Allan Hobson

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Allan Hobson

John Allan Hobson (born June 3, 1933 in Hartford , Connecticut ) is a retired professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School , Cambridge , Massachusetts . He is known for his research on REM sleep .

biography

Hobson received a bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University in 1955 and his Doctor of Medicine from Harvard Medical School four years later .

For the next two years he interned at Bellevue Hospital Center, New York. From 1960 to 1961 and 1964 to 1966 he worked in the psychiatry department of the Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston. In the academic year 1963/64 he was "Special Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health for the Department of Physiology" at the University of Lyon. He has worked in numerous hospitals and research laboratories and is currently the director of the Neurophysiology Laboratory at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

Hobson has three children, a mentally retarded son and significantly younger twins.

Among the awards received Hobson for his scientific work, inclusion in the Boylston Medical Society and the award of are Benjamin Rush Gold Medal for Best Scientific Exhibit of the American Psychiatric Association in 1978. 1998 he received the Distinguished Scientist Award of the Sleep Research Society.

job

Dream theories

Hobson's research examines mental events and relates them to the brain. He particularly deals with wakefulness, sleep and dreams. He believes dreams come about when random energy signals reach the brain during REM sleep. The brain tries to make sense of this random input, which in its opinion is what creates the dream. Hobson clearly rejects the idea that there are deep, nonphysical, hidden meanings for dreams. He calls such views “the mystique of the fortune cookie dream interpretation”. Years ago, he proved his theories through tests on mice and humans.

However, he revised this view in later works and now admits that personal experiences can be reflected in dreams. The mechanism he describes may only serve to switch between the different dream episodes.

In addition to his high-paying assignments, Hobson is actively involved with four groups related to his neurological sleep research: Society Membership, Society for Neuroscience, Society for Sleep Research, AAAS, and the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD), which he chairs .

Hobson is skeptical not only of dream analysis , but of psychoanalysis in general. He hopes that the neurosciences will provide impulses for a “new psychiatry”, but at the same time states that the biological insights into the functioning of the human brain currently do not offer a comprehensive basis for psychiatric treatments and cannot replace psychological and social discourse. However, he has recognized the importance of dreams for unconscious processing in the last few years of his research.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ CV of J. Allan Hobson (PDF; 15 kB)
  2. ^ A b Claudia Dreifus: A CONVERSATION WITH / J. Allan Hobson; A Rebel Psychiatrist Calls Out to His Profession , The New York Times. August 27, 2002. Retrieved January 8, 2009. 
  3. ^ Michael Hagmann: The Distiller of Dreams . 1998. Retrieved March 25, 2007.
  4. ↑ Jon Magnuson: Are Humans Wired to Dream? . August 27, 2002. Archived from the original on April 22, 2007. Retrieved March 25, 2007.
  5. ^ President and Fellows of Harvard College: Faculty Profile . 2006. Retrieved March 25, 2007.
  6. ^ Allan Hobson: Psychiatry as Scientific Humanism: A Program Inspired by Roberto Unger's Passion ( Memento from July 5, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Hobson, Allan
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hobson, John Allan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American psychiatrist and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Hartford , Connecticut