J. Allan Hobson
![The Dreaming Brain J. Allan Hobson]( "The Dreaming Brain J. Allan Hobson")
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Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Mental Health -> Dreams
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> By Topic -> Consciousness
Subjects -> Health, Mind & Body -> Psychology & Counseling -> By Topic -> Dreams
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Enjoy your Dreams 5 out of 5 stars.
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Dreaming inevitably seems like the flip side of consciousness. Indeed it was Freud's "discovery of the unconscious" that fueled the 20th century's most important movement in psychology: psychoanalysis. Dreaming, arguably a psychotic state, is deeply meaningful for psychoanalysts who apply rational means to irrational human drives. But neuroses are equally meaningful. And by looking at these fractured states of mind, psychoanalysts believed that they could discern the underlying structure of the emotions. (I have often thought this seemed like divining the functions of internal combustion for transportation by visiting junkyards.) Dreams, long held by seers and Freudians to be the voice of the unconscious, are better and more productively seen as more continuous with conscious thought. So says J. Allen Hobson, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who plucks dreams from the realm of mystery, and restores dreaming to a place where it is possible to generalize about the human mind from the physiology of dreaming. Dreamstates are brainstates. And studying dreams is to construct a psychology of the normal.There is little left of Freud's explanation of dreams when Hobson finishes. But he understands his own investigations as part of Freud's legacy. Hobson discards the fundamental psychoanalytic division of dreams into their manifest and latent content, in favor of a theory that still extracts meaning from dreams, yet no longer sees them as elaborate defense mechanisms deployed to censor the sleeping mind from its horrifying instinctual preoccupations.
Freud hoped for a biology of the mind, and predicted that one day our psychology would follow that route. But with neurology in a primitive state, Freud abandoned this "Project for a Scientific Psychology," (1895) and undertook a more literary analysis of dreams that we know famously as The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). This work features his dream dissections on based in a "hydraulic" view of psychodynamics where id, ego and superego fluidly displaced each other in ways that determined mental health and hygiene. Dreams acted as censors for Freud, mediating disturbing thoughts that bubbled up from the id, disguising alarming imagery with symbols, and ultimately protecting sleep. If we really knew the raging thoughts and images of our deep unconscious, we'd never manage to fall asleep.
But for Hobson, understanding dreams requires understanding brain chemistry and brain anatomy - and these discoveries have been astonishing in their mounting volume and power. Taken together, they begin to constitute a biology of mind. We now understand where in the brain dreams originate. We know how long they last. We know how frequently they occur, and on what timetable. (Freud thought that dreams crammed into a few seconds before waking - actually dreams may last hours, and our brains may devote 50,000 hours to dreaming over a lifetime. Is there any other single endeavor we spend so much time on?) We know that other mammals dream - following this rule: the bigger the brain, the longer the dream. We know the mechanisms of dreaming, the circuitry and the chemistry. We understand that dreams are characterized by vivid imagery, loss of ordinary causality, bizarreness, and that they stay with us only fleetingly after waking. We know that smell and taste rarely intrude into dreams. We understand that dreams are occasionally lucid, at which stages of sleep they occur, and their correlation with Rapid Eye Movements. (Researchers discovered that dreams even occur in deep sleep.) We know that our minds are not at "rest" when we're sleeping, the brain is still turning over using its 20 watts of power, generating dreams -- though they connect to our visual memories rather than to the outside world. (Only one set of neurons in the brain stem "rest" during sleep.) We also know that the brain disconnects from the body (with the exception of the eyes) as paralysis accompanies sleep - protecting us no doubt from the riotous fantasy of dreaming. (Evolution wouldn't favor sleepwalkers who wandered over cliffs or into lions dens.) And we can distinguish the dream margins, between hyponogogic sleep (those fleeting images that appear just before we fall asleep) and hypnopompic sleep - where dream states may persist and intrude into waking life. We even now know the precise neuronal chemistry of dreaming.
For Hobson, Dream content is all "manifest" though it may take some poking around to discover the connections and make coherent explanations. (Dream analysis works for me only insofar as it exposes verbal and visual puns. Some of these have been very complicated and funny.) Dreams aren't psychopathology - they're normal - the ideal sleep isn't dreamless, it's dream-filled. Hobson reasonably says we should relax and enjoy their creativity. The cortex tries to narrate and explain the vivid images that arise from deep in what we used to think of as the "primitive brain" (that part of the brain that looks most like the brains of reptiles). Hence dreams defy physical law, proceed in impossible plots, and seem heightened and vivid. Dreams do arise "from the bottom up" but in a way Freud could not have suspected.
What do dreams mean? This is still a question worth investigating - cleverly examined most dreams will yield meaningful commentary on our waking lives. (We shouldn't throw out the psychodynamic baby with the psychoanalytic bathwater - again, in my case, deconstructing puns helps.) Hobson cleverly analyses several dreams from an astonishing dream diary that an anonymous author carefully kept in 1939, and a few of his own to illustrate the point.
What are dreams' functions (again the positive Darwinian "adaptive" value)? Hobson speculates that variously dreams are: information processing -- as data dumping of the day before; as preparation for the future; neurotransmitter replenishment -- as neurotransmitters are sensitive to fatigue and depletion; fetal brain development -- as fetuses from about 30 weeks onward spend 90% of time in REM sleep; social control - as dreams "keep us off the streets" by fictively re-enacting the reflexive "Four F's" - feeding, fleeing, fighting, and, demurely here, "fornication"; entertainment - as dreams are "truly marvelous."
For Hobson, the mind is instinctually driven but not instinctually bound, and the brain is creative rather than reflex-driven. Where Freudians view of the psyche is tragic - harnessed to stern and dangerous instincts, the new machine model is optimistic and adaptive. Dreams are about imagination. And looking at them that way helps provide us with the psychology we lay people so sorely need - a psychology of the normal - and a "unified theory of brain-mind" that Western thought so sorely needs.
Editorial Review:
A Harvard Medical School psychiatrist and neuroscientist shows how dream science draws on psychology and neurobiology to provide new insight into the nature of the human mind.
