Sleepwalking and Consciousness

What is sleepwalking, and how can people do things that are impossible to do while being asleep? Some people sleepwalk to their kitchen to eat food and go back to sleep with no recollection of it in the morning.

Sleepwalking and Crime

There was a case where a man had driven to his mother-in-law's house and killed her and her husband. While driving back home, he had woken up in the car with a bloody knife. Realizing that something had badly gone wrong, he handed himself to the police with the knife, but with no recollection of what had happened—or maybe he did and used sleepwalking as a defence. He was acquitted of murder.

In another case, a man killed a prostitute and set fire to a brothel. Later, he was acquitted on grounds of sleepwalking. Sleepwalking may be real in some cases, but it’s the perfect defence for murder. There were other incidences, one where a couple would sleepwalk to the kitchen and eat raw bacon. In another, a woman would consume salted sandwiches, buttered cigarettes, and large quantities of peanut butter, butter, salt, and sugar. Once, she had woken up while trying to open a bottle of cleaning agent to drink. These individuals usually have no recollection of what happened while they were asleep. The empty packages and half-eaten food, though, made it obvious that something was amiss.

According to my mother, two of my brothers used to sleepwalk when they were very young. Once, one of them had even almost walked off the balcony. If my mother hadn't woken up, he would have fallen. My son used to sit on the bed and talk in his sleep, and sometimes even try to walk out. On a few occasions, he spoke of the One Ring (from The Lord of The Rings) and even looked for it under his pillow—though he didn’t really recall anything in the morning. As I was a light sleeper since my son was born, I would always wake up for the slightest sound, preventing him from walking out.

How can a person sleepwalk to the kitchen and prepare food and eat in their sleep, and how can a person drive while they are asleep and then commit murder, too? Why don't you fall off your bed at night as you are unaware of your many postural shifts as you sleep? Maybe it's because part of you knows where the edge of the bed is. Have you ever been engulfed in thought and spaced out while driving and suddenly snapped out with no recollection of the number of miles you have driven? This means that though you were conscious, you were still focused inward, and a part of you without conscious awareness kept track of the road, controlling your hand movements at the wheel.

The Puzzle of Consciousness

According to philosopher David Charmer, consciousness "is, at once, the most familiar and most mysterious thing in the world. These mysteries range from a normal state of awakening, sleep and dreams, drug-induced experiences, and beyond.”

But what exactly is consciousness, and how does it arise in our brain? In the 1800s, when psychology was founded, it’s “great project” was to unravel some of the puzzles of consciousness. This interest waned in the mid 20th century due to the dominance of Behaviourism, but the resurgence of cognitive and biological perspectives has led us to rethink the longstanding conceptions of the mind.

In psychology, consciousness is often defined as a moment-to-moment awareness of ourselves and our environment. Among its characteristics, consciousness is subjective and private: others cannot directly know what reality is for you, nor can you directly enter into their experience.

Dynamic throughout each day, we drift in and out of various states. Moreover, through stimuli, we are aware of constant change; we typically experience consciousness as a continuously flowing stream of mental activity, rather than as disjointed perceptions and thoughts. Self-reflective and central to our sense of self, the mind is aware of its consciousness. Thus, no matter what your awareness is focused on, a lovely sunset or an itch on your back, you can reflect on the fact that you are the one conscious of it.

Finally, consciousness is intimately connected with the selective attention process. It consists of the selection of some details and the suppression of the rest due to the urgency of attention. Selective attention is the process which focuses on the awareness of some stimuli to the exclusion of others. For example, if the mind is a theatre of mental activity, the consciousness reflects what’s illuminated at the moment; such as the bright spot on the stage, and the selective attention in the spotlight, or the mechanism behind it.

States of Consciousness

Scientists studying consciousness must operationally define private inner states in terms of measurable responses. Self-report measures ask people to describe their inner experiences—they offer the most direct insight into a person's subjective experiences, but aren't always variable or possible to obtain. Most of us do not speak while we sleep; nor can we fill our self-report questionnaires. Much of what occurs within our brains is beyond conscious access. You don't consciously perceive the brain process which lulls you to sleep, awakens you, or regulates your body temperature; and, although you are aware of your thoughts, you're unaware of the brain’s process of creating them.

