PY3468 - Psychology of Consciousness 2010-2011
Updated 16 / 10 / 2010


This modules will be taught on Term 2 this year.


Announcements:
Updated syllabus now available on the here (Intranet page; login required).

U-Link website of this module will be available in January at: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/intranets/u-link/

 

ESSENTIAL READING

·       Blackmore, S. (2010). Consciousness. An Introduction (2nd edition). Hodder Arnold.

·       Revonsuo A. (2009). Consciousness. The Science of Subjectivity. Psychology Press.



OTHER RECOMMENDED / USEFUL SOURCES:

·       Frith C.D. (2007). Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Blackwell.

·       Velmans, M. & Schneider, N. (2006). The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness. Blackwell.

·       Feinberg & Keenan (2005) The Lost Self: Pathologies of the Brain and Identity. Oxford University Press.

·       Laureys (2005). The Boundaries of Consciousness. Elsevier.

·       Baars (2003). Essential Sources in the Scientific Study of Consciousness. MIT Press.

·       Blackmore (2006) Conversations on consciousness. Oxford University Press.

·       Bayne, T., Cleeremans, A., & Wilken, P. (2009). The Oxford Companion to Consciousness. Oxford University Press.

·       Zelazo P.D., Moscovitch M. and Thomson E. (2007). The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness. Cambridge University Press.

·       Banks, W.P. (2009). Encyclopedia of Consciousness. Academic Press.

·       Dennett, D.C. (1993). Consciousness Explained. Penguin.

·       Koch (2004) The Quest for Consciousness : A Neurobiological Approach. Roberts & Co.

·       Baars & Gage (2010). Cognition Brain and Consciousness (2nd edition). Academic Press.

·       Solms, M., Turnbull, O. (2002) The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuropsychology of Subjective Experience. Karnac Books.

·       Farthing G.W. (1992). The Psychology of Consciousness. Prentice Hall.

·       Searle, J.R. (1998). The Mystery of Consciousness. Granta.

 

 

See syllabus for an extended reading list.

See lecture notes for recommended journal articles on specific topics.


SELECTED JOURNALS:

Journal of Consciousness Studies
Consciousness and Cognition
Psyche
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences
Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS online)
Trends in Cognitive Sciences
Links to additional electronic journals


COLLECTIONS OF PAPERS ON CONSCIOSNESS:

MindPapers
Special issue of Cognition on Consciousness (Volume 79, no.1-2, April 2001, edited by S. Dehaene)
ASSC E-Prints

Boundaries of Consciousness (Progress in Brain Research Vol 150, edited by S. Laureys)
More books


OTHER SOURCES:

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
Consciousness and Experiential Psychology (BPS Section)

 

VIDEO AND AUDIO LECTURES:

Richard Dawkins on the mind, universe and science.
Greenfield-Koch Debate
Interview with Daniel Dennett
Interview with Steven Pinker
Richard Cytowic talking about synaesthesia, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.
The Emerging Mind (Reith Lectures 2003: V.S. Ramachandran)
Royal Society Video Library
Olaf Blanke on out of body experience
Rubber hand illusion.
Auditory-visual synesthesia visualisations.


UPCOMING EVENTS:

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (15h meeting in Kyoto, June 2011).

Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (16h meeting in Brighton, June 2012).

Toward a Science of Consciousness conferences


USEFUL LINKS:

PubMed - One of the best places to look for papers. Search results here contain links to full text papers.  Many of them will be dowlaodable from comupters on campus.  Everything you find here can be considered a trusted source.
 
Brunel Electronic Journal Gateway  - Once you know which paper/journal you are looking for, use this site to gain access to full text papers from home. You will find whether the university has a subscription to the journal and a link will be provided where available. To start, click on CONNECT,  You may have to enter your Campus e-mail name/password, then you can search for journal title words. E.g., search 'Consciousness' and you will get links to a few journals on the selected list below.  Of if you found a paper in the journal 'Neuropsychologia'  or any other journal that doesn't have consciousness in the title, you can also find it here. Remember, this is a search for journals, not papers. The best way to find relevant papers is to run a PubMed or PsychInfo search using relevant keywords. You may be familiar with that concept from Googling things you want to look up. Sophisticated users will also use operators such as OR, NOT, * (the default in PubMed is AND between keywords).

Other Links:  Brunel Library     WOK    PsychInfo(BIDS)   PsychInfo(EBSCO)   ScienceDirect     


ESSAY TIPS:

For you essays, you are advised to rely on psychology/neuroscience journal articles and NOT on general internet sources such as Wikipedia or material you found on random websites.  Most psychology/neuroscience publications you will find on PubMed undergo peer-review, providing quality control by experts. For that reason, peer-reviewed articles should be trusted more than books (and definitely more than random people's websites). Be careful not to rely on pseudo-scientific sources.  A large list of books you can trust is provided (see syllabus for extended reading list).

Remember:
(1) You must rephrase and summarise arguments and finding in your own words. Copying someone else's words is considered plagiarism even if it's only one sentence (Note that markers know the paper/books you are using really well, and will usually spot immediately any such acts, so don't even think about it). You must also rephrase lecture notes or lecture transcripts.
(2) If you are quoting a sentence, it must be inside quotation marks; you should only quote in cases where the sentence illustrates or explains something really amazingly. Use quotes sparingly. It is not acceptable to quote because you can't be bothered to rephrase. You cannot submit a collage of quotes.

For more information on plagiarism and appropriate citation/paraphrasing practice, see:
http://www.plagiarism.org/