Hobson, Dr Allan

Category: Scientist

 

John Allan Hobson (born June 3, 1933) is an American psychiatrist and dream researcher, known for his research on rapid eye movement sleep.

He is Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Dr Hobson has been working in the area of lucid dreaming  since the 1960s.  His research speciality is quantifying mental events and correlating them with quantified brain events, with special reference to waking, sleeping and dreaming. He discovered, for example that some dreams are created when energy signals reach the brain's cortex during REM sleep.  He helped to show that some dreams are ‘reorganising dreams’. 

Dr. Hobson however entirely dismisses the idea that there are any deep, nonphysiological, or hidden meanings in dreams, which somewhat ignores the other stages of learning via dreams.

References

 

Out of its mind - psychiatry in crisis - While millions of patients with severe mental illnesses are neglected, those charged with caring for them are engaged in a troubling debate: Who should treat these patients-and how? On one side are psychoanalysts, on the other are pill-pushing psychiatrists. And on the fringe are neuroscientists, who are learning volumes about the brain but whose discoveries have largely been ignored. Truly, psychiatry is in crisis.  In this important book, Harvard psychiatrist J. Allan Hobson and medical journalist Jonathan A. Leonard explore the roots of this predicament and propose, for the first time, the development of a more balanced approach to treatment-neurodynamics-that bridges the worlds of biomedicine, therapy, and neuroscience. Written with passion and informed by decades of experience, Out of Its Mind shows a clear path to reviving psychiatry, providing sound care for millions, and realizing humanity's ancient dream of treating not just the mind or brain alone, but both together.

 

Dr Hobson has published the following books that relate to his mental health and dream research:

• 1989, Abnormal States of Brain and Mind
• 1989, The Dreaming Brain
• 1989, Sleep
• 1992, Sleep and Dreams
• 1996, The Chemistry of Conscious States: How The Brain Changes Its Mind
• 2000, Dreaming As Delirium: How the Brain Goes Out of Its Mind
• 2002, Dream Drugstore: Chemically Altered States of Consciousness
• 2002, Dreaming: An Introduction to the Science of Sleep
• 2002, Out of Its Mind: Psychiatry in Crisis, a Call for Reform
• 2005, 13 Dreams Freud Never Had
• 2005, From Angels to Neurones: Art and the New Science of Dreaming
• 2011, Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction

Observations

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• Hobson, Dr Allan - An interesting dream
• Hobson, Dr Allan - Dreaming and its use in creative pursuits
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The effects of a stroke 01 - Attacked by soldiers with fierce medieval weapons
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The effects of a stroke 02 - Shot up into the air like a rocket
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The effects of a stroke 03 - A monkey mama is floating in the air in front of him
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The effects of a stroke 04 - Brain structure [form] and functions are separate
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The effects of a stroke 05 - Imaginary reptiles conjured up by his drug-soaked thalamus
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The effects of a stroke 06 - Hallucinations in the MRI
• Hobson, Dr Allan - The importance of love in healing