Word: dream
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...Recent developments in dream research won't make sense without first touching on the academic thunderbolt of 1977, when a paper by two Harvard neurophysiologists, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, ran in the American Journal of Psychiatry. At the time, Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams (which holds, in part, that dreams preserve sleep by distracting the brain with reflections of the unconscious) was a pillar of psychiatry. In The Brain as a Dream State Generator: An Activation-Synthesis Hypothesis of the Dream Process, the Harvard pair challenged Freudian theory on virtually every point. They argued that dreams are nonsense...
...Still, sleep research is a breeze compared to studying dreaming. In the former, you can at least be certain you're observing a sleeping person. "But we don't have a device that looks into a person's head and sees dreams happening in real time," says Russell Conduit, a lecturer in the school of psychology, psychiatry and psychological medicine at Melbourne's Monash University. Instead, dream researchers rely on what he calls the "faulty methodology" of waking subjects and asking them what was going on in their heads immediately before they were woken. But because certain parts...
...mammals experience REM, but some have more than others. It appears the less mature a species is at birth, the more REM it has. Assuming for a moment that REM equals dreaming, the opossum and armadillo are among the most prolific dreamers, while dolphins do very little of it; humans are in the middle. Research suggests our dreams become more complex as our mental abilities develop. The dreams of very small children don't just seem prosaic because tikes lack the eloquence to bring them to life in the retelling-they really are prosaic. Two-thirds of dreams are almost...
...While hugely influential, Hobson and McCarley's Activation-Synthesis model attracted hordes of critics, who protested that many dreams aren't merely cognitive fragments nor a succession of chaotic images, but so story-like, sequential and dramatic that the thinking brain must surely have played a more substantial role in their production than the last-minute editing of a pile of neural bloopers. And there's the matter of lucid dreaming, in which people become aware in the course of a dream that they are, in fact, dreaming, and are able to control the course of events-a phenomenon that...
...Even more interesting to Solms were 53 Royal London Hospital patients with healthy brain stems who said they'd stopped dreaming. Most of them had damage to the part of the brain that generates spatial imagery. That made sense: if you can't create pictures in your mind, how are you going to dream? It was the circumstances of the remaining nine patients that fascinated Solms. They had damage to the white matter of the ventromesial quadrant of the frontal lobes, an area linked to the transmission of the chemical dopamine and crucially involved in motivation, urges and cravings. These...