Question

Directions: You must answer the following questions. It is not enough to answer a question by merely listing facts. You must present a cogent argument related to the model at hand based on your critical analysis of the questions, and using appropriate psychological terminology.
1) You are doing research at the Santa Clara University Psychology Department. You are working with a very special group of people called “Dreamers”. These people have the ability to not only remember every detail of every dream they have ever had, but they can also actively participate in, or modify, their dreams as they take place (a state known as “Lucid Dreaming”.) After spending 10 years observing these subjects you have been asked to give a symposium to your colleagues at the Stanford Research Center. You have limited your talk to the following two areas:

A) What part did the following play in your research of this phenomenon?
Biological Rhythms
Alpha Waves
REM Rebound
Evolutionary Psychology and the role of dreams

B) Part of your research involved the use of specific drug therapies to try and alleviate the lucid dreaming that many of the research participants said they disliked and would rather not experience. How might the following have an effect on your research participants?
Psychoactive Drugs
Hallucinations
Tolerance
Withdrawal

Answer 1

Binocular vision is used to perceive depth. When Brandon looks out into the forest, he uses binocular vision to determine how far away objects are in the forest. He uses the concept of the figure-ground relationship to identify trees and other figures in the forrest as separate from the background. The act of seeing or looking itself requires transduction. Light that hits his eyes undergoes a process called phototransduction in which light is converted to electrical signals which then move through different types of cells. Ultimately these signals are sent to a part of the brain called the occipital lobe where they are converted into an image in the brain.  

Brandon's dog begins to growl as a result of natural selection. Dogs who growled at potential predators were more likely to scare away the predator and survive. As a result, the dog growls when it sees a potential predator. When Brandon's dog starts growling, Brandon becomes fearful that there might be something in the forest. As a result of this fear, his body initiates a sympathetic response, releasing epinephrine into the body. This epinephrine acts on the heart and causes his pulse to increase. He also utilizes his peripheral nervous system to increase the strength of his grip on the leash