A Centenary Tribute to Michel Jouvet (1925-2017)

Today we honour Prof. Michel Jouvet (1925–2017), a pioneer and unchallenged leader in the field of sleep research, as we approach the centenary of his birth on 16 November. His most remarkable discoveries reside in the definition of the electroencephalographic (EEG) characteristics of brain death (irreversible coma), and the identification of the third state of the brain, i.e., “Paradoxical Sleep”.

To honour this centenary, we share a tribute written by his long-time colleague and friend, Prof. Vladimir Kovalzon:

“Professor Michel Jouvet was a leading neurophysiologist and somnologist of the second half of the 20th century, effectively the “father” of European somnology, to whom it owes most of its astonishing discoveries. Professor Jouvet was the pride of France, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a laureate of numerous national and international scientific awards, and was repeatedly nominated for the Nobel Prize, which he never received. However, it is worth remembering that such great 20th-century scientists in the fields of physiology and medicine as Sigmund Freud, Walter Cannon, and Hans Selye also failed to win the Nobel Prize.

Jouvet was one of the first to observe and record the electrophysiological manifestations of paradoxical (rapid eye movement, or REM) sleep in cats in the late 1950s. He coined the term “paradoxical sleep” based on the paradoxical combination of extremely high brain activity and deep inhibition of the spinal cord motor neurons. However, it was Jouvet who truly understood the discovery and created a new paradigm. According to Jouvet, paradoxical sleep is neither classical sleep nor wakefulness, but a special, third state of the body, a kind of “active wakefulness directed inward.”

In the following years, Jouvet succeeded in transforming his laboratory into the largest in Europe and one of the world’s leading centres for the experimental and clinical study of sleep, particularly the paradoxical phase. He and his colleagues studied and thoroughly described the entire phenomenology of paradoxical sleep, its anatomical basis, neurophysiological, biochemical, ontogenetic, and phylogenetic aspects, and more.

Michel Jouvet himself was almost a legendary figure; his own life also quite interesting, eventful, and full of comic and dramatic episodes, one of which nearly cost him his career and is described in the Bulletin of the World Federation of Sleep Research Societies (1998). Overall, despite the enormous contributions of Jouvet, his colleagues, and other somnologists of the second half of the last century to deciphering the mechanisms of paradoxical sleep and, consequently, dreams, the questions of “why” and “what for” remain unanswered. This answer will undoubtedly be provided sooner or later by neurophysiologists and somnologists of the 21st century. The foundation of Jouvet’s worldview is a belief in the limitless power of the cognitive mind, capable ultimately of knowing itself.

Vladimir Kovalzon”