Compare and contrast any two altered states of consciousness
introduction
definition of consciousness- very important
talk about drugs as an ASC
talk about sleep/ dreaming
Differences
they have different physiological respoonses you look at when you study them- brain waves, vs heart rates.
sleep tends to leave your body physically immobile, whereas different types of drugs have different effects.
memory- you have different memory processes- in sleep it is thought this is for memory consolidation, you tend to remember dreams right as you wake up.
drugs- a lot of drugs result in unclear or just no memories at all- especially alcohol, but there is some evidence that recall emerges when you are induced into that state again.
something that goes the other way on the Entropy scale. outside the critial period
the awakeness of your body, as sleep shuts down your body but on drugs you are still capable of moving around your surroundings.
there are morally charged issues with drugs whereas, people arent considering sleep dangerous- drugs are part of our normal biological cycle
are we talking about legal, illegal, damaging drugs??
talking about medicinal drugs that help us?
risk level in altering your state
what is an ASC?
should it be defined objectively or subjectively, how can we compare experiences, what is normal? so how do we know whats not normal.
"a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his or her consciousness is radically different from the way it functions ordinarily" Tart 1972
other definitions emphasise their temporary nature
sources of information
sleep- internal
SIMILARITIES
similarities
lack of inhibitions
arousal/ attention/ focus
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methodological issues
sleep- with sleep it is because waking people up in the middle of their sleep stages throughout the night causes issues for validity as in real life you wouldnt be woken up multiple times in the night and asked what you are thinking
drugs- with drugs it is becasue you are often unable to make any sense out of people while they are under the influence
memory- drink missing, sleep, effects memory somehow, dreams tend to be forgotten, and people have to think about what they say when they first wake up before they forget it.
links to normal consciousness
do they both have links to everyday life? dreams- things can come into the dream that you have seen or were thinking about (look at Snyder 1970) , does the same happen with hallucinations?
both are subjective experiences away from normal, we cannot measure their experiences through conventional means, we have to rely on self report of what they experienced for the most part, not including physiological changes such as heart beat, skin conductance, and sleep cycle brain waves.
have to rely on self report for the most part (also in links to normal consciousness)
different stages of sleep result in different levels of awareness and wakefulness, the same can be said for drugs, psychoactives : depressants, stimulants, hallucinogens
mention psilocybin
lack of inhibitions
drugs are enduce a lot of emotions- also might help with self insight, do dreams?- Nir and Tononi 2010 foudn that theres stronger activation of visual memory and emotion areas and diminished activation of the frontal lobes (lack of inhibition) in REM sleep might be a way of dealing with underlying problems. Ullman method- useful for therapy (Ullman 1996). drugs have also have some successes in psychodelic therapy (something like that)
neurological effects- psilocybin creates many connections that with low stability that disappear after the drug use (petri et al 2014)
you can have adverse effects to both of them- drugs can cause terror (griffiths 2016), you can have sleep paralysis.
drugs- time distortion
drugs- ego loss (Alanes 1964) , sleep may stabilise your sense of self?
Hallucinations/ delusions
Hallucinogens disable the brains "filtering ability"
dreams are most common in REM sleep, sleep cycle lasts around 90 minutes, REM sleep gets longer the more cycles you go through
In REM sleep dreams are more visual.
dreams have their own 'dream logic'- acceptance of strange things and reduction in logical reasoning- maybe due to the diminished activation in the frontal lobes
dreams result in a loss of awareness and directed thought
sleep- poor memory, Walker says that sleep could be consolidating memory, we might forget so we dont interrupt our memories in real life.
weirdness of dreams due to failure of binding (Revonsuo and Tarkko 2002)
although it could be argued that some of the contents of dreams have come from the outside world.
drugs- external
Sleep (Avidan 2011), Cheyne 2003
PARAGRAPH: Consciousness, for the purposes of this discussion, refers to an individuals awareness of their own thoughts, actions, environments and memories. Altered states of consciousness have been defined by Tart 1972 as 'a qualitative alteration in the overall pattern of mental functioning, such that the experiencer feels his or her consciousness is radically different from the way it functions ordinarily. this essay discusses the similarities and differences between the use of drugs, and dream states as altered states, although there are a number of altered states of consciousness. Dreams are most common in REM sleep, part of a four stage cycle that takes around ninety minutes to complete. In REM sleep, dreams are more visual, and there is stronger activation of emotion areas, and diminished activation of the frontal lobes (Nir & Tononi, 2010). There are a much wider range of substances that are under the classification of drugs, however, which can have a range of effects on a persons conscious perception. Psychedelic drugs like Psilocybin will be the focus of this discussion, comparing similarities in memory, methodological issues, and lack of inhibitions between dreams and drug induced states. It also discusses the neurological, ego and memory differences between the two.
