Review Of the Scientific Study of Dreams Case Assignment

Review Of the Scientific Study of Dreams Case Assignment

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Review Of the Scientific Study of Dreams Case Assignment

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Resumo: Reviews the book, The Scientific Study of Dreams by G. William Domhoff (see record 2002-06753-000). This book presents what Domhoff calls a neurocognitive model of dreaming. The first aspect of Domhoff’s review is the extent of the neuronal network and the mechanisms of its activation in sleep. The second aspect is Domhoff’s emphasis on the development of dreaming in humans. The third aspect is Domhoff’s approach to the quantitative description of dream content. The book will appeal to those who share Domhoff’s views about what a science of dreaming should accomplish. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2013 APA, all rights reserved)

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• SUMMARY OF THE BOOK’S CONTENT
• CRITIQUE

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This book presents what Domhoff calls a neurocognitive model of dreaming. The model is summarized in Chapter 1. On page 4 Domhoff states:

• Dreaming occurs when a relatively specific neural network-located primarily in the limbic, paralimbic, and associational areas of the forebrain-is activated in the absence of external input coupled “with a letting go of control by the self.” If defects occur in this network, dreaming can be lost temporarily or permanently, or it can be impaired in a partial way, such as through the loss of visual dream imagery.
• Dreaming is a cognitive achievement that develops gradually over the first 8 or 9 years of life.
• The “output” of the conceptual systems in the neural network for dream generation, called dream content and available to scientists through written or transcribed dream reports, is drawn from many of the same schemata and memory systems as waking conceptions; this content includes repetition in characters, social interactions, misfortunes, negative emotion, and related themes.

 

SUMMARY OF THE BOOK’S CONTENT

There are thus three aspects to the model which Domhoff develops in his book:

1. The first aspect of Domhoff’s review is the extent of the neuronal network and the mechanisms of its activation in sleep. He first emphasizes the forebrain generator networks in terms of the recent PET and brain lesion findings. Later in the book, he reviews the basic animal work which has focused mainly upon the brain stem controllers of the forebrain substrate of sleep states.
2. The second aspect is Domhoff’s emphasis on the development of dreaming in humans. Domhoff relies heavily on Foulkes’ laboratory studies of children showing that before age 9 they do not give adult-type dream reports.
3. The third aspect is Domhoff’s approach to the quantitative description of dream content. This is the central issue of the book and is discussed in the chapters 2-5. Domhoff’s analysis of dream content derives from the original Hall-van der Castle paradigm. Now well known, this painstakingly difficult descriptive cataloguing approach is capable of categorizing many interesting asrects of dream content reports. To overcome the labor intensive limitation, Domh6ff refers the reader to a computer instantiated Dreambank. He then goes on to discuss his analysis of dream samples, the purport of which is to show that dreams do make sense in terms of the dreamer’s personality, interests, concerns, and feelings.

Traditional dream theories are compared with Domhoff’s neurocognitive model in Chapter 6. Freud and Jung are dismissed by an extensive and devastating crtitique. Activation-Synthesis is found to be potentially useful but its shortcomings are emphasized. According to Domhoff, activation-synthesis is a reductionist neurophysiological approach which rejects phenomenology. The theory that dreaming serves problem solving is discredited.

 

CRITIQUE

The book will appeal to those who share Domhoff’s views about what a science of dreaming should accomplish. I hope I am not being unfair when I say that Domhoff’s goals, however ambitious, fall far short of my own. As an author of the Activation-Synthesis Model, I am a hopelessly biased reviewer and before I develop my own critique of Domhoff’s model I want to say that I agree with Domhoff’s assessment that the gap between us is narrowing. In fact, I think the gap is artificial.

