things we'll talk about in a subsequent lecture when we start moving through the stages of sleep

is we'll see exactly how these stages are organized right so we'll talk more about that later

for the moment what I want you to really kind of take away from this from this slide is the idea that we can we can use

EEG readings to get a sense of where people are in terms of their level of alertness and their level of

Consciousness right so if we're seeing someone with an EEG pattern that looks like this right we know that they are

awake and focused right if we start seeing EG patterns that look more like this right this would be someone who

would not be terribly responsive to us because they're in a deep stage of sleep right really high amplitude waves low

frequency and again we'll come back and we'll talk more about the stages of sleep as we

move through the rest of the lecture segments