Person
Robert McCarley
Harvard psychiatrist who co-developed the activation-synthesis hypothesis with John Allan Hobson.
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Robert W. McCarley, MD, (1937–2017) was chair and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the VA Boston Healthcare System. He was also Director of the Laboratory of Neuroscience located at the Brockton VA Medical Center and the McLean Hospital. McCarley was a prominent researcher in the field of sleep and dreaming as well as schizophrenia.
McCarley graduated from Harvard College in 1959 and Harvard Medical School in 1964. During his residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, he studied with J. Allan Hobson. In 1977, Hobson and McCarley developed the activation synthesis theory of dreaming that said that dreams do not have meanings and are the result of the brain attempting to make sense of random neuronal firing in the cortex. McCarley has extensively studied the brainstem mechanisms that control REM sleep. Additionally, he has studied the buildup of adenosine in the basal forebrain following sleep deprivation.
In the area of schizophrenia, McCarley studied brain abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia. McCarley and Martha Shenton published a classic paper in 1992 that described a relationship in a reduction in the volume of the left superior temporal gyrus and thought disorder in patients with schizophrenia.
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