Allan Hobson
| John Allan Hobson | |
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Allan Hobson in Vermont (July 2016)
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| Born | June 3, 1933 |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Psychiatry and dream research |
| Alma mater | Wesleyan University, Harvard Medical School |
| Known for | Research on Rapid eye movement sleep, Activation-synthesis hypothesis |
John Allan Hobson (born June 3, 1933) is an American psychiatrist and dream researcher. He is known for his research on rapid eye movement sleep. He is Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, Harvard Medical School, and Professor, Department of Psychiatry, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.
Hobson grew up in Hartford, Connecticut. In 1955 he obtained his A.B. degree from Wesleyan University. Four years later he earned his MD degree at Harvard Medical School in 1959.
For the following two years he interned at Bellevue Hospital Center, New York. Then in 1960 he was a resident in Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston for a year. Hobson then traveled to France where he was a Special Fellow of the National Institute of Mental Health for the Department of Physiology at the University of Lyon.
Upon returning to the United States, he went back to the Psychiatry at Massachusetts Mental Health Center in Boston until 1966.
He worked in numerous hospitals and research laboratories over the years and became the Director of the Laboratory of Neurophysiology at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.
Hobson has received four awards for his work:
Dr. Hobson's sense of humor is shown in such quips as: “The only known function of sleep is to cure sleepiness".
Hobson's research specialty is quantifying mental events and correlating them with quantified brain events, with special reference to waking, sleeping and dreaming. Hobson's recent work puts forward the idea that during dreaming, different aspects of the conscious mind; Primary consciousness and Secondary consciousness, diverge from a unified qualia enter a self-referential interplay where by one constantly creates the environment of another. In this way, the secondary consciousness performs the role of the dream environment itself, with the primary consciousness, not usually involved in self-awareness in waking life, becomes the object of conscious identity.
This process transpires for multiple reasons, but the primary one suggested is as a means of instigating synaptic pruning, to reductively simplify and stabilise the ideas learned in waking consciousness to less computationally complex ones, to improve overall system stability and reduce computational entropy, or free energy. Free energy is proposed by Hobson and Friston to correlate with capacity for an organism to experience shock or surprise. Thus, for humans the process of daily learning becomes unsustainable without a corresponding process to revert from these neuroplastic increases in complexity. Hobson has been critical of the idea that there are deep, nonphysiological, or hidden meanings in dreams, calling such notions "the mystique of fortune cookie dream interpretation." He has since used less confrontational phrasing in his critiques of Freud, and has produced much academic work supporting the notion that dreams may contain analytically useful information, just not psychoanalytically useful information in a Freudian sense of the term.
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