Altered States of Consciousness, Learning, and Memory
Altered States of Consciousness
The characteristics of altered states of consciousness include the following changes:
- Confused temporal sense
- Uncontrolled thinking
- Changes in emotional expression
- Changes in body image
- Distortions or reversals in perspective
- Changes in meaning
Altered states can be triggered in different ways, from overstimulation to sleep stimulus. The disappearance of all four stages of sleep is called NREM sleep. After having gone through the four levels, our sleep becomes lighter, and again, between 40 to 80 minutes after we fell asleep, we enter REM sleep. This is the time where it is most likely to dream. People deprived of sleep show physiological symptoms such as trembling hands, double vision, and a low threshold of pain. Children sleep more than adults. Sleep disorders include narcolepsy, sleep apnea, insomnia, nightmares, sleepwalking, night terrors, and somniloquy (sleep talking).
Hypnosis
Hypnosis is a state of high suggestibility and susceptibility to external influences. Symptoms that occur among hypnotized people include stiff arms, loss of voluntary control, hallucinations, amnesia, and the inability to feel pain.
Learning
Learning is a relatively permanent change in behavior reflecting an increase in knowledge or skills collected through experience. Learning does not include those changes caused by factors such as fatigue, maturation, illness, or medication.
There are different types of learning. The simplest is habituation, in which a body stops responding because it has become used to something.
Another type of learning is focused on the cognitive thought processes that are engaged in learning.
An unconditioned stimulus is one that automatically causes an unconditioned response.
Superstitious behavior occurs when an organism is reinforced by accident.
In punishment, a behavior is followed by an unpleasant event. The purpose of punishment is to reduce the response. The effectiveness of punishment is associated with temporal contingency factors in its application, such as consistency and the presence of alternative responses.
Memory
Memory works through four basic steps: perceptual encoding, storage, and recovery. There are three different types of memory: sensory, short-term, and long-term. Short-term memory, also known as working memory, has a limited capacity. Information in short-term memory disappears after about 20 seconds.
Long-term memory seems to have an unlimited capacity to store information. The effective recovery of information from long-term memory depends on how the material has been stored. The more associations made between what we now want to remember and what we already know, the more possibilities there are to remember things.
The phenomenon of the tip of the tongue is a problem of recovery in which a person cannot remember certain information, even though they know it.
The relationship between mood and memory is called state-dependent memory.
Proactive interference describes a situation where previously learned material interferes with the ability to remember new material. Retroactive interference refers to a situation where newly learned information interferes with our memory of previously learned material.
A mnemonic is a memory aid, which can be exceptional in some cases.
There are different memory impairments. Amnesia is a general term that includes various memory disorders.
The hypnotized person is in a state of consciousness different from normal.