According to Freud's proposal a century ago, the human mind consists of three levels of awareness. The conscious mind contains thoughts and perceptions of current awareness. Preconscious mental events are outside current awareness, but can be easily recalled under certain conditions. For instance, when someone mentions a friend you haven't thought about for years, you become aware of pleasant memories.

Unconscious events cannot be brought into conscious awareness under ordinary circumstances. Freud proposed that some unconscious content, such as unacceptable sexual and aggressive urges, traumatic memories, and threatening emotional conflicts, are repressed—kept out of conscious awareness due to the possibility of it arousing anxiety, guilt, or other negative emotions.

Behaviourists criticized Freud's ideas as they sought to explain behaviour without invoking conscious mental processes, much less unconscious ones. Cognitive psychologists and many contemporary psychodynamic psychologists, too, take issue with specific aspects of Freud's theory. According to psychodynamic psychologist Drew Westen, many aspects of Freud's theory are, indeed, out of date, and should be. Freud died in 1939, and he was slow to undertake further revisions. However, research supports Freud's general premise: that unconscious processes can affect behaviour.

Historical Perspectives on Mental Disorders

According to historical findings, psychological disorders are not just a modern issue. There are historical pages filled with accounts of prominent people who had suffered from such disorders.

For example, one description is in the Bible about King Saul's raging madness and terrors. The 18th-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau developed marked paranoid symptoms in the latter part of his life, which plagued him with fears of secret enemies. Mozart was convinced that he was being poisoned during the period of his composing of Requiem.

Abraham Lincoln had suffered frequent bouts of depression throughout his life. At one occasion, he had been so depressed that he failed to show up at his wedding. Winston Churchill, too, periodically suffered from severe bouts of depression, which he referred to as his 'black dog'. The billionaire aviator Howard Hughes became so terrified of being infected by germs that he ended up a bedridden recluse in the last decade of his life.

Assumptions on Supernatural Forces

This sort of dysfunctional behaviour doesn't go unnoticed. Throughout history, human societies have explained and responded to abnormal behaviours in different ways, at different times, based on their values and assumptions on human life and behaviour. The belief of abnormal behaviour being caused by supernatural forces dates back to the ancient Egyptians, Hebrews, and Chinese.

For example, one ancient treatment based on the notion of bizarre behaviour being the reflection of an evil spirit's attempt to escape from a person's body. In order to release this spirit, a procedure called trephination was performed. This was carried out with the help of a sharp tool, which was used to chisel a hole in that person's skull. The hole was about 2 centimetres in diameter. It seems likely that in many cases, the administration of trephination ended the patient's life.

In Medieval Europe, the demonological model of abnormality believed that disturbed individuals were either possessed involuntarily by the devil or had voluntarily made a pact with dark forces. The killing of witches was justified in various 'diagnostic' tests and theological grounds. Examples of such tests include the binding of a woman's hands and feet throwing her into a lake or pond.

This was based on the notion that while impurities floated to the surface, a woman who would sink and drown could be posthumously declared pure. This meant that while the pure drowned, the others thought to be witches due to floating on top wouldn't be spared either. During the 16th and 17th centuries, more than a 100,000 people afflicted by psychological disorders were identified as witches, hunted down, and executed.

Biological Links

Centuries earlier, around 5th century B.C., famous Greek physician Hippocrates suggested that mental illnesses were just like physical diseases. In anticipation of the modern viewpoint, Hippocrates believed the site of mental illness to be the brain. By the time of the 1800s, Western medicine had returned to viewing mental disorders as biologically based and attempted to extend medical diagnoses to them. The biological emphasis was given impetus by the discovery of General Paresis, a disorder characterised in its advanced stages by mental deterioration and bizarre behaviour, resulting from massive brain deterioration caused by Syphilis. This was a breakthrough as the first demonstration of a psychological disorder being caused by a physical malady.

