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When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping. These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about. During this phase, now called “REM sleep,” people tended to have vivid dreams. Maybe, Kleitman suggested, the eye movements reflected “where and at what the dreamer was looking” in their virtual world.
Several researchers tested this “scanning hypothesis” in the ’50s and ’60s by waking sleeping volunteers when their eyes twitched and asking them what they had just dreamed. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these crude methods failed to produce consistent results.
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