In this video I describe 4 characteristics of human consciousness. These include unity, intentionality, selectivity, and transience. The selectivity of our consciousness and our ability to filter out perceptions which are deemed irrelevant can be demonstrated in the Cocktail Party Phenomenon, dichotic listening tasks, and selective attention tasks involving change blindness and inattentional blindness.

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Video Transcript:

Hi I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In the past few videos we’ve seen the complexity of consciousness.

We’ve seen the difficulty of defining it and some of the problems associated with trying to understand it but we can still try to identify certain characteristics of consciousness that seem to be true. That’s what we’re going to look at in this video, so we’ll start with the idea of unity.

This refers to the idea that consciousness feels like a single state. We don’t have multiple separate consciousnesses all happening at once. It’s not you have your visual consciousness and your auditory consciousness and your skin sensation, that these are all separate sort of islands of consciousness. Instead we bring all of this together; all this information is integrated and so it feels like a single state even though there’s lots of different types of information being processed. You can see this when you watch a movie; you have these images on the screen and you have sound and you sort of automatically incorporate all of them into a single story. That’s the idea of unity.

Now this unity tends to always be focused on something and this brings us to our second aspect of consciousness which is intentionality. So this refers to the idea that consciousness always seems to be focused on something. Now that focus might be something external in the world or it could be something internal. You could be focused on your own thoughts but you always seem to be focused on something and this focus is pretty narrow. It also has to do with our motivation. So how you choose to focus on something or not depends on what your goals are. What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? That’s going to determine what it is you choose to focus on. Maybe you don’t always make that choice, maybe something stands out and it forces you to focus on it, and we’ll talk about that as well, but this idea is what you focus on, you’re always focused on something, is very narrow it’s you can’t focus on everything at once. That’s simply not possible.

So that brings us to our next idea which is the idea of selectivity. This is the idea that we have a very narrow focus of attention. You always focus on something and what that something is tends to be pretty small. And once we focus on something we tend to filter out everything else. So we have this ability to filter out irrelevant perceptions. You might ask, ” Well, what’s irrelevant?” and that brings us back to this idea of motivation which we’ll also talk about in a future unit. That is, well it depends on what you’re motivated to do. It depends on what your goals are. That’s going to determine what’s relevant to you at that moment and it’s also going to determine what’s irrelevant, what you don’t need to focus on; what you can filter out.

Ok, so how can we demonstrate this selectivity? One way we see this is in what’s called the cocktail party phenomenon. Ok, so the cocktail party phenomenon refers to the idea that when you’re in a, you know, you’re at a cocktail party, you’re in a room with lots of people and they’re all having separate little conversations and you’re able to focus on a single conversation. You’re able to talk to the person in front of you and you have your own conversation and everything else becomes background noise. So you have your single conversation and then everything else becomes background noise.

Now this isn’t just because of your hearing ability. It’s not the case that you couldn’t hear those other conversations if you wanted to, it’s just that you’re choosing to focus on this one, right? If you decide to eavesdrop on the conversation that’s happening behind you, you can hear it perfectly well but when you’re focused on the person in front of you, it’s background noise. You can’t make out any of it. But as soon as you shift your attention, as soon as you select that particular conversation, suddenly you can hear it really well. You might notice this, you know, if you’re talking to a person and suddenly you hear your name on the other side of the room.

What does that do? Well, it changes your motivation, right? No matter how interesting this conversation you’re in right now is, it might be more interesting to find out what somebody’s saying about you and so suddenly you find your selective attention is directed to the other side of the room. You can start listening to that conversation and as soon as you do that you stop being able to understand what the person that you’re talking to is actually saying.

All right, so this is this cocktail party phenomenon we can demonstrate this in the laboratory in what’s known as a dichotic listening task. So in a dichotic listening task what you do is you listen to multiple messages at once, or at least you try to listen to multiple messages at once. So you might put on headphones and you hear a message in your left ear and a message in your right ear and you’re told to pay attention to one of those. And the way that we make sure that you’re paying attention is we might ask you to shadow the message and that means you repeat it as you hear it, right?

So you’re listening to what’s happening in your left ear and you’re repeating it and then they ask you questions about what was in your right ear and it turns out you have very very little information about what was going on in your right ear. We can do strange things to the message like have it be just a jumble of words that don’t actually make sense and people don’t notice that. They don’t know if it was a coherent sentence or not. Or you can even change the speaker in the other ear so that the voice changes to another person and people don’t notice. So this brings us to a related idea that people don’t notice changes in their environment if they’re filtering something out. Once we’ve decided that this is not relevant, it can change completely and we don’t notice it.

This brings us to what’s called change blindness and I’ll post a link in the video description where you can see some demonstrations of change blindness; where you look at a picture and then there’s a little flicker and then the picture comes back and something in the picture has changed and it’s a fairly large change and what you’ll find is that it’s really hard to identify what has changed. You watch the picture, there’s this little flicker and then you look, it’s like “what happened?”. So what makes this test so hard? Well, part of it is that you don’t know what to focus on. You don’t know what’s relevant. You’re looking for change, you have no idea what it’s gonna be, you know? Should I look at this part of the picture? Should I look over here? Do I look over here? And so as a result you have to do this multiple times because your focus of attention is so narrow that you can only focus on part of the picture at once. You can say “okay I’m going to watch this tree and I’m gonna see if the tree changed” and it’s like “no, it didn’t change”. “Okay well now I have to watch it again because I have to focus on something else” right?

