[00:00:00] BERNARD DIAMOND:
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. I, uh, welcome you to the twenty-seventh Foerster Lecture at the University of California. I am, uh, Bernard Diamond from the, uh, School of Criminology and School of Law, and, uh, I’m here only to introduce our principal speaker tonight.
I want to, uh, inform you a little bit about the Foerster Lectures. Ah, these are the result of a special bequest to the University of California, which was made in 1928 in the will of a Miss Edith Zweybruck. Uh, Miss Zweybruck was– a sister was married to a, uh, Constantine E.A. Foerster.
Now, all of you know about the famous Morrison Library on our campus, and I’m sure that, uh, all of you have sometimes spent delightful hours in that library. Uh, Constantine Foerster was a young law partner of the Morrison who gave the funds for the Morrison Library. At the age of thirty-seven, he died, and his sister-in-law left this sum of money to the Regents as a memorial to his– to her brother-in-law and sister, Agnes and And Constantine Foerster.
And the terms of the will specify that there should be at least one lecture during each academic year on the subject of the immortality of the soul or other kindred spiritual subject. Such a lecture is not to form a part of the regular college course and shall be delivered by some person specially qualified therefore and especially appointed for the purpose. The, uh, Foerster lectures in the past have covered a very wide variety of subjects.
And, uh, it, uh– I think the list of the twenty-six preceding lectures reflects the fundamental ambivalence of the university towards, uh, religious subjects. As you know, the University of California is prohibited by law, or until recently it was so interpreted, that we were prohibited from giving instructions in religion because of the constitutional separation of, uh, state and church. Uh, you also know that the University of California is capable of all kinds of ingenious solutions to any and all problems that arise, whether it’s the necessity to develop tomato pickers or, uh, anything else.
And, uh, it’s not beyond the capacity to handle by the committee system, uh, such problems as who is qualified to lecture on the immortality of the soul. Uh, some of you may know my basic occupation here in– is really that of a psychiatrist, and a psychiatrist is confronted with many strange duties and occupations in his career. But I think, uh, since coming to Berkeley, the strangest of all was being appointed to the selection committee for the Pfister Lecture and to observe who my f-fellow committee members were it was very obvious as to who the university considers to be competent authorities on the immortality of the soul.
The committee was chaired by Dr. Curt Stern, of course, the world famous geneticist. A fellow member was a, a philosopher, former Chancellor Strong, and a, uh, molecular biologist, uh, and myself as a psychiatrist. And after due consideration, we decided that, uh, the university is obligated to view the terms of the Pfister will in, uh, I might say authentic, scientific, uh, in contemporary terms and to trying to translate those into modern psychology.
And, uh, we hit upon the idea of a lecture on dreams. Now, the basic work on dreams, uh, of course, uh, stems from a single publication. In November of eighteen ninety-nine, Sigmund Freud published his famous book, The Interpretation of Dreams.
The title page of that book is actually dated nineteen hundred because the publisher could not resist the temptation to update this, uh, great book into the coming twentieth century. Al-although practically no attention was paid to the book for many years after its publication, I think everyone is agreed that it is probably the most fundamental, uh, publication, uh, in contemporary Western thinking in terms of what it reveals about, uh, the human mind. And the Interpretation of Dreams forms the entire foundation for the science and art of psychoanalytic theory and practice.
Uh, no one was more aware than was Freud as to the shaky, uh, scientific underpinnings of “The Interpretation of Dreams”. Much of the book was written from a purely subjective standpoint. It, it– the interpretations often were of Freud’s own dreams and, uh, those of his patients.
Freud was, despite his current reputation, Freud was very much of a kind of a hard-nosed, materialistic scientist who, uh, believed that ultimately all human psychology would have to be understood in terms of the structure and function of the nervous system. And, uh, on more than one occasion, Freud stated that when the true science of the mind and the nervous system is revealed, then psychoanalytic theory will be just the, the froth on the, uh, surface of waves. And Freud looked forward to the day when there might be a sound biological foundation for, uh, the human psyche.
But he felt that this foundation was, uh, many hundreds of years off. The work of Professor Michel Jouvet of Lyon, France, has, uh, brought us much closer to Freud’s hope of obtaining a sound scientific basis for, uh, the psyche, for dreams, for consciousness, and for thought processes. Because it has been our speaker tonight, Professor Jouvet, who is a professor of experimental medicine at the medical school at Lyon, France, who has, uh, accomplished the most significant modern work in providing a physiological basis for the intangible psychological notions set forth, uh, by Freud and the early psychologists.
It’s of a great interest that, uh, ideas concerning the relationship of dreams to both normal and pathological psychology, uh, predated Freud by many years. And I would like to quote from you to you from the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, who wrote, uh, this statement some fifteen years before Sigmund Freud was born. And Feuerbach wrote, “There is a suggestion that the ravings of insane persons and the beliefs of savages may provide clues that help us to understand the workings of more civilized and normal minds.”
There is the idea of the satisfaction in imagination of essential desires of which the individual is unconscious. There is the association of this process with dreaming, and there is a governing principle that when someone comes to know himself more fully, he will be less obsessed with the thoughts of an imaginary world and will be able to deal more adequately with the real one. And Feuerbach added what has now become a famous maxim, “Religion is a dream of waking consciousness.
Dreaming is the key to the mysteries of religion. And with that statement in mind, I would like to prevent– present to you Professor Michel Jouvet as probably the one man in the world today who has made the most important scientific contributions to dreaming and the biology of dreams. Professor Jouvet.
(applause)
[00:09:33] MICHEL JOUVET:
Well, thank you, Professor Diamond. I will not try to break the role of, uh, your governor and of the University of California. I don’t think I will speak too much about religion.
