Here is a pdf of an chapter I wrote for a book published in 2011, Changing Minds: Religion and Cognition Through the Ages (edited by I. Czachesz and T. Biro) (Peeters), pp. 75-85:
Obama’s Brain Activity Map: Good News for the Psychology of Religion
On July 17, 1990 President George H.W. Bush initiated the “Decade of the Brain” by making an official proclamation that began with these words:
“The human brain, a 3-pound mass of interwoven nerve cells that controls our activity, is one of the most magnificent—and mysterious—wonders of creation. The seat of human intelligence, interpreter of senses, and controller of movement, this incredible organ continues to intrigue scientists and layman alike.”
Although the first President Bush disdained “the vision thing,” he had the foresight to recognize the immense value and national importance of a coordinated scientific effort to learn more about the workings of the brain.
The 1990’s produced a huge burst of neuroscientific research that revolutionized our understanding of human nature and generated several breakthroughs in the clinical treatment of brain injuries and diseases.
The Decade of the Brain also generated exciting new developments in the study of religion. For more than 100 years psychologists of religion have been investigating connections between brain activity and religious experience, going back to the pioneering efforts of William James, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung. Now, thanks to recent advances in neuroscience, researchers are using hi-tech imaging devices to study the brain’s activities during meditation and prayer, to identify neural correlates for empathy, gratitude, wonder, and self-awareness, and to investigate the human brain’s distinctive powers of imagination, a creative capacity celebrated by all religious faiths and spiritual traditions.
Alas, researchers have not found “the God spot” in the brain, and likely never will. But if we put that questionable goal aside, the Decade of the Brain was a boon for the psychological study of religion.
In his State of the Union Address on February 12th of this year, President Obama signaled his interest in launching a renewed collective effort to explore the nature of the human brain:
“Now, if we want to make the best products, we also have to invest in the best ideas. Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar. Today, our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer’s… Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation. Now is the time to reach a level of research and development not seen since the height of the Space Race.”
According to a New York Times story by John Markoff on February 17, the Obama Administration is preparing to launch an ambitious plan called the “Brain Activity Map” that will coordinate efforts by governmental agencies, universities, and private foundations to create a more comprehensive understanding of the brain’s dynamic functioning. The impetus for the Brain Activity Map project is to devise better ways of studying the complex interactions among neurons all across the brain, not just in small isolated groups. Once we can understand the brain at that higher level of sophistication, the hope is we will find new clues to treating stroke victims and curing diseases like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.
As the Brain Activity Map project goes forward, it will almost certainly benefit the psychology of religion. Many important features of religion (e.g., rituals, moral codes, symbol systems, conversion experiences, mystical revelations) involve a variety of psychological processes that are likely rooted in the interactions of multiple regions and systems in the brain. The more we learn about how the brain functions as a whole, the more we will learn about the psychological dimensions of religion.
And the more we will learn about dreams, a natural part of brain functioning that is also a source of religious interest and fascination all over the world. In a “Sunday Observer” column on February 23 for the New York Times titled “The Next Frontier Is Inside Your Brain,” Philip M. Boffey describes the exciting potentials of President Obama’s brain research initiative. Boffey points to neuroscientific research on dreams as an example of how the Brain Activity Map could spark the public’s imagination:
“Scientists have even determined what animals are dreaming by first having them walk through certain locations in a fixed order and recording which neurons are activated. Then when the animal is sleeping, they can see if the same neurons are firing in the same order, an indication that the animal is probably dreaming about the walking it had just done. This rather simple experiment involves putting electrodes in the brain to record perhaps 100 neurons at a time. To really understand what is happening when an individual dreams, scientists will need to record what happens to many thousands or possibly millions of neurons as the dream is unfolding.”
If the next decade of neuroscience can generate insights at this level of integrated detail, it bodes very well for the psychological study of dreams and all other forms of complex, multi-modal religious experience.
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Note: This commentary was also published on the Huffington Post.
New Venue for Talking About Sleep and Dream Research
I’ve just started writing a blog on sleep and dreams for the Huffington Post—let me know what you think! Initially I’ll focus on children’s dreams, using material from the book I co-wrote with my mother, then eventually I’ll broaden the scope and write about new developments in dream research and cultural expressions of dreaming.
Here’s a link to the first post, titled “Hey Parents, It’s Not ‘Just a Dream.’”
