#ALTERED STATE OF MIND STORE FREE#

In contrast to the dualists, psychologists believe that consciousness (and thus the mind) exists in the brain, not separate from it. For instance, the French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) was a proponent of dualism, the idea that the mind, a nonmaterial entity, is separate from (although connected to) the physical body. Some philosophers and religious practices argue that the mind (or soul) and the body are separate entities. For instance, Sigmund Freud’s personality theories differentiated between the unconscious and the conscious aspects of behavior, and present-day psychologists distinguish between automatic (unconscious) and controlled (conscious) behaviors and between implicit (unconscious) and explicit (conscious) memory (Petty, Wegener, Chaiken, & Trope, 1999 Shanks, 2005). The study of consciousness has long been important to psychologists and plays a role in many important psychological theories. We all know what it means to be conscious, and we assume (although we can never be sure) that other human beings experience their consciousness similarly to how we experience ours. The experience of consciousness is fundamental to human nature.

#ALTERED STATE OF MIND STORE FREE#

He walked out of the courtroom a free man (Wilson, 1998).Ĭonsciousness is defined as our subjective awareness of ourselves and our environment (Koch, 2004). Given this combination of evidence, the jury acquitted Parks of murder and assault charges.

They also agreed that such a combination of stressors was unlikely to happen again, so he was not likely to undergo another such violent episode and was probably not a hazard to others. The specialists eventually concluded that sleepwalking, probably precipitated by stress and anxiety over his financial troubles, was the most likely explanation of his aberrant behavior. Parks was examined by a team of sleep specialists, who found that the pattern of brain waves that occurred while he slept was very abnormal (Broughton, Billings, Cartwright, & Doucette, 1994). However, further investigation established that he did have a long history of sleepwalking, he had no motive for the crime, and despite repeated attempts to trip him up in numerous interviews, he was completely consistent in his story, which also fit the timeline of events. Not surprisingly, no one believed this explanation at first. His defense was that he had been asleep during the entire incident and was not aware of his actions (Martin, 2009). He said that he remembered going to sleep in his bed, then awakening in the police station with bloody hands, but nothing in between.

Parks claimed that he could not remember anything about the crime. Only then did police discover that he had indeed assaulted his in-laws. Parks then drove to a police station and stumbled into the building, holding up his bloody hands and saying, “I think I killed some people…my hands.” The police arrested him and took him to a hospital, where surgeons repaired several deep cuts on his hands. There, he attacked them with a knife, killing his mother-in-law and severely injuring his father-in-law. During the night of May 23, 1987, Kenneth Parks, a 23-year old Canadian with a wife, a baby daughter, and heavy gambling debts, got out of his bed, climbed into his car, and drove 15 miles to the home of his wife’s parents in the suburbs of Toronto.

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