In the early 1900s, Sigmund Freud's theory of psychoanalysis ushered in psychological interpretations of disordered behaviour. Psychodynamic theories of abnormal behaviour were soon joined in by other models based on behavioural, cognitive, and humanistic conceptions. These various conceptions focused on different classes of causal factors and help in capturing the complex determinants of abnormal behaviour. The importance of cultural factors has received increased attention, too. Although, still, many questions remain, these perspectives have given us a deeper understanding of the way biological, psychological, and environmental factors can combine to cause psychological disorders.

Today, many psychologists find it useful to incorporate these factors into a more generalised framework. According to the Vulnerability-Stress Model, each of us has some degree of vulnerability, ranging from very low to very high, to developing a psychological disorder, faced with sufficient amount of stress. The vulnerability can have a biological basis, such as our genotype, over or underactivity of neurotransmitters in the brain, a hair-trigger autonomic nervous system, or hormonal factor. It may also be due to a personality factor, such as low self-esteem or extreme pessimism, or due to previous environmental factors such as poverty, severe trauma, or loss. Cultural factors, too, can create vulnerability to certain kinds of disorders (Ingram & Price).

However, vulnerability happens to be only part of the equation. In most instances, a predisposition creates a disorder only when a stressor, such as a recent event which requires a person to cope, combined with a vulnerability to trigger the disorder (Van Praag). Thus, a person with a genetic predisposition to depression, or who suffered a traumatic loss of a parent early in life, may be primed to develop a depressive disorder, if faced with a stressor or a loss later in life. In conclusion, biological, psychological, and environmental levels of analysis have all contributed to the Vulnerability-Stress Model, as well as to our understanding of behavioural disorders and their development.

Dynamics of Anxiety

Anxiety is a complex condition with psychological, biological and environmental factors causing predisposition to stress.

Psychological Factors

psychodynamic theories

Anxiety is a central concept in psychoanalytic conceptions of abnormal behaviour. According to Sigmund Freud, anxiety-based disorders, or neurotic disorders, are called neuroses. Psychodynamic Theory is a concept that explains a person's personality in terms of conscious and unconscious ways such as unconscious desires and beliefs.

Freud said our personality develops from the interactions of three fundamental structures of the human mind: the id, ego, and superego. Our efforts to find balance among the conflicts and desires of these structures determine our behaviour and approach of the world. The way we balance any situation determines our manner of resolving a conflict between two overreaching behavioural tendencies: our biological aggressive and pleasure-seeking drives vs. our socialised internal control over those drives.

Psychoanalysts believe obsessions and compulsions as ways of handling anxiety. According to Freud, obsessions are symbolically related to, but not as terrifying, as the underlying impulses. A compulsion is a way of taking back or undoing one's unacceptable urges, as with obsessive thoughts of dirt and compulsive handwashing are used to deal with one's dirty sexual impulses. Generalized anxiety and panic attacks are believed to occur when one's defences are too weak to control or contain neurotic anxiety, but strong enough to hide the underlying conflict.

The Id

The id is the most primitive form of the three structures; its only concern is of instant gratifications of its physical urges and needs. Its behaviour is entirely unconscious; outside of unconscious thought, for example; if it saw someone having something it likes, it would grab it for itself without knowing or caring that it's being rude. Its only concern would be of itself.

The Superego

The superego cares about social rules and morals, similar to what some people call a moral compass or conscience. This develops as a child considers right and wrong according to its cultural background. For this reason, unlike the id, the superego wouldn't take what's not belonging to it even if it needs it as it would be rude.

On the other hand, if both the id and the superego were involved and the id was strong enough to override the super ego's moral compass, it would take what it wants with no knowledge or concern about being rude but would feel shame and regret in the aftermath.

The Ego

The ego; in contrast to the id, who is all instinctual and superego, who is all about morals; is the rational pragmatic part of our personality. It's less primitive than the id and is partly conscious and unconscious. This is what Freud considered to be the 'Self'.

