ANDRZEJ KRAUZEPrefrontal leucotomies—surgeries to cut a section of white matter in the front of the brain, thus severing the frontal lobe’s connections to other brain regions—were all the rage through the 1950s as treatments for psychoses. The operations drastically altered the mental state of most patients. But along with personality changes, dulled initiative, and reduced imagination came a seemingly innocuous effect of many of these procedures: the patients stopped dreaming.
Mark Solms, a neuropsychologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa, uncovered the correlation in historical data from around the globe as part of a long-term study to assess the impact, on dreams and dreaming, of damage to different parts of the brain. Between 1985 and 1995, Solms interviewed 332 of his own patients at hospitals in Johannesburg and London who had various types of brain trauma, asking them about their nightly experiences.
Solms identified two brain regions that appeared critical for the experience of dreaming. The first was at the junction of the parietal, temporal, and occipital lobes—a cortical area that supports spatial cognition and mental imagery. The second was the ventromesial quadrant of the frontal lobes, a lump of white matter ...
