![]() Before REM, it was assumed that sleep was a passive state absent stimulation, the brain simply switched off at night like a desk lamp. REM opened the terra incognita of the sleeping brain to scientific exploration. His now-classic paper, coauthored by advisor Kleitman, was less important for what it revealed than what it began. ![]() As Tom Roth, the former editor of the journal Sleep, put it: “It’s analogous to going to Mars with a third of the Earth’s surface still unexplored.” The REM state is so important that some scientists have designated it a “third state of being” (after wakefulness and sleep), yet the phenomenon itself remained hidden in plain sight until September 1953, when the experiments conducted in Chicago by Aserinsky were published. It remains an astonishing anachronism in the history of science that Watson and Crick unraveled the structure of DNA before virtually anything was known about the physiological condition in which people spend one-third of their lives. The association of a certain stage of sleep with dreaming might have been described by any number of observant cave men in fact, if the 17,000-year-old Lascaux cave painting of a presumably dreaming Cro-Magnon hunter with an erect penis is any indication, maybe it was.īut scientists had long been blinkered by preconceptions about the sleeping brain. The two-page paper is a fine example of the maxim that the eye can see only what the mind knows: for thousands of years the physical clues of REM sleep were baldly visible to anyone who ever gazed at the eyelids of a napping child or studied the twitching paws of a sleeping dog. The existence of rapid eye movement (REM) and its correlation with dreaming was announced 50 years ago last month in a brief, little-noted report in the journal Science. What was going on? Yet another problem with the infernal machine? Aserinsky didn’t know what to think, standing in bewildered excitement, on the threshold of a great discovery. But Armond’s eyes were closed the boy was fast asleep. Aserinsky went in to check on his son, expecting to find him wide awake. While the long banner of graph paper unfurled, Aserinsky noticed that the pens tracking his son’s eye movements-as well as the pens registering brain activity-were swinging back and forth, suggesting Armond was alert and looking around. The hours crept by in the spooky gray-stone gloom of Abbott Hall. Money was so tight Aserinsky would eventually have to accept a small loan from his dissertation advisor, Nathaniel Kleitman, and then be obliged to feign enthusiasm for the distinguished man’s suggestion that he economize by eating chicken necks. They lived on campus in a converted Army barracks heated by a kerosene stove. His wife, Sylvia, was pregnant with their second child. He had nothing but a high school degree to fall back on. He was a graduate student in physiology, and his future was riding on this research. When he was not in his lab coat, he usually wore a bow tie and a dark suit. He was 30 years old, a trim, handsome man of medium height, with black hair, a mustache, blue eyes and the mien of a bullfighter. Sustained by pretzels and coffee, Aserinsky sat at a desk under the hellish red eyes of a gargoyle-shaped lamp. ![]() And then it was lights out, the sharp smell of acetone lingering in the darkness.Īrmond fell asleep his father tried not to. ![]() The ink pens jumped in concert with the boy’s eyes. From the adjacent room, Aserinsky calibrated the machine, telling Armond to look left, right, up and down. And now, late one December evening in 1951, his 8-year-old son, Armond, came over to the lab and sat patiently on an Army cot while his father scrubbed his scalp and the skin around his eyes with acetone, taped electrodes to the boy’s head and plugged the leads into a switch box over the bed. He had tinkered with it long enough to think it might not be totally unreliable. He’d dragged an ancient brain-wave machine, an Offner Dynograph, from the basement to the physiology lab on the second floor of Abbott Hall at the University of Chicago. Night after night Eugene Aserinsky had been working late.
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