Unit 5 – States of Consciousness and Memory

Essential Questions:

  • What is consciousness?
  • What’s going on as we sleep?
  • What role or purpose does sleep play in our lives?  How does it affect behavior?
  • What are dreams?
  • Is Hypnosis a real thing and if so what is it?
  • What are psychoactive drugs actually doing to our consciousness and how do they affect behavior?
  • What are memories?
  • How do humans encode, store, and retrieve information in the memory systems?
  • How can humans enhance memory, encoding, storage, and retrieval?
  • Are memories stored or reconstructed?
  • How much can a person remember?
  • What are the conditions under which memories are made more easily or completed versus poorly?

Objectives:

  • Define consciousness.
  • Identify the different states of consciousness.
  • Describe the sleep cycle and its stages.
  • Discuss the different theories of dreams.
  • Identify the common sleep disorder, their causes and consequences.
  • Discuss hypnosis, the different theories and uses of hypnosis.
  • Discuss the controversy of the uses of hypnosis.
  • Describe the common psychoactive drugs and their effects.
  • Describe how certain drugs actually impact the synapse.
  • Discuss the nature and physiology of chemical dependence, addiction, tolerance, and withdrawal.
  • Discuss the different models for the memory system.
  • Analyze how humans encode, store, and retrieve memories.
  • Distinguish between automatic and effortful processing.
  • Compare and contrast the capacity and duration of sensory, short term (working), and long term memory.
  • Distinguish between implicit and explicit memory
  • Describe the importance of retrieval cues
  • Discuss the effects of interference and motivated forgetting on retrieval.
  • Describe evidence for the constructive nature of memory.

Activities, Readings and Viewings:

  • Read - Myers chapters 7 and 9
  • Hypnosis Experience - CD
  • Video – The Brain: Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
  • Video – Discovering Psychology: hypnosis
  • Video – The Mind: addiction
  • Read Excerpts from – The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat – Sack
  • Video – The Mind: memory
  • Memory activity – Experiencing Psychology
  • Memory Experiment Project

Evaluation:

  • Quizzes
  • Project
  • Exam 5

 

 

Daily Class Notes

Link to download smartboard software

States of Consciousness and memory (SB file) (pdf) (html)(powerpt)

 

 

 

Internet Resources:

Freud on Dreams (http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/) Translation of Sigmund Freud's 1900 book: "The Interpretation of Dreams" (from York University's "Classics in the History of Psychology" site.

http://www.dreammoods.com/

http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/chmemory.html