Consciousness

Question 1

XIn Steven Pinker’s book ‘how the mind works, how does he define conciousness


Answer 1

Sentience- Subjective experience or phenomenological awareness
Access to information-The ability to report our subjective experience
Self awareness-consciousness comes with a narrative self, corresponding to the pronoun

Question 2

What does Humphrey (1983) state about the possible functions of conciousness

Answer 2

said construction of the narrative self, (corresponding to the pronoun ‘I’) is adaptive because it helps us navigate the social world. it can help us understand what other people are thinking- theory of mind. Our self-awareness has evolved to make social life easier.

Question 3

Where is your skull according to Velmans, 2009

Answer 3

What we think of as the ‘outside world’ is a stream of visual consciousness, inside our physical skull

Question 4

in velmans, 2009, when he refers to the location of the skull being in the outside world, what does he characterise visual experiences as


Answer 4

All visual experience is as ‘internal’ as a dream. When we are awake the dream is systematically constrained by information coming in from the sense organs.

Question 5

what did chalmer 1995 famous for


Answer 5

distinguishing between the hard and easy problems of consciousness

Question 6

In Chalmer’s theory of easy and hard consciousness what do the easy problem mean terms 


Answer 6

■The easy problems are to do with the functions such as attention , which are carried out by conscious brain systems. Can be studied scientifically.

Question 7

what are the hard problems in Chalmer’s easy problems and hard problems of consciousness


Answer 7

why it’s not all unconscious. Most things that happen in the nervous system work unconsciously. The brain would seem to work just the same without consciousness experience, so why do we need to experience emotions/feel

Question 8

What does Chalmer state according to explain consciousness


Answer 8

that most scientific explanations only deal with the easy problems and leave the hard problems untouched, or dismiss it rhetorically

Question 9

how do people believe actions are caused by


Answer 9

concious thought

Question 10

in reference to the question of consciousness animating the body, what did Wenger 2003 state
this seems obviou

Answer 10

it feels like our conscious mind is in control and makes things happen

Question 11

What psychologist stated that saying that conscious thought is misleading and why

Answer 11

Blackmore 2013-
Some research shows that many of our actions might actually start unconsciously, and our feeling of deciding comes after the brain has already begun the action.

Question 12

what question arrises when trying to answer the question as whether consciousness animates the body


Answer 12

links to free will and determinism. Whether we are free to do as we chose or are our actions controlled

Question 13

What does Hume argue 


Answer 13

We never actually see cause and effect — we just notice that one thing happens after another and assume one caused the other. The same applies to internally willed causation. We introspect a thought, then we observe an action, so we infer causation.

Question 14

What does wegner and Wheatley (1999) state about the feeling of force of the will

Answer 14

normal introspection ( process of looking inwards at ourself) can leaf to the illusion that we have free will and that this determines our actions. There are some factoes that enhance the strenght of this illusion

Question 15

what does Wegner (2003) describe about free will

Answer 15

The feeling of free will is the minds best trick .Feels like thoughts cause action whether they can or not

Question 16

what does the theory of apparent mental causation state by wenger 2002

Answer 16

experience conscious will because we infer a connection between our thoughts and actions, regardless of whether that connection is real

Wegner proposed three principles that guide this inference

Question 17

what are the three principles that guide inference by wenger

Answer 17

Priority – The thought must occur just before the action.(If you think about raising your hand right before your hand rises, the timing supports a causal link.)
Consistency – The thought must be consistent with the action.(If you think about raising your hand and then raise it, they match.)
Exclusivity – There should be no obvious alternative cause for the action.(If nothing else seems to have made your hand rise, you infer that you caused it.)

Question 18

What is Wegner’s I spy experiment -procedure


Answer 18

• ppts and confederate shared mouse cursoer.
• listened to music and scrolled around the array of objects on screen
• they could stop and click on a picture when they wanted
• some were self-initiated by ppts and some where initiated by confederates at precise times.
• words which labelled pictures on the screen where presented through headphones interrupting music

Question 19

what did subjects rate in Wegner’s I spy experiment

Answer 19

1. People were asked to rate how much they thought they intended each stopping event Even when the stopping event was forced (they didn’t actually cause it), they sometimes felt like they had controlled it.

This happened when two things lined up:

Priority (timing): The word was heard just before the stop.

Consistency (match): The word matched the picture on the screen.

Question 20

in Wegner’s I spy experiment , what did the researcher manipulate


Answer 20

the stopping events

Question 21

What did libet find during the experiment


Answer 21

that the readiness potential (measured with EEG) is generated from the motor cortex before people report conscious decision to act.

Question 22

what did libet do in the readiness potentials experiment


Answer 22

had to press a button and report the time they chose to press the button

Question 23

What was thought before Libet’s readiness postential experiment

Answer 23

thought that conscious decisions to act causes the decision to act and then the action happens but instead The brain initiates action which become conscious of a decision to act and then action happens.

Question 24

Describe Soon et al’s MVPA 2008 experiment


Answer 24

fMRI-Two buttons = left and a right button
Can press left or right one whenever they want.
After pressed- they report what was on the screen when they pressed the button

Question 25

what was found in Soon et al's Mvpa experiment

Answer 25

Scientists can look at brain activity and predict what decision someone will make (like which button they’ll press) up to 10 seconds before the person becomes aware of their choice. This means unconscious brain processes start and decide actions before we consciously know what we’re going to do.

