Eugene Aserinsky

Yes, 1953 is the watershed moment.

The Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman discovery.

That's the one.

Aserinsky was a graduate student in Kleitman's lab, and he was actually studying attention in children, not even sleep specifically.

Oh, really? I didn't realize that.

Yeah.

Just to see what happened when the kid slept.

Right.

Pickwickian syndrome is now recognized as a form of obesity hypoventilation syndrome, which is related to but distinct from obstructive conditions.

The first formal laboratory was established by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, where they discovered REM.

Their work opened the door to understanding the different stages and eventually to studying how snoring and breathing disorders vary across those stages.

William Dement, a student of Kleitman's, went on to establish the Stanford Disorders Clinic in 1970, one of the first clinical centers dedicated to diagnosing and treating such conditions.

They actually are moving more because they are spending more time in lighter stages.

The connection between these stages and body movement was first described in detail after the discovery of REM sleep in nineteen fifty-three by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky at the University of Chicago.

Before their work, sleep was generally considered a single uniform state of unconsciousness, and the idea that it had a complex internal architecture was not widely recognized.

Kleitman is sometimes called the father of modern sleep research.

Once accepted, however, the EEG became the indispensable tool of rest research, and it remains the gold standard for measuring brain states more than nine decades after its invention.

The discovery of REM in nineteen fifty-three by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago revolutionized the field by revealing that rest contains distinct stages with very different patterns of brain activity.

Aserinsky, a graduate student at the time who was initially assigned the unglamorous task of watching resting infants, noticed that the infants' eyes moved rapidly at certain intervals during rest, darting back and forth beneath closed eyelids in bursts that lasted several minutes.

Intrigued, Aserinsky and his mentor Kleitman extended the observation to adult subjects and found the same rapid eye movements, and when they woke subjects during these periods, the subjects frequently reported vivid, narrative dreams.

This discovery overturned the prevailing view that rest was a uniform state of reduced brain activity and opened the door to understanding the complex, multi-stage architecture of a night's rest, revealing it to be as structured and dynamic as wakefulness itself.

The discovery of melatonin in nineteen fifty-eight by Aaron Lerner, a dermatologist at Yale University, was an accidental byproduct of his research on skin pigmentation.

Pickwickian syndrome is now recognized as a form of obesity hypoventilation syndrome, which is related to but distinct from obstructive conditions.

The first formal laboratory was established by Nathaniel Kleitman and Eugene Aserinsky at the University of Chicago in the early 1950s, where they discovered REM.

Their work opened the door to understanding the different stages and eventually to studying how snoring and breathing disorders vary across those stages.

William Dement, a student of Kleitman's, went on to establish the Stanford Disorders Clinic in 1970, one of the first clinical centers dedicated to diagnosing and treating such conditions.

Most of that activity takes place during a stage called rapid eye movement, or REM, which was first identified in 1953.

The scientists who discovered it were Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and his advisor, Nathaniel Kleitman.

Aserinsky noticed the rapid eye movements while monitoring his eight-year-old son with an electroencephalograph, a machine that records electrical activity in the brain.

When he woke subjects during those REM periods, they almost always reported vivid dreams.

Stream now on CBC Gem.

The discovery of REM in 1953 by Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman at the University of Chicago revolutionized the field by revealing that rest contains distinct stages with very different patterns of brain activity.

Aserinsky, a graduate student at the time who was initially assigned the unglamorous task of watching resting infants, noticed that the infant's eyes moved rapidly at certain intervals during rest, darting back and forth beneath closed eyelids in bursts that lasted several minutes.

Intrigued, Aserinsky and his mentor Kleitman extended the observation to adult subjects and found the same rapid eye movements, and when they woke subjects during these periods, the subjects frequently reported vivid narrative dreams.

or REM, which was first identified in 1953.

The scientists who discovered it were Eugene Aserinsky, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and his advisor Nathaniel Kleitman.

aserinsky noticed the rapid eye movements while monitoring his eight-year-old son with an electroencephalograph a machine that records electrical activity in the brain when he woke subjects during those rem periods they almost always reported vivid dreams When he woke them during other stages, they rarely did.

REM is sometimes called paradoxical because the brain's electrical activity during that phase closely resembles the pattern seen when a person is fully awake.