This shows just how narrow our focus of attention is and how much we are filtering out all the time. Now you’d be surprised and you can demonstrate this in real life too. It’s not just these, you know, flickering pictures changing. In one study by Daniel Simons and Daniel Levine they actually changed a person and people didn’t notice the change. So it was a pedestrian on the street and a confederate walked up to the pedestrian and asked for directions and then while the person was trying to answer this question some workers came by carrying a door and as the door passed in between the pedestrian and the confederate the confederate actually switched places with another person who was behind the door. Then they continued the conversation with this pedestrian and what the researchers wanted to see is will people notice the change?

And surprisingly, many times they didn’t notice the change. You would think if a person came up to you and then changed into a different person you would notice but the study shows unless you happen to pay attention, unless you happen to focus your attention on a particular feature of that person’s face, let’s say, then you wouldn’t notice that they changed into another person. Ok, a related idea to change blindness is what’s called inattentional blindness and this is another study by Daniel Simons this one with Christopher Chabris, and before I describe this study I want to know if you’ve seen it before and I don’t want to spoil it.

So there’s a video called the awareness test and it involves trying to count the number of passes that a particular team of basketball players makes and so if you’ve seen this before then I’m going to talk about the video in just a second. If you haven’t tried this test before, you haven’t tried to count these basketball passes before, I’d like you to try it before you watch the rest of this video. So you might want to pause this now and I’ve put a link in the video description box called The Awareness Test and I want you to try this test and see if you can do this. See if you can manage to count all of these passes. Ok, so hopefully you’ve watched the video or maybe you’ve seen it before because now I’m going to spoil some things about the video.

Ok, if you’ve watched this, you’ve seen this demonstration of inattentional blindness because what happened is while you were counting the passes by the white team, many participants failed to notice, about half of the participants failed to notice, that a gorilla walked into the scene and beat his chest and then walked off. Now this is surprising right? This, you would think you would notice this, and so the idea of inattentional blindness is it’s a blindness to something that you’re not paying attention to that you think would be obvious. It’s a stimulus that would normally be very salient, very noticeable.

You would think if a gorilla walked into the room you would always notice it but if your attention is directed somewhere else that focus is so narrow that you filter out everything else and what happened is you’ve filtered out the gorilla, right? You didn’t see it because you were so focused on the white team passing the ball. So that’s the demonstration of inattentional blindness and that also shows this selectivity of consciousness, that we filter things out. We have a very narrow focus.

Ok, so the last feature of our consciousness is what’s called transience and this is the idea that it’s always moving. All right our consciousness is transient, it’s always shifting around, right? It’s moving from one thing to another back to another and part of this is that because our focus is so narrow we have to move around a lot. It’s like, what’s going on, what’s relevant, what’s moving right? You shift your eyes around like crazy all the time because it’s like you’re trying to figure out what’s what’s going on. What do I need to pay attention to, right? And so it makes sense that it would be transient. You don’t want to be so focused on a single task that you don’t notice the predator that’s sneaking up on you, right? So it makes sense that we move our consciousness around. We shift its focus very, very often, sort of constantly moving.

Now if you’re in a particular environment, you’re studying or you’re watching this video, you probably are filtering out a lot of things, and hopefully you, you know, you’re watching this video in a place where you can pretty safely focus your attention on a single task and not shift it around too much, right? You’re probably not watching this in the middle of the jungle where, you know, a predator might be sneaking up behind you. If you were then you’d have a very hard time staying focused on the video, right? And that’s again this idea of anxiety that we see. That if you’re more anxious you’re going to be shifting your attention more often because you’re trying to figure out what’s going on. What do I need to be worried about? You know, what do I need to be concerned with and that’s why you’re going to be unable to stay focused. If you’re really anxious in class, you’ve got lots of things that you’re worried about, you’re gonna have a hard time focusing on the lecture no matter how good of a lecture it is, right? And so that shows this transience of our consciousness and that it’s constantly moving.

Ok, so how can you remember these four features of consciousness? Well, I have a mnemonic for you that I think is useful. I think it’s a good analogy for thinking about consciousness in general. So we have these four features; we have unity; we have intentionality; we have selectivity; and we have transience. So how can you remember these? Well I like to imagine that you’re exploring a dark cave, where it’s completely dark inside there’s no light but you have a flashlight. So if you think about exploring this cave, you can think about each of these four characteristics of consciousness.

The first idea is unity. You have a single spot of light that you can project around the cave, so there’s unity there. All the light is focused and you just have one spot. Intentionality, you’re always focusing it on something. No matter what you do, the light is going to be focused on something, right? So that’s the intentionality of consciousness.

Then we have selectivity and that is that you’re going to filter out the things it’s not focused on. So when you’re pointing the light around you’re going to be watching where that light is, you’re not going to point the light over here and and look in the other direction where there’s total darkness. That wouldn’t make any sense. Instead you’re gonna focus your attention on this narrow spot of light and you’re gonna filter everything else out and in doing that you’re gonna focus on what you think is important, what your goals are. If you suddenly hear a noise over there that’s where you’re gonna point the light. What, you know, what is t that I want to find, I want to investigate this. Now I no longer care about what’s over here because it’s not making any noise.

Lastly we have this idea of transience. If you’re exploring this cave, you’re gonna constantly be moving that light around. You’re not gonna point to that one spot and walk through the cave right? That wouldn’t make much sense. Instead you’re gonna be constantly moving it around looking for things trying to determine what’s relevant and what isn’t.

Ok, so hopefully that analogy helps you to remember these four characteristics of consciousness, which are unity, intentionality, selectivity, and transience. I hope you found this helpful. If so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!