Michel Jouvet

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Michel Jouvet, 2017

Michel Jouvet (born November 16, 1925 in Lons-le-Saunier , † October 3, 2017 in Villeurbanne ) was a French neuroscientist and dream researcher . Most recently, he was Professor Emeritus of Experimental Medicine at the Medical Faculty of the University of Lyon .

Life

Michel Jouvet, one of two sons from a medical family, trained in neurosurgery with Paul Wertheimer in Lyon . His real occupation with neuroscience began after a stay in 1955 in Horace Magoun's laboratory at VA Hospital (Veterans Affairs) in Long Beach . After his return he did research as a scientist at the CNRS and was later research director of the CNRS at the University of Lyon and the Neurological Clinic in Lyon.

In 1959 he described the EEG signals in brain death. Jouvet helped create the concept of REM sleep in the late 1950s and early 1960s . In 1961 he divided the sleep phases into telencephalic (shallow sleep phase) and rhombencephalic (REM sleep, which he called the paradoxical sleep phase), the latter, according to him , being the third state of the brain. In 1962 he and his colleagues located the pons as part of the brain that controls the phases of sleep. In experiments on cats, he showed that REM sleep is only possible with intact pons and that atony in REM sleep is caused by inhibition of the motor centers in the medulla oblongata . With his colleagues, he also researched the different phases of sleep in a wide variety of animal species.

He advocated a speculative theory ( The paradox of sleep , 1999) that the REM phase is a kind of iterative programming of the brain to maintain the person's psychological identity.

In 1989 he received the CNRS gold medal . From 1977 he was a member of the Académie des Sciences . In 1981 he received the Intra-Sciences Prize, in 1991 the Prix ​​mondial Cino Del Duca and in 1983 the Prize of the Foundation for the Medical Research. In 1993 he was accepted as a full member of the Academia Europaea .

Fonts

  • Neurophysiology des états de sommeil , Paris, CNRS, 1965 (Italian translation La Natura del Sogno , Rome 1991)
  • Le sommeil et le rêve , Paris, Odile Jacob, 1992.
  • Le château des songes , Paris, Odile Jacob, 1992.
  • Le Grenier des rêves , Paris, Odile Jacob, 1997.
  • Où, quand, comment: Pourquoi rêvons-nous, pourquoi dormons-nous? , Paris, Odile Jacob, 2000.
  • The paradox of sleep: the story of dreaming , MIT Press 1999
  • The states of sleep , Scientific American, February 1967, online

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michel Jouvet, le "sorcier du sommeil", est mort , accessed on October 3, 2017
  2. ↑ Described in Jouvet La naissance du concept de sommeil paradoxal comme troisième état du cerveau , University of Lyon 2001 . REM sleep was originally discovered by Nathaniel Kleitman in Chicago and Eugene Asorinsky around 1953.
  3. ^ Review of The paradox of sleep by John Sutton 2001
  4. ↑ Directory of members: Michel Jouvet. Academia Europaea, accessed September 5, 2017 .
personal data
SURNAME Jouvet, Michel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French neuroscientist
DATE OF BIRTH November 16, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH Lons-le-Saunier
DATE OF DEATH 3rd October 2017
Place of death Villeurbanne