1. &n=
bsp;
Give a bri=
ef
definition of what ‘consciousness’ is, and explain the four are=
as
of consciousness outlined by Young and Block:
Consciousness
can be described as…..
i. =
&nb=
sp;
Access
consciousness is….
ii. =
Phenomenal
consciousness is…
iii. =
Monitoring
consciousness is…
iv. =
Self
consciousness is…
2. &n=
bsp;
Explain wh=
at is
meant by ‘visual neglect’, and how this helps us to understand
consciousness:
3. &n=
bsp;
What is the
difference between day dreaming and sleep dreaming? Do we all
‘dream’? If we could take a pill which meant we never needed to
sleep, what might be the consequences for our psychological health and
development?
4. &n=
bsp;
Read the
articles overleaf on somnambulism and the legal system. Do you think that the judges in the cases mentioned made the =
correct
decision? What types of consciousness are involved in somnambulism, and what
types are absent?
5. &n=
bsp;
Read the
attached account of drug taking – in what ways did the individual
concerned experience altered consciousness?
6. &n=
bsp;
How might a
psychological understanding of consciousness help interventions with
individuals with drug and alcohol addiction?
Excerpts from =
The
Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley, 1954 (on taking mescaline, a drug
similar to LSD or ‘acid’)
=
Half an
hour after swallowing the drug I became aware of a slow dance of golden lig=
hts. A little later there were sumptuous red surfac=
es
swelling and expanding from bright nodes of energy that vibrated with a
continuously changing, patterned life. At another time the closing of my ey=
es
revealed a complex of gray structures, within which pale bluish spheres kept
emerging into intense solidity and, having emerged, would slide noiselessly
upwards, out of sight. But at no time were there faces or forms of men or
animals. I saw no landscapes, no enormous spaces, no magical growth and
metamorphosis of buildings, nothing remotely like a drama or a parable̷=
0;
I took my pill at el=
even. An
hour and a half later, I was sitting in my study, looking intently at a sma=
ll
glass vase. The vase contained only three flowers-a full-blown Belie of
Portugal rose, shell pink with a hint at every petal's base of a hotter,
flamier hue; a large magenta and cream-colored carnation; and, pale purple =
at
the end of its broken stalk, the bold heraldic blossom of an iris. Fortuito=
us and
provisional, the little nosegay broke all the rules of traditional good tas=
te.
At breakfast that morning I had been struck by the lively dissonance of its
colors. But that was no longer the point. I was not looking now at an unusu=
al
flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his
creation-the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence.
"Is it agreeable?" somebody asked….
"Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "it just is." Istigkeit—wasn't that t=
he
word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness."=
The Being of Platonic philosophy— except that Plate seems to have made
the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being=
from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the I=
dea.
He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their
own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance
with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and
iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing les=
s,
than what they were—a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetu=
al
perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique
particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was=
to
be seen the divine source of all existence.
I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light=
I
seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing—but of a
breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but o=
nly
a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper
meaning. Words like "grace" and "transfiguration" came =
to
my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for.=
…At the same t=
ime, and
no less obviously, it was these flowers, it was anything that I—or ra=
ther
the blessed Not-I, released for a moment from my throttling embrace—c=
ared
to look at. The books, for example, with which my study=
walls
were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, wi=
th
brighter colors, a profounder significance. Red books, like rubies; emerald
books; books bound in white jade; books of agate; of aquamarine, of yellow
topaz; lapis lazuli books whose color was so intense, so intrinsically
meaningful, that they seemed to be on the point of leaving the shelves to
thrust themselves more insistently on my attention.
…The mind does=
its
Perceiving in terms of intensity of existence, profundity of significance,
relationships within a pattern. I saw the books, but was not at all concern=
ed
with their positions in space. What I noticed, what impressed itself upon my
mind was the fact that all of them glowed with living light and that in some
the glory was more manifest than in others. In this context position and the
three dimensions were beside the point. Not, of course, that the category of
space had been abolished. When I got up and walked about, I could do so qui=
te
normally, without misjudging the whereabouts of objects. Space was still th=
ere;
but it had lost its predominance. The mind was primarily concerned, not with
measures and locations, but with being and meaning. And along with indiffer=
ence
to space there went an even more complete indifference to time. "There
seems to be plenty of it," was all I would answer, when the investigat=
or
asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, b=
ut
exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have
looked at my watch; but my watch, I knew, was in another universe. My actual
experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration or alternatively =
of a
perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.