Psychology: An Explanation Of Consciousness '

Chapter IV
Consciousness and its Variations

Intro: 4.1 Consciousness Your immediate awareness of thoughts, sensations, memories, and the world around you represent the experience of consciousness. William James described consciousness as a “stream” or “river.” Although always changing, consciousness is perceived as unified and unbroken much like a stream. Because his idea of structuralism was based off of introspection, many of the leading psychologists at the turn of the twentieth century emphasized with the study of overt behavior, which could be directly observed, measured, and verified. In mid 90’s many psychologists once again turned their attention to the study of consciousness. This was due to two main reasons. First it was becoming clear that a complete understanding of behavior would not be possible unless psychologists considered the role of conscious mental processes in behavior. Second was because psychologist had devised more objective ways to stud conscious experiences. For example, they could often infer the conscious experience that seemed to be occurring by carefully observing behavior. Technological advances in studying brain activity were also producing intriguing correlations between brain activity and different states of consciousness. Different perspectives that
Through the course of the day, there is a natural ebb and flow to consciousness. The most obvious variation of consciousness that we experience is the daily sleep-wake cycle. These daily cycles such as this are called circadian rhythms. You actually experience many different circadian rhythms that ebb and flow over the course of any given 24hr period. Normally your circadian rhythms are closely synchronized with one another. For example, the circadian rhythm for the release of growth hormone is synchronized with the sleep-wake circadian rhythm so that growth hormone is released only during