Michel Jouvet

French medical researcher, an Emeritus Professor of Experimental Medicine at the University of Lyon. He spent one year in the laboratory of the Horace Magoun in Long Beach, California in 1955. Since this date, he undertook research of experimental neurophysiology in the Faculty of Medicine of Lyon and of Clinical Neurophysiology in the Neurological Hospital of Lyon.

He described the electroencephalogram signs of cerebral death in 1959, and in 1961 categorized sleep into two different states: telencephalic (slow wave) sleep and rhombencephalic sleep (paradoxical sleep, known as REM sleep in English-language writings on the subject).

In "The Paradox of Sleep" (MIT Press, 1999) Jouvet proposed the speculative theory that the purpose of dreaming is a kind of iterative neurological programming that works to preserve an individual's psychological heredity, the basis of personality.

He was elected in 1977 to the French Academy of Sciences and received the Intra-Sciences Prize in the United States in 1981 and the Prize of the Foundation for the Medical Research in 1983. In 1991 he was awarded the prestigious Prix mondial Cino Del Duca. His works, and those of his team, have brought about the discovery of paradoxical sleep and its individualisation as the third state of functioning of the brain in 1959, to the discovery of its phylogenesis, of its ontogenesis and its main mechanisms.

Jouvet was the researcher who first developed the analeptic drug Modafinil.

He died in the early hours of 3 October 2017, aged 91, in Villeurbanne, France.