Word: mccarley
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hobson's and McCarley's "activation-synthesis" theory provoked a heated controversy in the American Journal of Psychiatry. "The editor of the journal told us our article generated more letters than any in the history of the journal," Hobson says. Much of the response was negative, Hobson says, in part because many people misinterpreted the theory...
Hobson and co-researcher Dr. Robert W. McCarley, professor of Psychiatry, have been investigating the physiological aspects of dreaming for 12 years at the mental health center, by focusing on the relationship between Rapid Eye Movement (REM--the active dreaming stage of sleep) and a "dream center" in the brainstem. Since 1953, when REM was discovered, most psychiatrists have believed that dream images from the frontal brain cause these quick, darting eye movements. Hobson and McCarley's "activation-synthesis," theory maintains that the opposite is true...
Kupfer's work seems to provide clinical confirmation of experiments involving REM sleep in cats. Harvard's Allan Hobson told the convention that he and his colleague Robert McCarley have been able to turn on the brain cells that control REM sleep in the animals. Their trick: using drugs that mimic the action of natural chemicals. Remarkably, they extended feline REM sleep from a normal six to ten minutes to nearly three hours. The Harvard cats obviously cannot describe their dreams or indicate if they really have any. But their cycles of sleep are so like those...