Hallucinations happen on psilocybin (Hasler et al. 2004)
emotions/ therapy
methodological issues
differences
ego loss
neurological differences
both
spiritual awakenings are common in both
memory
dont have a proper agreed definition of consciousness, so how can there be a empirical testable definition of what constitutes altered state of consciousness
should it be defined objectively or subjectively, how can we compare experiences, what is normal? so how do we know whats not normal.
drugs- (Pahnke et al. 1962)
PARAGRAPH
POINT: Both dreaming and drug induced states result in reduced inhibitions, logical reasoning and hallucinations.
EVIDENCE: Dreams have their own 'logic' where when strange things happen, and irrelevant information from previous days of waking life enters the dream (Blagrove et al. 2011), they are just accepted. This reduction in logical reasoning could be due to diminished activation in the frontal lobes (Nir & Tononi, 2010), which results in deficits in inhibition and logical reasoning. There is also evidence to support drugs such as alcohol impairs inhibitory control (Miyake et al. 2000) and illegal drugs such as Cocaine and MDMA have the same effect (Luijten, 2015). This lack of control in drug users is substantially more dangerous however, as it elevates impaired and impulsive decision making, resulting in actions that people without the drug do not do (Morgan et al. 2006). SImilarly, while dreaming states tend to create visual images that have no impact on the real world, some hallucinogens, such as LSD and Psilocybin, create hallucinations in their users. some report feelings of a mystical nature and spiritual awakening (Pahnke et al. 1962), and others have reported feelings of terror (Griffiths, 2016). Dreams can elicit similar kinds of responses, with 1 in 10 people experiencing sleep paralysis at some point in their lives (Avidan, 2011), with many cultures reporting fear and various forms of demons as the cause, as Gordon (2015) notes. Dreams can also cause reports of spiritual awakenings, and messages through dreams are common in religious texts.
link: there are a number of similarities between
PARAGRAPH
Point: there are also a number of methodological issues for studying ASC shared by both dream and drug states.
Evidence: For example, both states rely on self- report data for the most part, which is prone to memory, verbosity and reliability issues, for data collection on drugs especially, as it has to be collected after the fact, as while under the influence of some drugs there is no useful information about what they are experiencing that can be collected from participants. Dream studies experience the same problem, as their participants have to be woken up and asked quickly what they were dreaming about, as many dreams are forgotten quickly after entering waking consciousness. Wording of the question, and the nature of waking participants up at irregular times through the night, are also methodological problems for sleep studies, as slightly different questions can receive very different answers, and the methods of the study are very different to 'normal' sleep for most participants. There are also methodological concerns that encompass all forms of ASC, as there is no agreed upon definition for consciousness, so what constitutes an ASC is also vastly different for different researchers. closely following this, individual differences are likely to occur in this self report data as each participant's 'normal' experience is subjective, so as will their perceived change as a result of these ASC.
Explanation: many of these studies into ASC have strong methodological issues, meaning that their results may be flawed, and these studies may not tell us anything generalisable about these ASC.
PARAGRAPH:
Point: Memory acts as a buffer for the similarities and differences of dream and drug states, as it has both.
Evidence: They are similar as people report a poor memory for both states, drugs like alcohol temporarily disrupt the ability to form new long term memories, and there are a number of reports that give forgetting as a common side effect of prescribed psychotropic drugs (Cooper et al. 2007) Dreams are commonly quickly forgotten after waking up, potentially because the information in the dreams are not important, and this stops memories in dreams and reality from becoming muddled.
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However, Sleep seems to have a function in memory consolidation, which is where sleep and drug states differ. Van Der Helm & Walker (2009) suggested that dreams are a by-product of memory consolidation, where emotions at the time of encoding are used to tag the memory so the important ones are more likely to be remembered. This hypothesis has been supported by Deliens et al (2013) who found that after sleep, participants recall was protected against emotional context interference. Drugs seem to have very little beneficial effect on memory however, and as discussed, seem to often result in the inability to form long term memories. There is evidence however that state dependent forgetting may occur, as Goodwin et al. (1975) and Carter and Cassaday (1998) found that retrieval of memories improved when participants were in the same state as they were at the time of encoding.
therefore, there seem to be both similarities and differences between the effects of ASC on memory.
PARAGRAPH
while there may be some differences between the two ASC, such as risk, memory function and neurological differences, there seem to be many more similarities than there first appears to be, most importantly that they both share the same methodical issues and similar effects from frontal lobe inhibition.
neurological effects- psilocybin creates many connections that with low stability that disappear after the drug use (petri et al 2014)
Point: there seems to be neurological differences in the effects of both ASC.
evidence: Drugs such as Psilocybin create many connections within the brain that have low stability and last until the effects of the drug have worn off (Petri et al, 2014). However, research shows that the role of sleep can have many important functions such as memory consolidation, brain maturation (Marks et al. 1995) and some researchers have suggested that sleep is important for brain cells to repair and regain sensitivity, as Siegel (2003) discusses.