Dreams in Psychology

Dreams in Psychology

Why are dreams so important in analysis. Patients are often haunted by recurring dreams of their traumas and awaken in terror. As long as they remain ill, these dreams don't change their basic structure. The neural network that represents the trauma – such as Mr. L's dream that he was missing something – is persistently reactivated, without being retranscribed. Should these traumatized patients get better, these nightmares gradually become less frightening, until ultimately the patient dreams something like At first I think the trauma is recurring, but it isn't; it's over now, I've survived . This kind of progressive dream series shows the mind and brain slowly changing, as the patient learns that he is safe now. For this to happen, neural networks must unlearn certain associations – as Mr. L. unlearned his association between separation and death – and change existing synaptic connections to make way for new learning.

What physical evidence exists that dreams show our brains in the process of plastic change, altering hitherto buried, emotionally meaningful memories, as in Mr. L.'s case?

The newest brain scans show that when we dream, that part of the brain that processes emotion, and our sexual, survival, and aggressive instincts, is quite active. At the same time the prefrontal cortex system, which is responsible for inhibiting our emotions and instincts, shows lower activity. With instincts turned up and inhibitions turned down, the dreaming brain can reveal impulses that are normally blocked from awareness.

Scores of studies show that sleep affects plastic change by allowing us to consolidate learning and memory. When we learn a skill during the day, we will be better at it the next day if we have a good night's sleep. “Sleeping on a problem” often does make sense.

A team led by Marcos Frank has also shown that sleep enhances neuroplasticity during the critical period when most plastic change takes place. Huben and Wiesel blocked one eye of a kitten in the critical period and showed that the brain map for the blocked eye was taken over by the good eye – a case of use it or lose it. Frank's team did the same experiment with two groups of kittens, one group that it deprived of sleep, and another group that got a full amount of it. They found that the more sleep the kittens got, the greater the plastic change in their brain map.

Scientists blocked one eye of a kitten and showed that the brain map for the blocked eye was taken over by the good eye. Photo by Elena.

The dream state also facilitates plastic change. Sleep is divided into two stages, and most of our dreaming occurs during one of them, called rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM sleep. Infants spend many more hours in REM sleep than adults, and it is during infancy that neuroplastic change occurs most rapidly. In fact, REM sleep is required for the plastic development of the brain infancy. A team led by Dr. Gerald Marks did a study similar to Frank's that looked at the effects of REM sleep on kittens and on their brain structure. Marks found that in kittens deprived of REM sleep, the neurons in their visual cortex were actually smaller, so REM sleep seems necessary for neurons to grow normally. REM sleep has also been shown to be particularly important for enhancing our ability to retain emotional memories and for allowing the hippocampus to turn short-term memories of the day before into long-term ones (i.e., it helps make memories more permanent, leading to structural change in the brain).

Each day, in analysis, Mr. L, worked on his core conflicts, memories, and traumas, and at night there was dream evidence not only of his buried emotions but of his brain reinforcing the learning and unlearning he had done.

We understand why Mr. L. at the outset of his analysis, had no conscious memories of the first four years of his life: most of his memories of the period were unconscious procedural memories – automatic sequences of emotional interactions – and the few explicit memories he had were so painful, they were repressed. In treatment he gained access to both procedural and explicit memories from his first four years. But why was he unable to recall his adolescent memories? One possibility is that he repressed some of his adolescence; often when we repress one thing, such as a catastrophic early loss, we repress other events loosely associated with it, to block access to the original.

But there is another possible cause. It has recently been discovered that early childhood trauma causes massive plastic change in the hippocampus, shrinking it so that new, long-term explicit memories cannot form. Animals removed from their mothers let out desperate cries, then enter a turned-off state – as Spitz's infants did – and release a stress hormone called “glucocorticoid.” Glucocorticoids kill cells in the hippocampus so that it cannot make the synaptic connections in neural networks that make learning and explicit long-term memory possible. These early stresses predispose these motherless animals to stress-related illness for the rest of their lives. When they undergo long separations, the gene to initiate production of glucocorticoids gets turned on and stays on for extended periods. Trauma in infancy appears to lead to a supersensitization – a plastic alteration – of the brain neurons that regulate glucocorticoids. Recent research in humans shows that adult survivors or childhood abuse also show signs of glucocorticoid supersensitivity lasting into adulthood.

That the hippocampus shrinks is an important discovery. Depression, high stress, childhood trauma all release glucocorticoids and kill cells in the hippocampus, leading to memory loss. The longer people are depressed, the smaller their hippocampus gets. The hippocampus of depressed adults who suffered prepubertal childhood trauma is 18 percent smaller than that of depressed adults withous childhood trauma – a downside of the plastic brain : we literally lose essential cortical real estate in response to illness.

If the stress is brief, this decrease in size is temporary. If it is too prolonged, the damage is permanent. As people recover from depression, their memories return, and research suggests their hippocampi can grow back. In fact, the hippocampus is one of two areas where new neurons are created from our own stem cells as part of normal functioning.

