About two months ago, on October 16th, I attended an amazing lecture at McGill...
My Life in Science: The Excitement of Discovery was the title of the autobiographical lecture given by none other than Brenda Milner aka the mother of neuropsychology. I was looking forward to see her again as I’ve seen her twice already at other lectures. This one however, was quite different as Brenda Milner was speaking about her own life and the discovery of her passion. Before her lecture, there was a fifteen to twenty minutes ceremony with prizes for undergraduate students presenting a research project. Then, Milner’s colleague introduced her and mentioned that science has been defined as a gradual accumulation of knowledge, and that in Milner’s case, she invented a whole field! He also emphasised that, this year, Brenda Milner will be awarded the Balzan Price, worth a million dollars.
Brenda Milner celebrated her 91st birthday this summer and mentioned in her speech that it was the first time she would give a lecture seated due to recommendations from her medical colleagues. In that matter, Brenda Milner began her speech by introducing her dream as an undergraduate at Cambridge University which was to become a mathematician (to this day, she still wants to be a mathematician). She soon got lonely in mathematics and decided to try philosophy and psychology. After that, Brenda told us that she got lucky at many instances. The first luck was that as she got married to the engineer Peter Milner, they ended up moving to Montreal because of an atomic energy project Peter was interested in. That is when she worked at the University of Montreal (having always a great passion for French) teaching experimental psychology. Her second stroke of luck occurred when she went to a seminar given by Donald Hebb. She was very inspired by Hebb and convinced him to let her work for him. Then, the third lucky instance was that Hebb worked with Dr. Penfield (the founder of the Montreal Neurological Institute) and referred her. Hence, Brenda Milner was in the heart of the action concerning what is now called neuropsychology. Brenda Milner was studying visual perception in patients with lobotomies to the temporal lobes. Those were performed and still are to different extents to relieve a person from epilepsy. However, we all know Brenda Milner for her major work in memory and the different kinds of memory systems. Milner soon had to change interests as her patients complained of memory problems.
This is where it got interesting. She had one patient that suffered from anterograde amnesia (being the loss of the ability to make new memories) which is a very serious memory loss as a result of his unilateral temporal lobotomy (removing the temporal regions on one side of the brain, usually in the left). Later on, Brenda Milner was sent at the HartfordHospital to study another similar case in a patient called H.M. that had undergone bilateral lobotomies (to both temporal lobes). We can now call him Henry Gustav Molaison as he died this very year to my greatest deception. Brenda Milner said that she was often asked if she was sad. She replied that she cannot be as Mr. Molaison continually saw her every time for the first time. Thus, Henry never recognised her in the decades she worked with him. These two patients (P.B. and H.M.) led her to hypothesise that in order to create anterograde amnesia, both temporal regions must be lesioned in some way. This meant that P.B. had already a damaged right temporal lobe before the surgery. This was in fact correct and was determined only after his death as the technology was not invented to look at live brains. From there, research flourished on memory processing and separating different kinds of “memories” since both amnesic patients showed deficits in specific types of memory for example episodic memory (of events) but not procedural memory (of skills acquired such as riding a bicycle).
Finally, I stopped writing frantically after loads of more interesting findings and discoveries told by this amazing speaker. I remember thinking to myself “God, I wish she was my grandmother!”. This, of course, would have been the most convenient as I’m aiming for a career in neuropsychology. In any case, her speech was fun, interesting and very educational as the knowledge on the subject came from the horse’s mouth. I strongly encourage you (as Brenda Milner did also) to watch the movie Memento (2000): a uniquely filmed thriller focusing on an anterograde amnesiac. It will not only peak your interest on memory processing, but keep you on the edge of your seats for the duration of the movie.
Here’s some comments on the article A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain by Benedict Carey [can read or scan quickly at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/health/10mind.html?_r=2&ref=science]. This article points out a new theory of dream interpretation which slightly discards psychological interpretations and replaces them with physiological ones. The article refers to dreaming as being more a brain warm-up before facing the day instead of the build-up and release of the previous day's processing.
