ABSTRACT
Modern lettering tells one the department of experimental medicine which is headed by Professor Michel Jouvet. There is a bright carpet, on the walls there are bright posters showing off flowers, animals and even a nude. The transition from the gloom of the corridors seems quite dramatic. Jouvet himself is in his forties. Michel Jouvet is rather elegant and he enjoys a certain worldly air. In 1900, Freud wrote to his friend Fliess that he wondered if future generations would set up a plaque at his country house, Belle Vue. Magoun was an ardent advocate of reticularism, the doctrine that it is from reticular formation in the brain stem that most brain activity arises. One of the beliefs Jouvet is intense about is that it will be the methods of neurophysiology that will enable us to understand the mind and dreaming. He is at pains to emphasise that he is an experimental neurophysiologist, not a psychologist.