Dreaming in Adolescence
In the current issue of the IASD journal Dreaming (Vol. 22, No. 4, pp. 240-252) I have an article with results of a blind word search analysis of a teenage girl’s dream series. (Many thanks to the anonymous dreamer, “Bea,” and to Bill Domhoff for mediating our interactions.) The article is my latest effort at developing a method of using statistical patterns in word usage frequency to identify meaningful continuities between dream content and waking life concerns. I think the results show that we’re making good progress. Here is the abstract of the paper:
“Previous studies of dreaming in adolescence have found that 1) shifts in dream content parallel shifts in cognitive and social development and 2) adolescent girls seem more prone than boys to disturbing dreams and recurrent nightmares. This paper confirms and extends those findings by using a novel method, blind word searches, to provide results that are more precise, detailed, and objective than those offered by previous studies. The method is used to analyze a series of 223 dreams recorded in a private diary by an American girl, “Bea” (not her real name) from the ages of 14 to 21. Accurate predictions about continuities between Bea’s dream content and waking life concerns included important aspects of her emotional welfare, daily activities, personal relationships, and cultural life. The results of this analysis illuminate the multiple ways in which dream content accurately reflects the interests, concerns, and emotional difficulties of an adolescent girl.”
And here are the final two paragraphs:
“These findings underscore an important yet frequently misunderstood point about the continuity hypothesis: The strongest continuities between dreaming and waking relate to emotional concerns rather than external behaviors (Hall and Nordby 1972; Domhoff, Meyer-Gomes, and Schredl, 2005-2006). Many of Bea’s nightmares do not reflect actual waking experiences, but they do accurately reflect the dire possibilities and worst-case scenarios that trouble her in waking life. Bea’s nightmares mirror her worries about things that might happen, not necessarily any actual events that have happened.
“For clinicians, therapists, counselors, and teachers who work with adolescents, the Bea series adds new empirical depth to the idea that dreams are meaningful expressions of emotional truth, especially around issues of family history and personal relationships, and perhaps especially for adolescent girls. It remains to be seen if word search analyses have any further practical value, but the results presented here should certainly encourage anyone who works with teenagers to listen carefully to their dreams for potentially valuable insights into their developmental experiences.”
What’s In a Lucid Dream?
What do people dream about when they have lucid dreams? What’s going on in the dream when someone has the realization, “I am dreaming”? Here’s another example of how the word search function of the SDDb can help get a research project started. The database includes a set of surveys (Demographic Survey 2012) in which the participants were asked to describe a lucid dream. By word searching their answers you can get a quick sense of the overall patterns of their dream content. This information gives you an empirical context for deeper study of particular dreams and particular themes within the dreams.
I’m following here the same approach I described in the previous post with visitation dreams, with one refinement. Instead of searching for reports of 25 words or more, I performed separate searches for reports of 25-49 words and 50-300 words, for both females and males (see links below). This produced smaller numbers of dreams for each analysis, but it allowed more of an apples-to-apples comparison with the SDDb baselines I’ve been developing (described in posts here, here, and here). I now have provisional baselines for word usage frequencies in shorter (25-49 words) and longer (50-300 words) most recent dream reports. These baselines guide the analysis below.
To repeat the method: From the SDDb’s word search page I scrolled down the list of constraint values and selected harris_2012:Q1035, Lucid Dream. Then I selected Female from the top line of the constraint values, in the line for Gender, Q922. I clicked on “word search,” and then entered the appropriate numbers in the Min Words and Max Words boxes under “Limit Response Length” (25 and 49, 50 and 300). I clicked on “Perform Search” and received a set of dream reports with these parameters. I then searched the given set for each word class and word category, one by one. I followed the same procedure for the male lucid dream reports.
The results of this analysis, which took me about an hour to conduct, can be easily summarized. Compared to the SDDb baselines, lucid dreams tend to have unusually low frequencies of words relating to visual perception, color, emotion, characters, social interactions, and culture. Lucid dreams have higher than usual references to awareness, effort, and physical aggression (relative to friendliness). Females and males share these basic patterns, though the men’s reports included more flying-related words.
These findings, though preliminary, seem strong enough to formulate a working hypothesis that lucid dreams are generally characterized by low visual references, low emotions, high awareness and effort, and relatively high physical aggression compared to friendly social interactions.
