Sleep is an altered state of consciousness PDF

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Sleep is an altered state of consciousness...

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Sleep is an altered state of consciousness, and a necessary one; we must sleep. But there are other, voluntary forms of altered consciousness. Meditation and hypnosis are two of these. For what purposes is meditation used? Meditation is a group of techniques that involve focusing attention on an object, a word, one’s breathing, or a body movement to block out all distractions and achieve an altered state of consciousness. Some forms of meditation—yoga, Zen, and transcendental meditation (TM)—have their roots in Eastern religions and are practised by followers of those religions to attain a higher state of spirituality. Others use these approaches to increase relaxation, reduce arousal, or expand consciousness. Brain-imaging studies support the conclusion that meditation, in addition to being relaxing, induces an altered state of consciousness. Recent research has shown that, in addition to having a range of positive health effects such as stress reduction and lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels, meditation may also alter brain structure. Regular meditation generally helps individuals improve their overall psychological health Some meditators sit in a comfortable chair with eyes closed, both feet flat on the floor, and hands in the lap or simply resting on the arms of the chair. They might begin meditation by relaxing their muscles from the feet up to achieve a deep state of relaxation. Other people concentrate on their breathing—slowly, rhythmically, in and out. In transcendental meditation, the meditator is given a mantra—a word (such as om) assigned by the teacher. The meditator repeats the mantra over and over during meditation to block out unwanted thoughts and facilitate the meditative state. Dr Herbert Benson suggests that any word or sound will do. Moreover, he asserts that the benefits of meditation can be achieved through simple relaxation techniques. Do the What is hypnosis, and when is it most useful? Have you ever been hypnotized? Many people are fascinated by this unusual, somewhat mysterious phenomenon. Other people doubt that it even exists. Hypnosis is a trancelike state of concentrated and focused attention, heightened suggestibility, and diminished response to external stimuli. In the hypnotic state, people suspend their usual rational and logical ways of thinking and perceiving and allow themselves to experience distortions in perceptions, memories, and thinking. Under hypnosis, people may experience positive hallucinations in which they see, hear, touch, smell, or taste things that are not present in the environment; or, they may have negative hallucinations and fail to perceive those things that are present.

About 80 to 95 percent of people are hypnotizable to some degree, but only 5 percent can reach the deepest levels of trance. The ability to become completely absorbed in imaginative activities is characteristic of highly hypnotizable people.

Hypnosis: Separating Fact from Fiction Although hypnosis has been studied extensively, many misconceptions remain. Here are the facts:      

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Hypnotized subjects are aware of what is going on during hypnosis. Individuals will not violate their moral values under hypnosis. Individuals cannot demonstrate superhuman strength or perform amazing feats because they are hypnotized. Memory is not more accurate under hypnosis. Hypnotized individuals will not reveal embarrassing secrets. Hypnotized individuals will not relive events as they believe the events should have occurred (i.e., rather than as they actually took place in childhood). Hypnotized individuals are not under the complete control of the hypnotist. The hypnotized person’s responses are often automatic and involuntary

Medical Uses of Hypnosis: It’s Not Just Entertainment We have seen that responses followed by reinforcers tend to be repeated. What happens when reinforcement is no longer available? A rat in a Skinner box will eventually stop pressing a bar when it is no longer rewarded with food pellets. In operant conditioning, extinction occurs when reinforcers are withheld. In humans and other animals, extinction can lead to frustration or even rage. Consider a child having a temper tantrum. If whining and loud demands do not bring the reinforcer, the child may progress to kicking and screaming. If a vending machine takes your coins but fails to deliver candy or pop, your button-pushing or lever-pulling behaviour may become erratic and more forceful. You might even shake the machine or kick it before giving up. Not getting what we expect makes us angry. The process of spontaneous recovery, which we discussed in relation to classical conditioning, also occurs in operant conditioning. A rat whose bar pressing has been extinguished may again press the bar a few times when returned to the Skinner box after a period of rest. Skinner

conducted many of his experiments with pigeons placed in a Skinner box specially designed for them. The box contained small, illuminated disks that the pigeons could peck to receive bits of grain from a food tray. Skinner found that generalization occurs in operant conditioning. A pigeon rewarded for pecking at a yellow disk is likely to peck at another disk similar in colour. The less similar a disk is to the original colour, the lower the rate of pecking will be.

