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Mind + Body

The ancient Roman poet Juvenal is credited with coining the phrase mens sana in corpore sano (a sound mind in a sound body). In this issue of Search + Discover, University of Minnesota faculty members address the mind-body connection, including:

whether dreams have meaning
our perception of physical beauty
the effects of abuse on psychological development
the roots of schizophrenia

Plus, you can explore further reading and related links.

Do dreams have meaning?

Gold diamond graphic. Not likely, according to Mark Mahowald, director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center and professor of Neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School — although he admits there are two very different schools of thought.

“Some say that dreams have psychiatric or symbolic significance, or that they play a role in personality formation, problem solving or conflict resolution,” he says. “I maintain that dreams are the result of random brain activity while we sleep.”

According to Mahowald, dreams don’t appear to serve a biological purpose; thus it is highly unlikely that dreams themselves have meaning.

“All physiologic phenomena that serve an evolutionary function impart some survival or reproductive advantage to a species. There is absolutely no evidence that dreaming serves an evolutionary function—instead, it’s a byproduct of a physiologic phenomenon that does have functional significance: sleep,” he says.

Since much of that activity is generated in the brain’s memory centers, dreams may have the semblance of logic or meaning, but no scientific evidence exists to support the idea.

Instead, argues Mahowald, meaning is attributed after the fact — and only to the few dreams that sleepers remember and view as significant. Research has discounted the notion that dreams occur only during REM or “dream sleep,” demonstrating instead that everyone dreams nearly all the time while sleeping. The sheer volume of dreams, coupled with the arbitrary nature in which they are recalled, argue against any inherent meaning.

“The brain as a whole is active during sleep, and during REM sleep it’s even more active than during wakefulness. What we experience as dreams may well be the result of our brains trying to make sense of this activity,” he says. “The primary determinant as to whether we remember a dream is waking up during it—most of the time our sleeping mind is a self-erasing tape,” he says. “And people have very selective memories—the dreams we think have merit we remember while discounting the others.”

Mark Mahowald is director of the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center and professor of neurology at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Gold diamond graphic. It depends on what is meant by meaning, suggests Eric Klinger, professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota Morris.

“The current popular theory in dream psychology is Hobson and McCarley’s activation-synthesis theory. The idea is that during sleep the brain periodically—at random intervals—produces spikes in its activity (the ‘activation’ part of the theory’s title). These discharges generate sudden sensations, such as mental pictures and sounds, which form the perceptual core of dreams,” says Klinger.

“These sensations are random and meaningless, but people tend to interpret them in relation to their own lives (the ‘synthesis’ part of the theory’s title), thus giving them coherence and personal meaning.”

Klinger says the idea that dreams are completely random and lack meaning is inaccurate on two counts. One, the interpretations that people give their brain discharges are part of what they experience as their dreams. Because these syntheses draw on people’s views of themselves and the world, they do have personal meaning. Two, research conducted by Klinger and others demonstrates that dream content can be influenced by factors other than the brain discharges themselves and the purely associative pathways that Hobson and McCarley thought produced dream syntheses. Those other factors can include the dreamer’s personal goals, as well as words related to their personal goals that are played for them during sleep. They even include presleep instructions to dream about goal-related themes — in other words, even intention can influence dreams.

“Inevitably, there are similarities in dream themes among people in different cultures, because all people have similar core needs and emotions,” says Klinger. “However, there are also differences in the specific forms that dreams take.

“There is little hard evidence that any given dream symbol has the same meaning for everyone, but suggesting that meaning is inherent in the dreamer and not the dream is a false dichotomy. The dream is of the dreamer—it takes its meaning from its relationship to the dreamer’s goals and knowledge of self and the world.”

Eric Klinger is a Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Minnesota Morris.

Given "beauty is in the eye of the beholder," if you had three people in a room, would they visually appear the same to each person?

Although determining whether three people in a room visually see each other in exactly the same way is “one of the unanswerable questions in psychology and philosophy,” University Psychology Professor Ellen Berscheid says the three will likely agree on the subject of beauty.

