Facing Their Fears

In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, the students learned about boggarts, magical creatures that take on the form of whatever their targets fear the most:

While this could have been an absolutely terrifying lesson, as each student is asked to step up and face the boggart, the students spent much of the time laughing. During the lesson, Professor Lupin taught them a charm that would take away the power of the boggart (or rather, take away the power the boggart had over them), by forcing it to take on a ridiculous form (whatever the spellcaster imagines).

There may be something cathartic about facing one's fears, perhaps by taking a good long look at it and realizing it is actually ridiculous. That may have been the motivation for photographer Joshua Hoffine, who photographs reenactments of his children's nightmares:

Hoffine, based in Kansas City, Mo., and a self-proclaimed “Horror Photographer,” is interested in the psychology of fear. In his project “After Dark, My Sweet,” Hoffine’s surreal and staged images render these fears visible with the “visual grammar of a child.” Through elaborate sets, costumes, makeup and fog machines, Hoffine’s children act out these terrifying scenes in front of his camera.

It's easy to let things spiral out of control in one's mind, but talking to others about it helps keep you grounded; others may be better at seeing when something is irrational. In setting up and taking the pictures, Hoffine is able to talk to his children about their nightmares, which may help take some of the power away.

And the pictures, which will be featured in a forthcoming book, Horror Photography, are absolutely gorgeous, if not a bit disturbing:

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This

Worth Psychology recently tweeted this link to a New York Magazine story, "5 of Humanity's Best Ideas of What Dreams Actually Are." Believe it or not, I learned a thing or two in the article:

The earliest recorded dream is from the Sumerian king Dumuzi of Uruk, who ruled just before Gilgamesh, sometime around 2500 BC. “An eagle seizes a lamb from the sheepfold,” a translation reads. “A falcon catches a sparrow on the reed fence … The cup lies on its side; Dumuzi lives no more. The sheepfold is given to the winds.” The king was freaked out about his dream, and occasioned the first recorded dream interpretation, care of his sister, who was evidently a professional at these things. Sister’s advice: Some bad shit is about to go down, so you’d do well to hide.

The article then goes through the 5 theories, offering some background and explanation for each. Unfortunately, they give a lot of attention to the Freudian/psychoanalytic perspective, that dreams are your brain trying to tell you something.

• Dreams are pragmatic prophecies - This is not to say dreams are actual prophecies, but rather, that because we know our situation well and because human survival comes from our ability to think about and prepare for the future, we could have dreams about things that we expect to happen. Dreams in this theory are about preparation, so that we are ready to deal with situations in our wakeful life.
• Dreams tell you what to do - Unfortunately, for this item on the list, they really just followed along with the previous item, even delving into actual prophetic elements (such as mentioning that Lincoln dreamed of a White House funeral days before his assassination). However, one story they share, about Descartes, gets at a different aspect of dreams - that of consolidating and synthesizing information, and using that to solve problems:

"In the 17th century, René Descartes, the great doubter, had his life course shifted by a series of dreams he had one November evening. In Soul Machine: The Invention of the Modern Mind, historian-psychiatrist George Makari reports that Descartes had a series of sleeping visions that prompted him to realize that 'spatial problems could become algebraic, which crystallized a vision of a natural world underwritten by mathematical laws,' thereby changing his life and eventually the popular, scientific conception of reality."

This realization was likely not a sudden insight, but an issue Descartes had spent a great deal of time thinking about. Because of the memory consolidation aspect of sleep, combined with dreaming about something that had been on his mind, Descartes was able to solve his mental puzzle.