And also, I would think that the choice of a genetician, uh, for giving me this opportunity and this honor to give this lecture was probably very wise because I believe that genetician and molecular biology has a key of dreaming and has a key of the mind. We are certainly slowly but, uh, certainly approaching the last frontier of science. That is the mystery of the relationship between the mind and the brain.
My path in this search has been through the study of the states of the mind, waking, sleep, and dreaming. Many centuries ago, these states were described in the Indian mythology, the Upanishads, as follows. Waking was described as a state during which the self is conscious only of external objects.
Dreamless sleep was the state during which the self is veiled in unconsciousness. And finally, dreaming was the process in which the self is the enjoyer of the subtle impression in the mind of the deeds he has done in the past. In this lecture, I would like to summarize the reasons why I think the biology of dreaming is the main approach to the mind.
First, we will very quickly review the history of the physiology of dreaming since its, well, pre-logical or metaphysical approach to the actual neurophysiological approach which permits an objective description of dreaming. I will after review the so-called natural history of dreaming. When does it begin during phylogeny?
When does it begin during ontogeny? And finally, I will try to summarize the actual, at least my actual concept of the dream mechanism and try to, well, explain you why I think it is the only path left to the understanding of the mind. Now, if we start to refer to the history of dreaming, we have to keep in mind one very important fact, which we will have to explain, which will follow us, uh, during all this lecture, is that dreaming occurs only during sleep.
And, uh, well, this is– I will show you a picture of sleep, which is probably, of course, intuitive picture of sleep, but, uh, which tell you what is sleep. This is a picture of, uh, the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the Douanier Rousseau. This is a sleeping gypsy.
The sleepers is not aware of his surrounding, and you will see that it may be very dangerous. And only during sleep we may dream. I will not speak about today about the so-called daydreaming.
So the first problem which was present in my mind, and I think the main problem which has been solved quite recently was the following: Are we dreaming during all sleep or are we dreaming only during, well, let’s say, episodic moments or periodical moments? Well, for the first men, which were, uh, the first men, And the very modern men, frankly,
(cough)
have always been amazed by the content of their dreams. How a primitive man, how even a modern man can, can understand the totally fantastic scenery of his dream? Our primitive man can understand why he believes that he is flying when his body is motionless.
There was only one answer before modern physiology, and the answer was very logical. The answer was as follows: The body is material and has to undergo the sleep cyc-uh, cyclical, uh, death of sleep. That means the body has to rest.
But the soul, which is immaterial, does not need to rest, so it stays awake during sleep. And this is, this was the explanation of dreaming, and this has been the explanation of dreaming up to lately, only two centuries ago. For, uh, the great anthropologist Malinowski, the fact that we, uh, experience the fantastic, uh, experience of dreaming is probably, and, uh, other anthropologists agree, At the root of the belief that we have, that at least some people believe, and the religions believe that we are made of a body of a soul.
And probably the belief of the immortality of the soul, in which I have to give this lecture, came from the human experience of waking. Now, of course, after the Enl- Enlightenment and after the great encyclopedists in the eighteenth century, it begins to try to explain things with, uh, a type of explanation.
(throat clearing)
The first man who tried to explain it was, uh, Maury in the eighteenth century, and he said, “Well, uh, well, I don’t believe in souls,” he says, “and probably the only explanation of dreaming is that dreaming could be a state between waking and sleep. So the explanation of Maury was struggling with. We dream when we go to sleep.
That means that’s the hypnagogic hallucination between waking and dream. Or we dream when we are half awake and half asleep at night, either by internal events, let’s say pain, or by external events, a loud noise. So for Maury, the explanation of dreaming was that dreaming was essentially a state of the, well, of the brain between waking and sleeping.
Well, this explanation could explain one thing which could not be explained by the theory of dreams, that if you awaken a sleeper at some time, he will always remember a dream, and if you awaken a sleeper at other time, he will not remember a dream. Hence for Maury, dreaming was episodic. Well, we had to wait until, uh, nineteen fifty-three, and thanks to the work of, uh, Aserensky, Nathaniel Kleitman in Chicago, and, uh, my good friend Bill Dement, it was proved by modern techniques that by recording the electrical activity of the brain, it was possible to register electrical events or polygraphic events which could distinguish quite well between dreaming and sleep, this is, uh, a technique in which you put electrodes on the brain and also now cover the eyes and, uh, everything from the chin to even now the genitalia because they probably are the most important things to, uh, uh, to recognize dreaming.
And by registering, all the nights, you can have two indices which, uh, tell you when you sleep and when you dream. I will not go into details, but I will show you how we recognize, uh, the pattern of dreaming. I don’t think– I, I don’t wish to show you very much EEG recording, but this is just to show you that the electrical activities of the brain can be recorded, can be recorded when they’re awake.
And, uh, well, this is recording from dreaming in two different people. This is recording from eye movements. Well, the biggest story was that when we sleep, we don’t have– we don’t–
we don’t move our eyes. But when we dream, we move our eyes. Yes.
And the biggest was, uh, was the introduction of a new biology of dreaming was made by the Chicago school as, uh, seen at, uh, Kleitman and Dement, where they could record eye movement during sleep. This is the electrical activity of the brain. This is the recording of eye movement, recording from both eyes, right, left, to the right, to the left, to the right, to the left.
Now, when they did this experiment, they awakened the sleepers here, and they asked him, “What, uh, what are you doing?” And the sleeper said, “Well, I’m looking at a ping-pong match.” Uh, So, well, in this case, in this case, there was a very good, I would say that, uh, uh, it’s a very good correlation between what happens during sleep, and this is a proof that, and you will see this afterwards.
This is just the story, but this is a proof that we have now a very good objective way to know when dreaming starts and when dreaming finishes, you see. That means, uh, that, uh, at about one or two seconds, we can say, “Well, this fellow is going to have a dream. This fellow is dreaming, and now the dream is finished.”
