Chapter 4

This chapter deals with the mind and conciousness. Conciouness refers to the moment by moment subjective experience like reflecting on thoughts or paying attention to your surroundings. There are three levels of conciousness coma, sleep, and wakefulness. Splitting the brain is a surgery in which they cut the corpus callosum.They believe doing this also splits the mind. The experiment in the book that has a split brain patient that can see two objects but can only say one because there is no sharing of information between the sides of the brain where the information was processed. Blindsight is the ability of a blind person to see somethings but be unaware of seeing them. During sleep the concious awareness of the outside is mostly turned off but the bain is still active. We use an EEG to measure the different areas of brain activity. REM sleep stands for rapid eye movement during this stage the brain is more active during the awake hours. Hypnosis is a social interaction where a person responding to suggestions, experiences changes in memory, perception, and/or voluntary action. The person is still alert though and responds to questions so scientists believe its an altered state of conciousness. The concept of flow is when people do something because it facinates them rather then doing it for a reward at the end. Addiction is the idea that you need something in order to feel good. They often deal with the brain area in charge of reward. Alcohol is dependent on your expectations as shown in the experiment in the book. People who were told they were drinking alcohol and were given water behaved like those drinking alcohol.