Let me expound on this. The truth of the matter is that because we are interested in different scientific problems, we emphasize different aspects of the same processes. Activation-synthesis has as its central goal the creation of a specific neurocognitive model for understanding dreaming. Because we wish to map between the brain and the mind, we emphasize the psychological differences between waking and dreaming and attempt to account for in terms of differences in brain activity. Dornhoff, Foulkes, and many of their colleagues are interested in the continuity of mental activity and hence emphasize the similarities between waking and dreaming. The neurocognitive basis of these similarities can also be gleaned from the PET imagery data but not from the differences as Domhoff seems to emphasize when he cites the activation of a discrete and limited forebrain network. This network is activated only during REM and is therefore only useful in accounting for the differences between REM sleep dreaming and waking consciousness.

It is refreshing to see psychologists like Domhoff—and Antrobus before him—attempting to integrate their data with the burgeoning findings of sleep neurobiology. But psychologists must not misinterpret or misrepresent neurobiology any more than neurobiologists are entitlted to misrepresent psychology. Sad to say, Bill Dornhoff does just this. Three examples, and they are major theory wrecking ones, illustrate this point.

1. Solms’ human stroke lesion patients cannot be taken to indicate a limited forebrain circuit for dream generation. Instead they only indicaate that one or another structure is necessary—but not sufficient—for dreaming to occur. In all likelihood, these lesions are effective because they disconnect crucial parts of what is likely to be a widely distributed system for dreaming.
2. The human PET data cannot be taken to indicate a limited forebrain circuit for dreaming either. Since PET is a subtraction method, those few areas that are hyperactivated in REM are candidate structures for mediating the differences between dreaming and waking not the similarities that Domhoff emphasizes in his dream content analysis. The rest of the forebrain (with the important exception of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) is just as active in REM as in waking.
3. Domhoff erroneously suggests (see last line of p. 3) that the Hobson-McCarley single neurone recording experiments were performed in lesioned cats. Where Dornhoff ever got this idea, I do not know but I do know that it is not from reading our papers. I hesitate to suggest that it came to him in a dream! The net effect of this misrepresentation is to suggest that our results don’t even apply to normal cats, let alone people! But our cats were normal and, because they share a NREM-REM sleep cycle structure with all mammals (including Domhoff), I expect that even his sleeping brain would show the elaborate symphony of neurobiologic function that our cats revealed to us.

One of the major drawbacks of this book is that it neglects the voluminous work emerging from both the new discipline of cognitive neuroscience and its traditional counterpart, neuropsychology. As such the appellation “neurocognitive” (Introduction, Chapter 1) is a bit misleading. Dornhoff’s very emphasis on the continuity between dreaming and waking consciousness and cognition begs the question of why the neurocognitive basis of waking cognition is not better addressed. Domhoff’s reliance on the developmental arguments of Foulkes serves as one example of this missed opportunity. While he faithfully reviews Foulkes’ developmental arguments rooted in Piaget and developmental psychology, he does not avail the reader of what is now known about the developing brain! The key neurodevelopmental events of infancy through late adolescence constitute one of the most active fields of neuroscience as revealed by numerous reports, journals, books and textbooks in the fields of developmental brain imaging, developmental psychopathology and psychiatry, and neurodevelopmental disorders. We now know much of the brain basis of the very changes he and Foulkes infer from the psychological data!

Similarly, in adult dreams, not only what we call the formal features of dreaming (i.e., their “mental status” or “cognitive” profile, referring directly to the wake-dream continuity theory he embraces) but, we argue, even limited aspects of dream content can only benefit from the cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology of waking. Why does this book dwell almost exclusively on the by now extensively reviewed results of the dream awakening studies of the 60’s and 70’s? We now have available to us a wealth of data on the cognitive neuroscience of waking gleaned over the decade of the brain. The following are just a few examples: What does the neuropsychology of prefrontal inhibitory and social cognition systems tell us about our dreamed indiscretions? Or what do studies of motivational deficits in cingulate lesion patients or emotional blunting in amygdalectomized primates tell us about dream motivation or emotion profiles? Explanation of the presumably right parietally based preserved (enhanced?) spatial capabilities of dreamers (capabilities emphasized by Foulkes in his correlation of dream capabilities with Block Design and by Solms in his lesion studies) could only benefit from the voluminous literature on the visuospatial capabilities of parietal, dorsal stream systems revealed in studies of pathological neglect or normal spatial attention. What does the distinctive neuroanatomy of language and praxis (revealed decades ago to neuropsychologists studying stroke) tell us about elements of our dreamed speech, or physical abilities, or disabilities? These are just some of many areas amenable to content analysis! The most interesting aspect of Solms’ work, which he extensively cites, is not Solms’ critique of the Activation-Synthesis but rather his linkage of dream phenomena and deficits to waking phenomena and deficits (e.g., non-visual dreaming and visual irreminiscence). It is this aspect of Solms’ The Neuropsycholbgy of Dreaming which is truly innovative and exciting.

