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18 and Under: Fearing a Flu Vaccine, and Wanting More of It
By PERRI KLASS, M.D., The New York Times, November 10, 2009
When I tell nonmedical friends that our clinic is vaccinating children against the H1N1 flu virus, here is what they say.
With about half, it is something like: “Oh, my God, our doctor doesn’t have it! Can you get me a dose?” And with the other half, it is something like, “Oh, my God, that brand-new vaccine — do you really think it’s safe?”
There is a peculiar duality in the collective cultural mind just now, a kind of pandemic doublethink. Other doctors I know are all eagerly having their own children immunized. Many are answering frantic calls from people desperate for the vaccine. But at the same time, we are all coming up against parents who are determined to refuse that same vaccine.
Wondering what history might have to say about this incongruous state of affairs, I called David M. Oshinsky, a professor of history at the University of Texas who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story” (Oxford, 2005). Dr. Oshinsky compared the current vaccination campaign with two previous situations.
In 1947, a man newly arrived in New York City from Mexico died of smallpox. The authorities “lined up the entire city” and vaccinated everyone, even those who had already been vaccinated, Dr. Oshinsky said. “The entire city was revaccinated,” he added, “and there was no real resistance. People had a sense of risk versus reward and listened to public health officials.”
Then there were the polio vaccine trials of 1954, in which parents volunteered more than a million children to receive either an experimental vaccine or a placebo. And while they trusted the medical profession much more than parents do now, there was another factor, Dr. Oshinsky said: “They also had lived through virulent epidemics. That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. You’re dealing with parents who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic.”
Few doctors now practicing have ever seen a single case of smallpox, much less an epidemic (thanks to vaccination). But when pediatricians look at today’s strain of H1N1, we tend to be good and scared.
Serious cases of this flu are relatively rare but far from unheard of; more than 100 children have died of H1N1. The deaths seem to occur disproportionately in children and pregnant women.
So we give the H1N1 vaccine to children whose parents are almost tearfully afraid of the virus, and we try to win over those parents who are just as tearfully afraid of the vaccine. To them, we explain over and over that in fact this is not a brand-new vaccine — it is made with the same techniques as the seasonal influenza vaccine. Yes, it has been tested. Yes, it’s safe. Yes, it’s effective.
“When I gave a discussion to a group of parents at my daughter’s day care,” said my friend Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, the San Francisco public health director, “I counseled parents who were worried about the risks of vaccination to give their children — if healthy — the nasal vaccine, because what don’t our children put up their noses?
“Given the variety of viruses that our children are exposed to through their noses, it’s very hard to imagine how the vaccination could be that different. I think a lot of people were comforted by that.”
Such is the ambivalence out there that some parents who were once scared of getting the vaccine are now scared of not getting it. “I’m still seeing both ends of this dichotomy,” said Dr. John Snyder, a pediatrician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, adding, “It’s a really interesting moment. I can’t recall anything like this before.”
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk in the pediatrics department at Vanderbilt University. Tennessee was hit hard by H1N1 in September and October, before vaccine was available.
“I’ve seen some pretty healthy kids that got sick really quick with no underlying identified diagnoses,” said Dr. Gregory Plemmons, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. He spoke of children who needed lots of oxygen, who developed fluid collections in their chests and who stayed in the hospital for days and days.
There had been some tragic and terrifying deaths; I read the news articles about a kindergartner — healthy boy, no asthma, no heart disease — who died at Vanderbilt in early September, and the subsequent meetings held at his school with crowds of worried parents, about the sanitizing of the school and the wiping down of the district’s 600 school buses.
There was no H1N1 vaccine available in early September, but Dr. Plemmons said his clinic had recently received a limited supply. “I think there’s some parents that are clamoring for it, some that are fearful that the vaccine is just as dangerous as the actual disease,” he said.
Dr. Paul A. Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has written extensively about vaccines and the antivaccine movement. The H1N1 vaccine has 60 years of experience and technology behind it, he said; it’s safe, it’s clearly effective — and yet many people still have difficulty “figuring out where the real risks lie.”
Dr. Offit wondered if people were more comfortable with sins of omission than of commission. Rather than inject a foreign substance into your body, he went on, “you’ll take your chances with a natural virus infection, which may or may not kill you.”
