Some of these neurons fire when the mouse turns left others buzz when it turns right. And through a clever experiment involving mice, Scanziani and his colleague Yuta Senzai, who are both neuroscientists at UC San Francisco, think they’ve finally shown that eye twitches are a direct line into an inner dream world.Īs a mouse moves, a group of neurons in its brain tracks the direction of its head, acting like an internal compass. But despite alternative explanations-maybe the movements lubricate the closed eye or arise from random brain activity-the scanning hypothesis remains popular. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these crude methods failed to produce consistent results. Several researchers tested this “ scanning hypothesis” in the ’50s and ’60s by waking sleeping volunteers when their eyes twitched and asking them what they had just dreamed. Maybe, Kleitman suggested, the eye movements reflected “where and at what the dreamer was looking” in their virtual world. During this phase, now called “REM sleep,” people tended to have vivid dreams. In 1953, Eugene Aserinsky and Nathaniel Kleitman identified a special phase of sleep when neurons were abuzz and eyes were shut but flitting about.
These rapid eye movements (or REMs) are so obvious, Scanziani told me, that he can hardly believe that they were described just seven decades ago. When Massimo Scanziani’s daughter was young, he’d often see her eyes twitching beneath her eyelids while she was sleeping.
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