The ego's job is to balance the superego's and id's demands in a practical sense of reality. In the sense of the conflict between taking or not taking another person's thing, the ego would decide to buy what he needs instead. While this takes more time, the ego decides to make the sacrifice as an effort of compromise, which is satisfying your need for the thing you desire without taking part in an unpleasant social situation that could make you feel regret and shame in the aftermath.

Freud believed that the ego, superego, and id were constantly in conflict, resulting in adult personality and behaviour being rooted as a result of these internal struggles throughout childhood. Freud believed that a person with a strong ego has a healthy personality—and that imbalances in this system can cause neurosis (now thought as anxiety and depression, as well as certain unhealthy behaviours).

Cognitive Factors

Cognitive theorists stress that maladaptive thought patterns and beliefs associated with anxiety tend to magnify a situation worse than it is, causing people with anxiety to anticipate the worst outcome and making them powerless to cope effectively. Invasive thoughts about previous traumatic events are the main feature of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The presence of these thoughts after a traumatic event predicts later development of PTSD.

Cognitive processes play an important role in panic disorders. According to David Barlow, panic attacks are triggered by exaggerated normal misinterpretations of normal anxiety symptoms such as dizziness, heart palpitations, and breathlessness. A person misinterprets these as signs as a pending heart attack or psychological loss of control, creating more anxiety which spirals out of control, causing a full-blown panic attack. Helping panic-attack patients realize that it's just a bit of anxiety and not a heart attack can reduce the patient's anxiety and in turn, reduce panic-attacks.

The Role of Learning

From a behavioural perspective, classical conditioning observational learning or operant conditioning can contribute to the development of an anxiety disorder. Some fears are associated with traumatic experiences, which is a classical fear of response for a person who has had a traumatic experience like a fall from a height or almost drowning, which could cause fear of heights, or getting into a pool or other source of water.

However, classical conditioning cannot be the only case; there are people who have never been in a plane crash that are afraid of flying and people who have never had a bad fall, but fear heights (observational phobia). Seeing a random plane crash could trigger a fear in some people like some are afraid of spiders although they have never been bitten or there aren't any poisonous spiders in their counties. 

Yet, most people don't develop phobias through observation. It could be a biological and cognitive fact that causes some to develop phobias from observing or hearing while others don't. Once anxiety is learnt classically or vicariously, it could be triggered by cues from the environment or internal cues such as thoughts and images. In phobic reactions, the cues tend to be external, relating to feared objects or situations; whereas in panic disorders, the cues to the arousal of anxiety are internal bodily sensations such as one's heart rate, mental images of collapsing, and having a seizure in a public place.

In addition to classical conditioning and learning, operant conditions also play a role in motivating people with anxiety to avoid or escape it due to the unpleasant emotional state behaviour successful in reducing anxiety such as compulsions, or phobic avoidance responses become stronger through negative reinforcement.

Sociocultural Factors

Social and cultural factors can play a role in anxiety disorder development. The role of culture is not shown in culture-bound disorders that only occur in certain locales. One such phobia is found in Japan called 'Tianjin Kyofushu'. People affected by this disorder are pathologically frightened of offending others by emitting offensive odours, staring inappropriately, blushing or having a blemish, or improper facial expressions. This condition has been attributed to the Japanese cultural value of extreme interpersonal sensitivity and cultural prohibitions against expressing negative emotions or causing discomfort in others.

Another culture-bound disorder is 'koro'; a South-east Asian anxiety disorder in which a man thinks that his penis will retract into his abdomen and kill him. Western culture has culture-specific anxiety reactions too. Formally classified as an eating disorder, anorexia nervosa has a strong phobic component (fear of weight gain) and so also obsessive-compulsive elements. 

This eating disorder is mostly found in Western countries due to the cultural obsession of being thin. Causes of anxiety are complex and often interact with each other. These conditions can be viewed at biological, psychological, and environmental levels.