Reading Activity Week #9 (Due Monday)

1a) The first thing I found interesting in this chapter was the section titled “Framework for Consciousness: AWAREness”.

1b) This concept caught my eye mainly because of the way they placed AWAREness as half caps I knew that it was an acronym but I wondered how because the word is so perfect in itself to describe the word consciousness. There are 5 elements to this concept that make up the initial AWARE. A: Attention (focusing of cognizance on external or internal things); W: Wakefulness (the continuum from sleep to alertness); A: Architecture (the physical location of the physiological structures); R: Recall of Knowledge (the accessing of personal and world information through self-knowledge and world knowledge); E: Emotive (the affective feeling or emotion associated with consciousness). All of this was very interesting to me because it all seems so simple and commonsense-like yet there is so much thought and science behind it. Next the ness subcomponents consist of: N- Novelty (focus on central thoughts and events, and also seek out novel, creative, and innovative items); E-Emergence (consciousness is distinctive from other neural processes in the respect that it deals with private and internal thoughts); SS: Selectivity and Subjectivity (selecting a very few thoughts to consider at any given time.

2a) The next thing I found interesting in this chapter was the section on dreaming.

2b) The book said that many people are often curious about dreaming because it poses so many different questions and this is exactly why I am so intrigued. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep and there are many different theories behind why we dream. Freud believed that dreams were a way that our unconscious leaded out information and that we could infact learn hidden messages from our dreams. Some religions believed that dreams were a way to communicate with our ancestors. But the scientific approach behind dreams includes the activation synthesis hypothesis: the brain activity present during REM is interpreted by the brain in the only way it knows how by tapping into our existing knowledge structures in our LTM. This explains why we often see our dreams as movies because it utilizes the way we talk/form stories. In our dreams we experience similar emotions and we sometimes we dream about what we don’t know. What interests me the most from this section is the portion about lucid dreaming which means having cognitive control over our dreams and making decisions.

3a) One last thing I found interesting in this chapter was the section on deep brain stimulation.

3b) This was interesting to me because it dealt with a more medical side of psychology which is the direction I am wanting to go. Early researchers attempted to map out the brain using stimulation and while doing this others found out that they could retrieve old memories by stimulating certain regions in the brain. Deep brain stimulation was originally used in Parkinson’s patients, but recently it has been used in patients with minimal conscious states due to brain injuries. Researchers do this by implanting a small electrode deep into the thalamus and then an electrode is controlled by a device similar to a pacemaker. This procedure helped a man who had minimal consciousness for 6 years regain consciousness and he was able to eat and communicate properly. This procedure in the long run helps support the thalamus’ role in maintaining and regulating consciousness.

4a) The section I found the most uninteresting in this chapter was the section on automatic processes.

4b) I didn’t really enjoy reading this section because it was kind of boring. I have learned about automatic processes over and over again and they are kind of self explanatory so it wasn’t fun reading it again. Also the next section on implicit memory was boring too because again I have learned it over and over so many times.

5) All in all I think that knowing the overall definition of consciousness and and the different functions of consciousness will be the most important part to remember from this chapter. Cognitive psychology is all about how we perceive information, it deals with our understanding, and how we formulate and produce answers to questions. It studies our mental events and without understanding consciousness we aren’t able to fully understand cognitive psychology.

6) This chapter builds on previous chapters in many ways. Again LTM is brought up once again, and memories in general. Also in the last chapter we talked about amnesia and this chapter talked about people who had minimal consciousness which in a way is similar.

7a) I want to learn more about lucid dreaming.

7b) I am very curious about the dreaming subject in a whole and would like to learn more about it. More specifically I want to learn more about lucid dreaming because it just fascinates me that some people can control their dreams, and I feel like at times I have been able to but I didn’t know that was an actual thing.

8) As I was reading through this chapter I kept thinking about dreaming and how weird it is, I started looking up a few different theories on why we dream. Also I thought about inception with consciousness and how we are fooled at times. Last during the automatic processes I started thinking about how just today I started walking to Sabin thinking I had class when I actually needed to go to the library for work.

9) Terms: AWAREness, consciousness, attention, wakefulness, recall of knowledge, self-knowledge, world-knowledge, emotive, novelty, emergence, automatic processes, implicit memory, selectivity, deep brain stimulation, subjectivity, Sleep, REM, lucid dreams, dreaming

1.I found the concepts of self-knowledge and world-knowledge to be interesting. Self- knowledge was interesting because I enjoyed reading about the mirror test where various animals were tested to see if they recgonize a reflection of themselves, and if they notice that the image is indeed them (usually indicated by the recognition that the dye was on their face) and not simply another animal of the same breed. World-knowledge was interesting to me because it’s rather neat to ponder about how our long-term memory really does affect how we view and experience things. If our world-experience and world-knowledge has primed us to feel a certain way about something, that will almost always come back into play when you experience something else related.

2.Another concept I found really interesting was qualia. Like some other concepts I’ve written about before, I initially found it interesting and enjoyed reading about it because it was just sort of a fun word. It was also interesting to think about because of the various theories about wha are actually real experiences and what may possibly simply just exist in our minds, even if we don’t recognize it as such.

3.A portion of the chapter I found interesting as I read was the part that discussed drug use and consciousness. Drugs such as depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens can affect how you experience the environment and what level your consciousness is at. This was interesting to me because I’m also currently taking the Drugs and Individual Behavior class, so there was information I was able to use from both of these classes to get a better understanding of how the drugs affect your consciousness.