We are not seeing an epidemic of devastating disease, at least not now. But we are seeing a lot of infections with a virus against which children have no immunity, and which has already caused more deaths in children under 5 than we would see in years of regular seasonal flu.
The divided public mood about H1N1 — fear of vaccine and fear that there won’t be enough of it — reminds Dr. Offit of a joke Woody Allen tells in “Annie Hall.” One woman complains that the food at a Catskills resort is terrible, and her friend agrees: “And such small portions!”
So yes, I’m scared. I worry about H1N1 when a young child with cough and fever shows up; I worry about not being able to pick out that healthy child who may go on to get very sick, very fast. That is your basic pediatric nightmare: How do we judge which children are likely to get better and which few may get much sicker, and even die? That is why I find myself trying to offer parents exactly what I want for my own children: vaccine, protection, immunity.
In the clinic, we advise parents to have their children immunized, especially those with asthma or other chronic problems. “People all over the city are begging for this vaccine,” I heard another doctor tell a mother. “We’re incredibly lucky that we have it.”
Observatory: North American Origins for the Falklands Wolf
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, November 10, 2009
The Falklands wolf has puzzled evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin first encountered it during the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s. It was the only native land mammal on the Falkland Islands, which are 300 miles off the coast of Argentina. No one knew how it got there or what mainland animals it was descended from — and it did not help that the wolf was hunted to extinction by 1876.
But using genetic analysis, Graham J. Slater, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have solved some of the mystery. The closest living relative of the Falklands wolf, they write in Current Biology, is a South American species, but the two diverged in North America.
The researchers obtained snippets of DNA from five museum specimens, looked at variations among the samples and compared them with DNA from living species. They were able to build a family tree and a timeline of when the various branches diverged.
Earlier studies of the Falklands wolf had suggested it was related to foxes, but the DNA work showed the closest living relative to be another South American canid, the maned wolf.
Dr. Slater said the research showed that the maned wolf and the Falklands wolf last had a common ancestor six million years ago. “But canids didn’t show up in South America until two and a half million years ago,” he said, after the isthmus of Panama was formed. He said it was quite likely that the two species evolved in North America and then, faced with increasing competition from canids that entered the continent from Asia, “managed to survive by going to South America.”
Dr. Slater said the research also partly answered how the wolves got to the Falklands. They could not have been brought to the islands by ancient peoples, as some researchers suggested, because the most recent common ancestor of the five samples studied lived at least 70,000 years ago, long before humans arrived. Instead, he said, the wolves must have floated over on vegetation or ice floes.
Mind: A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, November 10, 2009
It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?
Uh-oh.
Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.
Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.
“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”
The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists. Dr. Rodolfo Llinás, a neurologist and physiologist at New York University, called Dr. Hobson’s reasoning impressive but said it was not the only physiological interpretation of dreams.
“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.
These novel ideas about dreaming are based partly on basic findings about REM sleep. In evolutionary terms, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. And studies suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream.
In studies, scientists have found evidence that REM activity helps the brain build neural connections, particularly in its visual areas. The developing fetus may be “seeing” something, in terms of brain activity, long before the eyes ever open — the developing brain drawing on innate, biological models of space and time, like an internal virtual-reality machine. Full-on dreams, in the usual sense of the word, come much later. Their content, in this view, is a kind of crude test run for what the coming day may hold.
None of this is to say that dreams are devoid of meaning. Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.
But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.
In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.
Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery — and a staple of New Age and ancient mystics. But it is a real phenomenon, one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.
In dozens of studies, researchers have brought people into the laboratory and trained them to dream lucidly. They do this with a variety of techniques, including auto-suggestion as head meets pillow (“I will be aware when I dream; I will observe”) and teaching telltale signs of dreaming (the light switches don’t work; levitation is possible; it is often impossible to scream).
Lucid dreaming occurs during a mixed state of consciousness, sleep researchers say — a heavy dose of REM with a sprinkling of waking awareness. “This is just one kind of mixed state, but there are whole variety of them,” Dr. Mahowald said. Sleepwalking and night terrors, he said, represent mixtures of muscle activation and non-REM sleep. Attacks of narcolepsy reflect an infringement of REM on normal daytime alertness.