Antidepressant medications increase the number of stem cells that become new neurons in the hippocampus. Rats given Prozac for three weeks had a 70 percent increase in the number of cells in their hippocampi. It usually takes three to six weeks for antidepressants to work in humans – perhaps coincidentally, the same amount of time it takes for newly born neurons in the hippocampus to mature, extend their projections, and connect with other neurons. So we may, without knowing it, have been helping people get out of depression by using medications that foester brain plasticity. Since people who improve in psychotherapy also find that their memories improve, it may be that it also stimulates neural growth in their hippocampi.

(Turning Our Ghosts into Ancestors. The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge, M.D., excerpt).

We are often haunted by important relationships from the past that influence us unconsciously in the present. Photo by Elena.

Human History

Human History

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as superpowers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural background working in some sense together – surely a humanizing and character-building experience.

If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nations will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.

A reasonable – even an ambitious – program of unmanned exploration of the planets is inexpensive. The budget for space sciences is not very expensive. Comparable expenditures in many countries are more or less the same. Together these sums represent the equivalent of two or three nuclear submarines per decade, or the cost overruns on one of the many weapon systems in a single year. In the last quarter of 1979, the program cost of the U.S. F/A-18 aircraft increased by $5,1 billion, and the F-16 by $3,4 billion. Since their inceptions, significantly less has been spent on the unmanned planetary programs of both the United States and the Soviet Union than has been wasted shamefully – for example, between 1970 and 1975, in the U.S. bombing of Cambodia, an application of national policy that cost $7 billion. The total cost of a mission such as Viking to Mars, or Voyager to the outer solar system, is less than that of the 1979-80 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Through technical employment and the stimulation of high technology, money spent on space exploration has an economic multiplier effect. One study suggests that for every dollar spent on the planets, seven dollars are returned to the national economy. And yet there are many important and entirely feasible missions that have not been attempted because of lack of funds – including roving vehicles to wander across the surface of Mars, a comet rendezvous, Titan entry probes and a full-scale research for radio signals from other civilizations in space.

Carl Sagan, Cosmos.

Even an ambitious program of unmanned space exploration in inexpensive. Image: Space Travel by © Megan Jorgensen.

X Ray Tech Salary

X Ray Tech Salary

Any society with a marked population explosion will be forced to devote all its energies and technological skills to feeding and caring for the population on its home planet. Technicians will be busy and tech salaries will go up. On any planet, no matter what its biology or social system, an exponential increase in population will swallow every resource.

We can predict thus that no civilization can possibly survive to an interstellar spacefaring phase unless it limits its numbers.

Of course, this is a very powerful conclusion and is in no way based on the idiosyncrasies of a particular civilization.

Conversely any civilization that engages in serious interstellar exploration and colonization must have exercised zero population growth or something very close to it for many generations.

The famous astronomer Carl Sagan and his colleague William Newman have calculated that if a million years ago a spacefaring civilization with a low population growth rate emerged two hundred light-years away and spread outward, colonizing suitable worlds along the way, their survey starships would be entering our solar system only about now.

But a million years is a very long period of time. If the nearest civilization is younger than this, they would not have reached us yet. A sphere two hundred light-years in radius contains 200,000 suns and perhaps a comparable number of worlds suitable for colonization. It is only after 200,000 other worlds have been colonized that, in the usual course of things, our solar system would be accidentally discovered to harbor indigenous civilization.

What does it mean for a civilization to be a million years old? We have had X rays, radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilization is young, scientific ideas of a modern cast a few thousand, civilization in general a few tens of thousands of years; human beings evolved on this planet only a few million years ago. At anything like our present rate of technical progress, an advanced civilization millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bush baby a macaque.

Will a civilization with a low population growth reach some lush Eden? Illustration by Elena.

Used Transmissions for Sale

Used Transmissions for Sale

The two Voyager spacecraft are bound for the Galaxy. Affixed to each is a gold-plated copper phonograph record with a cartridge and stylus and, on the aluminum record jacket, instructions for use. The humans sent data about their genes, something about their brains, and something about their libraries to other beings who might sail the sea of interstellar space. Although the recipients do not know any languages of the Earth, included are greetings in sixty human tongues, as well as the hellos of the humpback whales.

Photographs of humans from all over the world are attached, caring for one another, learning, fabricating tools and art and responding to challenges.

There is an hour and a half of exquisite music from many cultures, some of it expressing the sense of cosmic loneliness, the wish to end this isolation, the longing to make contact with other beings in the Cosmos. Recordings were sent of the sounds that would have been heard on this planet from the earliest days before the origin of life to the evolution of the human species and our most recent burgeoning technology. It is a love song cast upon the vastness of the deep.

But the Earth did not want to send primarily scientific information. Any civilization able to intercept Voyager in the depths of interstellar space, its transmitters long dead, would know far more science than the terrestrial science does.

Instead the Voyagers tell those other beings something about what seems unique about the Earthlings.

The interests of the cerebral cortex and limbic system are well represented; the R-complex less so.