"Beholders, whether they are male or female, of the same or different race or age, tend to agree on whether the beheld, whether male or female or of same or different race or age, is physically attractive or unattractive,” Berscheid says.

In the late 1960s, researchers at the University of Minnesota pioneered the first research on physical attractiveness and its importance to a person’s life, Berscheid says. Subsequent studies across the country helped define which characteristics lend to a person’s beauty.

One researcher determined that people who are deemed the most beautiful are those whose features most reflect the population average. In her research, she placed composite photos on top of one another and found that faces made up of the most photos were seen as the most beautiful.

“It makes good sense from an evolutionary point of view because people whose physical characteristics are very deviant from those in the general population are more likely to carry a mutation that would be harmful,” Berscheid says.

Other researchers found that symmetrical features are an important component of being considered attractive or beautiful.

While there is some controversy within the psychology community about what attributes define beauty, Berscheid says, there’s no denying that, for the most part, individuals across all cultures would share a similar opinion of the three people in the room, regardless of age, gender or ethnic origin.

“Although we do not know if the red I see is the same as the red you see,” Berscheid says “we do know that there is considerable agreement on the physical attractiveness of others.”

Ellen Berscheid is a Regents’ Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota. Her work includes research on attraction and close relationships.

If a human being spends the first 18 years of their life being abused emotionally, physically or sexually, will they ever become normal?

"The question of whether it is possible to function well despite a history of trauma or abuse falls under the topic of ’resilience.’ In the last two decades a great deal has been learned about how such positive functioning or recovery can occur in the face of adversity.

"In our own research, for example, we began by examining a group of women who, despite being abused in childhood, were providing adequate care for their children and certainly not abusing them. We compared them to a group of women who were perpetuating the cycle of abuse. Three factors stood out: those who broke the cycle more often had an alternative, consistently loving adult who cared for them in childhood; they more often had therapy of some duration in childhood; and they very much more often had a supportive partner now.

"Since this early study, we as well as others have gone on to show that, in general, when individuals do well in the face of such adversity, it is because either they have a positive foundation for dealing with the adversity or they have current supports, or both. Resilience is not a mystery, nor is it something that some children just have by magic.

"For most of us, there are both positive features of our past lives and difficult, even traumatic, features. Growth comes by capitalizing on current supports and opportunities to link up with the past, positive features. It is true that the more adversity we have experienced—the more intense, frequent, and prolonged—the more difficult it is to overcome the past.

"Our research shows that change toward healthy functioning can happen at any age, even in adulthood, yet the longer difficulties persist the more challenging change becomes. Put another way, the more negative our histories, the more help and support we now need. Certain situations and events will be more stressful or threatening for some of us than for others. That would mean that some of us need more support and more frequent support than others. One cannot erase the past. But neither is history destiny."

Professors Alan Sroufe and Byron Egeland are lead researchers for the Parent-Child Project in the Institute of Child Development.

What causes schizophrenia?

"Schizophrenia is a severe and complicated psychiatric illness that affects 1 percent of the population and has its onset of symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions in late adolescence and early adulthood,” says Dr. S. Charles Schulz, who heads the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Minnesota.

"At this time, no single cause of schizophrenia is known. However, most experts in the field think that the illness is caused by a combination of genetic/biologic predispositions that interact with environmental stressors leading to the onset of the illness. Researchers are hard at work trying to understand the genetic risk factors with energy equal to those investigators trying to understand the genetic risk factors for other serious illnesses such as breast cancer and diabetes.

"However, the National Institutes of Health have recently released a request for more research to study the environmental factors—those associated with substance abuse or those associated with stress—that may interact with biologic factors leading to schizophrenia and other psychiatric illnesses.

"For example, recent reports have come from Europe that indicate there is an increased risk of the development of schizophrenia associated with marijuana use at an early age. Further studies to understand the environmental risk factors may assist those of us working in the field of mental health to diminish risk factors in susceptible individuals.

"Other researchers, including those at the University of Minnesota, have utilized new brain imaging techniques to better understand how the brain is functioning. Such investigators aim to understand brain characteristics to get to the fundamentals of the illness."

S. Charles Schulz, M.D., is a professor and head of the University of Minnesota Department of Psychiatry.

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