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Independent thinker charts nocturnal journeys |
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ESCONDIDO ---- David Goodman studies the brain like a scientist from another century. In this age of multi-million dollar taxpayer-funded institutional research, he sticks out.
He holds a doctorate in neuroscience from the University of California, Irvine, but works alone surrounded by avocado and lime trees in the hills above Escondido.
"He’s a bona-fide genius," said his friend David Plotner, an eye surgeon in Escondido. "But he’s a little hard to keep up with."
Goodman has kept detailed records of his dreams for more than 25 years and has identified cycles in their themes. In the modest converted trailer he calls home, Goodman has stacks of hundreds of spiral-bound notebooks with records of his last 22,000 dreams. He’s trained himself to wake up three to five times per night and to record the exact time.
Goodman combines aspects of research from the 19th century and the 21st. He has the lone-wolf approach of a 19th century independent investigator, like Gregor Mendel cultivating peas at a secluded monastery. But to ultimately validate his ideas about how the brain works, he depends on the hope that other scientists could back up his theories with sophisticated brain imaging and computer analysis.
"Is there still a definitive role for the tinkerer driven by curiosity for personal satisfaction?" he asked rhetorically last week.
Dreams fall into four categories, Goodman theorizes. Categories of dreams ---- intellect, power/influence, danger/self-doubt and adventure/tension ---- follow each other in separate dreams that come in phases of equal duration and unvarying order. A dream from 2001 in which Goodman is a star athlete falls into the power/influence category, for example, but one in which he is teased for having a squeaky voice falls into the third, danger/self-doubt. He has spotted similar patterns in the recorded dream journals of others that he’s downloaded from the Internet.
In his case, the cycles lasted about 28 days when he started his self-recording experiment in 1977, but they’ve sped up over time, to about 18 days per cycle in the 1980s and then more dramatically to 1.25 days in the 1990s. He’s also detected other daily and weekly cycles embedded in his dream journals.
"If there are principles to this oscillation, maybe I could create a standard that other neuroscientists can refer to," he said.
Goodman thinks that the cycles of dream theme correspond to cycles of chemical activity in the brain, and that studying the cycles would open up a treasure of information about the brain’s inner machinery. For example, the cycles could explain why some anti-depressant drugs take weeks to take effect, Goodman said. They could also provide a glimpse into a question debated by Freud, Jung and today’s neuroscientists: What purpose do dreams serve?
"We can view dreams as manifestations of four ways of previewing problems," Goodman wrote in a paper presenting his work.
Dream research has evolved from the turn of the last century, when Freud postulated that dreams represent an unfulfilled wish, frequently sexual. The late Francis Crick, the DNA pioneer who later studied vision and consciousness at the Salk Institute, suggested in the 1980s that dreams represent "garbage collection," getting rid of inessential facts. More recently, Matthew Wilson, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has argued based on his 2001 animal research that dream activity helps the brain sort through recent memories and cement them into place.
In the late 1960s, Goodman performed graduate research on biological cycles in the salamander. He lectured at UC Irvine Extension, worked briefly for the Veteran’s Administration in Los Angeles and for a pharmaceutical company in Newport Beach, but says he became disgusted with the hype-driven drug business.
To isolate himself from effects that would disturb his dream cycles, he resolved to live alone, without an alarm clock and without changing time zones.
"I proceeded to live on a shoestring for the next 20 years," he said.
He makes some money by writing -- he’s written pamphlets on avoiding drug addiction -- and from "private benefactors," he said.
So far, Goodman’s work hasn’t received much attention from neuroscientists at research universities. Last month, he set up a poster presentation describing his theories at the San Diego Society for Neuroscience meeting, which he’s been attending since 1995. He was trying to interest other researchers in his data, hoping to do follow-up studies that could monitor the brain’s rhythms of electrical activity or chemistry.
"Most people think inside the box," he said. "They don’t know what to do with someone like me."
Goodman wrote in an 2003 article in The Scientist that his mainstream colleagues tell him his work "is ahead of its time," but also "seems flaky" and needs to be replicated by a more reputable group with more subjects.
But a few say that his work could point the way to other scientists.
"What’s so admirable about his work is that nobody has kept systematic dream records for so long a time," said Daniel Kripke, a professor of psychiatry at UCSD who studies the influence of light on brain cycles. "Sometimes this kind of work can show things we haven’t seen before," he said.
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