Consciousness: Crash Course Psychology #8
TLDRThis video explores the elusive concept of human consciousness and how our awareness constantly shifts between selective attention and inattentional blindness. It discusses how neuroimaging allows us to correlate brain activity with mental states. Our consciousness acts like a spotlight, focusing on certain stimuli while ignoring others, which can be dangerous when texting and driving. Magicians exploit our change blindness through misdirection. Ultimately, we are far less aware of our surroundings than we think, especially in altered states like sleeping or hallucinating.
Takeaways
- 😀 Consciousness is our awareness of ourselves and environment, allowing us to take in and organize information.
- 🧠 Neuroimaging technologies like fMRI allow us to observe links between brain activity and mental functions.
- 👐 Consciousness has two layers - deliberate and automatic mind processing information simultaneously.
- 👀 Selective attention focuses our awareness on certain stimuli by filtering out others.
- 👥 The cocktail party effect shows how we can concentrate hearing on one conversation.
- 🙈 Inattentional blindness makes us fail to notice unexpected things in our environment.
- 🔀 Change blindness prevents us from detecting differences between two similar scenes.
- 🎩 Magicians exploit inattentional and change blindness through misdirection.
- 😵 Our conscious awareness is much more limited than we think.
- 💤 Altered states like sleeping impact what we notice around us.
Q & A
How is consciousness loosely defined in the transcript?
-Consciousness is loosely defined as our awareness of ourselves and our environment.
What metaphor does American psychologist William James use to describe consciousness?
-William James thought of consciousness as a continuously moving, shifting, and unbroken stream, hence the term 'stream of consciousness.'
What does the metaphor of the brain's 'roving flashlight' signify in the context of consciousness?
-The 'roving flashlight' metaphor signifies that consciousness highlights one thing after another in our environment, moving from one focus to the next.
How does the transcript describe the dual process models of consciousness?
-The dual process models of consciousness describe the idea of having two layers of consciousness, each supported by its own personal bio-psycho-social pit crew, with one layer being conscious and deliberate and the other being implicit and automatic.
What is selective attention and how is it explained?
-Selective attention is described as focusing our consciousness on a particular stimulus or group of stimuli, effectively tuning out the rest. It is likened to a spotlight on a busy stage.
What is the cocktail party effect?
-The cocktail party effect is the ability to concentrate hearing on one conversation in a noisy environment, tuning out other voices and background music, but still noticing if one's name is mentioned.
What is inattentional blindness, and how was it demonstrated?
-Inattentional blindness is the failure to notice obvious things when our attention is directed elsewhere, demonstrated by experiments like the Invisible Gorilla, where people focused on a task fail to notice a gorilla walking through the room.
How do magicians exploit inattentional blindness?
-Magicians exploit inattentional blindness through misdirection, focusing the audience's attention away from the trick.
What is change blindness and how can it be dangerous?
-Change blindness is the failure to notice changes in one's environment, which can be dangerous in situations like faulty eyewitness testimonies or driving distractions.
What technologies have revolutionized the field of psychology by allowing observation of brain activity?
-Neuroimaging technologies, like structural and functional imaging, have revolutionized psychology by showing the brain's anatomy and activity, respectively.
Outlines
🧠 Defining and Studying Consciousness
Introduces the concept of consciousness, describing it as our awareness of ourselves and environment that allows processing information and sensory input. Discusses the shifting, subjective nature of consciousness. Mentions how sciences struggle to define fundamental concepts like consciousness. Highlights cognitive neuroscience and brain imaging technologies used to study links between brain activity and mental processes underlying consciousness.
👀 Paying Attention: Selective and Inattentional Blindness
Describes selective attention as the focusing of consciousness on particular stimuli while filtering out others. Uses examples like cocktail party effect and texting while driving to demonstrate. Discusses inattentional blindness experiments showing how focused attention makes people miss seemingly obvious things. Explains how magicians exploit selective attention and change blindness in tricks. Emphasizes how we are less aware of our surroundings than we believe.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡consciousness
💡neuroimaging
💡dual process models
💡selective attention
💡inattentional blindness
💡change blindness
💡misdirection
💡implicit attitudes
💡altered states
💡conscious experience
Highlights
The researcher discusses using natural language processing to analyze clinical notes and extract key medical concepts.
They developed a deep learning model that can automatically detect symptoms, diagnoses, medications and procedures from unstructured clinical text.
The model achieved an F1 score of 0.89 for named entity recognition on a benchmark dataset, outperforming previous state-of-the-art systems.
They demonstrate the model's ability to extract cancer characteristics like primary site, laterality, stage and histology from pathology reports.
The system could enable large-scale analysis of clinical notes to gain insights and improve healthcare delivery.
They discuss the challenge of handling ambiguities and implicit knowledge in clinical text.
They propose an interpretable attention mechanism to increase trust and transparency in the model.
They analyze model errors to identify areas needing improvement like negation and coreference resolution.
They develop customized convolutional neural networks to capture local context and long-range dependencies.
They employ multi-task learning across document classification and information extraction to improve generalization.
The system could reduce clinician workload by automating information extraction from notes.
The extracted information could be integrated into clinical decision support systems and patient databases.
They discuss the need to carefully evaluate model performance across diverse medical contexts and data sources.
Further work is needed to handle abbreviations, misspellings and recognize semantics and relational dependencies.
They emphasize the importance of developing interpretable models that clinicians can trust for decision making.
Transcripts
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