Discrimination in operant conditioning involves learning to distinguish between a stimulus that has been reinforced and other stimuli that may be very similar We learn discrimination when our response to the original stimulus is reinforced but responses to similar stimuli are not reinforced. For example, to encourage discrimination, a researcher would reward the pigeon for pecking at the yellow disk but not for pecking at the orange or red disk. Certain cues come to be associated with reinforcement or punishment. If a pigeon’s peck at a lighted disk results in a reward but a peck at an unlighted disk does not, the pigeon will soon be pecking at the lighted disk but not at the unlighted one. The presence or absence of the discriminative stimulus, in this case the lighted disk, will control whether or not the pecking takes place. We may wonder why children sometimes misbehave with a grandparent but not with a parent, or why they make one teacher’s life miserable but are model students for another. The children may have learned that in the presence of some people (the discriminative stimuli), misbehaviour will almost certainly lead to punishment, whereas in the presence of certain other people it will not and may even be rewarded. There are two types of reinforcement: positive and negative. These terms are used in their mathematical sense in operant conditioning. Thus, positive is equivalent to added, and negative is equivalent to subtracted or removed. refers to any positive consequence that, if applied after a response, increases the probability of that response. We know that many people will work hard for a raise or a promotion, that salespeople will increase their efforts to get awards and bonuses, that students will study to get good grades, and that children will throw temper tantrums to get candy or ice cream. In these examples, raises, promotions, awards, bonuses, good grades, candy, and ice cream are positive reinforcers. involves learning a behaviour in order to make something unpleasant go away. When people find that a response successfully ends an aversive condition, they are likely to repeat it. People will turn on their air conditioner to terminate the heat, and they will get out of bed to turn off a faucet to avoid listening to the annoying “drip, drip, drip.” For many students, studying with classmates (learned behaviour) reduces test anxiety (removed consequence). Thus, for these students, test anxiety is an important source of negative reinforcement, one that encourages them to engage in effective study behaviours. In these instances, negative reinforcement involves putting an end to the heat, the dripping faucet, and anxiety.

Responses that end discomfort and responses that are followed by rewards are likely to be strengthened or repeated because both lead to a more favourable outcome. Some behaviours are influenced by a combination of positive and negative reinforcement. If you eat a plateful of rather disgusting leftovers to relieve intense hunger, then eating probably has been negatively reinforced. You are eating solely to remove hunger, a negative reinforcer. But if your hunger is relieved by a gourmet dinner at a fine restaurant, both positive and negative reinforcement will have played a role. Your hunger has been removed, and the delicious dinner has been a reward in itself.

Hypnosis has come a long way from the days when it was used mainly by entertainers. It is now recognized as a viable technique to be used in medicine, dentistry, and psychotherapy. Hypnosis is accepted by the American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychiatric Association. Hypnosis has been particularly helpful in the control of pain, especially in the management of pain and other side effects associated with cancer care. However, hypnosis has been only moderately effective in controlling weight whereas suggestions made through hypnosis can have an indirect influence in reducing smoking.

Critics’ Explanations of Hypnosis: Is It Really What It Seems? Because there is no reliable way to determine whether a person is truly hypnotized, some critics offer other explanations for behaviour occurring during this state. One explanation is that people are simply acting out the role suggested by the hypnotist. Although some people who declare that they are hypnotized may be role-playing, this theory does not adequately explain how people can undergo surgery with hypnosis rather than with a general anaesthetic. This may be why some researchers have argued that hypnosis does indeed affect our ability to control behaviours. Former University of Waterloo researcher Ken Bowers proposed that the hypnotist’s suggestions weaken the executive function of the brain and that the hypnotized person’s responses are automatic and involuntary. Even though researchers still have theoretical differences of opinion, hypnosis is being increasingly used in clinical practice. Police believe Latulip suffered a head injury shortly after taking a bus to Niagara Falls in 1986, which reportedly left him with no memory of who he was. After the accident happened, no one noticed that Latulip was suffering from a rare form of amnesia and was unable to recall any personal

information from his past. Amnesia is a condition that can last from days to years, as was the case for Latulip who, in the absence of any personal information, decided to create a new identity for himself. DetectiveConstable Duane Gingerich, one of the Waterloo Regional Police officers who investigated Latulip’s disappearance, was surprised to finally close the case. While a reported sighting in Hamilton in 1993 gave him hope that Latulip might still be alive, he knew the odds of a happy ending were very low Gingerich noted that portions of Latulip’s memory slowly started to come back to him and he decided to contact a professional to determine what was going on. The social worker he contacted found his missing person’s report and called the police. The person who demonstrates a behaviour or whose behaviour is imitated is called the model. Parents, movie stars, and sports personalities are often powerful models. The effectiveness of a model is related to his or her status, competence, and power. Other important factors are the age, sex, attractiveness, and ethnic status of the model.

Whether or not learned behaviour is actually performed depends largely on whether the observed models are rewarded or punished for their behaviour and whether the individual expects to be rewarded for the behaviour. Research has also shown that observational learning is improved when several sessions of observation (watching the behaviour) precede attempts to perform the behaviour and are then repeated in the early stages of practising it.

We use observational learning to acquire new responses or to strengthen or weaken existing responses. Consider your native language or accent, attitudes, gestures, personality traits, good habits (or bad habits, for that matter), moral values, food preferences, and so on. Do you share any of these with your parents? While you were growing up, their example probably influenced your behaviour for better or worse. Look around the classroom and observe the clothes, hairstyles, and verbal patterns of the other students. Most people have been greatly influenced by observing others. Some researchers are exploring memory more minutely by studying the actions of single neurons. Others are studying collections of neurons and their synapses as well as the neurotransmitters whose chemical action begins the process of recording and storing a memory. The first close look at the nature of memory in single neurons was provided by Eric Kandel and his colleagues, who traced the effects of learning and memory in the sea snail Aplysia.

