Sleep

…Sleep, anaesthesia, hibernation and dissociative states are examined from molecular and circuit mechanisms through animal and human behaviour. Discussions connect experimental neuroscience with disorders of consciousness, recovery after general anaesthesia and the therapeutic potential of anaesthetic- and psychedelic-induced states. The format emphasizes unpublished findings, extended discussion, posters and interactions between trainees and established researchers. Atten

…vocal communication, social behavior, sleep, and neural dynamics. The role combines bird behavior, high-density electrophysiology, optical imaging, closed-loop stimulation, custom instrument development, and Python or MATLAB analysis, with later opportunities to support human EEG and natural-speech studies.

…This role leads computational work on sleep within a multiscale CREST BioDX collaboration with Kaoru Inokuchi and Tatsuya Haga. Analytical approaches draw on statistical physics and information theory, alongside mathematical models of learning and memory. The postdoctoral category is for researchers within five years of their doctorate; the research-scientist category is for more experienced doctorate holders. The appointment is at RIKEN’s Wako campus, with annual renewal

Investigate how sleep shapes human perception and cognition using MRI and EEG. The appointment includes development of methods for three-tesla and seven-tesla MRI and multimodal studies of the sleeping brain.

…between visual behaviour, arousal and sleep. Huberman is a neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University.

…and cortex, especially during sleep, and its relationship to learning, memory and navigation. He explains how AI models can help investigate these dynamics, alongside questions about model systems, cognitive maps and the relationship between neuroscience experiments and theory.

…questions, including what studies of sleep reveal about the relationship between observation and explanation.

…relationships among criticality, sleep and neural manifolds, drawing on their review of the experimental literature.

Sleep is an active state critical for processing emotional memories encoded during waking in both humans and animals. There is a remarkable overlap between the brain structures and circuits active during sleep, particularly rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, and the those encoding emotions. Accordingly, disruptions in sleep quality or quantity, including REM sleep, are often associated with, and precede the onset of, nearly all affective psychiatric and mood disorders. In this context, a major biomedical challenge is to better understand the underlying mechanisms of the relationship between (REM)

…and cortex coordinate during sleep. We aimed to test these predictions by answering the following questions: 1) Can replay be detected in V1 during sleep?

…Evidence from rest and sleep suggests that apparently inactive periods support reorganization, new inferences and shortcuts across experience, helping explain how knowledge becomes more useful over time.

Sleep supports learning both by preparing the brain to encode information and by stabilizing memories afterward. This seminar examines the brain activity involved in sleep-dependent consolidation and how those mechanisms change across the lifespan, from childhood into older age.

Behavioural unresponsiveness during sleep does not imply that information processing stops. This seminar examines which responses to outside stimuli and internal memories persist, which are lost, and how the remaining cognitive abilities affect sleep quality and its functions.

There is no consensus on if sleep is for the brain, body or both. But the difference in how we feel following disrupted sleep or having a good night of continuous sleep is striking. Understanding how and why we sleep will likely give insights into many aspects of health. In this talk I will outline our recent work on how the prefrontal cortex can signal to the hypothalamus to regulate sleep preparatory behaviours and sleep itself, and how other brain regions, including the ventral tegmental area, respond to psychosocial stress to induce beneficial sleep. I will also outline our work on examin

Human sleep is a complex physiological process necessary for the organisms’ restoration and the correct functioning of the brain. Insufficient sleep is an under-reported epidemic with sleep disturbances being common early signs of neurodegeneration, in particular of Parkinson’s Disease (PD). Clinical research is currently challenging the assumption that human sleep is a one-fits-all phenomenon: breaking new grounds into sleep research is needed. In this scenario, the European Research Council PathFinder Open project NAP proposes a new science-toward-technology paradigm enabling the study of hu

Sleep is an essential process observed throughout the animal kingdom, and it is important for memory consolidation. Coordinated neuronal activity occurs during sleep, characterized by distinct events across different sleep states. Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep features slow oscillations, delta waves, thalamocortical spindles and hippocampal sharp waves-ripples, while REM sleep is dominated by hippocampal theta oscillations and ponto-geniculo-occipital (PGO) waves, or pontine waves (“P-waves”) in rodents. Even though their origin from mesopontine cholinergic and glutamatergic nuclei is kn

