Dream life
Subtitle: an experimental memoir
By: J. Allan Hobson
Contributors: ebrary, Inc
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Cambridge, Mass; London, England
Language: eng
Format: [electronic resource] :
Number of pages: 296
ISBN-13: 9780262295598; 9780262015325
Subjects: Biography; Neuroscientists
Description: "Allan Hobson’s scientific experimentation began in childhood, with a soot-filled investigation into the capacity of a chimney to admit Santa Claus. (He discovered that even with the damper open the chimney was far too narrow.) Hobson’s life as an experimentalist has continued through a pioneering career devoted to aligning psychology and biology and to investigating the relationship of dreaming and consciousness. In Dream Life, Hobson conducts an experimental investigation into his life and work. Hobson charts his developing consciousness through a vividly imagined conception (in October of 1932), birth, and babyhood, offering a theory about "protoconsciousness" in fetuses and infants. He recounts his youthful zeal for scientific discovery, his early sexual experimentation, and his education. He describes taking on the entrenched Freudians at Harvard Medical School in the 1950s, as a maverick psychiatrist who wanted to replace psychoanalysis with biological science. He describes his further studies, his marriages and love affairs, his travels, and what he learned about the brain from his whiplash-induced amnesia after a 1963 automobile accident and from his "brain death" after a stroke in 2001..."--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Electronic reproduction. Palo Alto, Calif. : ebrary, 2011. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ebrary affiliated libraries.
Table of contents: title: Biologically speaking: an experimental autobiography; title: Brain birth: a non-immaculate conception; title: Brain growth: the illusion and reality of being a self; title: Brain state: a self organizing process; title: My experimental nature; title: The genesis of my experimentalism; title: Marginal modes of being; title: Experimental social structures; title: The nature of my experiments; title: Psychoanalysis as thesis; title: Brain science as antithesis; title: Cognitive neuroscience as synthesis; title: Experiments of nature; title: Brain shock; title: Brain death; title: Heart failure; title: Back ache; title: Sleep strangulation; title: Implications of my experiments; title: Scientific; title: Humanistic; title: Philosophical; title: Functional conclusions.