States of Consciousness
States of Consciousness
Living Nightmares
In New York’s Times Square, a strange spectacle unfolds: To raise money for charity, disc jockey Peter Tripp has agreed to go without sleep for 200 hours. All too soon Tripp’s fight to stay awake turns brutal. After 100 hours, he begins to have visual hallucinations. He sees cobwebs in his shoes and watches in terror as a tweed coat becomes a suit of “furry worms”. When Tripp goes to a hotel to change clothes, a dresser drawer seems to burst into flames.
After 170 hours, Tripp’s agony becomes almost unbearable. He struggles with the simplest thought, reasoning, and memory problems. His brain-wave patterns look like those of sleep and he is no longer sure who he is. By the end of 200 hours, Tripp is unable to distinguish between his waking nightmares, hallucinations, and reality (Luce, 1965).
The Womb Tank
We shift now to a scene far removed from Peter Tripp’s ordeal. Some years ago, physicians John Lilly pioneered the use of an unusual sensory deprivation environment. Subjects in Lilly’s experiments wore darkened goggles and floated naked in a tank of body-temperature water (Lilly, 1972). As they drifted weightlessly in this “womb-like” environment, subjects were cut off from smell, touch, vision, hearing, and taste sensations.
Question: What effect does sensory deprivation have?
Under such conditions, subjects often lose track of time and find it hard to concentrate. Some also undergo strange alterations in consciousness. For example, a subject in one experiment screamed in panic, “There is an animal having a long slender body with many legs. It’s on the screen, crawling in back of me!” Experiences of this wort are called hypnogogic images (hip-no-GAH-jik). They are similar to the mental images that may occur just as you are falling asleep. Such images are dream-like, very vivid, and often surprising. Sensory deprivation typically increases their occurrence (Taylor, 1983).
States of Consciousness -The Many Faces of Awareness
To be conscious means to be aware. Consciosness consists of all the sensations, perceptions, memories, and feelings you are aware of at any instant (Farthing, 1992). As William James noted, consciousness is an ever-changing “stream”, or flow or awareness. We spend most of our lives in ordinary waking consciousness, which is organized, meaningful, and clear. We perceive times, places, and events as real and familiar in waking consciousness. But as James also noted, states of consciousness related to fatigue, delirium, hypnosis, drugs, and ecstasy differ markedly from “normal” awareness. Everyone experiences at least some altered states of awareness, such as sleep, dreaming, and daydreaming. In everyday life, changes in consciousness may accompany long-distance running, listening to music, making love, or other circumstances.
Question: It’s clear that there are many altered states of consciousness. How are they distinguished from normal awareness?
Altered States of Consciusness
An altered state of consciousness (ASC) is a distinct change in the quality and pattern of mental activity. Typically there are shifts in perceptions, emotions, memory, time sense, thinking, feelings of self-control, and suggestibility (Tart, 1986). Definitions aside, most peoplke know when they have experienced an ASC.
Question: Are there other causes of ASCs?
The list of causes is nearly endless. In addition to those already mentioned, we could add: sensory overload (for example, a light show, Mardi Gras crowd, or mosh pit), monotonous stimulation (“highway hypnotism” on long drives is a good example), unusual physical conditions (high fever, hyperventilation, dehydration, sleep loss), sensory deprivation, and many other possibilities. Altered states of awareness may have important cultural significance.
Sleep -A Nice Place to Visit
Each of us will spend some 25 years of life in a strange state of semi-consciousness called sleep. Contrary to common belief, humans are not totally unresponsive during sleep. Studies show that you are more likely to awaken if you hear your own name spoken, instead of another. Likewise, a sleeping mother may ignore a jet thundering overhead, but wake at the slightest whimper of her child. Some people can ever do simple tasks while asleep. In one experiment, subjects learned to avoid an electric shock by touching a switch each time a tone sounded. Eventually, they could do it without waking. (This is much like the basic survival skill of turning off your alarm clock without waking). Of course, sleep does impose limitations. There is no evidence, for instance, that a person can learn math, a foreign language, or other complex skills while asleep -especially when the snooze takes place in class (Druckman & Bjork, 1994, Wood et al., 1992).
Because of its many contradictions, sleep has always aroused curiousity. What do we know about this daily retreat from the world?
The Need for Sleep
Question: How strong is the need for sleep?
Sleep expert Wilse Webb calls sleep a “gentle tyrant”. Webb means that sleep is an innate biological rhythm that can never be entirely sidestepped (Webb, 1994). But if flexibility is needed, sleep will give way temporarily, especially at times of great danger. As one comic put in, “The lion and the lamb shall lie down together, but the lamb will not be very sleepy. “You could choose, then, to stay awake for an extended period. But there are limits. A rare disease that prevents sleep always ends the same way: The patient falls into a stupor, followed by coma, followed by death (Oliwenstein, 1993).
In one set of experiments, animals were placed on treadmills over a pool of water. Needless to say, they didn’t find it easy to sleep. Even so, sleep won out. The animals soon began to drift into repeated microsleeps (Goleman, 1982). A microsleep is a brief shift of brain activity to patterns normally recorded during sleep. Microsleeps can lead to a macro-accident. Even a driver whose eyes are pen can be asleep for a few seconds.