And even if you don’t have an EEG machine, and if you, uh, look to somebody sleeping, if you are sleeping with somebody, you can just say, “Well, he is now dreaming,” and I can tell you how to do it. Only,
(cough)
even if you don’t, uh, like, uh, to learn,
(cough)
you can say when somebody is dreaming. Because when you are sleeping, your respiration will be very regular. When you are starting to breathe, your respiration will get very irregular. Sometimes we, we stop to breathe for one, two seconds. Wait, one, ten. Sometimes ten seconds or more.
(coughs)
A long inspiration. Sometimes you may breathe very quickly.
(breathing)
Uh, there is many other index on breathing. Change of the heart rate, and one of the best ones, at least in the male, is penile erection.
(coughs)
(coughs)
So by objective index, we can really say when dreamings begins, when the, uh, dreaming’s finished. But, uh, this is to say that essentially, uh, the discovery of, uh, Dement and Kleitman was to show without any doubt that we don’t dream all the night, and that we dream only periodically, during some episodes. Well, this is a sharp, a well-known sharp wave on charts, that we are, uh, drawing now.
At least one way to represent dreaming, you will see this is not the only one. Here we are awake. We are going to sleep.
I don’t want to go into details, but, uh, there is a first stage of sleep, more and more profound. And after about one and
(cough)
a half hour, about ninety minutes or two hours, there’s a first dreaming episode. It doesn’t last very long, but, uh, five to ten minutes. Back to sleep, and three hours later waking.
Another sleep, a dreaming episode which may last about, uh, fifteen to twenty minutes. Back to sleep again, another dreaming episode, back to sleep, and so on up to the morning. That means every human, Normal human adult will dream about five times in his night, and that will constitute about, uh, 20% of his night.
That means if you sleep about, uh, six to seven hours, you will certainly dream during 100 minutes. And this is, uh, so true that, uh, the dreaming time in minutes is becoming some kind of biological constant. So before going into now the natural history of dreaming, let me summarize very quickly the story of dreaming.
First, the so-called prehistoric history of dreaming. The body go from waking to sleep, and the soul, the soul is always awake. That means there was dreaming all the time.
This is not true. This is the explanation by, uh, Kleitman and Dement. Dreaming is periodically during the night and, uh, it has been, uh, well, it is being, that means in some, uh, school, that dreaming still could be like Morris says, uh, so-called, uh, light sleep.
So I hope that’s waking, going to sleep, deep sleep, back to dreaming, and so on. Well, I will try to show you that I found, at least I believe, that we undergo. Well, this is not my idea.
This was ten, two thousand years ago, that our brain goes through three different states: waking, sleep, and dreaming. And that is very difficult to put them in a continuum. They are quite different.
At least they are still different because we don’t know the essential mechanism which triggers them, but we still, we think that we are on the path to understand them. Now, of course, uh, can you give the light for just a moment? Uh, now, of course, when, uh, this discovery was made that it is possible to recognize dreaming in human, to say, “Well,” we don’t dream on the night.
We dream only, let’s say, one hundred minutes and, uh, five minutes after, uh, yeah, ninety minutes of sleep, and so on and so on. The question was, well, can we work on this in animals? Because of course you can work in human.
You can always awaken the man and ask him, “What, uh, what were you doing?” He will say, “Well, I was looking at, uh, at the TV or, uh, looking at the ping-pong game.” But you cannot, uh, remove the brain of any human, or you cannot, uh, look at his brain to see what biochemical, uh, changes are doing.
So the problem was to, to look
(cough)
first, can we see the same things I’m dreaming, let’s say, in the cats?
(laughter)
Because the cat is a much favorite, uh, animal for experimentation. So the first thing was, is it possible to recognize waking, of course, sleep, of course, but dreaming in animals? And after, so one of the first questions was to ask: When does dreaming occurs?
At least even if you don’t like to call it dreaming because you will never awaken a cat and ask him, “Well, to what mice, what were you dreaming?” But, uh, uh, uh, at what time in the evolution does this phenomenon start? Does it start in, let’s say, uh, well, reptiles?
Does it start in birds and so on? How, how can we do the map or, uh, the story of the phylogeny of dreaming? The second question was, of course, if we get the story of the phylogeny, when does it start during ontogeny?
Does it start only in adults? Or can we recognize objective signs of dreaming, let’s say, in infants? Or maybe it would be scandalous, but in baby.
Or maybe, and it will be much more scandalous, in fetus. And this is a story which I will try to explain to you. But before to explaining you the much more sc-scandalous event which happened in the story of dreaming, I would like to recall you how, we can recognize without any doubt, and with a security of one hundred percent, so when does, well, the physiological counterpart of dreaming occurs in any mammals?
And this is very simple. You can recognize dreaming in any mammal When any animal asleep, first will move his eyes and two, will stop totally to move and will totally drop his muscular tone. And the, the next, uh, slide will just remind you the basic events, polygraphic events, which are necessary to be sure that the animal we are recording from are either awake, asleep, or dreaming.
This is recording made from a cat. The cat is, uh, well,
(cough)
the favorite animal for many neurophysiologists because it sleeps a lot. And these are the essential three states of the brain of the cat. Three states which have been recognized two thousand years ago.
Waking, dreamless sleep, and dreaming. But which is called now still waking. This is called slow sleep or even now non-rapid eye movement sleep.
This was called by me parasympathetic sleep. Parasympathetic is too long to pronounce. It’s now called rapid eye movement sleep or REMS.
But these measures are actually very familiar, and you will get this, the explanation. Now those electrodes are placed upon the brain, in the brain, on the cortex, visual cortex, or occipital cortex. This is a really important terms where we are to speak about this, but, uh, well, it’s a visual relay of the thalamus, the lateral geniculate.
