The sleeping pups continued to twitch exactly as before.
He surgically removed the rats’ cortex-the brain region, involved in visual imagery and conscious experience, where dreams were believed to originate-leaving only the brain stem, which controls subconscious bodily functions, intact. So why were their eyes-and their whiskers, limbs, and tails-twitching hundreds of thousands of times each day?īlumberg decided to put the dream-debris theory to the test. But the rat pups were just days old their eyelids were still sealed shut, and they’d never seen anything. Why spend so much time in REM before you have anything to dream about? According to the dominant theory, the rats’ twitching eyes were supposedly looking around at dream scenery. But a baby in the womb hasn’t had any experiences. In adults, dreams are offshoots of waking life: we have experiences, then we dream about them. Increasingly, these facts struck Blumberg as odd. Once born, babies continue to spend an unusual amount of time in REM, often sleeping for sixteen hours a day and dreaming for eight. When a mother feels her baby kick, it may be because the baby is in REM sleep. But fetuses, by the third trimester, are in REM for around twenty hours a day-researchers using ultrasound can see their eyes flitting to and fro-and their whole bodies seem to twitch. Human adults spend only about two hours of each night in REM sleep. They’re dream debris-outward hints of an inner drama. During REM sleep, they say, our bodies are paralyzed to prevent us from acting out our dreams the twitches are the movements that slip through the cracks. Neuroscientists have long had an explanation for our somnolent twitches. It’s typically during REM sleep that we have our most vivid dreams. People, he knew, also twitch during sleep: our muscles contract to make small, sharp movements, and our closed eyes dart from side to side in a phenomenon known as rapid eye movement, or REM. He had often seen his dogs twitch their paws while asleep. Blumberg knew that the animals were fine. Blumberg was then on the cusp of forty the rats were newborns, and jerked and spasmed as they slept. In the late nineteen-nineties, a neuroscientist named Mark Blumberg stood in a lab at the University of Iowa watching a litter of sleeping rats.
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