How do our brains monitor the environment during sleep? Traditional views consider sleep a disconnected state. Yet, neural processing of sensory information persists, albeit resulting in different perceptual experiences compared to wakefulness. Here, we investigated the neural temporal lobe circuits underlying auditory processing during wake and sleep and how sleep physiology affects the processing of auditory stimuli. This was accomplished through the investigation of intracranial electrophysiological responses to pure-tone auditory stimulation (Panel A) in 18 neurosurgical patients with medi

Sleep is a physiological state often associated with a cutoff from the external world, and especially loss of conscious perception of sensory stimuli. Even though brain signatures of sleep have been studied for years, the mechanisms that prevent sensory information from reaching consciousness remain to be elucidated. Recently published findings suggest that the loss of perception experienced in anesthesia may be due to neurons population activity coding of stimuli in the cortex collapsing into the spontaneous activity subspace, therefore reflecting internally generated dynamics rather than evo

Memory consolidation is promoted by sleep. However, there is also evidence for consolidation into long-term memory during wakefulness via processes that preferentially affect nonhippocampal representations. We compared, in rats, the effects of 2-h postencoding periods of sleep and wakefulness on the formation of long-term memory for objects and their associated environmental contexts. We employed a novel-object recognition (NOR) task, using object exploration and exploratory rearing as behavioral indicators of these memories. Remote recall testing (after 1 wk) confirmed significant long-term N

Sleep is vital, but its benefits are unknown. One hypothesis posits that sleep is an antioxidant defence mechanism. Indeed, reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been shown to accumulate during prolonged waking, and experimentally increasing the ROS load of the brain induces sleep. In Drosophila melanogaster, a crucial ROS sensor in sleep-promoting dorsal fan-shaped body neurons (dFBNs) is the β-subunit, termed Hyperkinetic (Hk), of the voltage-gated potassium channel Shaker. Oxidation of a stably bound NADPH cofactor causes conformational changes in the channel, which increase dFBN activity. dFB

The consolidation of long-term memory is thought to critically rely on sleep. However, first evidence from a study in drosophila suggests that hunger as another brain state can benefit memory consolidation as well. Here, we report two human (within-subjects crossover) experiments examining the effects of fasting (versus satiated conditions) during a 10-hour post-encoding consolidation period on later recall of declarative and procedural memories in healthy men. In Experiment 1, participants (n = 16), after an 18.5-hour fasting period, encoded 3 memory tasks (verbal word paired associates, a vi

As the use of cannabinol, often marketed as a sleep aid, is increasing, we aimed to investigate the effect of this substance on sleep. We evaluated the effect of a low dose (1 mg/kg) of cannabinol in rats using electrocorticography and electromyography. Three groups were compared: rats that received saline, vehicle (1% Tween-80 dissolved in saline), and cannabinol dissolved in vehicle. We recorded data for 24 hours after a single injection, and for 7 days with injections taking place every day. Cannabinol decreased the percentage of time spent in non-REM sleep at different times across the day

The interaction between sleep function and memory processing is widely observed in both animals and humans, especially in how sleep supports memory consolidation and forgetting. However, whether memory activity during sleep has any regulatory effect on sleep processes is poorly investigated. Here we find that sensory stimuli-triggered emotional memory reactivation significantly affects sleep strategies after learning, as negative memory promotes alertness in sleep while positive memory protects sleep from perturbation. By combining EEG/EMG recording and engram cell activity tracing, our data r

Sleep is ubiquitous in the animal kingdom, yet our understanding of its possible functions, its control and evolution, remains rudimentary. Two main sleep states have traditionally been distinguished in mammals ­– rapid-eye-movement (REM, also paradoxical or “dream sleep”) and slow-wave (SW, also non-REM) sleep – but biphasic sleep is widespread, also exists in birds and non-avian reptiles, suggesting a possibly common origin. Studying sleep in the Australian dragon Pogona vitticeps, we have previously described a reptilian homologue of the mammalian claustrum and its role in generating activi