This is recording of the eye movement, but meaning if the cat move his eyes, there will be some signal change here. And this is a very important recording from a very important muscle here in the neck. But the neck muscle, that means if you are awake, you have a lot of activity here, because if you are awake, at least any animal awake, has to face immediately any attack.
That means that he has to move his head immediately if any enemy will attack him. Well, you know, I mean, most of you probably remember or, well, you will learn that during waking, the electrical activity of the brain is very fast. And as you well know, if you have this electrical activity, that means that you’re aroused.
And at the same time, the cat may move his eyes, and he has a lot of activity here in the, in the neck. Now the cat is going to sleep. Well, any animal going to sleep has to adopt a posture.
That means he has to learn how to sleep. Any animal, even man, learns how to sleep. It is an acquired posture.
That means you, you just sleep in the cat sleep, uh, where, uh, curved position. You want to sleep relaxed, but anyway it’s learned. And that means that during sleep, you still have to conserve what’s called the postural tone in the muscles.
That means that during sleep, your muscular tone does not totally disappear, but
(throat clearing)
there are still some activities. But at the same time, sleep can be recognized very well in every species by a very slow, or rather just a, slow activity in the, in the cortex. And you can see there is no active eye movement.
Now, after about, uh, let’s say twenty minutes of sleep, the cats will enter a totally different state, and those of you who have cats or kittens can recognize it immediately or don’t. It’s very simple to see. If you have your cat sleeping with the head like this, suddenly he will drop his head, and the head will touch the floor, and he will fall down slowly.
And at the same time, if you look at the cat very carefully, you will see that his eye is open a little bit. And then, uh, eyeballs will move very quickly. Now, if you recall all these events, you will see
(unintelligible)
those different events, and then you see two different phenomena. The first thing that the brain electrical activity is exactly the same than during waking. That means that if you don’t recall this, this, or this, Well, you cannot recognize it.
That’s why it was– it took so many years to be sure that such an activity was sleep and not waking. But if you look at the electrical activity of the muscle, you can immediately see that it is different from sleep or from waking because you can see that there is absolutely no more electrical activity in the muscle. This is absolutely essential for dreaming.
If you dream that somebody that you fly, you don’t fly, you don’t move. You don’t move. Why?
Because a very important part of the brain is acting upon your muscle tone in order to inhibit. So you cannot move. You stop the input for your brain, so the brain can dream by itself anything.
And this is what happens. And this is the dream, and this is the most important thing. We start from what happens
(coughs)
in the cells, in the interior of the brain. What happens is literally a topology of electrical events, which I will speak about after and which is the key for living. These electrical events, as you can see like this, are very irregular, but those of you who are aware of languages can immediately recognize that this is a language.
It’s a very– of the character of language. This is a language. There is a coding of electrical events which appears spontaneously over the brain and which trigger the rapid eye movement of the brain.
Now, we don’t know what happened to awaken the cat, and if you ask him, “What are you dreaming about?” But we know that he awoken a man here, and if you ask him, he will tell us, “Well, I was dreaming of some things,” which if the story is not too difficult, will be related with those eye movement, and of course, with those electrical events, which are the sources, we know now, uh, for those times. So just remember one thing, that dreaming is the association of two phenomena, one tonic and one phasic.
The tonic phenomena are the total inhibition of muscular tone. We cannot move when we dream. Every time, if we move during sleep, like nightmares, like somnambulism, this has nothing to do with dreaming.
So we cannot move an inch. This is one fact. That means any dreaming, if we have to study dreaming scale,
(cough)
it has to be associated with total inhibition of the muscle tone. And at the same time, we move. We cannot move our legs, we cannot move our hands, but we can move our eyes, and it’s located in some part of the central nervous system.
We can see a very interesting activity which we will try to, at least to explain, not explain. If we could explain it, uh, we would not be here. Uh, but, uh, which could be explained maybe one day, which is the key of dreaming, and which is the key of, of the mind.
Now let’s see, when does dreaming appear? Now I want to show you very quickly some slides of implanted animals. I mean, that there was a lot of animals with electrodes implanted in their brain.
And of course, when we started this experiment, we tried to start with one of the most ancient animals, at least in the phylogenetic scale, and we implanted the fish. Well, one of my students did it. And I said that, uh, it took him about one year to get the technique ready because as you know, if you put electrodes in a fish, and if the fish move in the water, you are ready to get, uh, a lot of artifacts.
But, uh, anyway, if you record a fish during days and nights for months, and, uh, this rose fish, this is a– Well, I don’t know how it’s called in English, but as in, in Latin it’s Tinca tinca, and in French it’s a tanche. It’s a freshwater fish.
They sleep, as it is well-known by people who, uh, by the fishermen, but they never drink. But, uh, I can assure you that fish never drink. That means
(laughter)
that means that they don’t move their eyes during sleep. They don’t have electrical activity, which is similar to waking during sleep. Of course, we don’t record from the neck because, uh, they don’t have necks. They don’t…
(laughter)
We record from the tail or from, uh, those muscles, and there are always a lot of activity. Well, fish is maybe not a good example, but we could record from a, a python and, uh, it’s very easy to recognize this in the animal because, as you can see, there are the, uh,
(cough)
well, white pupils when they sleep. This is awakened, the, the picture. But, uh, when they sleep, they are, they sleep miosis. They don’t dream, and, uh, we could not record any dreams. Now, maybe there is still some controversies. Those animals don’t dream.
(laughter)
It’s not because they dream, it’s one eye is open. Uh, North African iguana. Some people say that in Mexico, they have been recorded eye
(coughs)
moving around, and those animals move
(coughs)
their eyes almost all the time. They can move one eye and the other one, uh, doesn’t move and so on.
