Joe Griffin goes back to basics to arrive at a some powerful new insights into the givens of human nature.

HUMAN GIVENS is a living school of psychology and, as such, it has to continue evolving or it will become moribund. The day we think we have all the answers we become a cult, as some schools of psychology and psychotherapy have already done. So what follows are ideas in progress (because any piece of truth we may glean is always a fragment of a larger one).

All that any new science has in its infancy is the beginnings of an approach. It took hundreds of years for astronomers to focus their minds on the central fact of their work, which was to understand the physical universe. Prior to that, studying the planets and stars was mixed up with superstition — with astrology, occult practices and mythology. Our aim with the human givens approach is to bring that same clarity of focus to psychology and psychotherapy. To do that, we must draw out from the numerous approaches to studying psychology, and the hundreds of different ideological models for doing psychotherapy and counselling, the basic starting point — the one factor that all life forms have in common.

Every living thing, from banana tree to rare orchid, from insect to worm to jellyfish, and from mouse to orangutan to human being, all have in common that they come into the world with a set of expectations about the type of stimuli they will encounter in the environment and how to deal with them. Every living thing has an innate set of responses that matches to expected stimuli, such as food or light or danger. A baby instinctively knows to latch on to the nipple; a plant turns towards the sun; a rabbit freezes in the headlights. Expectations, therefore, are about the needs of living things and about the resources they anticipate using to help them meet those needs. This holds as true for the simplest unicellular creature, swimming about in a swamp, as it does for us.

Although plants have expectations they don't, of course, have brains. They don't need them. This is because they just react to environmental changes in preprogrammed ways, hour by hour, day by day, season by season. Movement is fundamental to the existence of brains, which developed primarily to control movement, remember the result of past movements and therefore predict the outcome of future movements. So, once creatures evolved to move, the range and complexity of their expectations became more elaborate. The part of the brain that controls movement is also the part of the brain that plans and calculates and assesses. So the more complex the creature, the greater its expectations and the greater the variety of ways it develops to meet its needs. For more complex creatures, emotions are linked into expectations (I shall come back to this more fully later). Emotions, derived from the Latin emovere, 'to move outwards, to stir up', are connected to our needs and survival. Any emotional arousal caused by an expectation — to eat, to have sex, to take defensive action — is discharged by satisfying the expectation.

Taking it as the starting point, then, that expectations are about the needs of all living things and the resources they anticipate using to help meet them, we can propose the following: any life form that meets its needs by using the resources with which nature has gifted it is a successful one. When a life form is not thriving — whether plant, animal or human being — the reason is that its needs are not being met. And because not every expectation is met, nature has had to evolve a mechanism to deactivate the unfulfilled emotional charges associated with those expectations — otherwise expectations unfulfilled today would continue to dominate consciousness tomorrow. That would soon jeopardise the integrity of our instinctive responses — any response is weakened if it continually goes unsatisfied. Nature's solution to unfulfilled emotionally arousing expectations, as I proposed and gave evidence for in The Origin of Dreams,[1] is to find a sensory match for them from memory stores (pattern matching) during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep and thus discharge them in metaphorical form in a dream — in effect, fulfilling them.

The new book Ivan Tyrrell and I have co-authored (Dreaming Reality: how dreaming keeps us sane or can drive us mad,[2]) reflects the changes and developments in the human givens approach as it relates to this core idea: the function of the REM state and dreaming and its importance to mental health. For much of our time, we're in a dream state. Not just at night-time, but for most of our lives. Indeed, the human species hasn't really woken up yet. The idea that 'Mankind is asleep', taught by mystics all over the world for thousands of years, is profoundly true, and modern science has confirmed it.

There is a tenet of science that I intuitively subscribe to: when a piece of truth is captured, it should simplify reality rather than complexify it. In the new book, Ivan and I again explain how emotionally arousing expectations that don't get pattern matched in the environment are deactivated in the REM state by finding a metaphorical pattern from memories to match to, which is the dream. But we wanted to find a succinct way to capture the essence of this theory. And the phrase that came to my mind was 'the expectation fulfilment theory' of dreaming. Once the theory was phrased in that way, it was easy to see how it contrasted with Freud's 'wish fulfilment theory' of dreaming. Freud's idea was not big enough to contain all the facts about dreaming. While wishes are indeed expectations, all expectations are not wishes.

Bizarre and complex theories

What made Freudian psychoanalysis so complex, arcane and twisted was that it had to try and explain why people would wish for nightmares. That is at the heart of the baffling complexity, the inane psychobabble, of psychodynamic therapy and all the strange notions about the subconscious mind, about symbols, about sex, and secret wishes to have one's penis cut off (or, if a woman, a penis transplant)! These bizarre complexities arose as Freud and his many followers tried to make sense of why people had painful dreams. They came to believe that our subconscious minds must, because we secretly wish it, get pleasure out of frightening the living daylights out of ourselves.

Another influential figure, Carl Jung, also grasped a bit of the truth — that dreaming is somehow connected to the knowledge of the species — but his idea was also not big enough to make coherent sense of it. Jung thought that, somehow, just by decoding their dreams, people could tap into an archetypal unconscious wisdom within the universe for free, without realising that all new knowledge has to be earned.[3] So Jungian thought also became complex, weird and damaging to people.

