Crash Course Psychology #8 is where I learn a little bit about consciousness and selective attention.
For context, Crash Course inspired me to learn the basics of psychology, so I’ve made it my mission to watch the entire Crash Course Psychology playlist and paraphrase each episode in my own words. This journey wouldn’t have been possible without the Crash Course team, so many thanks to them! To showcase what I learnt, here is my personal paraphrase of episode 8:
What is Consciousness? (At least, covered in Crash Course Psychology #8)
It is difficult to describe, at least if you want to describe it sufficiently or appropriately. So for the purpose of learning and discussion, the episode chose to loosely define consciousness as our awareness of ourselves and our environment. This is what allows us to take in information from the world and organise it simultaneously.
Other Interpretations
American Psychologist William James interpreted consciousness as this continuously moving, shifting, and unbroken stream. Hence where the term “stream of consciousness” came from.
Others interpret consciousness as the brain’s flashlight that highlights one thing and then moves on to the next thing.
What they have in common, and the point is, is that the conscious experience is forever shifting. One moment it’s on this blog you’re reading, the next moment, it’s on something else.
Beyond that moment to moment shifting, consciousness allows us to think big like contemplate life, plan our futures, consider what ifs, and reflect on the past. We experience consciousness so much, yet we know very little of it.
States of Consciousness
While we life, we go back and forth between various states of consciousness. They are waking, sleeping, and various altered states like dreaming, or physiologically sparked like a drug induced hallucination where you’re tripping, or triggered psychologically. This episode we’re looking at what it means to be awake.
Cognitive Neuroscience & Neuroimaging
For centuries, scientists learned everything they could about the brain through observation only. Even though a lot was learnt, it was limited. It was the only thing they could do given their technology at the time. With today’s technology, we can see not only the structures, but even the activity inside a living brain! We can see the electrical, metabolic, and magnetic signatures of a brain on a screen for interpretation.
Cognitive Neuroscience
This is the study of how brain activity is linked with our mental processes. This includes thinking, perception, memory, and language.
Important note: Cognitive Neuroscience is one of many integrative disciplines that derive from psychology and neuroscience. All of which reflect a variety of approaches. Most importantly, all of these are relatively new sciences, only scratching the surface of a very complex set of topics.
Like other kinds of neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience uses neuroimaging technologies to consider links between specific brain states and conscious experiences. There are multiple ways to scan a brain, here are some of them;
- Structural Imaging
- This shows the brain’s anatomy, useful for identifying large scale tumors, diseases, and injuries.
- Functional Imaging
- This shows us electromagnetic or metabolic activity in the brain, like blood flow. This lets us observe correlations between specific mental functions (I assume things like remembering, thinking, imagining, etc) and activity in particular brain areas (I assume blood flow in those areas).
Important reminder: Correlation does not equal causation. Knowing where activity is happening while performing specific mental functions can be useful to know, but it does not tell us the whole story. Since we know function is often localised in the brain and how everything psychological is simultaneously biological, it is reasonable to think that our thoughts and emotions could (at least partially) be displayed with the brain activity shown on screen. Additionally, some of this technology is very new. Plus, there isn’t a consensus on how to interpret neuroimaging findings.
Dual Processing
Dual Processing is the principle that information is simultaneously processed on separate conscious and non-conscious tracks.
We have collected a fair amount of evidence to posit that consciousness isn’t singular. Rather, it’s two layers, and both have their own processes and functioning. This is one of the dual process models of consciousness, the idea that our conscious mind thinks explicitly, while our automatic mind simultaneously processes information in the background. All of this weighs down on how we behave.
Attention
According to some estimates, our senses collect around 11 million bits of information every second (how do these estimates know?). Despite this, we only consciously register around 40 at a time. How do we focus in light of this? With Selective Attention!
Selective Attention
It’s how we focus our conscious awareness on a particular stimulus or group of stimuli. In turn, this tunes out the rest. However, our automatic mind secretly registers that rest. Still, while we focus on something, most of the other stimuli fade away.
The classic auditory example of selective attention is the cocktail party effect. Because in a party where many conversations overlap, you can still focus on the one you’re in. At the same time, when someone nearby mentions something of interest, your attention picks it up.
Selective Attention is useful, but it can be dangerous as well. With every action of selective attention, you concurrently activate your Selective InAttention. You can miss even the most obvious things when your full attention is elsewhere. We call this Inattentional Blindness. Magicians understand and use this same concept for their magic tricks, but they call it Misdirection. Magicians also prey on our Change Blindness, which is the psychological phenomenon in which we fail to notice changes in our environment. This means we don’t notice what was different a moment ago versus what is there now. This can be both fun, but also dangerous.
Conclusion of Crash Course Psychology #8
In actuality, we are far less aware of what’s going on around us than we think we are. What’s more, this is just for when we’re awake. Imagine our awareness levels and what we fail to notice when we’re in all the other states of consciousness.
Watch Crash Course Psychology #8 to see cool examples!
Danniel’s thoughts on Crash Course Psychology #8
- Hank mentions in the video at 3:59 “one of the dual process models of consciousness”. Does this mean there are other dual process models of consciousness?
Enjoyed this learning of Psychology? Test your knowledge against these quick custom Kahoot! quizzes I’ve made based on the episode above: This is the easy mode and this is the hard mode for Crash Course Psychology #8.
Also, do check out what else Psychology related I’ve learnt from my Psychology blog!
Credits for Crash Course Psychology #8
Original Content & Media by Crash Course
Content Consumed and Paraphrased by Danniel Iskandar
Paraphrase Proofread by
Paraphrase Reviewed by