There are a few points in the article that I was skeptical about. First of all, this article’s arguments were slightly too reductionistic as some of the researchers, such as Dr. Hobson, stated that the primary purpose of dreaming might be physiological. I find that this article tries to slowly set aside the psychological portion of dreaming since physiological answers are considered more credible.
I still find that the theory of REM sleep being a “warm-up before waking” sounds very plausible. However, I think we face a long debate of what came first, the chicken or the egg? The chicken being the psychological processing of events during the past day and the egg, the physiological warming-up for the day to come.
I find it disappointing that dreams do have a biased and non-scientific past, but reducing them to spontaneous physiological activities doesn’t seem to have more scientific basis than assigning them to psychological symbols.
Also, I am wondering about the 80% of dream contents that the dreamer hasn’t encountered while awake. Reports of lucid dreamers on their recollection of people and places in their dreams only support weakly the idea that only 20% of dreams are “made” of concrete memories since even awake, we sometimes don’t perceive a person or place as familiar even if we encountered it before. Hence, dreams can very well use past stimuli that we weren’t consciously aware of but that was still registered into our memory.
Finally, I found the findings of the study of Goethe and Hobson fascinating. The fact that frontal areas would be involved in lucid dreaming and waking but not normal dreaming is good evidence of the sense of logic and self-awareness one has in lucid dreaming and waking but not in normal non-lucid-sleep that is characterized by delusions and psychotic-like state. Furthermore, wasn’t psychosis associated with deficiencies in frontal areas… Thus, could it be that lucid dreaming research will help us find a prognosis for psychotic patients? This will be in another post. In the meantime…
To finish this comment, it is amazing that lucid dreaming seems to be in between waking and dreaming even in terms of brain activity as EEG data suggests activation of both visual areas and frontal areas (to a lesser extent than waking).
Here’s a recent interesting review on the physiology of lucid dreaming:
Random tip to all the women out there who ask for advice when a long-distance-guy doesn’t answer their email.
Ladies,
Here are the possibilities to explain this phenomenon in increasing order of probability:
either you wrote the wrong email, your email is in his junk mail, he doesn't know what to answer, he decided not to answer, he didn't think you would write that soon, he doesn’t know how to type, he doesn’t have internet, he is an alien, he is gay, he is pretty, he doesn’t deserve you, he pretends he’s rich, he doesn’t tan, his house burned down, he has aphasia, he is drunk, no, he is not drunk, he can type when drunk, he has a headache now, he has dissociative amnesia, he is studying, he is a girl, he is further than you thought, he doesn’t understand English or French, he is scared of you, he forgot your name, he truly believes in the bug of 2010, he is shy, he is stupid, find yourself a Montrealer (i.e. local)!
PS: If none of these explanations are satisfactory, check your junk mail.
NB: The following does not spoil the movie if you didn’t watch it yet. However, I strongly encourage you to do so as you probably guessed.
The Fall (2006) walks on a thin line between the surrealistic style of it's landscapes and the authenticity of its main characters. The title is a simple but clever choice for this movie, since it first suggest the fall of Alexandria (Catinca Untaru, yes a talented little Romanian girl) from an orange tree. This resulted in a broken arm and her being hospitalized for a while. Alexandria soon wonders around the hospital and meets this young man called Roy (Lee Pace) that is paralyzed in his bottom limbs and that starts to tell her wondrous adventure tales. Another meaning to the title is the fall of governor Odius, in the story’s plot, but it can also refer to the fall of human kind after the original sin. {I was actually surprised to the amount of blood spilled in this movie.}
I found the movie to be an artistic masterpiece! In one scene, the Indian’s wife is trapped in the Labyrinth of Despair that looked familiar (not that I’ve been there of course!) and it suddenly reminded me of a surrealistic painting of labyrinth I saw at an exhibition. When I searched, I found M. C. Escher’s paintingof Relativity (the one below); I’m still not quite sure that's the one, but it’s close enough.
