Allan Hobson

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

Biography

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

In the following two years, he interned at Bellevue Hospital Center, New York. From 1960-1961 and 1964-1966, he worked in psychiatry at 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 worked in numerous hospitals and research laboratories and is currently the Director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.

Hobson has three children, a mentally disabled son and much younger twins.

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

Work

Dream theories

Dr. Hobson's research examines mental events and puts them in relation with the brain. He pays special attention to wakefulness, sleep and dreams. He believes that dreams occur when random energy signals reach the brain during REM sleep. The brain tries to make sense of this random input, which in his opinion, the dream is produced. Dr. Hobson clearly rejects from the idea that there are deep, not physical, hidden meanings of dreams. Such views he calls " the mystique of the Fortune Cookie dream interpretation ." He has his theories confirmed by tests with mice and humans years ago.

However, he revised this view in later work, and now accepts a that personal experiences can be reflected in the dreams. The mechanism described by him might serve only to switch to between the different dream episodes.

In addition to his high-paying jobs, Dr. Hobson actively seized of four groups that are 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 ), whose chairman he is.

Hobson is not only the dream analysis but psychoanalysis against generally skeptical. From the neuroscience he hopes impetus for a "New Psychiatry ", but also notes that the biological insights into the workings of the human brain are still not provide a comprehensive basis for psychiatric treatment and the psychological and social discourse can not replace. However, he recognized the importance of dreams for unconscious processing processes in the last years of his research.