IN TERMS of science, 1953 was a remarkable year. Watson and Crick gave DNA its structure. Stanley Miller showed that a spark within an 鈥渁tmosphere鈥� of methane, ammonia and hydrogen created the basic chemicals of life. And Eugene Aserinsky discovered rapid eye movement (REM) in a sleeping subject.
All three discoveries spawned new fields. But while palaeochemistry and molecular biology have gone from strength to strength, sleep science has struggled to make headway. There is still no satisfying answer to the question, 鈥淲hat is sleep for?鈥�
With hindsight, exploring the mind (whether awake or asleep) was always going to be the toughest task. But sleep research had another handicap 鈥� Sigmund Freud. Freud emphasised the unconscious as a place of repressed feelings. From this flowed psychotherapy as a way to release patients from the grip of those feelings. Sleep and dreaming also took on a special role as a hotline to those feelings.
Advertisement
When REM sleep was discovered, the first to realise its significance were psychologists and psychiatrists trained in the Freudian tradition. They saw it as a chance to put psychoanalysis on a scientific footing. Out of this endeavour was born modern sleep research. Today, a handful of those pioneers are revered for their ground-breaking work. As a result, the Freudian tradition lingers on in sleep research.
Here鈥檚 an example. Most sleep researchers think that one of sleep鈥檚 main functions is to 鈥渃onsolidate鈥� memories. A minority disagree. Last month this issue was the subject of a debate at a meeting to mark the 50th anniversary of the discovery of REM. Amid the trading of scientific blows, one researcher invoked psychoanalysis, claiming that Freud had dismissed any link between dreams and memory. Cue lengthy discussion of Freudian theory. No one in the room objected.
This was no isolated incident: Freud was an invisible participant at many of the meeting鈥檚 sessions. That would not matter if Freud had anything to contribute to sleep science, but he hasn鈥檛. The flawless internal logic of psychoanalysis may give it a veneer of scientific rigour, but not one of its major tenets can be falsified by experiment. So, by the gold standard laid down by the philosopher Karl Popper, psychoanalysis is not science. Sleep science needs to escape its Freudian instincts.
New ideas are taking over. An array of scientific techniques, from gene expression to PET scans, are being brought to bear on sleep and dreams (see 鈥淭o sleep, perchance to dream鈥�). Then there is the simple fact that careers rarely last longer than 50 years. That other great philosopher of science, Thomas Kuhn, noted that some entrenched ideas are only overturned when the greybeards at the top of a field retire. Sleep science looks ripe for such a shift.