5 Steps to a 5 AP Psychology, 2010-2011 Edition - Laura Lincoln Maitland [64]
Figure 9.1 (a) Electroencephalograms of human sleep stages. (b) Sleep stages during a typical night.
“Remember delta and deep. Deep waves on the beach are high, so they have a high amplitude. Stages 3 and 4 are the highest numbers for sleep stages.”—Lori, AP student
Interpretation of Dreams
But what do dreams mean? Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud thought dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious,” a safety valve for unconscious desires, that reveal secrets of the unconscious part of the mind unknown to the conscious mind. Freud tried to analyze dreams to uncover the unconscious desires (many of them sexual) and fears disguised in dreams. He considered the remembered story line of a dream its manifest content, and the underlying meaning its latent content. Psychiatrists Robert McCarley and J. Alan Hobson proposed another theory of dreams called the activation-synthesis theory. During a dream, the pons generates bursts of action potentials to the forebrain, which is activation. The dreamer then tries to make sense of the stimulation by creating a story line, which is synthesis. The origin of dreams is psychological according to psychoanalysts, and physiological according to McCarley and Hobson. A cognitive view holds that when we sleep, information from the external world is largely cut off. So the only world our constantly active brain can model is the one already inside it from stored memories, recent concerns, current emotions, and expectations, which can be activated by electrical impulses discharged from within the brain. In other words, dreams are the interplay of the physiological triggering of brain waves and the psychological functioning of the imaginative, interpretive parts of the mind. Recent studies indicate correspondences between what you do in the dream state and what happens to your physical body and brain; thus if you dream you’re doing something, it’s as if you’re actually doing it to your brain.
Sleep Disorders
Chances are you’ve been sleep deprived at one time or another. When you get little or no sleep one night, you spend more of your sleep time the next night in REM sleep (called REM rebound), with few consequences. But millions of people suffer from chronic, long-term sleep disorders. The most common adult sleep disorders include insomnia, sleep apnea, and narcolepsy, while children are more likely to experience night terrors and sleepwalking. Insomnia is the inability to fall asleep and/or stay asleep. Insomnia complainers typically overestimate how long it takes them to fall asleep and underestimate how long they stay asleep. Sleep researchers recommend that you go to bed at a set time each night and get up at the same time each morning; exercise for about a half hour daily 5 or 6 hours before going to bed; avoid alcohol, sleeping pills, and stimulants; avoid stress; and relax before bed to avoid insomnia. Narcolepsy is a condition in which an awake person suddenly and uncontrollably falls asleep, often directly into REM sleep. Victims often benefit from naps or drug therapy with stimulants or antidepressants. Sleep apnea is a sleep disorder characterized by temporary cessations of breathing that awaken the sufferer repeatedly during the night. Sleep apnea most often results from obstruction or collapse of air passages, which occurs more frequently in obese people. Weight loss and sleeping on the side can help alleviate the problem. An effective treatment is a positive pressure pump that provides a steady flow of air through a face mask worn by the sufferer. Night terrors are most frequently