Rapid eye movement sleep in the brains of sleeping cats. In 1944, Ohlmeyer reported 90-minute ultradian sleep cycles involving male erections lasting for 25 minutes. At University of Chicago in 1952, Eugene Aserinsky, Nathaniel Kleitman, and William C. Dement, discovered phases of rapid eye movement during sleep, and connected these to dreaming. Their article was published September 10, 1953. Aserinsky, then Kleitman, first observed the eye movements and accompanying neuroelectrical activity in their own children. William Dement advanced the study of REM deprivation, with experiments in which subjects were awoken every time their EEG indicated the beginning of REM sleep. He published "The Effect
Rapid eye movement sleep of Dream Deprivation" in June 1960. ("REM deprivation" has become the more common term following subsequent research indicating the possibility of non-REM dreaming.) Neurosurgical experiments by Michel Jouvet and others in the following two decades added an understanding of atonia and suggested the importance of the pontine tegmentum (dorsolateral pons) in enabling and regulating paradoxical sleep. Jouvet and others found that damaging the reticular formation of the brainstem inhibited this type of sleep. Jouvet coined the name “paradoxical sleep” in 1959 and in 1962 published results indicating that it could occur in a cat with its entire forebrain removed. Hiroki