A New Interpretation of Dreams
Jeffrey Saver
- The Dreaming Brain by Allan Hobson
Basic Books, 319 pp, $22.95, March 1988, ISBN 0 465 01703 7
Allan Hobson is a leading Harvard neuroscientist who has figured prominently in the breakthroughs which have occurred over the past three decades in the neurophysiology and neuropsychology of sleep and dreams. Long known within the field for his provocative views on the philosophical implications of sleep research, Hobson in this much-awaited volume addresses himself for the first time to a general audience. The heart of this work is an exposition of the widely-accepted Hobson-McCarley model of dream activity. Dreams, Hobson proposes, are the product of the synthetic, ordering activity of higher cortical brain areas responding to somewhat random internal stimuli generated by lower brain centres in REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. In Hobson’s hands, this activation-synthesis model offers a grand vision of the creative power of the human brain, and yet one set squarely in the mainstream of current cognitive science and neuroscience. It is thus the first encompassing alternative modern neurobiology has offered to Freud’s interpretation of dreams. Hobson is knowledgable about and sensitive to psychoanalytic theory, but does not hesitate to declare its shortcomings. The Dreaming Brain may be seen as an attempt, generally successful, to supplant the analysis of dreams that lies at the core of psychoanalytic theory with a radically different neurophysiological vision, a central challenge to the scientific and psychological foundations of the Freudian world-view.
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[*] The proposal that the dreaming brain generates motor programs that are only subsequently blocked from being executed has received confirmation in the experiments of Michel Jouvet. Working with cats, Jouvet placed lesions in the neural tracts responsible for this inhibition of motor outflow in the dream state. When the lesioned animals entered the REM state, they stood, moved about and carried out complex behavioural sequences, including chasing imaginary mice across the laboratory floor – all the while remaining asleep by neurophysiological criteria. The cats literally acted out their dreams. I had long marvelled that no analogous human disorder arising from a spontaneous lesion in the nervous system had ever been delineated in the neurological literature. The recently recognised REM sleep behaviour disorder, however, appears to be in all respects equivalent. Its sufferers physically enact their dreams, often with resulting physical injury to themselves or their bed-partners. And unlike the more common parasomnias of sleep-walking that occur in non-REM sleep, the REM sleep behaviour disorder arises in neurophysiologically unequivocal REM sleep epochs.
Letters
Vol. 10 No. 15 · 1 September 1988
From Ron Taylor
Jeffrey Saver’s review of Allan Hobson’s The Dreaming Brain (LRB, 4 August) was instructive as to the habit of old behaviourism masquerading – or deluding itself – as new. So the ‘activation-synthesis’ theory is ‘non-reductionist’? This begs the question that, relative to human experience, all mere mechanisms, neurological or otherwise, are reductionist as total ‘explanations’. Stilt, while on the subject, we may note how Saver pooh-poohs as antiquated Freud’s (1895, later suppressed, as Saver admits) ideas on neurology, while extolling rather breathlessly currently hallowed neurological notions. The difference in these circuitry mechanisms being, if not between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, then surely not more than between a diesel and a petrol engine – interesting to engineering but disappointing as psychology. Except to a behaviourist, that is.
The whole article is a tissue of neurological naiveties. So implanting electrodes in a cat’s brain allows us to give it dreams? Big deal, supposing we’d never observed that heavy suppers or the presence or absence of a loved one also achieved this objective – the first being, if you like, a neurological reason, the second perhaps rather more than this. Saver further tells us, as though we didn’t know it already, that dreams are bizarre; then he discovers for us through Hobson that ‘dreamers are artists’ – as though Freud, and how much more interestingly, had had nothing to say about this. The most offensive aspect of his review is, indeed, the reductionism, amounting to travesty, to which he subjects Freud in comparing his scheme of things with the scientific certainties of Hobson. That of which he does make passing mention is overschematised and oversimplified, utterly failing to take into account the richness of the human dimension in Freud’s psychoanalysis – that is, the very aspect of Freud notably absent, or specifically excluded, from behaviourism. But behaviourists never learn, except dubiously about rats and cats.
Saver seems actually to know this, as he dodges eagerly, if unprofitably, from the hard facts of neuron stimulus and response to the softer-than-software territory of dreams themselves – not any of Freud’s, heaven forbid, but Hobson’s undetailed ones or, still more anonymously, those of a ‘Washington scientist-scholar’ from which he elicits a figure – ‘The Engine Man’ – that has a strange, attenuated resemblance to some of the dream-characters of Freud; here, with regard to behaviourism and its mechanical explanations, there is even something risible.
Dreamland, though, is marsh ground and Saver soon leaps back to the drier regions of neurology. Respectable science as it may be, neurology has yet, pace the entertaining anecdotes of Oliver Sacks, to tell us anything profound about ourselves as human and social individuals – how could, indeed, a mere uncovering of circuits and their responses ever do so? The argument of ‘activation-synthesis’ describes itself as still that of the reflex machine – without even an explanation of its primum mobile: i.e. the mechanism that causes the brainstem to fire its random signals, later to be cortically elaborated into dreams. Not that the last question is particularly interesting in itself, since an answer would immediately beg the next more fundamental question: it is at least possible that ‘activation-synthesis’ is the mechanism ‘causing’ dreaming – but does this tell us anything illuminating about the significance of our dreams? Saver acknowledges that Hobson has not, after all, managed to explain ‘why’ we dream – which rather disposes of his own easy dismissal of Freud, who certainly did seek to give, in ‘The Psychoanalysis of Dreams’, a (non-neurological) explanation, and in this and later writings integrated it into an overall picture of humanity in all its biological, social, personal-developmental and historical richness. More or less mistaken, as final explanations, these ideas are certain to be, but they do take on board what behaviourism, to its discredit and ultimate triviality, always leaves out.
Ron Taylor
London SW19