• Dreams are communications from the unconscious mind - The good old "Your dreams are trying to tell you something" hypothesis. I've blogged before about my thoughts on Freud and psychoanalysis, and why social psychological findings are a much better explanation for some of the things Freud and his ilk observed. And of course, I would argue that this "theory" differs very little from the first and second items on this list. (I would also argue that none of these first three items meet the definition of theory, hence the quote marks.)
• Dreams are data - This one is not actually a theory at all, but rather a thinly veiled reason to share the Sleep and Dream Database, a crowdsourcing site that has catalogued 20,000 dreams (which, to be fair, is a cool idea, and a site I'll be visiting myself). Using these data, researchers have been able to examine psychological themes, and the results suggest that, because we are rarely alone in dreams and we tend to dream about people we are close to, we use dreams to explore the quality of our relationships with others. Honestly, that would have been a better bullet point for this list.
• Dreams are your memories in action - And finally, the author mentions the memory consolidation and learning aspects of dreams. Of all these "theories," this is the only one for which they offer research support over anecdotes. The author hints at the neural network aspect of memory, and also shares findings from a study on learning that allowed some participants to nap afterward, resulting in enhanced learning. (In fact, many such studies have been performed.) But they also discuss a study on male zebra finches that also provides support for this theory. Birds aren't born knowing how to sing certain patterns, but instead learn them. Researchers at the University of Chicago found that male zebra finches showed the same patterns of neuron firing while sleeping as they were when they were singing, suggesting they may be practicing the songs in their dreams.

Personally, I ascribe to the last (and really only) theory on the list. But that's not to say that aspects of the other items on the list can't be true. In fact, as is the case with the Descartes anecdote, they can be easily combined with this theory. The human brain is an incredibly complex machine. Even with advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning, we have not even begun to truly imitate the human brain's incredible pattern recognition ability or attention to context. This is arguably an evolved trait, because the best way to learn (something humans excel at compared to most other species) is to connect it to something already learned. This strengthens neural connections, and not only enhances our ability to learn the new thing, it changes our understanding of what we've learned previously. This can, of course, have some pesky effects when it comes to memory of events. But all in all, this ability is a good thing.

While we're awake, we think through things and examine patterns, but we also have to devote a lot of energy to being awake and interacting with the world, making decisions that takes up space in our limited working memory. Sleep is a time of rejuvenation, when our body replenishes, heals, and repairs. Our cognitive resources are free to work through problems, and our brain is consolidating memories, getting us closer to a synthesized solution. And because our problems range from intellectual (like Descartes's) to social and psychological, the content of our dreams can also range from thought problems to interpersonal issues.

Sweet dreams, everyone!

You Have Been Weighed, You Have Been Measured

When people find out I'm a psychologist, there are a few very predictable reactions, as predictable as the response I get when I tell people I'm originally from Kansas:

I'm of course asked if I'm analyzing them right now. I have many go-to responses for that one:

"I'm a social psychologist. I don't help people."

"I do research, so actually I'm analyzing your behavior."

"You think any self-respecting psychoanalyst would do that for free?"

But the next most common question is about dreams. I've had many people ask me if I can help them figure out the meaning of a strange dream they had. Even people who have known me for years sometimes ask me about dreams.

Dreams are pretty fascinating. It's like your own TV channel, except the shows all involve you walking around with no pants. (Or in my case, shoes - I definitely have the naked dream but probably more common is realizing I went all the way to work/school/somewhere random with no shoes.) There are certain dreams we all have. The naked dream is one example. But another common one was a recent subject of an article for the Washington Post:

We’ve signed up for a course that we never attend, or we forget we enrolled in it. When final-exam day approaches, we are panic-stricken because we never went to any of the lectures, never took notes and never did the readings or assignments.

The author, a journalism professor at the University of Maryland, did some digging to find out what psychologists had to say about the dream. I give her credit that the first place she looked was at the peer-reviewed literature. She was dismayed when she found nothing and expressed surprise that no psychologists had studied such a common dream. I'll be honest, I sat down and tried to figure out how I would study such a dream, and unfortunately, there don't seem to be a lot of objective ways to study any dream. You'd need to find people right after (or right before) they had the dream and try to measure various aspects of their lives to find any connections or explanations. But the problem with recruiting people right before is that 1) you don't know when or even if they'll have the dream and 2) you risk influencing their dreams by the simple act of studying them, perhaps causing people to have the school dream. In fact, just writing down your dreams have been shown to influence how you dream - I'm told that's the best way to get into lucid dreaming, where you are able to control the direction of a dream during the actual dream.

