Jouvet, Michel

Jouvet, M. Michel, F. (1959). Correlations electromyographiques du sommeil chez le chat decortique et mesencephalique chronique. C. R. Soc. Biol. 153, 422-5. 

Jouvet, M. 8c E. Michel (1959). Comptes Rendus des Seeances de la Societe de Biologic etdeses filiales (Paris) 153, 422 25. 

Because it was known by 1960 that the pontine brain stem was crucial to REM sleep generation, it was natural to assume that the newly discovered modulatory elements played an important role in its generation. It was even reasonable, on an a priori basis, that each of the elements had responsibility for one state, viz, dopamine controls waking, serotonin controls slow wave sleep, and norepinephrine controls REM. Early lesion and parenteral pharmacological studies—some even armed with measures of amine concentrations in the brain—gave initial support to this concept. For example, Michel Jouvet produced insomnia in cats by blocking the enzyme that is essential to convert tryptophane into serotonin. He interpreted this result to mean that serotonin was a sleep mediator. 

Bells began to ring in my head I had seen REM sleep without atonia before. It was in Michel Jouvet s lab in the early 1960s, when he and his team were trying to selectively damage the locus coeruleus, which, they mistakenly believed, actively commanded REM. This meant that my neurosurgeon patient probably had a disease process affecting his brain stem, a possibility that had already been raised by his earlier symptoms of sleeplessness and difficulty with balance and coordination. 

We are inclined to assume that it is the slow progress of technological development that impeded scientific advances in studying dreaming. But this is a face-saving sop for those who were so conceptually blinded that they could not imagine the simple experiments that could have led to the brain activation conclusion. As Michel Jouvet shows in his novel Chateau du Reve, most of our vaunted twentieth-century discoveries about sleep could have been made earlier by the most useful scientific instrument of all direct observation. The direct observability of sleep is especially easy to achieve in our infants and children, the very individuals who most dramatically reveal the brain activation of rapid eye movement (REM) in their behaviour. 

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. 

Using the techniques of electrical stimulation and surgical alterations of the brain that led to Moruzzi and Magoun s concept of activation of a reticular system in the brain, the French neurophysiologist Michel Jouvet, working in Lyons from the mid-1950s onward, established once and for all that brain activation did occur and that it occurred spontaneously in sleep. 

Jouvet P, Poggi F, Rabier D, Michel JL, Hubert P, Sposito M, et al. Continuous venovenous haemodia-filtration in the acute phase of neonatal maple syrup urine disease. J Inherit Metab Dis 1997 20 463-72. 

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