But once we can see that it is our expectations that are fulfilled in dreaming, all the complexity falls away. When we grasp this larger piece of truth, it lights up our understanding in all directions. And, indeed, scientific research that further supports this understanding has just very recently been carried out. Before I comment on it, however, I want to refer to the theory of dreaming which till now has had the most scientific acceptance. This is the idea, proposed by J Allan Hobson, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, that dreaming is fuelled by the REM state, when it is activated by the brainstem periodically throughout the night. Certain neurochemicals, particularly acetylcholines, are released from the brainstem and trigger off electrical waves called PGO waves, known also as the orientation response.

The orientation response, part of our evolutionary heritage, is what makes us react, when awake, to anything sudden, such as a novel noise, sight or movement. During sleep, these PGO waves cause the brain to fire off at ran-
dom as it goes into repair and maintenance mode. Hobson suggests that this random firing is what causes the visual imagery we see while we are asleep, and that dreams are epiphenomena — of no significance in themselves. On the occasions when we remember them, our minds put together some sort of story to explain them, but essentially dreams are meaningless.[4] That is Hobson's big idea and it is the prevailing theory accepted within sleep research today. But it has recently met a very interesting challenge from the work of Mark Solms, professor of neuro-psychology at the University of Cape Town.

Solms's research is based on studies of people who have suffered strokes. He found that, when the nerve fibres connecting three brain structures (the amygdala, the ventral tegmentum and the anterior cingulate) to the frontal cortex were damaged, dreaming stopped but REM sleep persisted.[5] Hence his basic challenge to the most widely accepted theory at this time is that dreaming and the REM state are separate phenomena. This means that dreams cannot be meaningless epiphenomena resulting from random REM activation and that the firing of the REM state itself does not explain dreaming.

Any dreaming that occurs outside the REM state must further confirm that dreaming and the REM state are separate processes, says Solms. And, as sleep researchers have known for a long time, people report dreams in about 10 per cent of cases when they are woken from slow-wave (non-REM) sleep, compared with 80—90 per cent of cases, when woken during REM sleep.

The other half of the story

However, that is only half of the story. Four fifths of the 10 per cent of dreams recorded outside the REM state come from what is termed Stage 1 sleep, the stage when we drift off to sleep. But Stage 1 sleep has the same cortical organisation as the REM state, and any dreaming that occurs at that stage does not need to be stimulated by a signal from the brainstem because the brain is pattern matching to expectations that exist in working memory, to discharge them in a dream. Dreams are occasionally recorded from other stages of sleep, but these occur quite close to the REM state, when some of the typical REM state phenomena (such as paralysis of major muscles) also occur. Thus there is a partial activation of the REM state on those occasions.

So, while Professor Solms's work does represent a serious challenge to Hobson's theory, it actually supports the expectation fulfilment theory. If one of the effects, when particular bundles of neuronal fibres ascending to the cortex are knocked out by a stroke, is that dreaming stops, that focuses our attention on the fundamental question, "What are those fibres doing?" In his paper, Solms writes that this circuit is the dopamine circuit "which can be described as the seeking or wanting command system".[5] In other words, it is the brain's expectation system, just as the expectation theory of dreaming predicts. In the expectation theory of dreaming, those fibres should be involved in holding our expectations together and channelling them.

How the brain functions

For new scientific discoveries to be right, they have to be compatible with existing knowledge. If they are not, then we cannot claim that a true scientific advance has taken place. So let us see how these new understandings accord with what is already known about brain functioning.

In the somewhat stylised brain in the diagram (page 15), the dark shaded area represents organs that are activated in REM sleep and the lighter shaded areas represent organs deactivated in REM sleep. The hippocampus can be seen as the storehouse of all our conscious memories. Note the pontine tegmentum in the brainstem, which fires off the PGO orientation response, the amygdala and the organ called the anterior cingulate.

Also note the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, where what we term 'the observing self' operates. This is the region of the brain that American neuropsychiatrist John Ratey memorably termed 'the chief executive officer', [6] and that, on this side of the Atlantic, we might call 'the boss'. When we are fully conscious and awake, this organ is switched on. It is the part of our brain that coordinates all our awareness of the moment. It has a sense of who we are, what we are about and what our priorities are. But when it is switched off and we are operating 'on automatic', the anterior cingulate runs the show. The anterior cingulate was termed by Ratey 'the executive secretary' — we would say 'the boss's secretary'. I am going to use these metaphorical terms to create a picture of how the brain's expectation system works.

When we are awake, information comes in through the senses to the thalamus and is flashed to the amygdala (except smell, which goes directly to the amygdala) for a pattern match. (It is alerted by the orientation response, the mechanism in the brain that draws our attention to novel stimuli. The orientation response itself is an expectation; it says, in effect, "Something important is going to happen. Pay attention!" If the incoming information is deemed to constitute an immediate threat to survival and there is no time to go through the proper bureaucratic channels, the amygdala can
act as a manager in its own right and take the emergency step of activating the fight or flight response — though nowadays, of course, we experience life-threatening moments relatively rarely.

More usually, after pattern matching the incoming information, the amygdala tags it with sufficient emotional charge (in the form of dopamine), to reflect how important for survival it deems it to be and sends it up to the boss's secretary. (An emotional tag is what we think of as a feeling: anger, sadness, fear, desire, awe, joy, greed, disgust and so on.) On the way up, the information passes through other neural assemblies, which perform more analysis on it, each one adding more subtle chemical messages to the package. It is now a unique file with its own special chemical signature,

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References

© Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell 2006

This article first appeared in Volume 11, No, 1 (2004) 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 on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top

> More information on the human givens approach can be found in the following book, by Joe Griffin and Ivan Tyrrell

Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking

> You can find out more on the issues raised in this article at the following MindFields College workshops:

Brief therapy skills for stopping addictions

How to lift depression

Return to top