In study published in September in the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — most notably in the frontal areas of the brain, which are quiet during normal dreaming. Dr. Hobson was a co-author on the paper.
“You are seeing this split brain in action,” he said. “This tells me that there are these two systems, and that in fact they can be running at the same time.”
Researchers have a way to go before they can confirm or fill out this working hypothesis. But the payoffs could extend beyond a deeper understanding of the sleeping brain. People who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin. Dr. Hobson suggests that these flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness. “Let the dreamer awake, and you will see psychosis,” Jung said.
For everyone else, the idea of dreams as a kind of sound check for the brain may bring some comfort, as well. That ominous dream of people gathered on the lawn for some strange party? Probably meaningless.
No reason to scream, even if it were possible.
Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash
By LINDSEY HOSHAW, The New York Times, November 10, 2009
ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.
Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.
But once it does split into pieces, the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions and more of these particles are floating in the world’s trash-filled gyres.
PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemicals cannot dissolve in water, but the plastic absorbs them like a sponge. Fish that feed on plankton ingest the tiny plastic particles. Scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation say that fish tissues contain some of the same chemicals as the plastic. The scientists speculate that toxic chemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat.
The researchers say that when a predator — a larger fish or a person — eats the fish that eats the plastic, that predator may be transferring toxins to its own tissues, and in greater concentrations since toxins from multiple food sources can accumulate in the body.
Charles Moore found the Pacific garbage patch by accident 12 years ago, when he came upon it on his way back from a sailing race in Hawaii. As captain, Mr. Moore ferried three researchers, his first mate and a journalist here this summer in his 10th scientific trip to the site. He is convinced that several similar garbage patches remain to be discovered.
“Anywhere you really look for it, you’re going to see it,” he said.
Many scientists believe there is a garbage patch off the coast of Japan and another in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Bonnie Monteleone, a University of North Carolina, Wilmington, graduate student researching a master’s thesis on plastic accumulation in the ocean, visited the Sargasso Sea in late spring and the Pacific garbage patch with Mr. Moore this summer.
“I saw much higher concentrations of trash in the Pacific garbage patch than in the Sargasso,” Ms. Monteleone said, while acknowledging that she might not have found the Atlantic gyre.
Ms. Monteleone, a volunteer crew member on Mr. Moore’s ship, kept hoping she would see at least one sample taken from the Pacific garbage patch without any trash in it. “Just one area — just one,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to see. But everywhere had plastic.”
The Pacific garbage patch gained prominence after three independent marine research organizations visited it this summer. One of them, Project Kaisei, based in San Francisco, is trying to devise ways to clean up the patch by turning plastic into diesel fuel.
Environmentalists and celebrities are using the patch to promote their own causes. The actor Ted Danson’s nonprofit group Oceana designated Mr. Moore a hero for his work on the patch. Another Hollywood figure, Edward Norton, narrated a public-service announcement about plastic bags, which make their way out to the patch.
Mr. Moore, however, is the first person to have pursued serious scientific research by sampling the garbage patch. In 1999, he dedicated the Algalita foundation to studying it. Now the foundation examines plastic debris and takes samples of polluted water off the California coast and across the Pacific Ocean. By dragging a fine mesh net behind his research vessel Alguita, a 50-foot aluminum catamaran, Mr. Moore is able to collect small plastic fragments.
Researchers measure the amount of plastic in each sample and calculate the weight of each fragment. They also test the tissues of any fish caught in the nets to measure for toxic chemicals. One rainbow runner from a previous voyage had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.
The research team has not tested the most recent catch for toxic chemicals, but the water samples show that the amount of plastic in the gyre and the larger Pacific is increasing. Water samples from February contained twice as much plastic as samples from a decade ago.
“This is not the garbage patch I knew in 1999,” Mr. Moore said. “This is a totally different animal.”
For the captain’s first mate, Jeffery Ernst, the patch was “just a reminder that there’s nowhere that isn’t affected by humanity.”
Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists.
