Sleep Science Podcast

In this episode, we talk with Professor Chiara Cirelli from the department of Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin. We begin by hearing about how she first got interested in sleep research, and particularly about her time as a medical student at the University of Pisa where she worked on the noradrenergic system using cat models. We then look at the importance of using cross-species models in sleep research with flies, mice, rats and humans. We also discuss the different ways of using ...

In this episode we talk to Professor Manuel Schabus and Professor Kerstin Hoedlmoser from the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Salzburg. In this episode, we discuss their work on the development of sleep-in babies, first discussing what baby sleep is like and how it differs from older children and adults in regard to activity and sleep stages and specifically sleep spindles and why we think this is. We also look at the difficulties of recording sleep i...

In this episode, we interviewed Colin Espie, one of the world’s leading authorities on sleep and insomnia. Colin is Professor in Sleep Medicine at the University of Oxford, and Clinical Director of the Experimental & Clinical Sleep Medicine Programme, Sleep & Circadian Neurosciences Institute, again at the University of Oxford. Professor Espie talks about sleep problems, explains why actively focusing on getting more sleep is not the best way to combat these issues. ...

In this episode, we talk to Dr Tristan Bekinschtein from the Cambridge Consciousness and Cognition Lab and discuss his research looking into the boundary between consciousness and unconsciousness. We talk about his work in the loss of consciousness in vegetative state patients, sedation and sleep and his findings regarding brain markers which indicate when we change between these two states. We also discuss his research showing that people tend to neglect the left side of the wor...

Today's episode is a little bit different. We're marking the end of our first season by roping in the rest of the NaPS lab to answer listeners' sleep-related questions. Thanks to everyone who sent questions in! List of questions: Why do we use the term ‘sleeping like a baby’ when babies don’t, in fact, sleep? - From Jaime Jenkins How do hormones affect sleep? - From Beth Lee Why do some people talk in their sleep? – From Christopher Reynolds Can meditation before bed help you have de...

In this episode, we talk to Dr Daniel Bendor from University College London. Daniel's work focuses on rodent studies of place cells in the hippocampus. We discuss the phenomena of memory replay in which place cell activity mimics patterns of activity that occurred while the rodent was performing a task in wake. We also discuss how this process can be manipulated using targeted memory reactivation (TMR). From this we discuss how the TMR instead of triggering a reactiv...

In this episode we take a neuroethological approach to sleep, and discover why songbirds are such a good model system for studying sleep's role in learning. These include advantages like songbirds' sleep-wake patterns and sleep architecture being more similar to human's than rodents', the fact that songbirds are strongly motivated to learn their songs, which can then be easily assessed for accuracy, and the observation that population-level neuronal replay in the song system is often very eas...

In this episode we examine how sleep differs between species to get some clues about what sleep actually is as a phenomenon. How have marine animals solved the problem of sleeping when they regularly need to come up for air? And how do amphibians adapt their sleep architecture from life at sea to life on the land? What can mice running on their wheels tell us about what may be happening in our brains when we're performing tasks on autopilot? How do states like hibernation or torpor rel...