| In the early 1950s, Eugene Aserinsky, who was then a graduate student at the University of Chicago, made a remarkable serendipitous discovery. Initially, Aserinsky was intent on studying slow, rolling eye movements in infants while they slept in the hope he could uncover a relationship between eye activity and sleep depth. During the long arduous hours of observing the sleeping infants, Aserinsky noted that there were periods when the eyes were quiescent and other times when they exhibited bursts of movement. The eye movement bursts seemed to be associated with a lack of body movement. |  Psychology Test: Your Sleeping Posture is ... |
Aserinsky along with Nathaniel Kleitman decided to explore this phenomenon more systematically, this time using adults as subjects instead of infants. However, unlike infants, adults would obviously have trouble falling asleep in a lighted room. In order to get around this difficulty, Aserinsky and Kleitman decided to attach electrodes to their subjects and record their eye movements with an electroencephalograph. They also recorded their subjects' brain waves, pulse and respiration.
What they found was that the rapid eye movements, which I just described, occurred periodically and in conjunction with a number of physiological changes. For example the brain waves exhibited low voltage and fast activity, and heart and pulse rates seemed to speed up. As Kleitman later described it, "These changes suggested some sort of emotional disturbance, such as might be caused by dream." It's interesting to note that George Ladd, a philosopher at Yale University, had some seven decades earlier suggested that dreams might be associated with movement of eyes! On the basis of introspection, he postulated that when we dream our eyes move much as they do during the waking state, while when we are not dreaming, our eyes remain quiescent.
In order to investigate the possibility that these periods of rapid eye movement sleep were in fact related to dream, Aserinsky and Kleitman, and later Bill Dement awakened subjects in the midst of the REM periods. They were able to elicit dream recall from approximately seventy percent of those awakenings. Since then numerous investigators have succeeded in replicating these findings in many laboratories throughout the world. Although the amount of dream recall obtained from REM sleep is now a well-substantiated phenomenon.
1.Sleep by J. Allan Hobson
| "I slept and dreamed that life was beauty. I awoke -- and found that life was duty." |
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Ellen Stugis Hooper
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Sleep