4.Something I didn’t find very interesting was REM sleep. I’ve learned about the topic several times in multiple different classes. I didn’t learn anything new about it in this chapter and just didn’t find myself drawn into the topic. It’s also come up a lot in other circumstances lately with apps and things that are supposed to help track your REM sleep, making the topic even more overly discussed to be interesting.

5.There were several things that helped with my overall understanding of cognitive psychology in this chapter. The topic of this chapter, consciousness, is crucial to understanding cognitive pyschology. Because cognitive pyschology involves our brains and how we think, process, perceive, and interact with the world, learning about conscioussness, which is directly involved in all of those things, was very helpful to my understanding.

6.This chapter builds on the previous chapters by yet again continuing to expand the various categories we’ve covered in the broad topic of cognitive psychology. This helped tie in some of the previous concepts, such as memory. We must be conscious in order to build and experience memories and this chapter introduced consciousness, helping us understand how some of these other processes worked.

7.A topic I’d be interested to learn more about is the mere exposure effect. Advertisers use this to merely expose us to something, which increases our likelihood of having a positive impression of whatever it is later. I’m honestly a bit bothered by some techniques advertising companies as they seem really deceitful. However, I am curious about some more specifcs on how the mere exposure effect works and what ways various people intentionally use it.

8.During this chapter I thought it was fun to think about some of the “out-there” theories on consciousness. I don’t believe that everything we experience is entirely imagined and exists only in our minds, however I think it’s fun to ponder if that is actually the case. This chapter got me to wonder about some of those fun ideas about what it may actually mean if reality didn’t exist, and if we created it all! I think this is highly unlikely though because if I had control in my mind of what was happening and it was all just a conscious experience that existed in my head, many things would happen entirely differently than they seem to in reality.

9.Self-knowledge, world-knowledge, qualia, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, REM sleep, mere exposure effect

1a&b) I was interested in lucid dreaming and the ability to control your dreams. I think this is such a fascinating idea and really want to learn more about how this works. We talked in class briefly about this subject and a lot of other interesting things were talked about such as if you dream in color or not. I felt a little confused because I realized that I honestly don’t know what I dream in because I rarely even remember my dreams. This really made me even more interested in learning more about dreaming and the research that has been done on it.

2a&b) I also found the priming section to be interesting. I have always been interested in priming and similar topics because if used correctly it can be give someone a good deal of hidden power to control others. I don’t say this in a bad way but in my job if I state things in a specific way I will be much more successful at getting my kids to emit the correct response. This subject also frustrates me because of how easy it is for other people to do the same. For instance, I hate it when someone asks me a question and as bad as you don’t want to answer it the way they are expecting you to, they have you trapped and there really is no other appropriate response.

3a&b) The third thing that I found interesting was the mere exposure effect. I know that this can be really effective because if I’m asked to choose something I will always choose what I’m most familiar with even if I don’t know any background information. For instance, I was voting for the People’s Choice awards a few months ago and there were some categories where I didn’t know anything about the people that were being nominated. I ended up picking the one name that I had at least heard before. It also is true that the more familiar we are with someone or something, the more likely we are to pick that over something else.

4a&b) I found Baar’s Global Workspace Theory to be the least interesting. The theater metaphor didn’t help me to really understand consciousness. I think this may be a subject that has been covered in a lot of other psychology classes so that might be why it seems a bit mundane to me.

5) I think the part that covers consciousness is very important in understanding cognitive psychology because it talks about not only our brains on the conscious level but also the unconscious level. I think that it is very important for us to be aware of both of these levels of consciousness as well as our subconscious. Our cognition is so complex and this section really helped to clarify some of that complexity.

6) This chapter covers a lot of our unconscious cognitions which builds off of our conscious cognitions that we have been learning. It also continues with the idea of priming which builds off of the previous chapter on memory and associations. It goes into much more detail about metacognition which is something that was mentioned briefly in a previous chapter.

7a&b) I want to learn more about lucid dreaming. I think this is a very interesting subject because I never knew you could actually control your dreams. I also want to learn more about how people dream and especially the difference in people’s dreaming. I want to learn about why some people dream in color while others don’t, and why some people remember their dreams but others aren’t able to.

8) I was really interested in the dreaming section so most of my thinking was about that. I am very interested in our potential ability to control our dreams. I also was interested in the small section about meditation and that really got me thinking because I am in a meditation class now. The book gives a very brief description of meditation and it doesn’t do it nearly enough justice. The facts that I have been learning from my meditation class make me think they could have a whole chapter in this textbook about meditation and it would tie in perfectly with cognitive psychology.

9) Terminology: lucid dreaming, priming, emit, mere exposure effect, Baar’s Global Workspace Theory, consciousness, unconsciousness, cognitive psychology, meditation

1) The topic of sleep and dreaming I find the area of dreaming to be really interesting in general. One of the best ways to test the difference between consciousness and unconsciousness is when people are sleeping. Using the EEG for testing, as it is non invasive yet conveys a lot of great information from the brain. As we go about our day, we are always at attention, whether we realize it or not. However, those systems are much less engaged while we are sleeping, especially in regards to human to human interaction. We experience four stages of sleep and our brain waves show the marked changes that occur during the separate phases. The deepest sleep we experience is in stage 4, which then moves us into REM sleep, the stage that produces our dreams. The frequency of brain waves shows the different cycles of sleep we are in.

