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 phase. The prospect that well-known neurological aspects of REM do not themselves cause dreaming suggests the need to re-examine the neurobiology of dreaming "per se". Some researchers (Dement, Hobson, Jouvet, for example) tend to resist the idea of disconnecting dreaming from REM sleep. After waking from REM sleep, the mind seems “hyperassociative”—more receptive to semantic priming effects. People awakened from REM have performed better on tasks like anagrams and creative problem solving. Sleep aids the process by which creativity forms associative elements into new combinations that are useful or meet some requirement. This occurs in REM sleep rather than in