States of Consciousness, Stress and Health

1. States of Consciousness, Stress and Health

2. Review • Consciousness: Our awareness of ourselves and our environment • REM: Rapid Eye Movement • Dyssomnia: Broad classification of sleeping disorders; either too much or too little, or wrong time of sleep • Insomnia: Can’t sleep • Hypersomnia: Too much sleep

3. Review Cont’d… • Sleep Apnea: Breathing related disorder; you can stop breathing • Circadian Rhythm: Our bodies synchronize with the 24-hr cycle of day and night through they biological clock • Parasomnia-Once asleep, have problems waking during REM stage: this is stage where you are more likely to have nightmares and experience night walking (sleep walking)

4. Review Cont’d… • Nightmare disorder: Constant bad dreams • Night terror: Heart rate triples, screaming, crying, usually do not remember when they wake up.

5. The Rhythm of Sleep • Rapid Eye Movement • Eugene Aserinsky: Discovered REM • P. 212-Graph • Alpha waves: Awake relaxed state of mind • Stage 1 sleep: Breathing rate slows and your brain waves show irregular. • Hallucinations

6. The Rhythm of Sleep Cont’d… • Stage 2: About 20 minutes of Stage 2 sleep • Spindle waves • Can still be awakened without too much difficulty • Sleep-talking usually occurs in this stage

7. The Rhythm of Sleep Cont’d… • Next few minutes you go through Stage 3 to deep sleep 4. • Delta waves • Lasts about 30 minutes • Harder to wake up

8. Why Do We Sleep? • Teenagers typically need 8-9 hrs of sleep per night • Sleep deprivation increases pathogens normally suppressed by the immune system • Sleep plays a role in the growth process

9. Sleep Disorders • Narcolepsy, sleep apnea, night terrors, insomnia, etc…

10. Dreams • REM Dreams are “hallucinations of the sleeping mind” • Dreams that feel real: Testing their state of consciousness • Dream using 5 senses: Hear, touch, taste, smell, see. • Most often, dream of daily life events (working, going to school, event that has happened during day)

11. Dreams are open to Interpretation

12. Perception

13. Perception

14. Perception

15. Perception

16. Sigmund Freud • Story line of our dreams: • Manifest Content: The remembered story line of a dream • Latent Content: Meaning of a dream (drives and wishes that could be threatening)

17. Why Do We Dream? • To satisfy our own wishes: • Freud considered dreams the key to understanding our inner conflicts • Critics: based on accumulated science, “There is no reason to believe any of Freud’s claims about dreams and their purposes”. (William Domhoff)

18. Why Do We Dream cont’d… • To file away memories: • Researchers who see dreams as information processing believe that dreams may help to sift, sort, and fix the day’s experiences in our memory • REM sleep facilitates memory • Deep, slow-waves helps to stabilize our memories

19. Why Do We Dream Cont’d… • Robert Stickgold (2000) believed that many students suffer from a sleep bulimia, binge-sleeping on the weekend

20. Why Do We Dream Cont’d… • To develop and preserve neural pathways • Physiological function • The associated brain activity of REM sleep (the waves you are creating when sleeping) provides the sleeping brain with periodic stimulation • Stimulation experiences develop and preserve the brain’s neural pathways • Infants: Infancy stage is key to developmental process and infants spend a majority of time in REM sleep

21. Why Do We Dream cont’d… • WE NEED REM SLEEP!!! • REM Rebound: the tendency for the REM sleep to increase following loss of REM sleep • People who are awaken easily/have lost sleep will go into REM Rebound

22. Hypnosis • Hypnosis: A social interaction in which one person (the hypnotist) suggests to another (the subject) that certain perceptions, feeling, thoughts, or behaviors will spontaneously occur • Hypnotic state is an altered state of consciousness

23. Hypnosis Cont’d… • Recall forgotten events? • People (falsely) believe that our experiences are stored away and once hypnotized, they will be able to recall memories • 60 Years of research disputes the claim • Believe that people are “hypnotically refreshed” in their memories • May have been asked in hypnotherapy “Did you hear any loud noises?” thus planting the idea of loud noises in their pseudomemory

24. Hypnosis Cont’d… • Can Hypnosis be therapeutic? • Posthypnotic suggestion: A suggestion, made during a hypnosis session, to be carried out after the subject is no longer hypnotized; used by some clinicians to help control undesired symptoms and behaviors

25. Hypnosis Cont’d… • Can hypnosis alleviate pain? • Dissociation: A split in consciousness, which allows some thoughts and behaviors to occur simultaneously with others • DOES NOT block sensory input (your ability to feel pain) it may block our attention to the stimuli • Dissociating the pain sensation from conscious awareness (or by focusing the attention on other things)

26. Hypnosis Cont’d… • Social phenomenon: • Interpretations influence ordinary perceptions • Believe in the purpose of hynotherapy • Take on the role of “good hypnotic subjects” • Social Influence Theory: Extension of everyday social behaviors. Subjects may be “actors” playing the role of hypnotic subject

27. Hypnosis Cont’d… • Divided Consciousness: • Ernest Hilgard (1986): Hypnosis involved not only social influence, but a special state of dissociated (divided) consciousness • Controversial: We process information without conscious awareness (autopilot)