Aserinsky, Eugene

It was the combination of EEG and EOG that enabled Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman to make their 1953 discovery of brain activation in sleep. They called the brain activation phase of sleep REM (for rapid eye movements) because of the association of the activation of the eye movements (oculomotor activation) with activation of the brain. They asserted that dreaming might be another associated event. It was the EMG (together with the EEG and EOG) that allowed Michel Jouvet and Francois Michel to show that muscle tone supporting posture - and hence postural movement - was actively abolished in REM sleep. 

Eugene Aserinsky was interested in studying attention in children, so sleep was a nuisance to him because, no matter how hard he tried... 

The human newborn baby offers one of the best opportunities to observe REM behaviour directly. This is not only because REM occurs at sleep onset (as Eugene Aserinsky noticed in the young... 

One of the discoverers of rapid eye movement sleep, Eugene Aserinsky, died because he fell asleep while driving. This suggests that conducting research on sleep does not guarantee long or good sleep. 

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