At the University of Chicago in 1951, a student named Eugene Aserinsky was conducting experiments on wakefulness and sleep under Professor Nathaniel Kleitman. (Papanek 22) While studying sleeping infants, Aserinsky noticed that jerky motions of the eyes under closed lids frequently accompanied periodic body shifts. He decided to measure movements of the infants’ eye muscles using

The notion that REM could be a crucial ingredient in the learning process gained momentum during the 1970’s following the work of Boston psychiatrist Ramon Greenberg and Chester Pearlman. (Greier 11) In the laboratory, Greenberg and Pearlman deprived rats and mice of REM sleep while training the animals to run through a variety of mazes. The researchers discovered that while REM loss caused test rodents to perform only slightly worse on simple routines that they had already mastered, it had a markedly adverse impact on the animals’ ability to carry out more complex tasks or to learn new ones, of whatever degree of complexity. Greenberg and Pearlman noted that the same pattern appeared to be true with people. Human volunteers who went without REM sleep could perform routine activities without much trouble but had much greater difficulty tackling complicated word memorizing tasks. This finding led the psychiatrists to conclude that the mind is doing serious work when it dreams. It is incorporating newly learned information into a long-term memory bank. According to this theory, REM may thus be critical in stimulating the development of associative thought in infants and young children. The theory would also explain why humans, who must constantly adapt to meet new challenges, exhibit so much REM activity. REM sleep may give the brain the opportunity to analyze and file the day’s events, update its probrams, or discard useless information. During REM sleep certain connections among neurons are strengthened while others are weakened or lost. The electrical changes in the sleeping brain are accompanied by changes in the activity of certain neurotransmitters The neurons containing norepinephrin fire less frequently during the early stages of slow-wave sleep and do not fire at all during the REM stage. During waking and during emotional arousal, they show increased activity. The norepinephrin-containing neurons make up less than one percent of the cells in the brain, and their cell bodies are concentrated in the brain stem. They have far-reaching effects through their connections with many different parts of the brain. (Poole 346)

Many ideas of why REM sleep exists have been published. One group of scientists speculated that dreams make the mind alert and able to sense possible danger while the body is resting. (Hammon 5) According to this view, REM serves as a kind of sentinel, keeping the nervous system tuned up and ready to respond to external threats.(Greier 10) Other scientists thought that REM activity might be a vestigial behavior, perhaps inherited from an earlier stage of evolution, no longer of specific use for human beings. In the mid-1960’s, a psychiatrist named Howard Roffwarg, and Columbia University in New York, suggested that nervous activity during REM sleep helps to stimulate the developing brain in very young children, thus promoting the growth of neural connections necessary for learning. In adults, according to Roffwarg, REM serves, like physical exercise, to maintain tone in the central nervous system.

When a person falls asleep for the first time at night, his or her eyes remain fairly relaxed for about 45 minutes as the brain moves deeper and deeper, through all the stages of sleep. (Rose 42) Then the process reverses itself, and the sleeping brain moves back up through the levels. But then, instead of ascending from stage 2 into stage 1, the brain shifts into a different phase. At this point pens recording eye movements jerk across the page and the mysterious REM period begins. REM sleep initially lasts for only twenty minutes, and the deep sleep recurs. REM sleep recurs for a longer period of time and is followed by another phase of a deeper level of sleep. As night passes, the levels of deep sleep become longer and longer. Over the course of a night, four or five periods of REM sleep occur. Four or f

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