How A Sleeping Cat Might Have Saved Your Life
Before the mid-20th century, there was not a lot of scientific interest in sleep. After all, science concerned learning about the whole universe — what did being unconscious have to do with it?
However, in the mid-1950’s, Dr. William Dement, who started out with an interest in psychiatry (Freud? Dreams? What do they mean?), began to study the sleeping state of the human brain. He set up a lab with a cot and an EEG machine and would monitor student volunteers, to see what their brains were doing while they were sleeping. He is the one who named the different stages of sleep, including REM (rapid-eye-movement) sleep, during which people were dreaming.
Meanwhile, over in France, Dr. Jouvet was studying cats. Cats will sleep 18-23 hours a day. When he wired the cats up to an EEG, he found what he called “paradoxical sleep.” A lot of the time, cats sleep in the “sphinx” position with their paws curled up in front of them. Their eyes may be closed, slit-like, or even open, and the EEG would show the slow even brainwaves of sleep, but the sleep was light and they were instantly awakened by any change in their environment, i.e., a noise.
However, when cats go fully to sleep, they lie flat, their muscles become completely loose, and you get that beautiful sleeping cat. However, the EEG showed that their brains were wide awake. He called this the paradoxical sleep. Wide awake brain/sleeping cat. He also noticed that their little paws would twitch, and their eyes would move rapidly under their closed eyelids. He even found that he could gently nudge their eyelids open during this sleep, and they wouldn’t wake up!
These two doctors heard about the others’ research and combined their findings to define dreaming as REM sleep — when your brain activity is as active as when awake, but your muscles become paralyzed to keep you from getting up and running around.
So, how could a sleeping cat save your life? Dr. Dement continued on from this foundation research to start the Sleep Research Center at Stanford University — the world’s first sleep research laboratory. He has done research on sleep and sleep disorders. Many people have died of sleep disorders, such as sleep apnea, until his research found out what that was and how it could be treated. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on sleep disorders and their treatment.
If you have a sleep disorder, such as sleep apnea — if you wear a CPAP or use medications for a sleep disorder such as Restless Legs Syndrome — all of this medical research and care was founded on studying sleeping students and sleeping cats.
Dawn Scott loves cats and sells cat furniture, including, fittingly, cat beds at www.cats-loveandcare.com
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