In any case, The Fall was also psychologically realistic. Thus, it is done in such a way that we, viewers, see everything and know what Alexandria doesn’t, such as the fact that Roy is quite mentally unwell too. As the story he’s telling her shapes around his state of mind, little Alexandria hopes for a happy ending…
The video below shows the trailer of Star Trek: The Next Generation Season 4 Episode 17 called "Night Terrors". I highly recommend this entire season to any psychology and/or science fiction fans out there. This 4th season is a little different from the others as it is full of mind games, psychopathology and insanity, and touches on subjects such as the crossing of mental boundaries between "alien species". Even though the quality of this trailer is prehistoric and gives you a different impression, it still shows you a preview of the episode and helps me introduce the topic of psychosis.
This star trek episode starts with the ship Enterprise finding another ship that is in perfect shape where the whole crew of 34 people was murdered. As they investigate the problem, the crew on the Enterprise start to experience auditory and visual hallucinations (such as snakes, seeing people that aren’t there, seeing dead people getting up), paranoia and delusions. Also, including many instances of forgetfulness and confusion. Doctor Crusher and counselor Troi soon realize that the whole crew is moving towards the realms of psychosis. This episode, even though sometimes following obvious Hollywoodian styles, is still a good suspense and keeps you intrigued especially if you want to verify if the claims made in the episode are still relevant today.
Thus, the episode is called "Night Terrors" even though it does not explicitly show the phenomenon of night terrors. To clarify, night terrors often occur in children between 4 and 12 years old, (but can easily be experienced by anyone) and consist of sudden awakenings from sleep due to intense fear and panic even though nothing is remembered from the dream itself. Night terrors are different from nightmares since they occur specifically during Stage 4 or REM sleep, whereas nightmares are independent from the sleep cycle. I would suggest watching it before reading the next part in green.
Thus, the symptoms the crew exhibit are consistent with the progression of psychosis such as in schizophrenics, involving forgetfulness, delusions leading to full blown paranoia and hallucinations. However, these symptoms can be temporary and not due to a specific disorder, but to the environment. A possible trigger for these symptoms when people use hallucinogens, they will then experience both visual and auditory hallucinations, but will also sometimes be subject to delusions, intense panic episodes and forgetfulness.
Also, in a study by Cohen et al. (2005) it has been observed that people with the Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) were also experiencing vivid dreams, illusions (e.g. mistaking objects), hallucinations and delusions. GBS patients also have sleep disturbances. We do not know if the syndrome itself is causing the symptoms or the sleep disturbances do. In any case, it was found that patients with GBS experiencing hallucinations would have significantly shorter periods of REM sleep in their sleep cycles than GBS experiencing no hallucinations and people without the syndrome. In this case, towards the end of the episode, the crew finally realizes that they are REM sleep deprived which causes these psychotic symptoms. Remember, the episode was based on theories already developed involving dreams and psychosis. However, I was still wondering if it was relevant today. Thus, this previous recent finding still supports the idea that REM sleep deprivation is correlated with increased hallucinations confirming the claims of the episode of 1991. Thus, other examples of peered reviewed articles, one in 1962 by Ralph J. Berger and one in 2008 by Scarone et al., are both associating REM sleep (where dreams occurs) and psychosis. Thus, this shows how across time, even though we do not fully understand the processes involving dreams and psychosis, these two states of mind are still closely related even decades later. This subject will be further discussed in future posts.
Finally, this episode first reminded me of the movie Solaris (2002) starring George Clooney based on the book with the same name by Stanislaw Lem (1961) and which I won't discuss here either, but highly recommend to anyone!!
Berger, Ralph J. (1962). Effects of sleep deprivation on behaviour, subsequent sleep, and dreaming.The British Journal of Psychiatry, 108, 457-465.
Cochen et al, (2005) Vivid dreams, hallucinations, psychosis and REM sleep in Guillain–Barré syndrome.Brain, 128, 2535–2545.
Scarone et al, (2008). The dream as a model for psychosis: an experimental approach using bizarreness as a cognitive marker.Schizophr Bull, 34(3), 515–522.
Try to find as many solutions to this problem as you can. It was invented to assess and problem solving in an experimental setting*. I will explain it further and give you the statistics on it after you tried it :)
Here it is:
"Suppose you are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed the patient will die. There is a kind of ray that can be used to destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a sufficiently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this intensity the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At a lower intensity the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?"
________________________________________ * I will post the references and credits after a few days, so you won't be tempted to look for answers or hint.
