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Dreaming to forget: the real reason why

pattern-matching process is used in dreams to deactivate emotional arousal.

It is also consistent with Domhoff's requirement for "a forebrain network for dream generation"[14] (ie the uncompleted emotional expectations). And that is "most frequently triggered by brainstem activation" — the PGO startle response serves to alert the cortex to something happening and, as the brain is getting no information from the outside world at this point, it has to release from memory its current unfulfilled expectations, as its best guess as to what the 'something happening' might be.

The theory explains the consistency of dreams and the relationship to waking emotional concerns, so it meets Domhoff's criteria in that respect too. It explains the depression evidence, which none of the other theories does. (Depressed people have proportionally too much REM sleep because they continually worry and introspect, causing so much arousal needing to be discharged in dreams that they end up exhausted in the morning, instead of refreshed after sleep.[8]) It provides the first scientific explanation for hypnosis (showing that the REM state and the state known as hypnosis are one and the same). It is the only REM theory in the field to go beyond itself in this way and, indeed, a good theory ought to be able to do that, to enlarge our understanding by explaining other things not currently explained.

The functions of REM sleep

So what, then, are the functions of REM sleep? There are three. First, it has the function of switching off emotional expectation and thereby reducing the stress of managing increasing numbers of expectations that are no longer applicable to the current environment.

Second, it creates spare storage capacity in the cortex. If we look back to a primitive mammal such as the echidna (the spiny anteater), we see that, from one perspective, it has the most amazing brain on earth. It has the biggest cortex of any creature alive, for the amount of its body-weight. It doesn't have REM sleep. That is evidence to suggest that, if a creature doesn't have REM sleep, maybe it needs to have a massive cortex instead because, if unfulfilled expectations are not cleared out each night, a brain is going to need the ability to grow an ever bigger catalogue of expectations that it is still seeking to fulfil. So, by clearing in dreams each night expectations that haven't been acted out, there can be more spare capacity in the cortex.

Third, REM sleep has the function of preserving the integrity of our emotional templates. Up till now, we have never really said much about how this happens. We have said that somehow REM sleep removes impediments by acting out the unfulfilled expectations, but we haven't been specific about what is actually going on in the brain. And that is what I would like to do now to carry the expectation fulfilment theory forward to show that it is consistent with the very latest neurological findings and ideas about how the brain works.

First, let us look at how intelligence systems work. Evolutionary psychology had postulated that brains, and in particular the human brain, must contain particular modules in the cortex that give us various types of intelligence. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of these modules are in there, written from the genes in the cortex, telling us how to do all the things we might have to do — for instance, how to choose a mate, how to calculate whether there is reciprocity in a partnership, when to have sex, what tastes good, how to recognise the faces of the people we know, when to get sexually jealous and how to read other people's minds. Hundreds of little intelligence systems within the brain were postulated to explain how human beings can be so intelligent.[21]

What we've learned from bees

That view has been strongly challenged from two separate sources. The new theory is that the brain has what is termed an adaptive intelligence.[22] It starts off with some basic instincts but these instincts are modifiable, as a result of experience, and the brain can continually refine its learnings.

Of course, this is similar to the terms in which we have been talking for the last eight or so years in human givens theory — patterns being programmed into the brain in the REM state, during gestation and very early childhood, which humans seek to complete in the environment after birth, allowing our brains to be more flexible. All learnings, we have said, are about pattern refinement — and that, in effect, is what is contained in the latest scientific theory, which has been shown to be capable of explaining complex human behaviour.

The first evidence for this came from research findings that the honeybee has a neural transmitter called octopamine, which is similar to dopamine, our own motivation neurochemical. One single cell, using this neurochemical, motivates the bee to go out every morning to search for nectar (instinctive behaviour) and then that cell keeps a record of where the nectar is found.

The next time the bee goes out, it predicts, on the basis of that record, where it will get nectar today. So if the bee got nectar from a blue flower yesterday, it will pattern match and go to a blue flower today, predicting and expecting that it will get nectar there again. If it doesn't get nectar from the blue flower today, it immediately revises its memory store. So the memory store will now show that blue is not such a good predictor of nectar after all. Clearly, then, the bee has an instinct plus a capability for learning; it takes an instinctive pattern, builds on current information and modifies it, literally, on the wing.[23]

That is also what was postulated by computer scientists trying to model how the brain works. Their computer program succeeded in modelling complex bee foraging behaviour, and many other kinds of more complex behaviours, using this simple idea that you start with an instinctive core that can be modified through feedback from previous efforts.[24] It is a far more efficient system for acquiring knowledge than the one suggested in the module theory. If we had masses of modules in the brain, all occupying their own areas, the brain should be pretty well fixed, and that is exactly what the evolutionary psychologists thought was so.

Their idea was that those modules had evolved over the two million years that we were Stone Age hunter-gatherers and that, as all of our knowledge would go back to those times, we are ill-fitted for the world we live in today — a very fatalistic view of human nature. But the new information allows us to be more optimistic about human capacity. Even bees can learn. Behaviour has been shown to be so very much more malleable than anyone had ever suspected.

The sight cells that read Braille

The second source of evidence is neurological, and became available to us once brain scans were developed that could show exactly what was happening inside the skull cap when people learn new things. For example, it is now clear that, when people are born blind, the brain cells that would have been used to generate sight learn to read Braille instead.[25] So neurons are incredibly adaptive. They can take on new tasks.

It is now well known, for example, that the hippocampal area in taxi drivers' brains grows new cells and expands, when they do 'the knowledge' — the huge number of street maps they must plot out, learn and keep in their

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References

© Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell 2006

This article first appeared in Volume 12, No, 1 (2005) of the Human Givens journal.

JOE GRIFFIN is a psychologist and psychotherapist. he is co-founder with Ivan Tyrrell of the human givens approach.

> More information, including all references, can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad

> You can find out more about the importance of dreaming in this related article:

Sleep and dreaming

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> More information, including all references, can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Dreaming Reality: How dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad

> You can find out more about the importance of dreaming in this related article:

Sleep and dreaming

Return to top