| Abstract | Covers research on levels and states of consciousness. Levels: conscious vs. pre-/sub-/nonconscious. States: ordinary (OSC, waking consciousness) vs. altered states of consciousness (ASCs, e.g., sleeping/dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, pharmacologically altered state). Applications in health/clinical psychology, and implications for the scientific mind (insight, flow) are also considered. |
| Content | The study of consciousness involves scholars from diverse fields, such as psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, philosophy, linguistics, computer science, medicine, religious studies, anthropology, as well as literature and art studies. While the study of consciousness is presented mainly from the point of view of psychology in this course, additional interdisciplinary viewpoints are also integrated.
Psychological consciousness studies involve research on levels and states of consciousness. Psychologically researched levels of consciousness are the conscious, preconscious, unconscious/subconscious, and nonconscious levels of mental processing. Psychological research on states of consciousness – which is the main focus of this course – takes waking consciousness as the most common state (ordinary state of consciousness, OSC), using it as a baseline against which altered states of consciousness (ASCs) are compared. Some of the most prominently or promising researched ASCs in psychology will be introduced in this course and include sleeping/dreaming, hypnosis, meditation, sensory deprivation (e.g., floating tank), rhythm-induced trance, as well as ASCs induced by psychoactive drugs (classic psychedelics, dissociative anesthetics, empathogens). Furthermore, it will also be shown how a growing number of health and clinical studies investigate the therapeutic potential of being temporarily in an ASC. Finally, in this course, two mental phenomena that are also highly relevant for the scientific mind – insight and flow – are also introduced from a consciousness-studies perspective. |
Performance assessment as a semester course