Word: braine
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...What we took was essentially a novel approach to dream research," says Hobson, who received an M.D. from Harvard in 1959. "Nobody had ever studied the electrical activity of the individual [brain] cells during sleep. What we did was use microelectrodes in the brain to see what was going on. We put them under the bone and aimed them at the cells where we thought REM was occuring and put an object on the bone to measuere the output...
Hobson and his colleague, Robert McCarley, say they found the brain appears to contain two populations of neurons, which are cells specialized for transmitting sensory information, and each type of neuron interacts with the sleep process in different ways...
Hobson and McCarley, who are both associated with the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical School, also tried to add to their dream model by analyzing the chemicals processed in the brain during REM sleep and then studying differences in the way various hormones direct sleeping versus waking activities...
...researchers found that there were drastic chemical differences between a sleeping and a waking brain. When a person is not asleep, one of the two groups of neurons in Hobson's model, called aminergic neurons, processes the hormones norepinephrine and seretonin, which can control bodily functions. On the other hand, if someone is engaged in REM sleep, the other set of neurons, referred to as cholinergic, become receptive to the hormone acetylcholine for muscle control...
...Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, the psychologist argues that dreams allow the unconscious to send secret messages to the brain, releasing information pertaining to repressed desires and emotions...