So with no peer reviewed literature to guide her, she asked various psychologists to offer their thoughts on the dream. Though many of the explanations crossed into the realm of psychoanalysis (see this blog post to find out what I really think about Freud and his ilk, a post that was also about dreams in which I briefly referenced the "going back to school" dream), there did seem to be a thread linking these explanations together that probably gets at the truth:

"I think those who have it tend to be professional and were successful students," says Judy Willis, a neurologist and teacher who lives in Santa Barbara, Calif., and who wrote about the dream in a 2009 Psychology Today blog post. "These are people who have demanded a high performance from themselves. The recurrence of the dream correlates with times of stress and pressure, when people feel they have a challenge to achieve."

Gemma Marangoni Ainslie, an Austin psychoanalyst, agrees. The final exam, she says, "is likely representative of an occasion when the dreamer feels he or she will be tested or measured, and the anxiety is about not measuring up. The dreamer's task in 'awake life' is to translate the final exam to a situation he or she is facing that stirs up concerns about potential failure."

But why school? Why don’t we dream about current pressures — grant proposals that are due, impending legal briefs or oral arguments, or newspaper deadlines?

"Emotional memories and impressions made during high-stress experiences are particularly strong, and are further strengthened each time they are recalled and become the place the brain goes when the emotion is evoked," Willis wrote in an email. "Since each new stress in the current day is 'new,' there is not a strong memory circuit that would hook to it in a dream. But there is that strong neural network of previous, similar 'achievement' stress. Since tests are the highest stressors. . . [it] makes sense as the 'go-to' memory when stressed about something equally high stakes in the 'now.'"

So the dream is really about fear of not measuring up, or of being measured and found wanting. We're concerned about failure. Though in the article, the psychoanalyst goes on to talk about manifest/latent content and how your brain is trying to shield yourself from the real truth, the neurologist's explanation is probably more accurate and certainly more supported. It's kind of the "neural-connectedness" theory of dreams. Information stored in your brain is connected through a neural network. Some connections - such the connection between dog and leash - are stronger than others - such as the connection between dog and duck-billed platypus.

The internet, however, laughs in the face of your strong-weak connection dichotomy and says, "You want to see a dog dressed as a duck-billed platypus? Boom!"

When you sleep, your brain is consolidating memories, and building up the neural network. So if a stressful time in your current life reminds you of a stressful time in school, your resting brain will forge or strengthen that connection. I think, and I think Dr. Willis would agree, that dreams are just your brain making and testing connections, causing you to see elements of these memories and bits of information while you sleep. We see common themes and threads not because your subconscious brain is sending you coded messages, but because that's how neural connectedness works.

If you have had this dream, unfortunately you're probably going to continue having this dream, especially in times of stress. Dreams can be disconcerting but they're really just your brain testing out the wiring - and that's a good thing.

Inspiration, Dreams, and Why Social Psychology is Awesome

After finishing up my time on a non-profit board, my plan was to fill that extra time with things I enjoyed - including writing. Unfortunately, as is often the case with "extra" time, it quickly gets filled with tasks. So I resolve, once again, to try to spend more time writing, including writing on this blog.

Many writers have clashed on the issue of inspiration - whether one should write only when "inspired" to do so, or whether one should write regularly as a practice, whether you feel like doing so or not. Ray Bradbury, one of my favorite authors, had a lot of advice for aspiring writers, much of which involved writing often, regardless of "inspiration." Isaac Asimov also wrote every day, and was very prolific as a result.

I know I should apply this logic to myself and basically make myself write regularly. But as I was pondering this issue of inspiration, I started thinking about when and where I get some of my best ideas. For me - and this is especially true of fiction ideas - I tend to be most creative at night, especially after I've woken up from a strange and inspiring dream. I'd say dreams are the source of some of my best ideas. (P.S., I've blogged before about head songs that I think come from dreams, in part.)

