2. Consciousness and Information Processing  Consciousness: our awareness of ourselves and our environment  Allows us to voluntarily control and communicate our mental states  Enables processing outside of our awareness  Conscious Processing is sequential  Slow and limited capacity  EX: driving– hands and feet do the driving while your mind handles new challenges

3. SLEEP and DREAMS  What is sleep?  Definition: periodic, natural, reversible loss of consciousness  Biological Rhythms  Periodic physiological fluctuations  Our bodies experience 4 TYPES of Biological Rhythms

4. Biological Rhythms  Annual Cycles  Example: Seasonal Affective Disorder  Depression in the dark, winter months  Twenty-eight-day Cycles  Female Menstrual Cycle  Twenty-four-hour Cycles  Varying alertness, body temperature, and growth hormone secretion  Ninety-minute Cycles  Stages of sleep in 90 minute cycles

5. The Rhythm of Sleep  Circadian Rhythm  The biological clock; regular body rhythms that occur on a 24 hour cycle.  Example: body temperature  Rises in morning, dips in early afternoon, dips more before we go to sleep  Thinking is sharpest & memory is most accurate when we are in our peak circadian arousal  Younger: “night owls”  Older: morning people  Transition from sleeping later to sleeping earlier occurs around age 20 (esp. for women who begin puberty earlier than men)

6. The Rhythm of Sleep (cont’d)  What disrupts our circadian rhythm?  Jet Lag  Light: triggers proteins & decreases melatonin  Melatonin: sleep inducing hormone  We can reset our biological clocks by adjusting sleep schedules

7. SLEEP STAGES  Every 90 minutes we pass through a cycle of 5 distinct sleep stages  Stage 1: brief, many experience hallucinations; feeling of falling (body may jerk)  Hallucinations: false sensory experiences  Stage 2: 20 minutes, periodic sleep spindles; now fully asleep  Sleep talking can occur at this stage  Stage 3: transitional, only a few minutes until stage 4

8. SLEEP STAGES cont’d  Stage 4: deep sleep; brain emits large delta waves; 2 slow-wave sleep stages last for about 30 minutes— hard to awaken  End of stage 4 likely to see sleep walking or bed wetting  REM (Rapid Eye Movement): recurring sleep stage during which vivid dreams commonly occur  AKA Paradoxical sleep: muscles are relaxed but other body systems are active

9.  About 1 hour after falling into a deep sleep go back to Stage 3 and Stage 2 (where you spend about half of your night)  End in REM: heart rate increases, irregular breathing, eyes move around  Often remember these dreams more vividly if woken during REM

10. Sleep Theories  4 Theories for why we sleep 1. Protect 2. Recuperate 3. Remember 4. Growth

11. WHY DO WE SLEEP?  Sleep patterns are not uniform  Age-Related  Infants sleep for 2/3 of their day  Most adults sleep for less than 1/3  Culturally Influenced  Industrialized nations (USA) sleep less than those without artificial light

12.  Without interruption, most will sleep for 9 hours  Can not “catch-up” on sleep  The Need for sleep  Strengthen memory  Increases concentration  boost mood  moderates hunger & obesity  helps immune system  resets biological clock  helps organs

13. The effects of sleep deprivation  Teens should sleep for 8-9 hours  Ranges from serious to subtle  Car accidents to lower immune system  Reduced:  productivity  Concentration  Ability to remember, think critically and logically  Creativity, vocabulary, and communication skills  How long can humans stay awake?  8 to 10 days  Can recover to relatively normal functioning with one or two nights of recovery sleep

14. SLEEP DISORDERS  Insomnia: recurring problems in falling or staying asleep  Chronic if lasts for 3-4 weeks  Anxiety, depression, situational stress, and stimulus overload cause about 50% of all cases  Drugs (caffeine, alcohol, and nicotine ) account for 10%  Narcolepsy: uncontrollable sleep attacks; may lapse directly into REM at inappropriate times  Sleep Apnea: temporary cessations of breathing during sleep and repeated momentary awakenings  Night Terrors: high arousal and appearance of being terrified; occur during stage 4 of sleep not REM—seldom remembered

15. ~ ~* DREAMS * ~ ~  Dream: a sequence of images, emotions, and thoughts passing through a sleeping person’s mind— notable for hallucinatory images and discontinuities.  Lucid Dreams: When you are aware that you are dreaming  Manifest Content: The remembered storyline from a dream (says Freud)  Latent Content: underlying meaning of a dream (says Freud)

16. What do we dream about?  8 in 10 dreams involve negative emotions  Commonly dream of:  Repeated failures  Rejections  Experience misfortunes  Events of our daily lives

17. Why do we dream? -- Dream Theories  To satisfy our own wishes  To file away memories  To develop and preserve neural pathways  The make sense of neural static  To reflect our cognitive development

18. HYPNOSIS  Hypnosis: a social interaction in which one person suggests to another that certain perceptions, feelings, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur.  FACT v. FICTION  All of us are somewhat susceptible to suggestion  20% of people are highly susceptible  Also very imaginative, likely to be easily absorbed in a vivid novel, lead fantasy lives

19. Hypnosis (cont’d)  Can hypnosis enhance recall of forgotten events  Can hypnosis force people to act against their will?  Can hypnosis be therapeutic?  Posthypnotic suggestions: actions intended to be carried out once the person is not hypnotized  Can hypnosis relieve pain?  Yes! Can reduce fear thus reducing hyperactivity to pain  Dissociation: a split in consciousness which allows some thoughts and behaviors to occur simultaneously with others.

20. Is Hypnosis an Altered State of Consciousness?  Hypnosis is a combination of  Biological Influences  Distinctive Brain activity  unconscious info. processing  Psychological Influences  Focused attention  expectations  Social-Cultural Influences  Authoritative figure and the need to play your role “be a good subject”