Having said that, we agree with the three basic precepts of Domhoff’s model

1. Forebrain activation is essential to dreaming;
2. Dreaming—or at least, the reporting of dreams-is a neurocognitive achievement requiring linguistic competence and;
3. The analysis of dream content be both scientifically manageable and clinically useful.

Activation-Synthesis has always affirmed all three of these principles and still does. I have already commented at length about the neural network precept. As far as development is concerned, it seems a truism to hold that adult dreams require an adult brain. The most important point is the analysis of dream content. Activation-Synthesis shares Domhoff’s conviction that this must be done and that it can be done. But our emphasis on dream form is strategic and powerful because it is paradigm specific. It begins by explaining the formal aspects of REM sleep dream content in terms of REM sleep physiology.

I do not think that Domhoff’s approach is scientifically potent because it doesn’t even try to address the big scientific questions about dreaming which are:

1. Where do dreams come from?;
2. Why are they so strange?; and
3. Where do they go?

If you were an outsider and you read Domhoff’s book, you wouldn’t even know that questions 2 and 3 have been raised and answered by that very same kind of reductionism that Domhoff somewhat reluctantly and half-heartedly uses himself in answering question 1.

Question 1: Where do dreams come from? They come from the brain mind when it is activated in sleep. The details of the activation process are matters of neurophysiological fact. And it is also a fact that the activation process is different in sleep from that of waking. Therefore dream consciousness must be very different from waking consciousness. But you would never guess that from reading Domhoff. This is because Domhoff wants to regard cognition as continuous across the states. And in some ways, of course, it is. And this is what Domhoff’s system is good at catching. But because the brain physiology is so different, dreaming can’t be identical to waking. And it isn’t!

Why are dreams so strange? According to Domhoff, they aren’t all that strange. But if you take the trouble to measure bizarreness using the approach that we developed (Hobson et al., 1987), they are strange. In the analysis of the Dream Journal of the Smithsonian insect specialist (called the Engine Man), which I lent to Domhoff, the Engine Man’s stylistic consistency is the main conclusion reached by Domhoff after coding 187 of the dreams. But the long dream reports in that journal are also laced with what I call microscopic bizarreness. Times, places, and persons (also their behaviors) change without notice, and they change constantly. I use the term microscopic to contrast what we measure with the major scene changes that Domhoff mistakenly believes to be at the heart the activationsynthesis theory of bizarreness and its measurement.

I fully agree with Domhoff’s conclusions about the personality of the dream journal’s author. The Engine Man was shy, meticulous, and constricted. But I daresay we hardly needed to analyze his dreams to reach that conclusion. Meanwhile, Domhoff has simply missed the boat when it comes to characterizing what so distinctively differentiates the Engine Man’s dreams from his waking consciousness. Domhoff doesn’t even ask if his subjects have detailed visuomotor imagery so vivid that they are fooled into believing they are awake nor does he ask if his subjects can think with the same logical force that they use in waking. Are their emotions intensified and are they relevant to the content? We found that if we asked out subjects to tell us about their dream emotions, we got about ten times more emotion scored than Hall and van de Castle detailed and that dream emotion was always relevant to dream cognition even though dream cognition was bizarre with respect to itself. To give another, more graphic example, consider the drawings of the Engine Man, many of which depict the sports of which he was so fond in his waking life. But the drawings are clearly intended to depict bizarre trajectories that would never be taken by waking golfers, tennis or baseball players. Domhoff’s system is insensitive to these gross distinctions.