By PERRI KLASS, M.D., The New York Times, November 10, 2009
When I tell nonmedical friends that our clinic is vaccinating children against the H1N1 flu virus, here is what they say.
With about half, it is something like: “Oh, my God, our doctor doesn’t have it! Can you get me a dose?” And with the other half, it is something like, “Oh, my God, that brand-new vaccine — do you really think it’s safe?”
There is a peculiar duality in the collective cultural mind just now, a kind of pandemic doublethink. Other doctors I know are all eagerly having their own children immunized. Many are answering frantic calls from people desperate for the vaccine. But at the same time, we are all coming up against parents who are determined to refuse that same vaccine.
Wondering what history might have to say about this incongruous state of affairs, I called David M. Oshinsky, a professor of history at the University of Texas who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Polio: An American Story” (Oxford, 2005). Dr. Oshinsky compared the current vaccination campaign with two previous situations.
In 1947, a man newly arrived in New York City from Mexico died of smallpox. The authorities “lined up the entire city” and vaccinated everyone, even those who had already been vaccinated, Dr. Oshinsky said. “The entire city was revaccinated,” he added, “and there was no real resistance. People had a sense of risk versus reward and listened to public health officials.”
Then there were the polio vaccine trials of 1954, in which parents volunteered more than a million children to receive either an experimental vaccine or a placebo. And while they trusted the medical profession much more than parents do now, there was another factor, Dr. Oshinsky said: “They also had lived through virulent epidemics. That to me is probably the biggest issue of all. You’re dealing with parents who’ve never seen a smallpox epidemic, a polio epidemic.”
Few doctors now practicing have ever seen a single case of smallpox, much less an epidemic (thanks to vaccination). But when pediatricians look at today’s strain of H1N1, we tend to be good and scared.
Serious cases of this flu are relatively rare but far from unheard of; more than 100 children have died of H1N1. The deaths seem to occur disproportionately in children and pregnant women.
So we give the H1N1 vaccine to children whose parents are almost tearfully afraid of the virus, and we try to win over those parents who are just as tearfully afraid of the vaccine. To them, we explain over and over that in fact this is not a brand-new vaccine — it is made with the same techniques as the seasonal influenza vaccine. Yes, it has been tested. Yes, it’s safe. Yes, it’s effective.
“When I gave a discussion to a group of parents at my daughter’s day care,” said my friend Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, the San Francisco public health director, “I counseled parents who were worried about the risks of vaccination to give their children — if healthy — the nasal vaccine, because what don’t our children put up their noses?
“Given the variety of viruses that our children are exposed to through their noses, it’s very hard to imagine how the vaccination could be that different. I think a lot of people were comforted by that.”
Such is the ambivalence out there that some parents who were once scared of getting the vaccine are now scared of not getting it. “I’m still seeing both ends of this dichotomy,” said Dr. John Snyder, a pediatrician at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan, adding, “It’s a really interesting moment. I can’t recall anything like this before.”
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk in the pediatrics department at Vanderbilt University. Tennessee was hit hard by H1N1 in September and October, before vaccine was available.
“I’ve seen some pretty healthy kids that got sick really quick with no underlying identified diagnoses,” said Dr. Gregory Plemmons, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt. He spoke of children who needed lots of oxygen, who developed fluid collections in their chests and who stayed in the hospital for days and days.
There had been some tragic and terrifying deaths; I read the news articles about a kindergartner — healthy boy, no asthma, no heart disease — who died at Vanderbilt in early September, and the subsequent meetings held at his school with crowds of worried parents, about the sanitizing of the school and the wiping down of the district’s 600 school buses.
There was no H1N1 vaccine available in early September, but Dr. Plemmons said his clinic had recently received a limited supply. “I think there’s some parents that are clamoring for it, some that are fearful that the vaccine is just as dangerous as the actual disease,” he said.
Dr. Paul A. Offit, chief of infectious diseases at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, has written extensively about vaccines and the antivaccine movement. The H1N1 vaccine has 60 years of experience and technology behind it, he said; it’s safe, it’s clearly effective — and yet many people still have difficulty “figuring out where the real risks lie.”
Dr. Offit wondered if people were more comfortable with sins of omission than of commission. Rather than inject a foreign substance into your body, he went on, “you’ll take your chances with a natural virus infection, which may or may not kill you.”
