<P> In addition to this, Allan Hobson and colleagues came up with the activation - synthesis hypothesis which proposes that dreams are simply the side effects of the neural activity in the brain that produces beta brain waves during REM sleep that are associated with wakefulness . According to this hypothesis, neurons fire periodically during sleep in the lower brain levels and thus send random signals to the cortex . The cortex then synthesizes a dream in reaction to these signals in order to try to make sense of why the brain is sending them . However, the hypothesis does not state that dreams are meaningless, it just downplays the role that emotional factors play in determining dreams . </P> <P> While, historically, the psychoanalytic research tradition was the first to focus on the phenomenon of unconscious mental activity, there is an extensive body of conclusive research and knowledge in contemporary cognitive psychology devoted to the mental activity that is not mediated by conscious awareness . </P> <P> Most of that (cognitive) research on unconscious processes has been done in the mainstream, academic tradition of the information processing paradigm . As opposed to the psychoanalytic tradition, driven by the relatively speculative (in the sense of being hard to empirically verify) theoretical concepts such as the Oedipus complex or Electra complex, the cognitive tradition of research on unconscious processes is based on relatively few theoretical assumptions and is very empirically oriented (i.e., it is mostly data driven). Cognitive research has revealed that automatically, and clearly outside of conscious awareness, individuals register and acquire more information than what they can experience through their conscious thoughts . (See Augusto, 2010, for a recent comprehensive survey .) </P> <P> For example, an extensive line of research conducted by Hasher and Zacks has demonstrated that individuals register information about the frequency of events automatically (i.e., outside of conscious awareness and without engaging conscious information processing resources). Moreover, perceivers do this unintentionally, truly "automatically," regardless of the instructions they receive, and regardless of the information processing goals they have . Interestingly, the ability to unconsciously and relatively accurately tally the frequency of events appears to have little or no relation to the individual's age, education, intelligence, or personality, thus it may represent one of the fundamental building blocks of human orientation in the environment and possibly the acquisition of procedural knowledge and experience, in general . </P>

Who made advances to our understanding of the conscious and unconscious mind