I started doing a little research into this and found a whole literature on dreams and creativity. For instance, dreams inspired Paul McCartney's "Yesterday" and Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein." Because of sleep's role in memory consolidation, it makes sense that sleep can have a positive impact on certain aspects of creativity, such as insight.

REM (dream) sleep specifically is associated with increased abstract reasoning as well as increasing the strength of normally weak associations in the brain (see here). What that means is, two different things that your waking brain might not even see a connection between could become associated rather easily in a dream. Our brain does this kind of linking (neural networking) naturally, and it's a great way to learn new things - by connecting new knowledge you need to memorize to something you already know. Just as you can connect any actor to Kevin Bacon, you can connect any concept in your brain to another. Some connections are more direct than others.

Apparently one thing your brain does during REM sleep is play six degrees of "showing up to work without your pants." Or some such.

Of course, Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists would state that these strange juxtapositions are simply your subconscious trying to work out any conflicts you're having in your life. In fact, pretty much everything goes back to this idea of the subconscious, at least for psychoanalysts.

According to these theories, within your mind are three forces vying for control: the id, which operates on the pleasure principle (i.e., that feels good, keep doing it; that feels bad, stop doing it); the superego, which operates on morality (i.e., that feels good, stop doing it; that feels bad, keep doing it); and the ego, the conscious self who is just trying to pick the right feel goods to keep doing or stop doing and the right feel bads to keep doing or stop doing.

In case you would prefer a visual representation of the id, ego, and superego (respectively); Homer's id is clearly winning

When you dream, according to these theories, there are two types of content: manifest content, which is the literal subject of the dream (e.g., showing up to work without your pants), and latent content, which is the underlying meaning of the dream (e.g., you have issues with your mother, or maybe you like exhibitionism - I don't know, I'm a social psychologist!).

Of course, the interesting thing about all this theory is that social psychologists have come up with a variety of hypotheses and theories that explain many aspects of psychoanalytic theory. Putting some kind of idea in your head below your awareness that influences behavior? Priming. Attitudes that you swear you do not hold but that guide decisions, such as whether to trust someone of a certain group? Implicit attitudes. And of course, underlying meaning in your life and nonconscious sources of influence based on past experiences, temperament, and so on? Self and identity.

See also media effects, mob mentality, and ingroup/outgroup effects, just to name a few forces that influence you without you even realizing it. (Note: social psychologists prefer the term 'nonconscious,' rather than the psychoanalyst-laden term 'subconscious.')

Why do we need these little snippets of theory and hypothesis if Freud's and other psychoanalysts' theories can sum much of this up, in a neat, Oedipus-complex-themed package? After all, parsimony is an important aspect of science - the simplest explanation tends to be the best one, in the absence of evidence to support one over the other.

But that's the thing - the various social psychological theories outlined above have just that: evidence. Specifically empirical evidence, which is pretty important for science, something I've also blogged about before. In fact, psychoanalytic theories lack the basic ingredients that make them at all scientific: the ability to test these concepts (we call this 'testability') and, if they are false, demonstrate that (we call this 'falsifiability'). If there really are subconscious forces operating in your brain, trying to give you glimpses of what's really bothering you (latent content) but hiding behind symbolism (manifest content), how would we even begin to test this? After all, they're subconscious. But for social psychological theories, such as priming, we may know what evidence we would observe if priming happened and what we would observe if it isn't happening.

One of the key differences is whether the hypothesis/theory is nomothetic (describes a general pattern) or idiographic (describes a specific pattern, usually within a particular person). There are ways to test idiographic hypotheses, but it is more difficult than if you can generate a hypothesis that should apply to a group of people receiving the same intervention. You would just test to see if the group of people responded the way you expected.

These various social psychological theories lack a couple of things - 1) there isn't a unified theory that sums all this up in a neat little package and 2) other than the various findings outlined above in regard to sleep/dreams, there isn't really a good hypothesis/theory for the purpose of dreams. What you read above is descriptive with regard to sleep and dreams, but not predictive; that is, we haven't identified some key cause that would allow us to understand why we dream what we do and perhaps predict what people will dream, based on knowledge of the important variables. We don't even know what those variables are.

