Thinking and Consciousness
9 important questions on Thinking and Consciousness
What did Freud argue about consciousness?
According to Freud's psychoanalytical theory, we are motivated by instincts. He believed that most of the brain processes which control these drives are unconscious.
To Freud, the content of dreams, slips of the tongue and patterns of forgetting provide existence of unconscious thought processes
How can the subconscious be measured?
i.e. There are two images: one shows a boy misbehaving and the other image shows the boy behaving well. One of the two images are shown briefly before a neutral image of the boy is presented.
Results: subjects never report being consciously aware of the initial image. However, when asked to judge the boys personality, they have been clearly influenced by the first picture. i.e. when although we are not consciously aware of the masked stimulus, we can still use this info in later processing.
These techniques play an important role in advertising design.
Who is the most famous blindsight patient?
GY can determine direction of movement even though he cannot consciously see it, he can detect things but is not aware of them.
THIS SHOWS that vision is not entirely about seeing = we can separate responding to visual information from the act of being visually aware
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Who is a famous patient who suffered from visual form agnosia?
Despite her ability to identify objects, her ability to grasp and reach for objects was unaffected. e.g. she cannot recognise a fork but she knows how to use a fork
= the brain has different systems for visual object recognition and visual guidance of movement. It also shows that you can process visual information that allows you to grasp an object without being consciously aware of what it is.
What 2 experiments show that our brains know what we are going to do before we do?
Task: subjects were required to grasp an illuminated rod as quickly as possible. A light moves from one rod to another. Most subjects found that they were grasping the new target before they were aware it had moved.
Experiment 2
Chun Siong Soon used fMRI to show that the brain knew which button participants were going to press before they became aware of it
= our impression of free-will may be an illusion i.e. we may not be aware of the unconscious processing that leads to our decision making
Which brain area is involved in our perception of movement?
Lesions to MT disrupts the perception of motion (motion agnosia) - sufferers cannot consciously perceive movement. E.g. Josep Zihl saw the world in strobe i.e. to continuous motion
Is there a conscious area?
What is 'locked in' syndrome?
Is it likely that animals are consciously aware?
The question on the page originate from the summary of the following study material:
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