(laughter)
But, uh, really, those animals start to sleep. But most people agree that s-dreaming start with birds. Why this is a pigeon, and pigeons do dream.
At least they do show like chicks, chickens, and all this, uh, all the birds which has a bit, even the mix, even the Mexican eagles, which has been recorded now, dreams. But it’s certainly a, uh, dream has been taken just at the beginning Because the longest dream which has been recorded in the chicks does not last one hour and fifteen seconds. But it’s here, it’s the beginning.
Now, well, I don’t want to go into details, but if you are following me a little, you can see that, well, this is a chicks recording, the chronic chicks recording. When the chicks is awake, that’s electrical activity of the neck. So well, when you have seen a few chickens, they move their head a lot.
And, uh, the electrical activity of the brain is very rapid and, uh, while this is a small eye movement. Now, if you put the chip in the dark, then very immediately you see, and you can see the big difference between the electrical activity of the brain during sleep than during waking and still in negative activity. Now, if you are very Patient, if you wait a very long time, and if the chip is very habituated to the surrounding, it will certainly show, if it’s in a good mood, a very short episode of
(laughter)
wave, you see? And you can recognize how the chip moves smoothly, and you can see here one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten eye movement. This lasts fifteen seconds.
And back to sleep. But here, we can see all the polygraphic elements in which we are sure that the patient is asleep because we can see that he is asleep. He has an almost total loss of the activity of the legs.
He has electrical activity of the brain, which is quite similar from waking, and he has an eye movement. Well, this is very important because, uh, we, we get here Where does dreaming start during the phylogenetic tree? There is no dreaming mechanism in fish, no dreaming mechanism in reptiles, and maybe, but very few.
In birds… You know, in mammals, dreaming is, uh, constitutes about twenty percent of sleep. In birds, it does not constitute more than one to two percent of sleep. That means we are just here at the beginning.
Let’s put the iguana. Uh, we don’t know. There is still some controversy.
But if the iguana dreams, it’s no more than point one percent of his sleep, so it’s just at the beginning. Now, of course, it’s very interesting. I don’t have time to, to go into details, but in mammals, all mammals sleep.
But they don’t, they sleep very differently. And, uh, well, this is one of the two or three things we call dreamers, as a lion. And, uh, there is some exception, but very few.
Just retain that hunters sleep well and dream well, and that the hunted sleep very few and just don’t dream very much. And this is a very important fact because this, so this makes plain, uh, well, a very undemocratic way of evolution. You know, a lamb, I mean, a lower lamb to get his, uh, uh, calories has to eat about almost seventy five percent of the day, because he eats only grass, and the grass is not very high in calories.
So he has to eat a lot of time, he has to be awake a lot of time in order to be alive. So you have only twenty five percent to sleep And since, and it has been shown in many species, brain cleaning can occur only if sleep is very profound. And since lamb or sheep or a cow or a giraffe or anything like that is a very, well, not very powerful animal, it does not get, uh, very secure when it’s drinking.
(breathing)
So it does not have very much time to have the security to drink. And of course, it won’t be very much. The most that you can get even in a laboratory sheep, because they don’t have fear of anything.
But of course, they are together, but they are- They have limits. They don’t sleep, they don’t dream more than about five to six percent of their sleep. Whereas a cat, a dog, a lioness, they can get their calorie by eating a lamb.
(laughter)
(laughter)
Eating a dog. So in about fifteen minutes, they will get all their calories. So the rest of the time they will sleep.
So they will dream much more. And if they dream much more, they- we dream about twenty to twenty-five percent of the time. Since it is most probable, as we will see after, that dreaming has something to do with the integration of memory and learning, of course, well, poorly will stay poorly and poorly and poorly.
Whereas the learned will stay brilliant, brilliant, brilliant and so on and so forth. So there is a s- a so-called vicious cycle, which is totally, of course, undemocratic, but which is. Now, what about human?
It’s about the same. Well, it’s about the same at the cellular level. If you are insecure, if you are anxious, if you don’t sleep very well, you will dream Much, very much less.
When I ask if, well, if you don’t have any problem or if you sleep very well, you will dream more. And since dreaming probably, as we will try to see, has something, some function to
(coughs)
uh, undertakings the brain, there will be also a vicious cycle if you are not treated. If you dream less, you will have more problems, you will feel less secure, and you will dream less, and so on and so on. So you see that, uh, this problem has– may have, uh, some, uh, well, uh, some, uh, what problem with human life.
So remember that dreaming maybe start with birds, explode literally with the mammals, and, uh, Well, in the mammals, the hunters sleep more and dream more, the hunted sleep less and dream less. Now this is the evolutionary tree, which will be summarized very quickly here. Or well, I will go very quickly.
This is the percentage of, uh, dreaming. This is a slide made by Peter Snyder from the NIH. You see, that’s one kind of explanation of the dreaming tree.
It appears that maybe sleep appears with the birds, whereas in all mammals today and even in marsupials, there are some dreams. Now you will see when does, if we go from phylogeny to ontogeny, that means from the evolution of, uh, mammals from the reptiles to humans. If we look at humans or at mammals, and if we say, When does REM, when can we record REM in, let’s say, a chicken?
Uh, well, it’s difficult to do now in, uh, in New York, but, uh, uh, in a laboratory. When does helping start? Well, this is a very new study.
This experiment was done by my wife almost two months ago, and, uh, she did not permit me to, to show the slide. But, uh, it is absolutely certain that it is possible to record the physiological characteristic of brain in utero. That means if you implant guinea pigs in utero, you can record the first appearance of REM sleep or paradoxical sleep after only thirty-five days of gestation.
And the guinea pig when it give birth, the, the birth. The birth of the guinea pig is after sixty days of gestation. That means at the
(coughing)
middle
(coughing)
(laughter)
of gestation starts the brain. And this is a very, uh, this is very important. You see why.
