Psy 202 - Do Conscious Thoughts Cause or Control Behavior

Carlo Hernandez

Professor Kim

PSY 202

April 22nd 2014

Do Conscious Thoughts cause or control Behavior

Consciousness has three parts to it. They are responsiveness, self-awareness, and awareness of mental processes. As humans we do not respond to external or even internal stimuli. Our conscious does in fact help us realizes of one self. We realize that we are one separate entity from everything. One test used to show our awareness is the mirror test. The animal test (which was experimented on animals first) determines if we have the ability recognize our selves in a mirror. An experiment that was used to determine the awareness of the mental process was the blind sight experiment. When we are occupied paying attention to some kind of detail, sometimes we do not notice the obvious that is sitting in plain sight. AN example of this was the video we saw in class that asked to keep track of how many times the basketball was passed among a group of people. Due to the fact that we were keeping track of the ball most of us failed to see the gorilla that came out of no where and stood in between everyone. The actual definition of the word “consciousness” is the awareness of mental processes such as perception, thinking, and remembering.

Conscious thought does not control our behavior. However there have been experiments that prove both that it does and that consciousness does not control our behavior. For example, Libet’s Experiment suggest that the conscious mind decided what it wants to do two seconds before we physically carryon what we want to do. In this experiment, a woman was chosen to wear sensors in her head while she watched a hand go around a clock. She was instructed that when she felt an impulse to stop the hand from going around the clock to hit a key on the keyboard.  While she was doing this a separate person was measuring her brain activity. It seemed that the activity was at his highest peak two seconds before she actually clicked the key determining that the conscious mind makes decisions two seconds before we physically act upon it. An experiment that proves that consciousness does not have control over our behavior is the Split Brain Study. The Split Brain Experiment is when the Corpus Collasum (bridge between left and brain) is surgically cut off to control epilepsy. The Corpus Collasum is the bridge of communication between the left and right side of the brain. However, both hemispheres are still connected to a common brain stem, which support similar arousal levels so conveniently that both sides sleep and wake up at the same time. When a Split Brain patient is shown an image inly in their left visual side, they cannot vocally name what they have seen. However, if a Split Brain patient is touching an object with only their left hand, the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the ride side is of the brain is touching.