We are not seeing an epidemic of devastating disease, at least not now. But we are seeing a lot of infections with a virus against which children have no immunity, and which has already caused more deaths in children under 5 than we would see in years of regular seasonal flu.
The divided public mood about H1N1 — fear of vaccine and fear that there won’t be enough of it — reminds Dr. Offit of a joke Woody Allen tells in “Annie Hall.” One woman complains that the food at a Catskills resort is terrible, and her friend agrees: “And such small portions!”
So yes, I’m scared. I worry about H1N1 when a young child with cough and fever shows up; I worry about not being able to pick out that healthy child who may go on to get very sick, very fast. That is your basic pediatric nightmare: How do we judge which children are likely to get better and which few may get much sicker, and even die? That is why I find myself trying to offer parents exactly what I want for my own children: vaccine, protection, immunity.
In the clinic, we advise parents to have their children immunized, especially those with asthma or other chronic problems. “People all over the city are begging for this vaccine,” I heard another doctor tell a mother. “We’re incredibly lucky that we have it.”
Observatory: North American Origins for the Falklands Wolf
By HENRY FOUNTAIN, The New York Times, November 10, 2009
The Falklands wolf has puzzled evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin first encountered it during the voyage of the Beagle in the 1830s. It was the only native land mammal on the Falkland Islands, which are 300 miles off the coast of Argentina. No one knew how it got there or what mainland animals it was descended from — and it did not help that the wolf was hunted to extinction by 1876.
But using genetic analysis, Graham J. Slater, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues have solved some of the mystery. The closest living relative of the Falklands wolf, they write in Current Biology, is a South American species, but the two diverged in North America.
The researchers obtained snippets of DNA from five museum specimens, looked at variations among the samples and compared them with DNA from living species. They were able to build a family tree and a timeline of when the various branches diverged.
Earlier studies of the Falklands wolf had suggested it was related to foxes, but the DNA work showed the closest living relative to be another South American canid, the maned wolf.
Dr. Slater said the research showed that the maned wolf and the Falklands wolf last had a common ancestor six million years ago. “But canids didn’t show up in South America until two and a half million years ago,” he said, after the isthmus of Panama was formed. He said it was quite likely that the two species evolved in North America and then, faced with increasing competition from canids that entered the continent from Asia, “managed to survive by going to South America.”
Dr. Slater said the research also partly answered how the wolves got to the Falklands. They could not have been brought to the islands by ancient peoples, as some researchers suggested, because the most recent common ancestor of the five samples studied lived at least 70,000 years ago, long before humans arrived. Instead, he said, the wolves must have floated over on vegetation or ice floes.
Mind: A Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain
By BENEDICT CAREY, The New York Times, November 10, 2009
It’s snowing heavily, and everyone in the backyard is in a swimsuit, at some kind of party: Mom, Dad, the high school principal, there’s even an ex-girlfriend. And is that Elvis, over by the piñata?
Uh-oh.
Dreams are so rich and have such an authentic feeling that scientists have long assumed they must have a crucial psychological purpose. To Freud, dreaming provided a playground for the unconscious mind; to Jung, it was a stage where the psyche’s archetypes acted out primal themes. Newer theories hold that dreams help the brain to consolidate emotional memories or to work though current problems, like divorce and work frustrations.
Yet what if the primary purpose of dreaming isn’t psychological at all?
In a paper published last month in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Dr. J. Allan Hobson, a psychiatrist and longtime sleep researcher at Harvard, argues that the main function of rapid-eye-movement sleep, or REM, when most dreaming occurs, is physiological. The brain is warming its circuits, anticipating the sights and sounds and emotions of waking.
“It helps explain a lot of things, like why people forget so many dreams,” Dr. Hobson said in an interview. “It’s like jogging; the body doesn’t remember every step, but it knows it has exercised. It has been tuned up. It’s the same idea here: dreams are tuning the mind for conscious awareness.”
Drawing on work of his own and others, Dr. Hobson argues that dreaming is a parallel state of consciousness that is continually running but normally suppressed during waking. The idea is a prominent example of how neuroscience is altering assumptions about everyday (or every-night) brain functions.