Right. Now, so we know now that in utero, at least in the beginning, and we have indirect evidence that this happens also in kittens. In utero, dreaming starts, and of course in the newborn, which is very easy to record, dreaming exists very well.
Well, this is recording made from, uh, kittens from the first week. This is, uh, dreaming and waking, you see. It’s very frequent during the first week, and less frequent in adults.
We will also see very quickly that, uh… And one thing is very important for those of you who are interested in this. Those of you who have seen kittens, kittens are born blind.
They don’t see anything. When they, on the first day or even on the first hours of life, when they are totally blind, they move their eyes when they are so-called paradoxical sleep, when they are dreaming. So at week twenty-eight, that means that the mechanism, the physical mechanism which triggers the rapid eye movement during dreaming are in principle, are existing at birth.
And we know now that they exist at the middle of the, the gestation age, when, when, when the brain is just starting to work. That much before any animal is waking, much before you can sleep, you can dream. That means something exists, is built in, is genetically acquired, which starts appearing movement before that kitten can see anything in his life.
But the first hours, when this is a premature kitten. He can move his eyes very slim, very delicate. This is a premature, uh, uh, normal kitten at birth, the first day.
And this is where we’ve shown rapid eye movement during dreaming, first day to the first month. But anyway, we see that something exists, is built in, in utero, which will be responsible after for dreaming, and which maybe is responsible for dreaming. We don’t know.
Nobody know. Nobody know what is the subjective experience of dreaming, but it exists. Now we can recognize also at birth the same difference between the hunters and the hunted.
The big difference is that while this is a, a young rat, kittens and guinea pigs, this is a recording, That’s a work made by my wife during the first months of life. And this is a percentage every day of waking, sleep, and dreaming, that we call, as many of you know, paradoxical sleep in French. But you can see that, uh, in humans, and those of you who are working in embryos know how small, how certainly, uh, immature a human at birth.
But the human at birth will spend seventy percent of his time the first day, in infancy which is like dreaming. And thirty percent of his time in waking just to, to be fed by his mother and no sleep at all. There is no, no sleep the first day.
Very few sleep, only going to waking to suck the mother and after going to dreaming. That means rapid eye movement, mo– small movements. And you can see that sleep appears only after about one week and goes in the middle between waking and dreaming, and that dreaming is reducing very quickly.
Now, this is a kitten. The story of the kitten is about to say, but the kitten belongs to the cats. The cat is a hunter, so it will have much more paradoxical REM than this older cat.
Now, the poor guinea pig is very, very–
(laughter)
Because you can see even at birth, he’s much awake. He has much more sight, but much less sound sensitivity. But he… he’s born guinea pig. He’ll stay guinea pig all his life. He’s a hunter.
(laughter)
Well, this is not exactly the explanation, but this is a fact. So… Well, well, one thing. Well, one thing that at the time when the brain undergoes its most important maturation, at this time, dreaming is very important. And as you know,
(cough)
it’s probably right at birth and of course, much before birth, Many maturational, and those processes are occurring in the brain. And they have something to do, of course, with protein synthesis. Now, of course, everybody is speaking about protein synthesis and of course, to molecular biology.
But it is very important to, to think that at this time, dreaming is very important because it’s quite probable, even if we don’t have any direct evidence, that at this time scientific processes are shown and that during in utero, at a time when the fetus does not get any information from the outside world, something is being built which, giving some kind of internal simulation, which after will be the, well, the cause of dreaming. So if, uh, at the end we have to explain, we have tried to explain dreaming, we have to keep in mind this fact very important and, uh, which is summarized in the next slide.
(cough)
Try to explain, uh, well, try to explain, uh, the correlation between ontogeny and phylogeny. Now, I remember the adage of the, of the great
(cough)
uh, uh, German embryologist Haeckel, that ontogeny is the recapitulation of phylogeny. I have put here one very, in a very schematic and probably, uh, false form,
(laughter)
but, but not very false. The evolution of a child, father of the man, the newborn. This will be the conception where nobody has ever recorded any experiment at all. That’s better.
(laughter)
And the evolution that, uh, during up to gestational age nine months, one year, ten years, fifty years, and now one hundred years. Now this is the percentage of dreaming versus total sleep time.
(clears throat)
Now, it is well known, it is around here, this year, that around the fifteen days, the brain of a newborn looks like a fish. Well, we don’t know. We have never, nobody has a clue, but probably there is no dreaming here.
But what we know is that most probably what we have seen is that dreaming may probably start when the way is such– there is such evolution. This is like the kitten or the newborn. That means there is a terrific increase of REM in utero just before birth.
Now a newborn baby has much more REM than a normal human. It’s about sixty percent of its sleep time. A premature baby which is born before nine months, that’s in about eight months, have even much more REM because it’s about eighty percent of its total sleep time.
Now very quickly after birth, there is a very rapid decline in dreaming because at one year, dreaming time is almost the same than adults. That means only twenty-five percent. And after, there is a slowly decline, and there are very few, of course, but there are some recordings made in centenarians which show that, uh,
(cough)
at one hundred years, we dream less. So, something happens probably in about six months which starts, which is built in, which is thus genetically acquired, and which will be
(cough)
after responsible for meaning. Something which happens at the same time that the brain develops,
(cough)
that the protein synthesis is going on, and which probably can be transmitted, well, not to the mother, but which is genetically acquired, and why not call it archetypes in the Jungian terminology? Because it will be transmitted like this, you know. Uh, if a newborn move his eyes before looking at anything, if he has something built in, it has to be something which is very archaic, and it’s exactly the terminology of, uh, Jung.
