Word: sleeps
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 created when the forebrain...
...recent advances in brain science, it shouldn't surprise that the riddle of dreaming hasn't been cracked. "We still don't know why we sleep, let alone why we dream," says Dorothy Bruck, professor of psychology at Melbourne's Victoria University. It seems commonsensical that sleep is a restorative phase for brain and body, and there's some evidence that the effects of sleep deprivation are the result of minor brain damage that would normally be repaired when we're asleep. But despite their best efforts, scientists have been unable to pinpoint what's going on in sleep that...
...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...
...Before delving into the latest theories, then, it's worth reviewing what we know about dreaming and the sleep state in which we seem to do most of it. REM follows four stages of sleep known collectively as non-REM sleep, in which brain activity becomes progressively more subdued. In REM-which occurs four or five times a night and lasts about 30 minutes at a time-our muscles become paralyzed, which could be a mechanism for preventing the acting out of our dreams. About half of a baby's sleep is REM compared to a quarter of an adult...
...reverse learning" theory held that dreams rid the brain of superfluous notions, and that without this regular flushing brain overload would manifest as hallucinations and obsessions. There are echoes of this idea in the perspective of Drew Dawson, director of the University of South Australia's Centre for Sleep Research: "I tend to think of dreaming as a bit like backwashing the swimming pool filter...