Psychologists have discovered that human beings experience several different sta

Question

Psychologists have discovered that human beings experience several different states of consciousness during the course of a day. For example, people have times when they are especially alert and times when they are awake but not alert, often called "daydreaming." Also, while people are asleep, they experience different stages of sleep, each characterized by different patterns of brain and bodily activity.

In a multi-paragraph essay, discuss the different states of consciousness that you have experienced in the past 24 hours, including any periods when you were asleep, alert, or "daydreaming." Be sure to describe both the brain and bodily activity you experienced during each state of consciousness. Include information from class materials, readings, and research on states of consciousness to support your discussion.

Explanation / Answer

While working non stop for 4-5 hours today,I went from being sleepy and brain completely shut to forcing myself to become alert and get my mind working to a state of completely just looking into nothing and thinking nothing at all. This happens with all of us,wherein our mind goes from complete alertness to complete sleep or being blank. Obviously when you are sleeping your brain is still working.The hormone melatonin increases at night and is associated with becoming sleepy. Your natural daily rhythm, or Circadian Rhythm, can be influenced by the amount of daylight to which you are exposed as well as your work and activity schedule. While you are awake and alert your brain activity is marked by beta waves. Beta waves are characterized by being high in frequency but low in intensity.As you begin to relax these change to alpha waves. When you go into deep sleep,the rapid eye movement starts that is the brain waves are less intense during deep sleep in contrast to when you are awake. Studies show that the first cycle of REM sleep dreaming reflects back on the occurrences of the day. As the night progresses, the dreams that happen within REM sleep cycles will reflect on the themes learned from the previous one. This is why when you wake up in the morning that there are only few connections that make sense to you in relations to your life. Daydreaming is in fact different from night dreaming in the sense that daydreams are neither as vivid or mysterious as night dreams, and your daydreams are under your control. Daydreams also let us learn consequences in real life situations. We often think of scenarios while we daydream and come up with many cause & effects of the scenarios. Daydreaming is like your own personal counselor stored into your brain. Which happens quite a lot with,wherein I keep thinking about my future,my goals,what I want to achieve,or even a small thing like where I want to go and travel. Also a particular work decision and its effects on myself and in general thinking about the possible scenarios.

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