Allan Hobson
American psychiatristWikipedia
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Search complete. 6 mentions across 6 episodes found for "Allan Hobson".
Sep 26, 2026
BrewHOST
The most popular reason as to why we dream is called activation synthesis theory.
BrewHOST
It was posited in a paper called REM Sleep and Dreaming Towards a Theory of Proto-Consciousness by John Allen Hobson, in which he argues that dreams are byproducts of our brain's lower functions translated into visual and auditory hallucinations while we sleep.
BrewHOST
He believes that dreams are as much a preparation for waking consciousness as a reaction to it.
BrewHOST
We are as much getting ready to behave as we are getting over the effects of our behavior.
speaker_2HOST
By the mid-20th century, the discovery of REM shifted dream research away from purely psychological theories and toward neuroscience.
speaker_2HOST
In 1977, the psychiatrists J. Allen Hobson and Robert McCarley proposed the activation synthesis theory, one of the most influential neurobiological models.
speaker_2HOST
According to this theory, dreams are the brain's attempt to make sense of random electrical signals generated by the brainstem during REM.
speaker_2HOST
The theory proposed that the cortex receives these essentially meaningless signals.
HowardHOST
No one knows exactly why we dream, but we do know that your thalamus, the structure in your brain which translates information from sense into memory, is active during REM, along with the amygdala, which houses fear and anger reactions, and the prefrontal cortex, which controls short-term memory.
HowardHOST
The most popular theory of why we dream, stipulated by John Allen Hobson and Robert McCarley, argues that dreams are a byproduct of lower functions of the brain during REM sleep, like heart and blood pressure, translated by our higher functions, like memory and speech, into visual and auditory hallucinations, which were used by our ancestors to practice being conscious.
HowardHOST
Think of it like a virtual reality game that you can use to practice being a human while you sleep.
speaker_8UNKNOWN
How is your day? I love you.
Josh ClarkHOST
So, um, there are some characteristics of dreams that these, uh, these guys who came up with the activation synthesis hypothesis pointed out.
Josh ClarkHOST
Alan Hobson and Robert McCarley-
Chuck BryantHOST
Mm
Josh ClarkHOST
... by the way, are the guys who f- figured this out.
Oliver BernathGUEST
It was until 1953 that we recognized there's not just sleep, but actually different sleep stages, with REM sleep being discovered at that point.
Oliver BernathGUEST
And even as late as in the 1990s, then one of the prominent professors in Harvard, Alan Hobson, his answer to what sleep would for all we know is that it cures sleepiness.
Oliver BernathGUEST
Well, I thought, that's not terribly much.
Oliver BernathGUEST
And so the whole thing is actually pretty young.
TerryHOST
Their function was to keep you from being woken up by these horrible subconscious desires you had.
TerryHOST
When in the early 1990s he went to work with J. Allen Hobson, a pioneer of the modern study of dreams who was famously anti-Freudian, it was often assumed that dreams had no function at all, says Stickgold.
TerryHOST
They were just noise in the neurons.
TerryHOST
stickgold didn't believe that dreams hid suppressed desires but he also wasn't so sure they were pointless it seemed clear to him that the dreams drew on rehashed moments from the recent past and he began to think about what that meant focusing first on sleep he found that people who learned a new task and then slept on it were better at it after waking than people who tried it again without first going to sleep.