Dreaming, as I mentioned, occurs during REM stage of sleep, in which we experience rapid eye movements visible to someone watching us sleep. Freud believed that dreams held hidden meanings and our unconscious brain leaked out this information. However, there are scientific theories that explain the reason for sleeping, one of which is called the activation synthesis hypothesis. This hypothesis states that the brain activity seen during REM, which is very similar to our brain activity when we are awake, is a result of our brain utilizing the systems it is most familiar with. Our long term memory, day to day feelings and experiences, language are combined to create short narratives known as dreams. Our dreams hold the same emotions and feelings we have during the day and we dream about what we already know and fill in the gaps of things we don’t know. How do we know a dream is a dream? When we awake from a dream, we realize very quickly that a far out dream is not plausible and can quickly dismiss; yet it takes us some time to shake off the unsettling feelings of a dream that is more real. While most people describe dreaming as watching a movie or as being an outsider, there are some people that can take control of their dreams and participate. This is known as lucid dreaming.

2) Drug use I have always been interested in the area of drug abuse and while this was included in the section with sleeping and dreaming, I thought I would write about it as a separate subject. The ability for a drug to create the affect it does in the brain is because we have receptors that fit into the chemical. However, our brain receptors are not designed to process these kind of chemicals, therefore we can experience very altered waking state. There are various types of drugs that cause various types of reactions within the body, such as depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens. Drugs, in regards to consciousness, alter you physically as well as psychologically. Ecstasy, for example, psychologically makes one feel closer to others, as well as a need to touch. Physically, the drug causes teeth clenching, blurred vision, chills, sweating and increased blood pressure and heart rate. The repeated use of ecstasy, even though thought to not be as habit forming, causes damage to serotonin production in the brain, which can affect mood and cognitive abilities. Hallucinations, which can be experienced with certain drugs, are vivid visual experiences that only the user can experience. These images have an impact on your awareness of self, the world and sensory information.

3) Raising your level of consciousness even though short was fairly interesting to me. As the book described, I do notice that once I get a new car or a friend does, it is a car that I all of a sudden start seeing all the time. These things were always there, but by bringing it into a new awareness, therefore making us realize those things more than before.

4) The history of consciousness was quite boring to me. Even though history is very important it was just very boring to me. Every time I hear or read about something related to history I do find it interesting, but the section in this chapter did not peak my interest at all.

5) This is an area of the field that is continuing to grow, as we try and learn more and more about
consciousness and what it means in psychology. I think that reason alone makes it important in the field of cognitive psychology. There are different levels of consciousness and reasons it may be altered, which is important to cognition.

6) It take topics and concepts and uses it to describe consciousness, such as memory.

7) Dreaming I find this area of psychology to be really interesting, and would like to find more information on why we dream, does everyone really dream, and what happens with the absence of REM sleep.

8) It really made me think a lot about the things that I don’t notice or notice. It just makes me realize how much of what I do during the day is automatic and I don’t even always notice it.

Terms: consciousness, depressants, hallucinogens, rapid eye movement sleep, stimulants, wakefulness.

1.
a. I am interested in meditation.
b. Many religions use meditation in their practices. They can use things to help them to meditate, like beads statues or music. Meditation can help clear your mind so that you can reduce stress in your life, also it can help reduce pain. There are many people that meditate to help them with issues that they are having in their life, also it can reduce pain, and also has been known to reduce stress. People like Benjamin Franklin, the Dalai Lama, Bruce Lee, William Shakespeare, Mahatma Gandhi, Muhammad and Buddha have all mentioned sometime within their career. So even with many people that have used meditation not all have it help them at all. I have personally tried meditation and it has really helped me when I am severely stressed. I have also listened to music while meditating, although I prefer classical music or Oliver Shanti. They help my mind and by following the music I can clear everything from my mind so that way the problems of the world can melt away for a little while. For me meditation helps a lot, but it doesn’t always help so you try even though it only helps sometimes.
2.
a. I am interested in dreaming and what dreams mean to you.
b. Most people dream, yet we don’t all dream the same. Some people dream in color and some dream in black and white. Yet, if we do dream, what do those dreams mean? Dreams can be about a lot, real life problems, or things you want to figure out. Dreams are fun to look into because if you can see the meaning behind your dreams. Dreams are fun to interpret most of the time. I would love to be able to interpret my dreams so that maybe I could tell what I was thinking of what my brain is trying to tell me when I’m trying to sleep. The brain is usually dreaming when it is in the REM sleeping cycle of the sleep cycles.
3.
a. I am interested in priming studies.
b. Priming your mind to recognize things by seeing parts of items is a cool effect. Having your brain recognize a thing that have been seen from your life and put them with a stimulus is a good thing. That means that you can make your brain do things just by looking at a stimulus, that your brain has been primed to recognize. So you could possibly have your mind primed to see possible dangers to you and the people that you are around. Your brain sees a lot of things in one day, but it doesn’t always recall all the things that you see as an important thing so if you can prime certain things to be seen you could see more in your life.
4.
a. I didn’t really like the models of consciousness.
b. It was not that interesting of a read, although it was very informative part of this chapter.
5. I think that consciousness is the most important part of this chapter because it is a big part of most of this chapter. Consciousness is also a big part of our daily lives. WE are conscious for long periods of time so we need to know more about it because we spend time in a conscious state.
6. This chapter relates to STM and LTM because you have to have some conscious thought to make memories and be able to recall them for later use. The conscious mind is very important to remembering things.
7.
a. I would like to learn more about dreaming, and what it means about the conscious mind and what it would do for you by learning about those dreams.
b. I would like to learn more about dreaming because dreams are very interesting to learn about. There are things that our dreams that can help us realize what we want to do with our lives that our mind wants to tell us from our dreams.
8. I was thinking of how consciousness affects our lives. I think that if we didn’t have consciousness we would have very boring lives, although we wouldn’t realize much because life is mostly built on consciousness thought and work.
9. Meditation, REM Sleeping, Priming Studies, consciousness, STM, LTM,

