In 1950, Robert Lawson had a short letter published in the prestigious science magazine Nature. But, the letter did not detail a series of rigorous and highly controlled experiments as you might expect to find in such a publication. Instead it described a casual observation made by a train passenger.

Lawson had been sitting opposite a man and his wife on a long train journey. Instead of doing a crossword or looking out of the window, he began to causally observe how many times the couple blinked while their eyes were open (awake) and how many time their eyelids moved when their eyes were shut. Having watched them for some time, he noticed that when their eyes were shut there was a point at which there were no eyelids movements at all. He assumed that they must have moved from resting with eyes shut to being asleep. As there seemed to be a distinct point at which the movements stopped he reasoned that the transition from awake (with eyes shut) to asleep was sudden since there was not a gradual decrease in eye movements.

Lawson’s letter caught the attention of the famous sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman. He asked his student Eugene Aserinsky to investigate the link between eye movements and sleep and Aserinsky set about designing a series of more formal/systematic observations. Eventually, the idea of rapid eye movement sleep was discovered. William Dement (another famous sleep researcher) and Nathaniel Kleitman went onto devise a very well known experiment which revealed the link between REM sleep and the subjective experience of dreaming. The researchers used an EEG machine to determine whether their sleeping participants were in REM or NREM sleep (the IV) and then woke them up with the sound of a loud door bell. Participants were asked whether they had been dreaming or not (the DV) and to describe any dream they were having. They concluded that dreaming was more common in REM than nREM sleep.

This story demonstrates how casual or informal observations can inspire systematic and formal experiments in which researcher seeks to demonstrate causal relationships between IVs and DVs.

Remember to keep your eyes and ears open – pay attention to what is happening around you and don’t forget to ask yourself why?! Good science starts with observations in the real world. Be alert, be curious, beware – you’re acting like a scientist!

Lawson, R. (1950). Blinking and Sleep. Nature 165, 81–82. https://doi.org/10.1038/165081b0