Sleep Deprivation
With few exceptions, 4 days or more without sleep becomes hell for anyone, but longer sleepless periods are possible. The world record for stayng awake is held by Randy Gardner -who at age 17 went 268 hours (11 days) without sleep. Surprisingly, Randy needed only 14 hours of sleep to recover (Dement, 1972). It is usually not necessary to completely replace lost sleep. As Randy found, most symptoms of sleep loss are reversed by a single night’s rest.
What are the costs of sleep loss? Age and personality make a big difference. Randy Gardner remained clear-headed to the end of his vigil. In contrast, disc jockey Peter Tripp’s behaviour became quite bizarre. In general, there is little impairment on complex mental tasks after 2 or 3 days without sleep. But most people do decline in their ability to pay attention. Remaining vigilant and following simple routines becomes very difficult (Mikuliner, 1989). As Wilse WEbb says, “It’s not your thinking or memory that goes, it’s your will to continue; you would prefer to be asleep”. For a driver, pilot, or machine operator, this may be enough to spell disaster.
Greater sleep loss sometimes causes a temporary sleep-deprivation psychosis like Peter Tripp suffered. Confusion and disorientation, delusions (false or distorted beliefs), and hallucinations are typical of this reaction. Hallucinations may be visual, like Tripp’s “coat of furry worms”, or tactile, such as feeling cobwebs on the face. Fortunately, such “crazy” behavior is not common. Hallucinations and delusions are rarely evident before 60 hours of continuos wakefullness. The most typical reactions to sleep loss are trembling hands, drooping eyelids, inattention, staring, more pain sensitivity, and general discomfort (Naitoh et al., 1989).
Biological Rhythms
Question: Sleep was described as an innate biological rhythm. What does that mean?
Scientists have long known that the body operates like a finely tuned instrument, guided by internal “biological clocks”. Every 24 hours your body undergoes a cycle of changes called circadian (SUR-kay-dee-AN) rhythms (circa: about; diem: a day).
Throughout the day, large changes take place in body temperature, blood pressure, urine volume, and amino acid levels. Also affected are the activities, and many others, peak sometime each day. Output of the hormone adrenaline, which causes general arousal, is often 3 to 5 times greater during the day.
Most people are more energetic and alert at the high point of their circadian rhythms. Differences in such peakes are so basic that when a “day person” rooms with a “night person”, both tend to give their relationship a negative rating (Carey et al., 1988). This is easy to understand: What could be worse thatn having someone bounding around cheerily when you’re half asleep, or the reverse?
Rhythms of sleep and waking are so steady that they continue for many days, even when clocks and light-dark cycles are removed. However, under such conditions, humans eventually shift to a sleep-wwaking cycle that averages 25 hours, not 24 (Sulzman, 1983). This finding suggests that external time markers, especially light and dark, help tie our sleep rhythms to a normal 24-hour day). Otherwise, many of us would drift into our own unusual sleep cycles.
Sleep Needs and Patterns
Question: What is the normal range of sleep?
According to medical records there is a man in England who gets by on only 15 minutes to an hours of sleep each night -and feels perfectly fine. However, this is rare. Only 8 percent of the population averages 5 hours of sleep or less per night. ON the other end of the scale, long sleepers tend to be people who worry more during the day (McCann & Stewin, 1988). The majority of us sleep on a familiar 7-to 8-hour-per-night schedule. It is quite normal, however, to sleep as little as 5 hours per night or as much as 11. Urging everyone to sleep 8 hours would be like advising everyone to wear medium-size shoes.
Question: Do elderly people need more sleep?
They may need it, but they seldom get it. As people age they usually sleep less. People over the age of 50 average only 6 hours of sleep a night. In contrast, infants spend up to 20 hours a day sleeping, usually in 2- to 4-hour cycles. As they mature, most children go through a “nap” stage and eventually settle into a steady cycle of sleeping once a day.
Some people , of course, maintain the afternoon “siesta” as an adult pattern. Perhapes we all should: Experts now regard midafternoon sleepiness as a natural part of the sleep cycle. Brief, well-timed naps, therefore, may be the key to maintaining alertness in people like truck drivers and hospital interns who often must fight drowsiness (Aschoff, 1994; Goleman, 1989).
It is very tempting to try to reduce sleep time. However, people on shortened cycles- for example, 3 hours of sleep to 6 hours awake -often can’t get to sleep when the cycle calls for it. The underlying sleep rhythm simply won’t cooperate. This is why astronauts continue to sleep on their normal earth schedule while in space. Adapting to longer than normal days is more promising. Such days can be tailored to match natural sleep patterns, which have a ratio of 2 to 1 between time awake and time asleep. One study showed that 28-hour “days” work for some people. Evidently, younger subjects find it easier to adapt to thse longer “days” -presumably because their sleep habits are less firmly established. Sleep patterns may be bent and stretched, but they rarely yield entirely to human whims (Akerstedt et al., 1993).
