Dream Life: An Experimental Memoir - Hardcover

Hobson, J. Allan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0262015323 ISBN 13: 9780262015325

Publisher: Mit Pr, 2011

Synopsis

A pioneer in sleep and dream science surveys his life and work through the lens of dreaming and consciousness.

J. Allan Hobson's scientific experimentation began in childhood, with a soot-filled investigation into the capacity of a chimney to admit Santa Claus. (He discovered that even with the damper open the chimney was far too narrow.) Hobson's life as an experimentalist has continued through a pioneering career devoted to aligning psychology and biology and to investigating the relationship of dreaming and consciousness. In Dream Life, Hobson conducts an experimental investigation into his life and work.

Hobson charts his developing consciousness through a vividly imagined conception (in October of 1932), birth, and babyhood, offering a theory about "protoconsciousness" in fetuses and infants. He recounts his youthful zeal for scientific discovery, his early sexual experimentation, and his education. He describes taking on the entrenched Freudians at Harvard Medical School in the 1950s, as a maverick psychiatrist who wanted to replace psychoanalysis with biological science. He describes his further studies, his marriages and love affairs, his travels, and what he learned about the brain from his whiplash-induced amnesia after a 1963 automobile accident and from his "brain death" after a stroke in 2001. Through it all, Hobson uses his life as the ultimate case study for his theory that REM sleep provides a test pattern that allows the brain to develop "offline." Dreams―most intense in REM sleep, when the brain is active―need no Freudian-style decoding, he says. Dreaming is a glorious mental state, to be enjoyed and studied for what it tells us about consciousness.

About this title

About the Author

J. Allan Hobson is Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, at Harvard Medical School. He is the author of The Dreaming Brain: How the Brain Creates Both the Senseand The Nonsense of Dreams, Dreaming as Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind (MIT Press,1999), The Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness (MIT Press, 1999, 2001), and other books.

Review

Aiming squarely at Freud, Hobson and a succession of collaborators documented people's sleep cycles, monitored their brain waves, and tracked chemical changes in the brain. In a series of books driven by five decades of research, Hobson argued that what's really happening when we dream is that our forebrains―the center of thinking and memory―are offline, while our visual, auditory, and emotional centers are not only online, but lit up. Bizarre and powerful dreams aren't caused by repressed desire, he argued, but by biology. Dreams may be fun to think about, but they're really just a side effect of sleep.

―Boston Globe

Many scientists write lay expositions of their research. Others do memoirs. Hobson, one of the world's most eminent sleep researchers, provides a unique amalgam. He recounts his life history, employing diverse episodes to convey insights into brain function. Hobson is frank to a fault, baring painful personal traumas―including his stroke, heart failure, and marital infidelities―all as learning moments for the reader. The resulting volume is as engrossing as a detective story, emotionally moving, and teaches far better than any textbook. Every scientist, physician, and curious lay reader will wish to devour this succulent brain food.

―Solomon H. Snyder, M.D.

Edition details

• Publisher: Mit Pr
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0262015323
• ISBN 13: 9780262015325
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 296