“Most people who have studied dreams start out with some predetermined psychological ideas and try to make dreaming fit those,” said Dr. Mark Mahowald, a neurologist who is director of the sleep disorders program at Hennepin County Medical Center, in Minneapolis. “What I like about this new paper is that he doesn’t make any assumptions about what dreaming is doing.”
The paper has already stirred controversy and discussion among Freudians, therapists and other researchers, including neuroscientists. Dr. Rodolfo Llinás, a neurologist and physiologist at New York University, called Dr. Hobson’s reasoning impressive but said it was not the only physiological interpretation of dreams.
“I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” said Dr. Llinás, who makes the case in the book “I of the Vortex: From Neurons to Self” (M.I.T., 2001). Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels — the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.
These novel ideas about dreaming are based partly on basic findings about REM sleep. In evolutionary terms, REM appears to be a recent development; it is detectable in humans and other warm-blooded mammals and birds. And studies suggest that REM makes its appearance very early in life — in the third trimester for humans, well before a developing child has experience or imagery to fill out a dream.
In studies, scientists have found evidence that REM activity helps the brain build neural connections, particularly in its visual areas. The developing fetus may be “seeing” something, in terms of brain activity, long before the eyes ever open — the developing brain drawing on innate, biological models of space and time, like an internal virtual-reality machine. Full-on dreams, in the usual sense of the word, come much later. Their content, in this view, is a kind of crude test run for what the coming day may hold.
None of this is to say that dreams are devoid of meaning. Anyone who can remember a vivid dream knows that at times the strange nighttime scenes reflect real hopes and anxieties: the young teacher who finds himself naked at the lectern; the new mother in front of an empty crib, frantic in her imagined loss.
But people can read almost anything into the dreams that they remember, and they do exactly that. In a recent study of more than 1,000 people, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and Harvard found strong biases in the interpretations of dreams. For instance, the participants tended to attach more significance to a negative dream if it was about someone they disliked, and more to a positive dream if it was about a friend.
In fact, research suggests that only about 20 percent of dreams contain people or places that the dreamer has encountered. Most images appear to be unique to a single dream.
Scientists know this because some people have the ability to watch their own dreams as observers, without waking up. This state of consciousness, called lucid dreaming, is itself something a mystery — and a staple of New Age and ancient mystics. But it is a real phenomenon, one in which Dr. Hobson finds strong support for his argument for dreams as a physiological warm-up before waking.
In dozens of studies, researchers have brought people into the laboratory and trained them to dream lucidly. They do this with a variety of techniques, including auto-suggestion as head meets pillow (“I will be aware when I dream; I will observe”) and teaching telltale signs of dreaming (the light switches don’t work; levitation is possible; it is often impossible to scream).
Lucid dreaming occurs during a mixed state of consciousness, sleep researchers say — a heavy dose of REM with a sprinkling of waking awareness. “This is just one kind of mixed state, but there are whole variety of them,” Dr. Mahowald said. Sleepwalking and night terrors, he said, represent mixtures of muscle activation and non-REM sleep. Attacks of narcolepsy reflect an infringement of REM on normal daytime alertness.
In study published in September in the journal Sleep, Ursula Voss of J. W. Goethe-University in Frankfurt led a team that analyzed brain waves during REM sleep, waking and lucid dreaming. It found that lucid dreaming had elements of REM and of waking — most notably in the frontal areas of the brain, which are quiet during normal dreaming. Dr. Hobson was a co-author on the paper.
“You are seeing this split brain in action,” he said. “This tells me that there are these two systems, and that in fact they can be running at the same time.”
Researchers have a way to go before they can confirm or fill out this working hypothesis. But the payoffs could extend beyond a deeper understanding of the sleeping brain. People who struggle with schizophrenia suffer delusions of unknown origin. Dr. Hobson suggests that these flights of imagination may be related to an abnormal activation of a dreaming consciousness. “Let the dreamer awake, and you will see psychosis,” Jung said.
For everyone else, the idea of dreams as a kind of sound check for the brain may bring some comfort, as well. That ominous dream of people gathered on the lawn for some strange party? Probably meaningless.