In this spirit the people who launched the Voyagers included on the spacecraft the thoughts and feelings of one person, the electrical activity of the brain, heart, eyes and muscles, which were recorded for an hour, transcribed into sound, compressed in time and incorporated into the record.

In one sense the Humans have launched into the Cosmos a direct transcription of the thoughts and feelings of a single human being in the month of June in the year 1977 on the planet Earth.

Perhaps the recipients will make nothing of it, or think it is a recording of a pulsar, which in some superficial sense it resembles.

Many, perhaps most, of recorded messages will be indecipherable. But the Earth sent them because it is important to try.

Or perhaps a civilization unimaginably more advanced than the Humanity will be able to decipher such recorded thoughts and feelings and appreciate these efforts to share all these thought with them.

We have sent our messages because it is important to try, not because we’d like to sell used transmission. Image: © Megan Jorgensen.

How Do Lasers Work?

How do lasers work?

If you knew what the letter stood for you might be able to guess from the name itself that a laser, which stands for Light Amplification by the Stimulated Emission of Radiation, is a device used to create a very special kind of light beam.

Ordinary light – the kind we flip on with a wall switch – in incoherent. All we mean by this is that the light waves are emitted in a random, disorganized way, going in different directions and out of phase – that is not in step with one another. For example, when we turn of a fluorescent lamp, a current of electrons is sent through the fluorescent tube, bombarding the atoms inside. This excites the atoms to a state of energy higher than normal. When they return to their normal energy state, that is when they give off their light. But since each atom is bombarded, excited and gives off its light energy at random directions and times, the light waves which come from the fluorescent tube are still mixed together, like a troop of drummers who refuse to keep time with one another.

In a laser, though, the atoms all keep time together, and the light waves they give off are pointed in the same direction, with their crests and troughs aligned with one another. This is why we say laser light is coherent. Coherence is what makes laser beams so special.

To create a laser beam, we first of all need to have material whose atoms can be excited and remain excited long enough so that a collection of them can be made to radiate together. One of the early kinds of lasers used a synthetic ruby crystal to accomplish this.

The crystal was machined into the shape of a small cylinder. Its ends were made parallel, polished flat and smooth, and coated with silver to make them act as mirrors. Using this apparatus, here is what happens: when the first of the group of simulated falls to its normal state, and, in so doing, radiates light, that light comes in contact with another of the excited atoms, and it too radiates light. And, what is more, the light waves from both atoms will be in step – that is, in phase. When the light waves from these two atoms hit other excited atoms, they too will be stimulated to emit light in step.

Any light waves which are emitted in the wrong direction – that is, in any direction but parallel to the walls of the cylinder – will bounce through the walls and escape. But the light waves which do travel parallel to the walls will continue to be reflected back and forth by the mirrors at each end, at the same time stimulating other excited atoms to do the same. In this way the light increases in intensity, just as the drummers would sound louder and louder if, one by one, they started keeping time together.

Is one of the mirrors is built so that it will allow a small amount of light to escape, the beam which results will come out straight ahead, the crests and trough of each light wave aligned in unison. It will be coherent. And it will have very little “spread” – unlike a flashlight beam, for example, which in just a few feet spreads out from its initial small diameter to a large circle.

Many other kinds of materials – solid, liquid and gaseous – have been used to create lasers. Some emit different colors – that is, different wavelengths – other than the red of the ruby laser. Other requires less power to operate.  At TRW, for example, where were laser research began in 1961, they developed a portable laser the size of a flashlight. An argon ion gas laser uses a TRW-developed high-current cold cathode (electron emitter) which greatly reduces the power requirements (because of their large power requirements most lasers must remain stationary).

Lasers have many practical as well as scientific uses. A ruby laser, for example, which puts forth its radiation in a thousandth of a second, is used to surgically weld a torn of detached retina of the eye.

Because it is highly directional, that is, it has very little spread - a laser beam will carry over great distances. A dramatic example of this is seen when a laser is used to illuminate a mile-wide spot on the Moon.

One laser beam has an extremely high frequency – a thousand million cycles per second. This gives it more information-carrying capacity than any radio, tv, or any other communication channel now in existence.

Another application of laser technology is holography, a remarkable kind of three-dimensional photography. What makes a hologram so unusual is that it really is three-dimensional. You can move to the side of a hologram and actually see behind the objects in the foreground, as though you were looking through a window.

These pictures are photographs of holograms developed during research at TRW, they are different aspects of the same scene. They were made by viewing a single hologram from three different angles. The three-dimensional aspects of holography make it extremely useful for studying particles of droplets in a dispersion pattern. For this reason holography is a valuable tool for evaluating many kinds of nozzles and vaporizing devices, including paint spray guns, oil burners, fuel injectors and carburetors. The photographs show the dispersion of droplets in two impinging water jets.

At TRW, holography research began in 1963, when they studied the behaviour of electrostatically charged droplet streams in air and vacuum for the Air Force. Later, they work in the field expanded to holography of moving subjects at high-speed events, holographic microscopy and spectroscopy, optical gauging by holography, and acoustic holography.

Engineers of the NASA Goddard Space flight Center send a message by laser beam to a satellite in orbit.