There were many things that I liked about chapter 9. The first thing that I like was the section on semantic feature comparison model. The other thing that I liked from the chapter was the section on semantic network models. The last thing that I liked from the chapter was the section on the spreading activation model. The one thing that I did not like the most was the section on working memory. I did not like this section that much because it was shorter and it had been talked about another time in the book. It was interesting to learn about working memory when it came to adaptive control of thought. I will also talk about what I would like to learn more about, how this chapter helped in my understanding of psychology, how this chapter builds off of the other chapters, and then what thoughts that I had while I was reading the chapter.

What I learned from this chapter is that there are three important models of memory. The first one that the chapter talked about was the set theoretical model. This model uses semantic concepts that are represented by sets of elements, or collections of information. Long term memories are stored as exemplars that can be tied to different meanings. The book gives the example that a penguin can be catergorized as a bird and that it can fly. What happens in the set theoretical model is that exemplars can be over lapping. This means that the word canary can also fit into the exemplar of bird because it flies as well. There are two types of logical relationships between semantic categories. The first one is the universal affirmative which means that all members of one category are subsumed in another category which is represented as both A and B, or as the book example gave me all penguins are birds. The second one is the particular affirmative which means that only a portion of the members of one category make up the member of another category (some A and B), which means that some birds are penguins.

The next model that was talked about in the chapter that I thought was interesting was the semantic feature comparison model. This model is different from the previous one that I talked about because a semantic can be used for a broad set of semantic features. For example a robin can be put in the category as something that perches, flies, and sings. Words can be broken into two categories such as the defining features, or aspects of the word, and then also characteristic features or identical to the aspect. The book gives the example that a bat can also be categorized as a bird along with that penguin. Since the bat and the bird both fly and have winds that means that they both fall into the bird category.

The third model that I thought was interesting in the chapter was the section on semantic network model. I liked this model that best because it was the one that I could understand the best. This model states that all things are linked together in your memory through a web. A canary is a bird, a bird is an animal, a bird is an ostirich, an animal is a fish, a fish is a salmon, and so on and so on. This makes more sense to me because this is about how my brain works, so it was easier for me to relate to this theory rather than the others. I can see the brain being a network that is accessed and stored into a web that makes it easier to access that information when we want to remember something. Collins said that the memory is a semantic memory consisting of a vast network of concepts which are composed of units and corresponding properties and are linked by a series of associationistic nodes. This was the one theory that I could understand completely.

The thing that I did not like the most from this chapter was the section on working memory. I did not like this section the most because it had been talked about in the book before and it did not have the most information. I thought that it did a good job of building of previous chapters in the book because they tied working memory to adaptive control of thought or ACT. The ACT consists of the working memory, declarative, and productive memories. Working memory is information that we can access right way and is usually considered our short term memories as well. The theory is sort of the web based structure that we talked about in the last paragraph. Like I said, this was not the most interesting topic in the chapter, but there was information that came from this section that was important in my understanding of psychology.

The one thing that I would like to learn more about is the section on semantic network memory. I would like to learn more about this section because it was something that I found to be really interesting. This section and theory was also the only theory that I understood completely. I think that I could relate to this section because it is how I think that my brain works and operates. I think that if I did some more research in the topical blog that it would be fun to do the research and see of there are any studies out there on this topic.

I think that this chapter helped in my understanding of psychology because I could relate to a couple of the topics. The section that I just talked about is something that I use everyday so it was easy to correlate that to the chapter and then to my life. This made the information easier to learn for me because how easily I could relater the information to my life.

I think that this chapter build off of the previous chapters in a important way. It relates in the sense for working memory. I know the the section of working memory was not the most interesting, but the information was very important. We had talked about working memory in the previous chapters, and now it is coming back again in this chapter. In this chapter working memory was discussed in the sense of the ACT which uses declarative, and procedural as well.

Some ideas that I had while reading the chapter were how some of these theories came about. The one theory that made sense to me was the network theory. I was wondering how that came about and if it built off of other theories? I know that in history and systems that other psychologists learned from previous psychologists when discovering new theories. So I was just thinking that maybe the psychologists that was involved in the networking theory learned from a previous psychologist that had a previous model.

Terms: set theoretical model, semantic feature comparison model, defining features, characteristic features, semantic networking model, spreading activatio model, adaptive control of thought, working memory

Chapter 8 Blog

The first thing that I found interesting in chapter eight was the section about dreaming. The chapter says that Freud believed that dreaming was our way of getting information from our unconscious. Dreaming has always been very fascinating to me and I would like to learn more about it. Everyone views dreams differently. When we dream, we dream of emotions that we have in everyday life. Everything we dream of are things that we have already known or seen. The only problem with dreaming is that sometimes we can’t see the different between our dreams and reality. Some dreams are obviously fiction – things happen that would never happen in real life. And some other dreams seem realistic. The example that the book gives is a dream a person has of being at work. Say that they dream they get in a fight with their boss at work. This is not unlikely. So upon waking, that might be confusing to a person. I have always thought that dreams are a really magical part of sleeping. There are so many different explanations for why we dream. And there are so many different meanings that people apply to their dreams. But maybe they have no meaning. Maybe our dreams are just our minds working hard at night.