3. Where do dreams go? In other words, what is the status of the memory system during and after dreaming? This question-so rightfully dear to psychologists’ interests for at least a century-is never raised by Domhoff. Memory for dream in subsequent waking is notoriously poor! And, as we have recently shown, memory is markedly impaired during dreaming too! Subjects rarely, if ever, have access to important details of narrative memory while they are dreaming. Yet such details are immediately available to them when they wake up (Fosse et al., 2001)! Again, there can be no dissent from the conclusion that neurocognition has changed dramatically in dreaming.

It is admittedly unfair to cite a paper that was published after Domhoff’s book came out and I admit to that. But I submit that the study of memory within dreams is every bit as much an exploration of neurocognition as the number of male and female characters that appear in dream reports! And possibly more so. Domhoff’s system can only classify what is there. But it is also what is absent that is important.

So, what’s the problem? The problem, it seems to me, is that the fundamental power of dream science is not being used by dream content analysts like Domhoff. Since Domhoff is not a physiologist he admits the import of neurophysiological data only grudgingly and half-heartedly. Dream science needs to make the most of both basic neurophysiology and phenomenology. And to view dreaming as the product of both top down and bottom up information processing.

Since 1986, activation-synthesis has championed this both-and approach. The gap between us and psychologist critics like Domhoff is only that we want to document and explain the differences between waking and dreaming. We use neurophysiology and phenomenology to develop our bottom-up and our top-down strategies. And we use bidirectional mapping to tie the two parts together. The similarities are numerous and of some interest too but their study will not be helped much by physiology.

To call us reductionistic is to pay us a compliment we welcome. All science is reductionistic in its desire to explain the greatest number of variables with the fewest assumptions. What does Domhoff want to explain? That dreams reflect individual’s personality, concern, feelings, and conflicts? Of course they do. I have always thought this was true but I didn’t know how to account for the striking formal differences between waking and dreaming. The brain is surprisingly helpful in this endeavor.

 

REFERENCE

1. Fosse, M. J.,  Fosse, R.,  Hobson, J. A., &  Stickgold, R.  (2003). Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

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Assunto: Dream Analysis (principal); Dreaming (principal); Models (principal); Neurocognition (principal); Development; Dream Content; Neural Networks; Sleep

Classificação: 2380: Consciousness States

Identificador (palavra-chave): dreams neurocognitive model dreaming neuronal network sleep dream content development

Título: Review of The scientific study of dreams .

Autor: Hobson, J. Allan

Título da publicação: Dreaming

Volume: 13

Edição: 3

Páginas: 187-191

Data de publicação: Sep 2003

Formato coberto: Electronic

Editora: Educational Publishing Foundation

País de publicação: United States

ISSN: 1053-0797

eISSN: 1573-3351

Revisado por especialistas: Sim

Autor do trabalho revisado: Domhoff, G. William

Trabalho revisado: The Scientific Study of Dreams. APA Press

Idioma: Inglês

Tipo de documento: Journal, Review-book, Peer Reviewed Journal

Número de referências: 1

DOI:  http://dx.doi.org.vlibdb.vcccd.edu/10.1023/A:1025377513630

Data de lançamento: 23 Jul 2012 (PsycINFO); 23 Jul 2012 (PsycARTICLES)

Número de registro: 2012-15866-001

ID do documento ProQuest: 1027831769

URL do documento:  http://search.proquest.com.vlibdb.vcccd.edu/docview/1027831769?accountid=39859

Copyright: © Association for the Study of Dreams 2003

Base de dados: PsycARTICLES

Bibliografia

Estilo de referência bibliográfica: APA 6th – American Psychological Association, 6th Edition

Hobson, J. A. (2003). Review of the scientific study of dreams. Dreaming, 13(3), 187-191. doi:http://dx.doi.org.vlibdb.vcccd.edu/10.1023/A:1025377513630

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