 Hi, and welcome back to this biological psychology video course, and in this section, section 6, we're going to talk about attention and consciousness. Now, this is the introductory video, video 6.1, so let's start with a little bit of reading. As throughout this course, we're going to use the OpenStacks textbooks, which you can download for free from OpenStacks.org, and more specifically, we're going to use from the psychology textbook chapter 4, States of Consciousness, but mostly the reading for this section is actually the slides or the videos themselves, because there is not that much in the OpenStacks textbooks about attention and consciousness, even though I feel that the attention and consciousness are really very important aspects of human cognition and biological psychology. I also like to recommend a more accessible book, and in this case, I would like to recommend Why Red Doesn't Sound Like a Bell, there it is, written by Kevin O. Reagan, recently retired psychologist professor from Paris, and in this book, he describes his sensory motor approach. Now, what is the sensory motor approach? It's a little bit abstract, so if you really want to understand what it means, I recommend that you read the book, which I really do recommend, but basically it refers to the idea that perception and consciousness are all about predicting the outcomes of our actions, so that when we see something that what we're actually doing is making some kind of inference of what would happen if we act upon the thing that we see. That sounds very abstract, but again, as I said, Kevin O. Reagan makes it quite clear in his book, and I think what I really like about it is that it is a mix of philosophy and psychology, as is, I hope, this section about attention and consciousness. So what are we going to see in this section? In video 6.2, the next video, we're going to take a look at attention, and we're going to take a look at spatial attention, so attending to one location in space and not some other location in space, a very familiar form of attention. We're also going to take a look at temporal attention, so attending to one moment in time, or essentially paying more attention at one moment in time than at some other moment in time. And we're also going to take a look at the neurobiology of attention, and specifically we're going to look at the biased competition theory proposed by John Duncan, whom we've met before, and others. Then in video 6.3 we're going to get a little bit philosophical with consciousness, so we're going to describe the philosophy to some extent of consciousness, even though we're not going to delve deep into philosophy. And we're also going to talk about the global workspace theory of consciousness, which is a theory that explains some aspects of consciousness, even though of course consciousness is still largely a mystery, and we cannot explain all aspects of consciousness. And then finally, in video 6.4, we're going to take a look at sleep and dreams, so the various stages of sleep, and we're also briefly going to consider what dreams are, whether they have any meaning, very little I would say, and most of all what we do not know about dreams. In general, this section, especially the parts about consciousness and sleep, are as much about what we don't know than they are about what we do know, but that I think is what makes it extra exciting. With that, let's move on to the next video, video 6.2, in which we're going to talk about attention.