Beginning in 1937, Moruzzi studied under
Frederic Bremer at the Neurophysiologic Institute at the
University of Brussels. He then worked at the Neurophysiological Institute of Cambridge under
Edgar Adrian, where the pair became known for recording discharges from single motor neurons in the
pyramidal tracts. In the years following
World War II, many European scientists relocated to the United States. Moruzzi came to
Northwestern University to work with a brain scientist named Steven Ranson. Once at Northwestern, Moruzzi met
Horace Winchell Magoun and
Donald B. Lindsley, and they worked to elucidate the neural processes responsible for wakefulness. Until the 1940s, some scientists felt like wakefulness simply required an adequate level of sensory input rather than a specific process inside the brain. In a 1949 experiment with a cat, Moruzzi and Magoun proved that stimulation of a certain brain region (near the intersection of the
pons and
midbrain) created a state of alertness. This stimulated area of the brain became known as the reticular activating system or reticular formation. In their experiments, Moruzzi and Magoun also transected the cat's reticular formation without disrupting any of the sensory nerves; the cat was rendered comatose. The experiment shifted science's conception of sleep from a passive process to one that was actively controlled by the brain. ==Death==