The next thing that I found interesting in chapter eight was the section on drug use. There are three types of drugs that this section talks about. The three types of drugs are depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens. Depressants slow down the nervous system activity. Stimulants speed up nervous system activity. And hallucinogens alter a person’s sense of reality. All of these types of drugs can mess with a person’s sense of consciousness. This is pretty interesting because there are a lot of legal drugs that are considered depressants or stimulants. Alcohol is considered a depressant. And it is something that can change your consciousness if you drink enough of it. This just isn’t really something that is ever laid out so matter-of-factly. There are also legal things that are stimulants. Coffee is a very common stimulant. I drink coffee almost every morning. I do feel that it makes me more alert. But I never stop to think that it is altering my consciousness. That’s why these drugs are so interesting to me. There are many other drugs that are illegal that probably alter a person’s consciousness even more than the legal ones. But I thought it was interesting that all of these are considered consciousness altering.

The third thing that I found interesting from chapter eight was the concept of meditation. The book defines meditation as a state of relaxed concentration when the mind is free from all thought. I have heard about meditating. And I have heard that it is a very soothing, relaxing state to be in. The thing that I don’t understand about meditation – is how it works! I feel like a person’s mind is always working. I feel like a person’s mind is always thinking. I have tried before to free my mind of thought. I have tried before to have a “clear slate”. It must take a while to get to that state because I had a very hard time doing it. That’s why I think meditation is so interesting. The book does state that it takes nearly 10-30 times of practice a day to be able to meditate. It also states that meditation affects the brain. Meditation is known to improve the part of the brain that involves planning, reasoned decision making, and positive mood.

The thing that I found the least interesting in chapter 8 was the concept of AWAREness. The term awareness is used to describe the concept of consciousness by compiling many different descriptive words into one. The acronym (AWARE) stands for Attention, Wakefulness, Architecture, Recall of knowledge, and the Emotive. Attention is when a person focuses their consciousness on external or internal things. Wakefulness is the time we spend from sleep to alertness. Being awake is being alert and aware. Architecture is the fact that consciousness has some sort of structure. Recall of knowledge is when the person accesses certain knowledge or information. Emotive is a bit harder to explain. When you see something that it makes you feel a certain way, you are obviously conscious. This is the concept of emotive. There are also three other parts that make up the “-ness” in the acronym. This is the part that I start to get confused with. There are a couple of terms that I just don’t understand, and that I don’t think should be a part of describing consciousness. One was the term novelty and the other was the term emergence. I started off thinking it was all a really interesting idea. But I ended up not really understanding, or liking it.

I think that this chapter will help me in understanding cognitive psychology because most of what we think is done when we are in a state of consciousness. When we are conscious, we are usually thinking (unless we are meditating). Whenever we are using cognitive abilities, we are thinking. I think that consciousness is a huge part of our mental cognition. I’m sure that dreaming and sleeping has something to do with it as well – because our minds are always working. A chapter on consciousness is a great chapter to use for describing cognitive psychology.

This chapter built on the previous chapter because it was about forgetting and remembering. In order to remember something – you have to be in a state of consciousness. If your mind isn’t conscious, there is no way that it will take in and encode information. There will also be no way that your mind will be able to retrieve information if you aren’t conscious. The chapter is also about forgetting. You might be able to easily forget something if you are unconscious. But with consciousness comes unconsciousness. They go hand in hand. As does this chapter with all of the other chapters that we have gone through thus far.

I would really like to learn more about meditation. I was initially going to choose the topic of dreaming for my next blog, but I feel that everyone will pick that. And meditation is something that equally interests me. I think that meditation is unique and hard to conquer. I would like to find information on how people best learn to meditate. I would also like to know if a person is more apt to be better at mediation than others. I would also like to try to meditate for myself. I have heard that there are a lot of benefits to meditation. I think that it would be interesting to learn and I think that it would be good for my mental health if I could conquer it.

While reading this chapter I was thinking a lot about my own consciousness and my own mental states. I thought about my own awareness of the things around me and the information that I take it day-to-day. I also thought a lot about the dreaming and sleeping section. I thought about how I sleep and how I dream. I even recalled a couple of dreams I had recently. I have always thought that dreams were interesting. While reading the section on dreams, I was thinking about a paper that I wrote in high school. I did a research paper that was all about dreams and what they mean. I found a lot of interesting information. Some of it matched what was in the chapter and there was some information that wasn’t mentioned.

Terms: AWAREness, Attention, Wakefulness, Architecture, Recall of Knowledge, Emotive, Dreaming, Sleeping, Freud, Depressants, Stimulants, Hallucinogens, Novelty, Emergence, Meditation, Consciousness, Unconsciousness, Cognitive Psychology, Remember, Forgetting

1. One thing that I found interesting in this section was the general framework of consciousness known as AWAREness. This term and idea lay out the main features of what makes up our consciousness. It is also used to determine the level of consciousness that something has. Consciousness is on a gradient and it is possible to have different levels of each part of the framework individually as well as levels of the framework as whole. I thought this was interesting to explain how certain species such as humans have more consciousness and how our consciousness compares to that of something like a particular animal. Certain animals may have parts of the AWAREness framework but not every piece. The major aspects of consciousness that are outlined in this framework include attention, wakefulness, architecture, recall of knowledge, and emotive. Consciousness is not only different from species to species but is also a little different within species as well. Aspects of AWREness develop and grow as you age and can also get to different levels for different individuals.

