What Intellectual and Cultural Developments in the Late Nineteenth and Early

question 8

Essay

What intellectual and cultural developments in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "opened the way to a modern consciousness," and how did this consciousness differ from earlier worldviews?

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Definitions:

Cocktail Party Effect

The brain's ability to focus one's auditory attention on a particular stimulus while filtering out a range of other stimuli, much like when a person can focus on a single conversation in a noisy room.

Inattentional Blindness

A psychological phenomenon where an individual fails to perceive an unexpected stimulus in plain sight, due to the focus being elsewhere.

Information-Processing Perspective

A cognitive approach that likens the mind to a computer, focusing on how information is taken in, processed, stored, and retrieved.

Activation-Synthesis Theory

A theory proposing that dreams are the result of the brain's attempt to make sense of random neural activity during REM sleep.