Book Review: Memory and Dreams (George Christos)

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George Christos

MEMORY AND DREAMS

The Creative Human Mind

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Book review by Anthony Campbell. Copyright © Anthony
Campbell (2003).
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George Christos is a physicist by training who now teaches mathematics
at Curtin University of Technology in Perth, Australia. For the past
decade he has been interested in how human memory works, and in this
book he offers his ideas about this, especially in relation to dreaming.

The book has six chapters, which are intended to be partly independent
of one another, so that there is deliberately some repetition. The first
chapter is introductory, with an overview of the territory. The second
is intended for readers with little knowledge of how the brain works; it
gives a brief account of neurons and how they are connected, of the
synaptic gap, and of some neurotransmitters; the main parts of the brain
thought to be involved in memory formation. especially the hippocampus,
are also described.

Chapter 3 presents an account of memory and relates this to models
derived from neural networks. This leads to an important idea for
Christos, which reappears in Chapter 4: that is, that the brain produces
"spurious memories". One current theory about memory is that it depends
on "strange attractors" which can emerge in dynamic systems like neural
networks. According to some theorists these attractors constitute the
basic building blocks of memory. In certain circumstances memories occur
in neural networks which were not stored there intentionally; these are
called spurious memories and Christos believes that they can also occur
in the brain. However, he does not provide much in the way of
psychological evidence for this, though he suggests that they may
explain curious experiences such as déjà vu and jamais vu.

One might think that spurious memories would be something to avoid as
far as possible, but Christos thinks that they are essential for
creativity because they provide the input for new ideas. They seem to be
the seed from which originality arises. This is the theme of Chapter 4,
and it is developed further in Chapter 5 where the role of dreaming is
considered. Some scientists, notably Francis Crick, have proposed that
the function of dreaming is to erase unwanted memories and so to make
the brain more efficient, a process described as "unlearning". Christos
agrees with this up to a point, but he thinks that dreaming also
generates more spurious memories in order to enhance creativity. He has
little sympathy with Freudian or Jungian notions of dream meaning and
symbolism but regards dreaming as serving to "roughen up" the memory
landscape to generate new patterns and new linkages among memories.

The final chapter proposes a theory about sudden infant death syndrome
(SIDS). Approximately one in a thousand live births results in a death
whose cause is unknown, when an apparently healthy infant dies suddenly
and unexpectedly while asleep. This is a diagnosis of exclusion: it is
made when no cause for the death can be found. Numerous explanations
have been suggested but there is no firm agreement about the mechanism
of death in these cases. Christos's hypothesis is that the infant dreams
it is back in the womb, and because it did not need to breathe at that
time it stops breathing. He claims that this theory can explain all the
known facts about SIDS.

As Christos acknowledges, however, it is not enough just to account for
the known facts. A would-be scientific theory should also make
predictions by which it can be tested. This is difficult to do in the
case of SIDS but Christos offers some suggestions. The most useful (and
potentially beneficial) test, he believes, would be to make the
environment as unlike the womb as possible so as not to encourage the
infant to dream of being back in the womb and to remind it that it has
been born. If the theory is right, it follows that attempts to recreate
a womblike environment for infants by wrapping it up firmly or using
apparatus intended to make sounds like those of the mother's heartbeat
are misguided and potentially dangerous. Giving the baby a dummy
(comforter) to suck might be helpful because this would not happen in
the womb, but thumb-sucking is undesirable because fetuses do suck their
thumbs before birth.

Though the book is short it is quite ambitious and tackles a number of
somewhat disparate subjects: memory, dreaming (including lucid dreams),
creativity, and SIDS. It is well written and fairly jargon-free and
provides a useful overview of current thinking about the questions it
deals with, which is interesting whether or not one agrees with the
author's conclusions. The SIDS theory is intriguing though I suspect it
will not gain widespread acceptance. I think the "spurious memory" theme
ought to have been developed at greater length than it is here; for
example, it would be interesting to know whether Christos believes that
it is relevant to the contentious matter of "recovered memories" in
cases of alleged child sexual abuse.

14 November 2003

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%T Memory and dreams
%S The Creative Human Mind
%A George Christos
%I Rutgers University Press
%C New Brunswic, New Jersey and London
%D 2003
%G ISBN 0-8135-3130-6
%P xiii + 235 pp
%K brain and mind
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