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Week 5 · Module overview

Week 5 — Consciousness

Introduction to Psychology Free sample edition

Welcome to your Week 5 Start Here page.

Why this matters

A nurse rotating onto night shifts and a long-haul driver deciding whether one more coffee is enough both depend on how sleep, the body clock, and drugs change awareness.

In plain language

Right now you are aware of these words, the chair under you, and maybe a sound in the next room. That awareness is called consciousness, which means your awareness of yourself and your surroundings, and it rises and falls through every day and night. This week you will learn how your body keeps time on a circadian rhythm, which is a daily cycle of alertness and sleepiness, and what your brain does across one night's sleep. You will compare three ideas about why we dream. You will also sort psychoactive drugs, which are chemicals that change awareness by acting on the nervous system, into three families.

  • Already covered: Week 2 taught what a correlation can claim; Week 3 met the hypothalamus; Week 4 followed light into the eye.
  • This week: the body clock, the stages of sleep, dreams, and psychoactive drugs.
  • How they connect: light reaching the eye sets a clock in the hypothalamus.
  • Where we're going next: Week 6, Learning, asks how experience changes behavior.

Focus

What is consciousness, and what changes when you sleep, dream, or take a drug?

By the end of this module, you should be able to:

  • [ ] explain how light, the SCN, and melatonin set the circadian rhythm
  • [ ] order the sleep stages and say why NREM-3, not REM, is the deepest
  • [ ] read the sleep and quiz-score correlation as an association, not a cause
  • [ ] compare three dream theories and sort drugs into three families

To-do

Plan your week

  1. Read Chapter 5 (about 40 minutes), then the lecture and the slides.
  2. Work the lecture tutorial (60–90 minutes) and the practice set (about 20 minutes).
  3. Do the Analysis Workshop (about 90 minutes), the discussion, and the assignment.
  4. Take the quiz.

This week's checkpoint: say why NREM-3, not REM, is the deepest sleep.

You've got this

Take it in order, and ask your instructor early if a step snags.

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