No reason to scream, even if it were possible.
Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash
By LINDSEY HOSHAW, The New York Times, November 10, 2009
ABOARD THE ALGUITA, 1,000 miles northeast of Hawaii — In this remote patch of the Pacific Ocean, hundreds of miles from any national boundary, the detritus of human life is collecting in a swirling current so large that it defies precise measurement.
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one — an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.
Scientists say the garbage patch is just one of five that may be caught in giant gyres scattered around the world’s oceans. Abandoned fishing gear like buoys, fishing line and nets account for some of the waste, but other items come from land after washing into storm drains and out to sea.
Plastic is the most common refuse in the patch because it is lightweight, durable and an omnipresent, disposable product in both advanced and developing societies. It can float along for hundreds of miles before being caught in a gyre and then, over time, breaking down.
But once it does split into pieces, the fragments look like confetti in the water. Millions, billions, trillions and more of these particles are floating in the world’s trash-filled gyres.
PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemicals cannot dissolve in water, but the plastic absorbs them like a sponge. Fish that feed on plankton ingest the tiny plastic particles. Scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation say that fish tissues contain some of the same chemicals as the plastic. The scientists speculate that toxic chemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat.
The researchers say that when a predator — a larger fish or a person — eats the fish that eats the plastic, that predator may be transferring toxins to its own tissues, and in greater concentrations since toxins from multiple food sources can accumulate in the body.
Charles Moore found the Pacific garbage patch by accident 12 years ago, when he came upon it on his way back from a sailing race in Hawaii. As captain, Mr. Moore ferried three researchers, his first mate and a journalist here this summer in his 10th scientific trip to the site. He is convinced that several similar garbage patches remain to be discovered.
“Anywhere you really look for it, you’re going to see it,” he said.
Many scientists believe there is a garbage patch off the coast of Japan and another in the Sargasso Sea, in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
Bonnie Monteleone, a University of North Carolina, Wilmington, graduate student researching a master’s thesis on plastic accumulation in the ocean, visited the Sargasso Sea in late spring and the Pacific garbage patch with Mr. Moore this summer.
“I saw much higher concentrations of trash in the Pacific garbage patch than in the Sargasso,” Ms. Monteleone said, while acknowledging that she might not have found the Atlantic gyre.
Ms. Monteleone, a volunteer crew member on Mr. Moore’s ship, kept hoping she would see at least one sample taken from the Pacific garbage patch without any trash in it. “Just one area — just one,” she said. “That’s all I wanted to see. But everywhere had plastic.”
The Pacific garbage patch gained prominence after three independent marine research organizations visited it this summer. One of them, Project Kaisei, based in San Francisco, is trying to devise ways to clean up the patch by turning plastic into diesel fuel.
Environmentalists and celebrities are using the patch to promote their own causes. The actor Ted Danson’s nonprofit group Oceana designated Mr. Moore a hero for his work on the patch. Another Hollywood figure, Edward Norton, narrated a public-service announcement about plastic bags, which make their way out to the patch.
Mr. Moore, however, is the first person to have pursued serious scientific research by sampling the garbage patch. In 1999, he dedicated the Algalita foundation to studying it. Now the foundation examines plastic debris and takes samples of polluted water off the California coast and across the Pacific Ocean. By dragging a fine mesh net behind his research vessel Alguita, a 50-foot aluminum catamaran, Mr. Moore is able to collect small plastic fragments.
Researchers measure the amount of plastic in each sample and calculate the weight of each fragment. They also test the tissues of any fish caught in the nets to measure for toxic chemicals. One rainbow runner from a previous voyage had 84 pieces of plastic in its stomach.
The research team has not tested the most recent catch for toxic chemicals, but the water samples show that the amount of plastic in the gyre and the larger Pacific is increasing. Water samples from February contained twice as much plastic as samples from a decade ago.
“This is not the garbage patch I knew in 1999,” Mr. Moore said. “This is a totally different animal.”
For the captain’s first mate, Jeffery Ernst, the patch was “just a reminder that there’s nowhere that isn’t affected by humanity.”
Travel expenses were paid in part by readers of Spot.Us, a nonprofit Web project that supports freelance journalists.