2. Another thing that I found interesting in this chapter was the section about dreaming. Dreaming occurs during REM sleep, which is the stage of sleeping where the brain waves closely resemble those of the conscious awake brain but occurs during unconscious state of sleep. I found it particularly interesting that the activation hypothesis for dreams claims that dreams occur by the brain performing the same type of interpretation for the activity as it would as if you were in a conscious state. This includes the use of long term memory and the use of representation through narratives. This can make it particularly difficult to differentiate between our dreams and real life if the dreams do not contain out of place or strange content. It is possible to control what goes on in your dreams through a process called lucid dreaming. You bring the conscious into the unconscious process so that you are able to control what happens.

3. I found the section that explained priming studies and how priming effects a person without them being aware of it to be incredibly interesting. The studies used subliminal priming which presents the prime below the sensory threshold where it is undetected by conscious awareness. Two different primes were shown to make two groups of people form different opinions of the same picture based upon the two different primes they were presented, even though they did not recall being shown the primes. Priming was also shown to aid in recognizing words quickly if they related to the prime that was shown before the exposure to the word. It is amazing to think about how much information we could be taking in at any moment that we don't realize and how all of that undetected information can influence our understanding and perceptions. The mere exposure effect highlights this point. This effect occurs when simply being exposed to something increases the liking of it by a person even though the person generally attributes the liking to other sources.

4. The thing that I found the least interesting in this chapter was the section on metacognition. This is mostly due to the fact that I felt like the different types of monitoring that were mentioned in the text were all very close to the same thing. When reading the descriptions of each I kept going back to earlier described types of monitoring because I felt as though the descriptions were almost the same just using different wording. I found it difficult to understand the differences between the different types, though I'm sure they all have differences and relate to different aspects of monitoring. I would have liked more examples given for each monitoring type so that maybe I could find the differences when they were used in context.

5. I think that the section explaining the different functions of the conscious is important for understanding cognitive psychology. This section allows for someone to wrap their brain around just how much our conscious does everyday minute of every day. Many times these things are done so automatically by the conscious without the need to think about the process happening. Understanding all the conscious mind does allows for someone to understand how complex our cognitive processes are and all of those that take place without any effort on our part to make them happen. If our conscious did not do some of these things automatically it would make it far more difficult to live the pace of lives that we do and take in and process everything that comes in from the world around us.

6. The explanation of the architecture of consciousness built on to the chapter on neuropsychology where we were introduced to neurons and the fact that there are many different types that perform very different tasks. The architecture of consciousness shows how the process is spread out through the entire brain and involves a number of different neurons. Consciousness would not be possible with only one type of neuron. This chapter also expanded on the tip of the tongue state that was discussed in a previous chapter. It was explained that this tip of the tongue state is a naturally occurring metacognitive state because they are aware that they know the information they just are unable to retrieve that information from their long term memory.

7. I would like to learn more about dreaming. In particular, I would like to learn more about the content of dreams and theories of how that content comes about. I would like to learn why we have nightmares and if there is something in particular that causes them to occur.

8. While reading this chapter I was taken back to when I was a kid and into my middle school years when I could wake up mid dream and force myself to go back to sleep and finish the dream in the way that I wanted it to end. While reading about lucid dreaming I became curious as to why I was able to do this then and no longer can now. While reading this chapter I also began to wonder about how much subliminal priming is done in every day life and how much effect it has on us without us knowing. The mere exposure effect particularly had me wondering about why I liked the things that I think that I do and wondering if there is a different hidden reason that I am unaware of.

9. Terms used- consciousness, AWAREness, attention, wakefulness, architecture, recall of knowledge, emotive, REM sleep, lucid dreaming, subliminal priming, sensory threshold, mere exposure effect, metacognition, monitoring, long term memory

1)The first topic I found interesting was AWAREness. This is the framework of consciousness. These include A: attention, being able to direct our attention and focus on something. Making something look more clear because of focus. W: wakefulness, this is the continuum from sleep to alertness. We have different levels of wakefulness and we can alter them through meditation, drugs, or intensive attention. A: architecture, physical location of the physiological structures. There are 52 types of cells which have specific functions. R: recall of knowledge, accessing of personal and world information. Recalling helps gain knowledge of personal and world knowledge. E: emotive, are the components associated with consciousness. Emotive is the emotional state that has internal expression but is hard to relate to others. These are helping in defining the experience of consciousness. This is interesting because of all the parts that go together to form consciousness. There are a lot of different parts that go into what you would think to be simple things.

2)Drugs are an interesting topic too and how they affect the brain. There are three kinds depressants, stimulants, and hallucinogens. They slow down the nervous system, speed it up, and can alter our senses. Some drugs can have two effects like ecstasy which is a stimulant and a hallucinogen. Hallucinations which are visual experiences are different from illusions because others can view them. This is something that would be worth learning more about. Learning about how different drugs and experiences can affect our brains are really interesting.

3)Deep brain stimulation looks like its going to be a very useful thing. Researchers have mapped out the brain using stimulation. They found out they could retrieve old memories using stimulation in certain regions. The procedure DBS has recently been used to help to revive conscious states from brain injury. The researchers implant an electrode in the thalamus of a brain injured patient. This has showed progress in these patients in regulating consciousness.