It’s probably some kind of archetypes called. We will, we will see this after. But, uh, so this is one way at least to try to reconcile the finding in ontogeny and phylogeny.
Now, to finish this talk, what do we know now? Now what we see, when does dreaming start in on– in phylogeny? When does it start during, uh, ontogeny?
What do we know about, uh, its mechanism? Well, we know, we begins to know quite well, I don’t– I don’t want also to go into too much details, but we know.
Can you give the light? Can you give the light? Just one moment.
No, classical neurophysiology is like, uh, during the war. It’s a little search and destroy or just silent search. Uh, neurophysiologists have their animals.
They knew how to recognize when those animals are dreaming. So they apply the best technique they had at this time, at this time, ten years ago or five years ago, it’s not very far. Well, why don’t we remove the cortex cell, the cerebral cortex, and see if still we can record eye movement during sleep or total drop of muscular tension during sleep.
If we still can do it, that proves that the essential mechanism which trigger dreaming are not in the cerebral cortex. You cannot escape this conclusion. It’s very simple, but it works.
Now, after you can always say, “Well, I will remove the thalamus, and I will see what happens.” We see in a cat without thalamus that we record eye movement during sleep and total loss of muscular tone and so on and so on. Well, this is because thalamus is not involved in dreaming and so on and so on.
And since at this time it was known that, uh, dreaming could be recorded in newborn or in fetus, the best, of course, bits, the bit where dreaming will get its start certainly will not be in the most, uh, uh, the most, uh, developed part of the brain. And of course, it was not. And one of the most, uh, interesting facts and also a very almost scandalous fact was that dreaming starts from the most ancient part of the brain, just near the respiratory center down in the brainstem.
And, uh, I will now very quickly review this because, uh,
(coughing)
my time is up.
(coughing)
is getting, uh, quickly tired. This is a classical chart. This is just to, to try to explain you the philosophy of one kind of neurosurgery, the theory which destroys one part of the brain.
The view is a mechanistic theory. Yes, so the top of the brain which I have removed is not a separate part. It’s a very primitive type of thinking, but until now, there is no other way to make sense.
Now, this is a normal brain of a cat. This is a setup. Now, these are the parameters of, uh, dreaming in any animal.
Well, this is a primitive of the brain, a very schematic mind of the brain of a mammal, and this is what you would expect to record by recording brain cortical activation signifies that you are in a fast activity during sleep. Pontine spikes indicate that you have this activity that I have shown you before, rapid eye movement and loss of muscular tone. Of course, this happens in a normal cat in which we have removed the cerebellum.
The cerebellum, which is the most stupid of all the brains, has nothing to do with dreaming. Well, this is what I’m saying, which is, of course, very, very good. Now, here we remove the cerebral cortex.
This is a part, and we get a lessening of the dreaming, but of course, the cortical activation because we are removing the cortex. Now, we remove everything. That means it’s a very obvious preparation.
We remove almost all the brain. So, this is a medulla oblongata. Remove everything in front of the pons.
Those animals can be kept for months in special condition alive. They still show, and this is the most facilitating phenomenon. They still show very regularly, with the regularity of biological occurrence of the behavioral signs of dreaming.
Of course, we don’t know in the brain, but that proves that the mechanisms which trigger dreaming is still in the brain. And since we have removed everything above, it has to be here because, of course, many experiments have shown that it cannot start from the spinal cord or anywhere else on the whole body. All right.
So dreaming must occur from here, from here and above. By doing lesions where it was difficult to find the place, but by doing lesions in a small place of the pons, it was possible to suppress selectively paradoxical sleep or dreaming in, in a cat, in the cat. Now I will show you, this is just to show you what is the most important part of the brain of the cat, from which the dreaming mechanisms are triggered.
I don’t say occur, but are triggered, which are essential for triggering dreaming. This is the brain of the cat. Now, those are the cerebral cortex.
The cerebellum has been removed. You can see here the floor of the fourth ventricle. If you cut the brain here, and if you remove everything from this area.
This animal, which is almost, uh, almost a spinal animal, will show periodicity during a primitive sleep will show rapid eye movement and a total loss of muscle tone, which will be triggered from this pons. Now, of course, by doing many, many experiments, which I don’t have time to recall, by associating those experiments with neuropharmacology. By the conjunction of new techniques like histofluorescence, it was shown recently that those cells in the brain which are responsible for seeing are now cells which are very fashionable because they can be recognized with because they contain neurotransmitters which can be recognized very easily.
Very easy, very easy to use it. It’s like if you have a black and white map, and now you have color. And now it’s very simple.
It’s very easy to see what is the system state, now in the middle of the body. This is the so-called macro system. I don’t want to go into detail, but the dream system we know now where does it start, and it’s also very fascinating.
It’s not really yellow, it’s greenish yellow. Those are cells located in the bones which distinction will destroy the periodical appearance of the brain in the gut and in the heart and probably in most of the animal. Those are not exactly containing cells.
I don’t, of course, want to disturb you with your chemistry, but we know now where does dream start in the brain. We know that those cells are quite different from other cells in the brain. And, uh, we now, and I will, uh, conclude about this.
Now, please, uh, can you g-give the light, please? I will finish with this. Can you give the light?
We now have some explanation. Can you give the light? I will, uh, show you very quickly the regions of the brain as we understood them when we started with the outside.
We know that the brain of a cat… The sagittal map of the brain of the cat, the cortex, the brainstem here. Medulla, the pons, and the medulla oblongata, and here the thalamus.
We know without any doubt that dreaming is started by a small group of cells which… well, we, we know where they are, but we know that, by chance, they are not like those cells in the brain. We know that they contain the so-called, uh, transmitters, which is called, in this context, neuromodulatory monoamines, by a sort of blockade, and so on. We know that during dreaming from this part of the brain, a very important and obligatory mechanism going down will totally stop, Uh, any movement and particularly all the processes which are responsible for the muscular tone.