As I mentioned in my previous post linked above, scientific findings are tentative, pending better evidence and methodology. We may not completely understand dreams now, but perhaps will be able to in the future, as we expand on technology for studying the living, working brain.

For the time being, though, I'll be happy to take whatever inspiration my dreaming brain sends my way. But please, no more going back to high school dreams.

Dreamily yours,
~Sara

On Head Songs, Ear Worms, and Air Guitar

For quite a while, I've been posting on Facebook many mornings what I like to call "head songs", songs I wake up with in my head. I started wondering about what might cause these head songs, and did a bit of research.

You may have heard the term "ear worm", which seems very similar to what I describe above. A somewhat recent TedEd talk describes just this phenomenon. According to this video, ear worms are bits of a melody, often just a small part of a melody, as opposed to the complete song that get "stuck" in your head. Usually, the ear worm is only the melody, without any harmony lines. Though many believe modern technology, and the ease with which we can hear music as a result, is to blame for ear worms, the video states that this concept has been around since before the invention of the phonograph.

But what actually causes ear worms? Or more specifically, what causes a particular ear worm - why do we suddenly get a certain song stuck in our head? The video linked above, as well as an older story on NPR, shares that, though we don't completely understand the causes, psychologists believe memory triggers, emotional states, and anxiety may be to blame.

As I've blogged before, memory and emotions are strongly linked in the brain, due in part to the close proximity of the amygdala (involved in emotion) and the hippocampus (involved in transferring memories from short-term to long-term). In that previous post, I talked specifically about the connections of memory and emotions to scents. But what about auditory experiences?

You probably won't be surprised to learn that the auditory cortex is close by to the systems above. In fact, the auditory cortex is basically the olfactory cortex's next-door neighbor.

"Howdy, neighbor, mind turning that music down?" "Only if you stop burning that disgusting incense."

All of these systems connect to the higher parts of the brain (the systems that evolved last and differentiate humans from other animals) through a path known as the somatosensory cortex. This is where higher reasoning skills come in. Rather than simply being flooded with random sights, sounds, smells, etc., we can think rationally about these occurrences, understand connections between them, and even expand on them.

And not to get too heavy into brain systems, but running alongside the somatosensory cortex is the somatomotor cortex. So if you're listening to a song played by guitar, and you know how to play the guitar, you may have to resist the urge to "play" along, even if a guitar is nowhere near your hands. The connections are strong.

Next up, an epic air guitar solo

Have I, as usual, gotten away from the original point? Maybe, but isn't brain physiology fun?!

Okay, seriously, head songs.  While I definitely fall prey to a repeated (usually annoying) melody, often of a song I don't like, my head songs are a bit different. They usually are the whole song - even if the head song begins at some point within the song, I usually hear the song as a gestalt (complete with accompaniment, percussion, harmony lines, and so on). So at least my auditory hallucinations are multi-faceted, right? That's got to count for something. In either case, this seems qualitatively different from ear worms.

As far as I can tell, the explanations for my head songs usually come from my dreams (e.g., I once had a dream about an androgynous person, and woke up with David Bowie's "Rebel, Rebel" in my head - "because she's not sure if you're a boy or a girl"), or some random thought I had upon waking (e.g., it's Monday and I get Foreigner's "Blue Monday" stuck).

Why is it usually the whole arrangement, not just melody/vocals? I probably should blame this on modern technology. Though we can't fully blame radio, iPods, and Spotify for ear worms, we can blame it for giving us a full - and usually consistent - experience of a song. And my head songs, though quite variable in genre, range, and instruments used, are most often songs I've heard more than once.

Do head songs happen to you or someone you love?  Don't worry, you're not alone. And there are worse things to have in your head when you wake up each morning. Unless that head song is [redacted to save your sanity].

Musically yours,
~Sara