Word: stickgold
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...There are tensions in the field, but "it's starting to break out of its malaise," says Robert Stickgold, associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School's Center for Sleep and Cognition. Recently, scientists have abandoned stagnant theories of dreaming and postulated new and intriguing ones, with experiments underway in various parts of the world aimed at establishing the function of our nightly hallucinations. If recent work suggests anything, it's that there is such a function, or more than one, and that dreams aren't just neural waste. They may improve the quality of our sleep. They...
...Harvard's Stickgold believes dreams have a different function entirely. "I think it's pretty clear now that sleep and dreaming serve to process memories from the last day and all the way back," he says. "Sleep can strengthen memories... and help extract the meaning of events by building associative networks with other memories. Dreaming is probably a high-level version of this processing." Clearly, he adds, you don't have to remember your dreams for these processes to work. "The brain is tuning your memory circuits as you sleep, and remembering the imagery created during this process...
...Stickgold's evidence includes an experiment he led in 2000 when Harvard researchers were able to elicit the same dream in a bunch of people as they drifted off to sleep. They did this by exposing 27 subjects to an intensive three-day course in the computer game Tetris, which involves assembling geometric shapes. By the second night of training, 17 subjects had reported having the same dream image-falling Tetris pieces-indicating to Stickgold that the need to learn prods the brain to dream. More of these kinds of studies are needed, he says, "because as we learn...
...competing theories on why we dream may be wrong. One or more of them could be right. "I have no doubt that dreams can be enjoyable, informative, even revelatory to the dreamer," says Harvard's Stickgold. "But dream analysis is a more tricky question. The more dogmatic and doctrinaire the beliefs of the analyst, the less useful and potentially more destructive the analysis process becomes." People should understand, he adds, that dreams aren't constructed with the goal of delivering a message; they don't have an inherent meaning. "But when you look at your dreams after you wake...
...Your mother was right,” a Harvard Medical School professor told undergraduates last night. “If you don’t sleep enough, you’ll get dumb, sick, and fat.” Associate Professor of Psychiatry Robert A. Stickgold was speaking in Boylston Hall last night as part of a panel assembled by the Community Health Initiative to tell notoriously sleep-deprived Harvard students about the importance of a good night’s sleep. The panel, composed of sleep experts from the medical school, started out with an issue particularly close...