That means from here, there are inhibitory, very potent inhibitory influence, active inhibitory, which will transform the system in a totally immobile limb. That means even if you dream that, uh, you are running, you don’t run. You cannot move because from here the fast waves and the rhythms which are most probably those of the stage of paradoxical sleep.
In this phase, catecholaminergic neurons act upon the spinal cord to totally immobilize it. What we know also, we know that there’s a group of cells which are located here are responsible for the most important movements from brain. They will act upon eye movements.
They will act upon the visual relays in the brain and the
(clears throat)
global relay with, with… And, well, they… lucid dreams can be caused. They can be caused.
And they will be responsible, those mechanisms, for those, uh, well, basic events which occur in the brain during dreaming and which are responsible most probably for the hallucination of lucid dreaming. So what happens during dreaming? Well, first, I will put it… put it this way.
But sleep mechanisms are located here, in the raphe system, just in the medulla. And this is probably serotonin pathway of brain. Our sleep mechanism, what they do directly in the brain, we don’t know.
But, uh, let’s say during waking,
(coughs)
We receive information. Now, while most of you, at least, are in the headspace, I’m making this up.
(laughter)
A little information from me, you know, from the transformation. The information is going in. But at the same time, what you have to do, because you are in a social environment, you have to inhibit consciously your motor output.
You would like to say, “Why am I doing this?” and so on, but you cannot.
(laughter)
You have to be very quiet. So information, the input is coming, and consciously or not, you have to stop. But consciously, it takes a lot of energy from you.
When you have to stop, you have to stop your energy. Well, this information is stored, nobody knows how it is stored. So I don’t want– I cannot tell you, but it’s probably stored in some, uh, electrical form.
But you will not see slowly sees. It’s a big guess, and it’s a good debate that this information will be stored in this form, will be stored in your neurons in another form in a whole other way, you see. Probably…
(clears throat)
This now, since malicious ideology is so, uh, I really need to research by sharing it, it’s probably still in some kind of ma-macro body, but not the linear. That’s, it’s just, uh, that’s, that’s a bit information started some project talk in the,
(clears throat)
uh, like this. Exactly this meaning. Now, in about after one hundred and twenty minutes, something will start in our brain and we- for us, this means brain.
Total stop any output and we do not be concerned about the stop. So that is something else. And at the same time, we stop or we inhibit any input to the RAM.
And if you dream, your threshold of arousal will be most of the time terrifically increased. That means there is a lot of little window in the, well, we don’t know exactly why it is, but it is pretty in the light era, in the ears, which will stop everything to grow into the brain. And at the same time, there is your entire physical mechanism which are built in since the loss, And in detail, we play in our way, probably it takes all the information which has been stored during the whole year, and then we will create another side.
We will create the biggest game, anything you want in your life with the code which has been acquired, and we will do everything. Not only first change, but a total blockage of movement in the shoe. Now, the thing which is most interesting is is that this language, which is played by the, the…
It’s probably not totally impossible to decipher it because it’s truly a language. And can you give the last— well, no, the same slide, yes. Yes.
Now, this is crystallized, what I’ve told you. Here we are seeing. Right here, this is a cat.
The cat is seeing. That’s the electrical activity of his brain. At the neck, that’s the eye movement.
He does not see any signal. Now he’s awake. Information going in.
At the stèle, looking at him, the pons, you see. Information is going in. This is the entrance.
Information is going in. Stop. Information is going in, in a very difficult task, the cat is conscious of its external world.
Now, twenty minutes after the cat was going back when it was asleep and after into dreaming, and this was the appearance of dreaming. He had the very substantial sign of dreaming. See the muscle of the neck here?
The muscle of the neck here. He could not move at all. Look there, the movement.
and look what happens. What happens is that be– even in utero or after in utero, some kind of, I call it, oneiric code is triggering his brain, is stimulating his brain, and most probably is trying to, by projecting, well, we don’t know, archetypes to what he is looking for, is trying to integrate it and to do something. That means,
(clears throat)
uh, we don’t know what, what is going on at this time, but we are one node. This code is coded in a new language. You see, it’s a language.
It’s a linear operator. It’s coded on the way, if you take this one A, A. If you have two, B.
And if you have, let’s say here, C. It’s, it’s– you can, if you apply technology of language to your, uh, big computer and so on, at least you can try to begin to decipher it. And since we know now quite well that this activity, which is quite different in different cases, which is very quite acquired, which code, of course, is not yet deciphered, but which can be one day, we don’t know, can be this, uh, It’s possible that by this approach, which can be quantified, we can approach the problems of the mind much better than we can do during waking because we can compare this from in utero to, uh, uh, well, to old age. We can compare this during phylogeny of the birds, this type of activity of the birds to human.
And it is not
(coughs)
impossible that one day the deciphering of this oneiric code would be the only one, or at least one very good objective approach to the problem of the mark. And to finish, uh, by the last slide, I would like to say that, uh, All this concept will manifest many different things. The prophetic, uh, findings of, uh, speculation of Carl Jung.
When we dream, since this code has been acquired much before birth, it’s probably has something to do with genetics story, and this probably has something to do with archetypes. Now, and to conclude, deciphering the oneiric code, which I’ve tried to show some aspects, will certainly be an enormous, very long, and Promethean task. But I strongly believe it is the only path which, to quote the words of, uh, Gunther Stent in Berkeley, will enable the brain of providing an explanation for itself.
To know the nature of dream is to know the history, the natural history, and the essence of mankind, and possibly to alter it artificially. So the question is for all scientists: Would such a phenomenal discovery be indeed a destructive one? We must continue to dream about dreaming.
Thank you.
(applause and crowd cheering)