60 Nick Atlas
with statistically-driven ‘facts,’ though they fail to include the details of the
studies they cite. Intend, they frequently rely on words like ‘most’ and
‘tend’ to imply statistical significance.
Meyers and DeWall write, “Night owls tend to be smart and creative”
(Giampietro & Cavallera, 2007), while “Morning types tend to do better in
school, to take more initiative, and to be less vulnerable to depression”
(Meyers & DeWall, 2015, p. 101; Preckel et al., 2013; Randler, 2008,
2009). It is not our intention to debate whether these and similar studies
cited by the authors are reliable—this is not the point. Rather, the authors
have established standards that the readers, the vast majority of whom are
undergraduates, must now compare themselves against. They may try to
conform to the norms prescribed by the authors, or rebel against them.
Meanwhile, their individual experience goes entirely unacknowledged.
Likewise, a typical description of consciousness (or lack thereof)
during sleep is described almost entirely in biological discourse and looks
something like this: “When we are awake and alert, our brain (as measured
by an EEG) emits beta waves”; “Stage I sleep is a light sleep and is
characterized by theta waves”; “Stage II sleep is characterized by sleep
spindles”; “Stages III and IV sleep are referred to as slow-wave sleep”
during which “you begin showing delta brain-wave patterns” and “Heart
rate, respiration, body temperature, and blood flow to the brain are
reduced” (Pastorino & Doyle-Portillo, 2016, p. 136-137). Again, the issue
here is not whether these biological markers are accurate—they most
definitely are—or whether such information is useful for burgeoning
psychology students—it is. The problem is that, in this example, sleep and
sleep-related phenomena are dehumanized and described exclusively via
the language of third-person observation of EEG reports. The reader learns
little to nothing about what the experience of sleep is like from the first-
person perspective. Granted, the experience of sleep is typically
inaccessible to self-awareness and, therefore, is colloquially regarded as
inferior to wakefulness, lucid dreaming and related phenomena
demonstrate that this is not always the case.
Sadly, overreliance on biological and statistical analysis as devices for
describing consciousness prevents us from describing consciousness from