Allan Rechtschaffen, Distinguished Sleep Researcher, dies at 93

Unable to find the cause of death, they added, “this is why the sleep function itself is a hard nut to crack.”

Allan Rechtschaffen was born in Manhattan on December 8, 1927 and moved to the Bronx as a teenager. His parents were Jewish immigrants from the state of Galicia, which was then the Austro-Hungarian empire. His father, Philip, a tailor, was from Kalusz in what is now Ukraine; his mother, Sylvia (Jaeger) Rechtshaffen, a homemaker, also came from Bolechow, Ukraine.

Previously, Allan was smitten by journalism, first at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked for the student newspaper, and then at the City College of New York, where he first studied. However, he later switched to psychology, earning three degrees in the subject: a bachelor’s and master’s degree and a doctorate from CCNY in 1949 and 1951. from Northwestern University in 1956.

He went on to teach psychology at Northwestern and was a research psychologist at Chicago’s Veterans Administration (now the Department of Veterans Affairs) before being hired by the University of Chicago in 1957.

Professor Rechtschaffen added to sleep research, the discoverer of REM, Dr. It started in the same laboratory space, in an old building used by Kleitman. (Dr. Kleitman’s only advice to himself was to “clean up in the morning.”) He later expanded the laboratory and conducted research on humans, mice, cats, crocodiles, and turtles there. Ms. Rechtschaffen said that Persons for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sometimes called her home in the middle of the night to protest their experiments.

One day in the 1960s, he had a dream that someone he knew looked different than he had when he was awake. He asked her to start a study to see if dream images were detected by stimulating the retina. Three volunteers were brought to his lab, where his pupils were dilated and his eyes were taped.

While the subjects were asleep—and monitored by electroencephalograms and eye movement recordings—Professor Rechtschaffen sneaked into the room and put various images in front of their taped open eyes. When they awoke, they described their dreams, but did not report seeing any of the images displayed in them.