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Scientists Never Dreamed Finding Would Shape a Half-Century of Sleep Research
Lynne Lamberg
JAMA. 2003;290:2652-2654.
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| Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings. |
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Anyone who closely observes a sleeping human baby or adult, even a household pet, can see eyes occasionally dart beneath closed lids.
Anyone can see that, but one would have to watch many sleepers closely for hours to spot a pattern. No one reported doing that until 1953, when Eugene Aserinsky, PhD, and Nathaniel Kleitman, PhD, of the University of Chicago, published their landmark article, "Regularly occurring periods of eye motility, and concomitant phenomena during sleep" (Science. 1953;118:273-274).
In a 7-hour nighttime sleep episode, they wrote, adults experienced three to four periods of rapid, jerky, symmetrical eye movements, lasting a mean of 20 minutes. Cortical activity, respiration, and heart rate increased at these times. Waking 10 sleepers just after they had rapid eye movements (REMs) almost always elicited reports of complex dreams involving visual imagery. Waking the same sleepers at times of ocular quiescence rarely did.
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