During REM sleep, a researcher records irregular bursts of neural activity beginning in a small structure in Aisha's brainstem. A clock is ticking beside her bed, but no sound from the room appears in her dream. When woken, Aisha reports that she was choosing food in a supermarket when the shelves became railway carriages and carried her into a classroom.
Name the small structure in Aisha's brainstem where the bursts of neural activity began.
State the term used in Activation Synthesis Theory for the random neural firing recorded by the researcher.
Give one reason why the sound of the clock did not appear in Aisha's dream.
According to Activation Synthesis Theory, state how Aisha's brain turned the irregular activity into a sequence of events.
81 exam-style questions on OCR GCSE Psychology 6.2 Theories/Explanations: The Nature of Dreaming, covering 6.2.1 Freudian dreaming: unconscious and repression, 6.2.2 Freudian dreaming: wish fulfilment and dream content; criticisms, 6.2.3 Freudian Theory research study: Freud (1918), 6.2.4 Activation Synthesis: REM sleep and the brain, 6.2.5 Activation Synthesis: pons, cortex and synthesis; criticisms, and 6.2.6 Activation Synthesis research study: Williams et al. (1992). Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.