Cocaine, a stimulant derived from coca leaves, can be sniffed (snorted) as a white powder, injected intravenously, or smoked in the form of crack. The rush of well-being is dramatically intense and powerful, but it is just as dramatically short-lived. In the case of cocaine, the euphoria lasts no more than 30 to 45 minutes; with crack, the effect lasts no more than 5 to 10 minutes. In both cases, the euphoria is followed by an equally intense crash that is marked by depression, anxiety, agitation, and a powerful craving for more of the drug. Chronic cocaine use can also result in holes in the nasal septum (the ridge of cartilage running down the middle of the nose) and in the palate. Cocaine stimulates the reward or “pleasure” pathways in the brain, which use the neurotransmitter dopamine. With continued use, the reward systems fail to function normally and the user becomes incapable of feeling any pleasure except from the drug. Animal researchers have shown that animals addicted to multiple substances prefer cocaine when offered a choice of drugs and will lose interest in everything else—food, water, sex—in order to continually self-administer cocaine. The main withdrawal symptoms are psychological—the inability to feel pleasure and the craving for more cocaine. Cocaine constricts the blood vessels, raises blood pressure, speeds up the heart, quickens respiration, and can even cause epileptic seizures in people who have no history of epilepsy. Over time, or even quickly in high doses, cocaine can cause heart palpitations, an irregular heartbeat, and heart attacks. Recent studies suggest that cocaine use has remained low in Canada over the past 10 years, with just over 1 percent of Canadians reporting cocaine use in the past year. The cheapest and perhaps the most dangerous form of cocaine, crack, can produce a powerful dependency after just several weeks of use Using tiny electrodes implanted in several single neurons in the sea snail, Kandel and his fellow researchers were able to map neural circuits that are formed and maintained as the animal learns and remembers. Furthermore, they discovered the different types of protein synthesis that facilitate shortterm and long-term memory. Cocaine, a stimulant derived from coca leaves, can be sniffed (snorted) as a white powder, injected intravenously, or smoked in the form of crack. The rush of well-being is dramatically intense and powerful, but it is just as dramatically short-lived. In the case of cocaine, the euphoria lasts no more than 30 to 45 minutes; with crack, the effect lasts no more than 5 to 10 minutes. In both cases, the euphoria is followed by an equally intense crash that is marked by depression, anxiety, agitation, and a powerful craving for more of

the drug. Chronic cocaine use can also result in holes in the nasal septum (the ridge of cartilage running down the middle of the nose) and in the palate. Cocaine stimulates the reward or “pleasure” pathways in the brain, which use the neurotransmitter dopamine. With continued use, the reward systems fail to function normally and the user becomes incapable of feeling any pleasure except from the drug. Animal researchers have shown that animals addicted to multiple substances prefer cocaine when offered a choice of drugs and will lose interest in everything else—food, water, sex—in order to continually self-administer cocaine. The main withdrawal symptoms are psychological—the inability to feel pleasure and the craving for more cocaine. Cocaine constricts the blood vessels, raises blood pressure, speeds up the heart, quickens respiration, and can even cause epileptic seizures in people who have no history of epilepsy. Over time, or even quickly in high doses, cocaine can cause heart palpitations, an irregular heartbeat, and heart attacks. Recent studies suggest that cocaine use has remained low in Canada over the past 10 years, with just over 1 percent of Canadians reporting cocaine use in the past year. The cheapest and perhaps the most dangerous form of cocaine, crack, can produce a powerful dependency after just several weeks of use.

But the studies of learning and memory in Aplysia reflect only simple classical conditioning, which is a type of non-declarative memory. Other researchers studying mammals report that physical changes occur in the neurons and synapses in brain regions involved in declarative memory What happened to Edgar Latulip is difficult to understand. How could a minor head injury cause someone to forget his identity? And how can we explain why he suddenly started to recall that he had had another identity thirty years ago? How can we know whether our behaviour is normal or abnormal? At what point do our fears, thoughts, mood changes, and actions move from normal to mentally disturbed? This chapter explores many psychological disorders, their symptoms, and their possible causes. But first let us ask the obvious question: What is abnormal? In the canals, the moving fluid bends the hair cells, which act as receptors and send neural impulses to the brain. Because there are three canals, each positioned on a different plane, the hair cells in one canal will bend more than the hair cells in the other canals, depending on the direction of rotation.

The semicircular canals and the vestibular sacs signal only changes in motion or orientation. If you were blindfolded and had no visual or other external cues, you would not be able to sense motion once your speed reached a constant rate. For example, in an airplane you feel the takeoff and landing or sudden changes in speed. But once the pilot levels off and maintains about the same speed, your vestibular organs do not signal to the brain that you are moving, even if you are travelling hundreds of kilometres per hour.

Why don’t all people perceive sights, sounds, odours, and events in the same way? The reason is that our perceptions involve more than just the sensory stimuli themselves....