i 580 



HANDBOOK OF PHYSIOLOGY "NEUROPHYSIOLOGY III 



connotation. Subsequent testing of the words revealed 

 that a conditioned anxiety had spread to words in the 

 list with a rural connotation for the one group and 

 with an urban connotation for the other. Many of 

 the subjects were unaware that they had been shocked 

 on a word belonging to a particular category and that 

 they were responding with autonomic anxiety responses 

 in other words of that category. In this experiment 

 however the subjects were awake and not asleep. 

 They were quite aware of the stimuli as words with 

 meaning, but were 'unconscious' or unaware of the 

 categorization or abstraction process which devel- 

 oped beyond the simple perception of a word. Such 

 extended cognitive conditioning goes on in a brain 

 awake and alert due to shock reinforcement and exists 

 without awareness as a relational process. But what 

 of sleep where the simple perceptual process appears 

 not to develop due to lack of ARAS influence? Can 

 a lower order of perception occur and leave a useful 

 residual in memory? Can dissociation of levels or 

 hierarchies of perception occur during sleep and be 

 redintegrated during subsequent wakefulness? 



Consciousness, Attention, Hypnosis and the EEG 



consciousness. The term consciousness has suffered 

 both from the broadness and narrowness of its 

 conception. This is illustrated by a review entitled 

 'Consciousness Reconsidered' by Schiller (208) and 

 by five volumes cm ering the annual Macy conferences 

 from 1950-54 entitled Problems of Consciousness, edited 

 by Abramson (1). The broad framework of these 

 treatments of consciousness ranges from the anatom- 

 ical, concerned with the seat or locus of consciousness, 

 to the zoological or phylogenetic approach. Also 

 included are philosophical, psychological, psycho- 

 analytic, anthropological, sociological, biological, 

 biochemical, neurological, neurophysiological and 

 oilier view-points. It is perhaps significant however 

 that the neurophysiologie.il approach because of its 

 recent advances and contributions to new concep- 

 lions ol brain ortiani/alion and function has decidedly 

 influenced thinking, and has given new impetus to 



discussion ol an old topic. 1 [ere we shall be concerned 

 mainly with certain -.elected aspects of the neuro- 

 physiological, electroencephalograph ic, psychological 



and behavioral manifestations Oi consciousness. 



Iii the Macy conferences .\\»\ in Schiller's review 

 then- is an evident failure to resolve .1 definition of 

 consciousness which would satisfy the various inter- 

 disciplinary approaches to this problem. Because ol 

 this the Macy ferences which began with the 



somewhat restrictive title 'Levels of Consciousness' 

 shortly shifted to Problems of Consciousness. In his 

 summary Schiller states: "Exclusively physiological 

 and exclusively introspective accounts are incompre- 

 hensive and give rise to artifacts. Although they are 

 complementary, integration of knowledge is hard to 

 achieve because their points of reference and scales of 

 observation are wide apart." 



Lindsley (160) has argued for some kind of opera- 

 tional definition of consciousness in terms of which we 

 can observe, measure and evaluate. He proposed that 

 consciousness is a state of awareness, and that under- 

 lying this is sensory or perceptual discrimination 

 which might serve as an anchoring point in terms of 

 observation and measurement. Thus to determine the 

 state of awareness of consciousness at some point on 

 the sleep-waking continuum (see table 1) we can 

 measure the intensity and other characteristics of the 

 stimulus necessary to arouse the subject to a point 

 where he can discriminate the stimulus presented. 

 The act of discrimination may be an overt or covert 

 response, the latter being measurable as an autonomic, 

 somatic (electromyographic) or central-nervous- 

 system (electroencephalographic ) response, as well as 

 by subjective judgment and verbal report. 



Piaget in the 1954 volume of Abramson 1 1 I stated 

 that consciousness might be analyzed in two ways, 

 one, by studying the earliest or most elementary 

 forms of awareness, or by concentrating upon states oi 

 consciousness which were in process ol disappearing 

 and returning, and two, by Studying the develop- 

 mental changes in awareness as these are revealed by 

 objective criteria of language, judgment and so 

 forth. He discussed the second of these approaches 

 under the heading of consciousness of necessity in 

 which awareness of logical necessity was dealt wiih as 



it develops in children, lor example, 7-vear-olds 

 clearly see the logical necessity of the number of 

 beads in a short broad vial equaling those in a long 

 thin one. This is a cognitive consciousness or a con- 

 sciousness of relationships, which Piagei attempts to 

 trace developmentallv in terms ol total operational 

 structures. He believes these structures not only help 

 to explain changes in consciousness, but are eventually 



isomorphic with corresponding neurological struc- 

 tures. He states that consciousness is essentially a 

 sv stem of meanings that mav be cognitive or affective. 

 We shall now revert to the first approach mentioned 

 bv Piaget, namely what are some of the earliest 

 forms of awareness, or when does .1 newborn infant 

 lirsi manifest signs of awareness. Kleitman in the 



1950 and 1954 volumes of Abramson (1 1 emphasized 



