Word: hobson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...detect brain activity during REM sleep in his laboratory at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Hobson uses electroencephalograms (EEG). He says measurements of the brain's electrical output, made by attaching electrodes to the head, show that the brain is almost 90 percent more active during REM sleep than at any other slumber time. The normal human passes through five distinct stages of sleep, with the REM stage following the lighter, first two stages. Sleep stages three and four--following REM chronologically--are deep sleep periods...
...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, who first carried out his electrode experiments in 1977, says these initial studies led to impressive results. "We began to map activity of the cells during sleep and came up with a now much discussed model...
...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 says his dual neuron dream model allows him and his research staff to study "dreaming as a state as opposed to dreaming as a story." Hobson's concept allowed the researchers to study the content of dreams not as Sigmund Freud would have psychoanalyzed them, but as physiological processes...