Question 26

evaluate whether consciousness animates the body

Answer 26

At least some of our conscious decisions are already prepared pre-consciously.(challenges the idea that conscious will directly causes our actions, highlighting a potential limitation in the claim that humans have full conscious control over all decisions) This research only investigates super-simple actions, like pressing a button. We are unsure about the role of consciousness in big life decisions (e.g. who to marry). Brass and Haggard’s (2008)-What When Whether (WWW) model of characterizes a few more stages of ‘free decision making’ and points to the pre-motor circuitry that could mediate this. Multi step process not that simple

Question 27

how do we measure conscious experience


Answer 27

we can usually study the brain using objective measures, but we can't measure what someone else is experiencing, meaning we can't measure conscious subjectively . This is as nobody has invested a quala-scope

Question 28

What is qualia

Answer 28

Qualia are the personal, felt qualities of our experiences—like how pain hurts or how colours look to us. They are what introspectively accessible, phenomenal aspects of our lives , the way things feel persoally

Question 29

What brain areas are associated with consciousness


Answer 29

no single brain area which ‘does consciousness’ e.g the cerebellum contains half the neurons in the brain bur does not produce consciousness entirely

Question 30

What was Dehaene et al (2001) research into brain areas assossiated with consciousness


Answer 30

Compared brain activation when words were processed consciously vs. subliminally. Found that unconscious (subliminal) processing activated only the visual cortex. Conscious processing led to widespread activation across the brain

Question 31

Brain areas associated with shifting attention Rees2007

Answer 31

looked at brain areas activated during changes in visual awareness found that there was a clustering of activation around superior parietal and dorsolateral pre-frontal areas. shows that different brain regions are responsible for attention shifting from an environmental stimuli.

Question 32

what are parietal lobe functions essential for and what happens when this area is damaged

Answer 32

essential for maintaining awareness of spatial regions in the contralateral visual field Damage to the right parietal lobe leads to left hemifield neglect, even if the visual cortex responds to left hemifield stimuli. | meaning if we can still see it

Question 33

Evaluate brain areas assossiated with consciousness evaluation

Answer 33

Even subliminally presented words, can be processed semantically (Mack and Rock, 1998). Kiefer and Brendel (2006) found that words still generate meaning-related ERP, even when they were not processed consciously. So we dont have to be conciously aware/ attend to the words to proccess and understand them A large brain network must have been activated, despite lack of consciousness.si activation alone doesn't provide support that conciousness exists in these areas there must be other factors Rees (2007) surmised unconscious and conscious processing activate the same networks, but activation is higher when we are conscious. Therefore there's no evidence to show that one specific area has a particular role in conciousness

Question 34

theories of consciousness

Answer 34

1.Global Neural workspace theory baars et al 2007 2.Dehaene and Naccache’s theory

Question 35

who purposed the Global Neural Workspace theory


Answer 35

Baars et al 2007

Question 36

What is the Global Neural Workspace theory


Answer 36

Most information in the brain is processed unconsciously and locally. When we selectively attend to something, that information is integrated into a “global workspace.” The contents of this global workspace are what we experience as consciousness. Attention is necessary to bring information into consciousness, but attention and consciousness are not the same. Consciousness involves integration of information across many brain regions. ## Footnote The act of looking is the deployment of selective attention, the result, seeing, is caused by integration in the global workspace.

Question 37

Dehaene and Naccache’s theory


Answer 37

You only become consciously aware of what you see when the brain is both strongly processing the visual information and you are paying attention to it.

Question 38

what are the three levels in Dehaene and Naccache’s theory


Answer 38

the concious state the preconcious state sublimal state

Question 39

what is the concious state


Answer 39

There is much activation in areas involved in visual processing, and sufficient top-down attention to connect this to other brain areas

Question 40

What is the pre-concious state


Answer 40

There is sufficient basic visual processing to permit conscious awareness but insufficient top-down attention.

Question 41

what is sublimal state


Answer 41

There is insufficient basic visual processing to permit conscious awareness, regardless of the involvement of attention

Question 42

evaluate the theories of consciousness

Answer 42

consciousness-There is strong support for both theories, and they are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they overlap in many ways. Both suggest that the integration of information across various cortical regions is crucial for consciousness e.g melloni et al 2007 syncronisation of cortical osilations mysterious why integrated cortical information should be consciously experienced= doesnt solve hard problem work only looks at visual consciousness -not generalize to other sensory modalities e.g hearing

Question 43

how do we draw distinctions between consciousness and selective attention- example of research


Answer 43

: Continuous flash suppression experiment - 2eyes with goggles that have different images presented to them . One eye – change in pattern that is bright . This dominates conciousness. Other eye- unconscious. Naked ppl attracted attention . This was unconcious. attention and consciousness are distinct processes in the brain.

Question 44

What is the universal agreement for cortical integration for consciousness


Answer 44

that consciousness has something to do with integration of information across distributed cortical areas.

Question 45

Describe split brain patients

Answer 45

cut the corpus callosum to save people from intractable epilepsy.Even though the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa, split brain patients function quite effectively.- 2 streams of consciousness

Question 46

what is the key diffrences in how the left and right hemisphrere function in split brain patients

Answer 46

The left hemisphere controls speech and language; it gives verbal answers based on the information it has. If something funny is shown to the right hemisphere, the patient may laugh, but the left hemisphere doesn’t know why and confabulates an explanation. The right hemisphere can understand some words and draw sensible pictures, but its verbal output is limited. Both hemispheres can recognize the person’s own face

Question 47

How do the hemispheres differ in consciousness and self-awareness?


Answer 47

The left hemisphere provides the verbal, narrative aspect of consciousness and self-awareness, while the right hemisphere supports emotional and perceptual experiences. Both are necessary for the full human experience of consciousness, but they specialise in different domains.