ANDRZEJ KRAUZE
In 1959, two French scientists, Michel Jouvet and François Michel, recorded strange patterns of neural activity in the brainstem of sleeping cats. The brain waves seemed remarkably synced to rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which University of Chicago researchers had connected with dreaming six years earlier. These new brain activity patterns seemed as though they might also correspond with dreaming.
In the 1960s, Jouvet and collaborators showed that cats with a lesion introduced into that same brainstem area—the pons—exhibited odd behavior. Cats displayed REMs as though they were asleep, while reacting to nonexistent prey or predators, pouncing, or hiding. Humans can also experience REMs while dreaming, hallucinating, or even recalling deeply emotional memories while awake. But do humans also exhibit the same patterns of neural ...