If I were now given two sets of dreams and told that one is a set of lucid dreams and the other a set of most recent dreams, I believe this working hypothesis could help me tell the difference without ever reading through the dreams, just by performing a few word searches.
Of course, each individual report has its own unique constellation of content. Some lucid dreams are filled with visual perceptions, strong emotions, and friendly social interactions. Indeed, I think it’s even more interesting to study such dreams now we know they are rather unusual.
If learning about the patterns of ordinary dreams gives us new insights into extraordinary dreams, then learning about the patterns of extraordinary dreams gives us new insights into extra-extraordinary dreams.
Female lucid dreams 25-49 words: 113 total
Female lucid dreams 50-300 words: 71 total
Male lucid dreams 25-49 words: 60 total
Male lucid dreams 50-300 words: 29 total
Dreaming of the Dead: Patterns of Word Usage in Visitation Dreams
Here’s a good example of how to use the word search function of the Sleep and Dream Database. It focuses on “visitation dreams,” i.e., dreams in which people who are dead appear as if alive. These vivid and highly memorable dreams have been reported in cultures all over the world, in many periods of history. People today still experience visitation dreams with remarkable frequency (1). As part of research I’m doing for a new book, I want to learn more about the basic patterns in visitation dreams. I’m especially interested in their social and emotional aspects. My hypothesis, based on cross-cultural evidence and the results of a 2007 content analysis study I did of mystical dreams (2), is that visitation dreams tend to be positive experiences, characterized by friendly interactions and low negative emotions.
Can I put that hypothesis to an empirical test? Can I push the analysis of visitation dreams to a deeper level of detail and identify additional recurrent features?
The SDDb word search function makes this kind of research easier to pursue than ever before. There’s a new set of dreams in the database, Demographic Survey 2012, which includes a question about visitation dreams. On the word search page I scrolled down the list of constraint values to harris_2012:Q1030, Visitation Dream, and selected it. I then selected “Female” from the top line of the constraint value list. I clicked on “Word Search” again, and entered “25” in the Min Words box under Limit Response Length. When I clicked “Perform Search” I had a set of 221 reports from women of visitation dreams of 25 or more words in length. When I repeated this procedure and selected “Male” instead of “Female,” I had a set of 96 reports from men of visitation dreams of 25 or more words in length.
For both the Female and Male sets I searched for all 7 Word Classes and 40 Word Categories, one class or category at a time. It took about 20 minutes to generate these figures.
The results both confirm and extend my initial hypothesis. The visitation dreams have many more friendly than physically aggressive social interactions, and generally low proportions of negative emotions (3). That’s a solid confirmation of previous findings, with some additional details to fill out the picture:
— The overwhelming majority of characters in the visitation dreams are elder family members. For women, the most frequently used family character words are grandmother, mother, and father. For men, the most used words are father and dad.
— Other than vision, speech, and some mention of intensity, these dreams have very few other elements of content: low non-visual perception, low colors, low emotions, low cognition, low nature, low non-family characters, low non-friendly social interactions, and virtually no culture references.
This quick exercise in using the SDDb’s word search function has taught me several things. Visitation dreams do seem to be mostly positive experiences. They very often include elder family members, i.e. well-known and personally intimate characters with whom the dreamer speaks and has friendly social interactions. Evidently few other details matter; the dreamer’s focus is squarely on the appearance of the person who is dead but appears as if alive. There may be some gender differences in which particular family characters show up most frequently, but the basic patterns of content emerge clearly in both the women’s and men’s reports.
I’m sure I’ll find many more recurrent themes once I read through the dream narratives. But already, after just a few minutes of statistical analysis, I have a good overview of the dreams that gives me an empirical context for highlighting further subtleties of significance.
Notes:
(1) In American Dreamers I cite a 2007 survey of 705 American adults that found 38% of the participants had experienced a visitation dream at least once in their lives (p. 32).
(2) “Mystical Dreaming: Patterns in Form, Content, and Meaning” (2009), Dreaming 19(1): 30-41.
(3) These two sets are not perfect matches for comparison with the SDDb Baselines, since they include all reports of 25+ words, whereas the SDDb Baselines are for reports of 25-49 words and 50-300 words. But the baselines can still be useful in evaluating the broad patterns of the visitation dreams.