Word: rem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
This theory, presented three years ago in the American Journal of Psychiatry, maintains that periodically during sleep REM activates a dream center in the brainstem. For example, if the eyes look to the left, the dream center may receive a message for the body to turn left. The dream center then relays this command to the body. Although the body does not actually move left, it sends a message to the frontal brain indicating that it moved. But the movement is not always so simple as turning left. Because the eyes are not actually seeing, the messages they transmit...
...other words, it resets the REM sleep clock to normal even while there are still symptoms of depression. Kupfer told the convention that REM patterns could become a powerful diagnostic tool-speeding up the process of finding the right drug or identifying patients for shock therapy. Said he: "We hope to find people who are clearly not going to respond three or four months earlier than we used...
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...
While some researchers remain skeptical of cat-brain research, a team of psychiatrists from the National Institute of Mental Health provided strong support for it. Using a similar drug, physostigmine (which indirectly "fires" or triggers brain cells that cause REM sleep), Psychiatrists Natraj Sitaram and J. Christian Gillin produced early REM dream states in humans. When they awakened subjects and quizzed them about their reveries, they found the artificially triggered dreams indistinguishable from normal ones. The researchers think they have established objective criteria for the subjective state of depression: injecting their compounds into different people, they detected a "markedly supersensitive...