4)History of consciousness wasn’t too interesting to me. This section didn’t give a lot of interesting information. I think the other sections offered more information that caught my attention and made me want to spend more time learning about it.

5) I think this is an important part because everyone has a consciousness mind. We need it to survive in the world. This is part of everything we do when do and is a part of cognitive psychology and the brain. It involves how it works and how it effects us.

6) Each chapter has just built on top of one another adding more and more parts on
how the brain works. It shows the different parts of the brain and how it affects our days to day lives. This is just helping us expand our knowledge on the cognitive psychology.

7) I think drugs are very interesting on how they respond with neurotransmitters in the brain. There are many different kinds of drugs that have many different affects on people. Learning about how taking a drug can change an entire personality or way of thinking is something I don’t think I could stop learning about.

8) While reading this paper I was thinking about the recent killings. There have been two different murders in which the killers were on some sort of drug. It made me think if the drugs affected the neurotransmitters in a way that it made them go crazy as opposed to hallucinations.

9)attention, wakefulness, architecture, recall of knowledge, emotive, depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens, deep brain stimulation, neurotransmitters.

1a) What did you find interesting?
Hard problem of consciousness.
1b) Why was it interesting to you?
I was already excited about starting this chapter but after reading the first section about consciousness I knew it would be my favorite. Consciousness covers a wide variety of topics, all of which have at least some point of interest to me. When I got to the hard problem, which is for scientists interested in consciousness, the question of how the mind emerges from the brain activity really sparked my interest. As discussed in the book, brain activity is observable by others but the “mind” in only observable to its owner. It is a fascinating mystery I had never really given much thought to but if it were possible to see into other people’s minds it would open up a whole world of ethical considerations. The most private or secret thoughts a person holds are often just as important as external stimuli in determining the kind of person we are and how we think.
2a) What did you find interesting?
AWAREness
2b) Why was it interesting to you?
Clearly our consciousness is too powerful to currently understand, after all it controls our thoughts, beliefs, memories, information processing and actions. Our awareness of the world is not made up of one thing though, awareness can be further broken down into five sub categories that allow us to make sense and interpret the world. The word aware can even be used as an acronym, Attention, Wakefulness, Architecture, Recall of knowledge and the Emotive. All of these components of the consciousness permit us to make sense of the world around us. Attention is how we focus on external or internal stimuli, we can direct our attention in any direction or shift our gaze inward much like a spotlight or meditation. Wakefulness is the period in between waking up and becoming fully alert. Our mind during sleep and during our daily activities are two fundamentally different states. Architecture has to do with the physiological structure of our consciousness, as we have previously learned, those with severe head trauma usually experience difficulty in what would otherwise be natural for a normal functioning individual. The make-up and architecture of the brain plays a very important role on who we are. Our recall of knowledge or how well we can access memories or information is the next vital role of consciousness. Without our ability to recall we would never be able to learn either personal or world information. The final part of awareness is the emotive, the affective components associated with consciousness. While it is impossible to convey exactly how you feel, our emotions allow us to express ourselves. They are internal reactions to external stimuli or events.
3a) What did you find interesting?
Dreaming.
3b) Why was it interesting to you?
Dreams and dream interpretation has been an area of great interest for me ever since I first saw the movie Inception. I have always been one to question and wonder what the hell dreams are and mean but as I have come to learn throughout my time in psychology they are still a mystery to many scientist and psychologists. Dreaming occurs during REM or rapid eye movement portion of the sleep cycle. The REM cycle one of five stages of sleep an individual usually exhibits over the course of the night, the REM cycle is the last and when you are at your deepest sleep and dreaming occurs. There are many beliefs about why we dream and what they mean, from communicating with ancestors to our unconscious leaking information while asleep. Dreams make up many of the same experiences we encounter in our daily lives and we can often exhibit very real emotions like anger, fear, sadness or anxiety. An area that I am most interested in is lucid dreaming, many individuals can exert cognitive control in their dreams or in other words when you know you are dreaming. I would like to learn more about how to do this more effectively.
4a) What one (1) thing did you find the least interesting?
The section least interesting to me was context-setting.
4b) Why wasn't it interesting to you?
I still found it interesting but compared to everything else I read in the chapter this was just the least interesting to learn.
5) What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding Cognitive Psychology?
I have gained a much greater understanding of the processes of the consciousness and how we are constantly interpreting the world around us to form our picture of the world. One thing that was hard to picture is how other people look at the world, as the reading said, we can look at one’s brain waves but we cannot look at their mind.
6) How, in what ways, does this chapter relate (build on) to the previous chapters?
In the previous chapter we spoke about our recall of knowledge as well as how information becomes stored into our short term and long term memory. Much of this chapter dealt with areas of our consciousness that would be of no use to us if we had no STM or LTM.
7a) What topic would you like to learn more about?
Lucid Dreaming
7b) Why?
It is a topic I have been interesting in for many years and also attempted a few times with minimal success. I would love to learn more about how to effectively lucid dream and perhaps more about meditation.
8) What ideas related to what you were reading (what did you think about) did you have while reading the chapter?
One of my favorite movies on this topic is Inception, the book also mentioned Vanilla Sky, another film about lucid dreaming. While reading the book I kept thinking about all the levels of consciousness and how unexplained some parts of our mind still are today.
9) Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
-consciousness, hard problem, attention, wakefulness, architecture, recall of knowledge, emotive, context-setting, REM sleep, lucid dreaming, meditation

1a) What did you find interesting?
1b) Why was it interesting to you?

