Learning genetic determination

To help the reader understand the reasons for this emphasis on the brain, we now turn our attention to two specific disorders of sleep and dreaming that illustrate, respectively, a genetically determined predisposition to experience dreamlike consciousness in waking (narcolepsy) and an acquired tendency to express dream behavior in sleep (REM sleep behavior disorder). The existence of these clear abnormalities emphasizes what we have learned earlier in the chapter about the normal difficulty we have in containing dreaming to consciousness within sleep. 

A major effort in contemporary olfactory research has focused upon determining the genetic basis of odours of individuality in mice with both major urinary proteins (MUPs) and the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) believed to provide a contribution to discriminable individual differences (Singer, Beauchamp and Yamazaki 1997 Hurst and Beynon 2004). Many of these studies utilized instrumental conditioning tasks in which the animals were rewarded for learning to discriminate between odours. While these experiments demonstrate what an animal... 

We have learned a great deal about the role of genetics in determining the safety and efficacy of drug therapy and the molecular... 

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