I thought the functions of consciousness were rather interesting. Before reading the chapter I thought consciousness is just a state of awareness. I learned that consciousness has a total of eight functions, ranging from detecting error to self-monitoring and making decision. However, these are merely theories that a few scientists have suggested. I would be interested to read some research article regarding the functions of consciousness. Also, since I believe in animals also having consciousness, I wonder whether their functions of consciousness are similar to ours. They can definitely adapt and learn, but not quite self-monitoring, I believe.

2a) What did you find interesting?
2b) Why was it interesting to you?

Automatic processing appears interesting to me and it answered many questions I have had about advertisement over the years. I have always wondered why companies spend so much money on advertisements on the internet or applications for mobile devices, since most people I know admitting that they automatically click out of or ignore any advertisement they see. If they keep the advertisements, that means they make money. But since most people do not spend time reading or watching advertisement, where do the companies make money from? Subliminal priming is a perfect explanation. It is true that we may not remember seeing the advertisement but we choose the product because unconsciously we are familiar to it. For example, whenever I log into Facebook I encounter an advertisement of Viva, and after constant exposure to Viva, I will start buying Viva rather than Bounty.

3a) What did you find interesting?
3b) Why was it interesting to you?

I found metacognition interesting. Although it took a few reads to understand the concept that I am rather familiar with in much more details, I did not get bored reading it like I always do when I encounter long paragraphs. It is interesting because I am positive that metacognition exists, but how many people are aware of that? How do we know that we know something if we cannot remember what it’s called? How do we feel that we will know something we learned in the up coming exam? I think that metacognition is what actually separate humans from other primates besides bipedal walking. Apes do not know that they know something, they just know. But humans have many different layers of consciousness and awareness that we “know” what we know or don’t know.

4a) What one (1) thing did you find the least interesting?
4b) Why wasn't it interesting to you?

I found sleep and dreams rather less interesting, although they are the topics that I have always been curious about. They were less interesting only because they were mentioned in every psychology class I took in college and a few assemblies I attended in middle school and high school. I know that sleep in important and we dream in REM. The only thing I want to know more regarding sleep and dream is that why exactly do we dream? Does dream serve any purpose? But unfortunately there still isn’t a perfect answer to answer these questions.

5) What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding Cognitive Psychology?

I thought understanding metacognition would be useful in understanding cognitive psychology. If we know about metacognition in more details and can vividly describe how it works, we will be able to answer many other questions regarding cognition. For example, if we could describe what goes on in our working memory when we encounter the tip of the tongue state, we may be able to develop a technique to aid people with dementia recall better.

6) How, in what ways, does this chapter relate (build on) to the previous chapters?

The previous chapter discusses forgetting and remembering. This chapter expands that topic to a much wider range and discusses consciousness as a whole. The previous chapter talks about we remember and forget what we remember, this chapter takes up the part where we know things we do not remember, and do things we do not decide on a conscious level.

7a) What topic would you like to learn more about?
7b) Why?

The zombie and consciousness part was very interesting and I wonder if there are articles regarding this topic. I would also like to learn more about automatic processing and unconsciousness, because I feel like a number of mental illnesses can be more successfully treated or coped with if we understood how the brain process information unconsciously.

8) What ideas related to what you were reading (what did you think about) did you have while reading the chapter?

I thought about Billy Milligan when looking at the theatre metaphor for conscious experience. Billy Milligan suffered from multiple personality disorders and there are a total of twenty-four personalities. The personalities described how they came to become conscious as stepping into the spotlight. Apparently, there are bunk beds around the spot light and whoever walks into (in some cases, pushes into) the spot light, that personality becomes conscious and can interact with the world. However, the personalities also recall times that they are not conscious, where they talk to each other while remaining in the dark. I read the book many times in different languages and I was obsessed with it for quite some time when I was in middle school. It still fascinates me thinking about this disorder.

9) Once you are done with your post make list of the terms and terminology you used in your post.
Multiple personality disorder, consciousness, unconsciousness, awareness, metacognition, automatic processing, sleep, dream

1)awareness
Attention, wakefulness, arch.,recall, emotive. attention how you pay attention to certain things in around you or what is going on with yourself. you go somewhere and you focus on someone or something and you see every detail and it kinda consumes you. wakefulness is neat how you realize how awake that you are. how this can be altered. its neat to think about when you are sleeping and then you are awake and you know that you know the difference. arch. where things are located in your brain and how it all comes together. recall how we can bring back certain things from maybe your short or long term memory. and then emotion how you feel when you see or hear something.
2)i found the section about dreaming to be interesting. what we dream about and why. how it is maybe you brain releasing random stuff while you sleep and it puts it together in a story. sometimes its hard to determine if it really happened or not. some times i think that my dreaming may cause some of my false memory. i don't know if it was real or not.
3) drugs is always interesting thing. how and why do they work and why do we take them. its neat that we have made drugs that help get rid of some of those bad memories, dreams and feelings. i take a lot of these drugs and they help. i have always wondered what other drugs do, i don't know if that is good or bad.
4)i liked it all i know that doesn't help but i did.
5)i think the part about the drugs will help me the most understanding how they effect the brain.
6)i think it builds on the previous chapters in how things may get in to our memory and how it can be affected by outside stuff.
7)i think that i would like to learn more about dreaming and what that is all about, and drugs.
8)i was thinking about dreaming, and some of the medications that i take and how they might effect my memory or the way that i think.