Sleep Science Podcast Penny Lewis

For our end of season special, we have the rest of the NaPS lab in to answer a number of exciting sleep-related questions from our listeners. These touch on a range of different subjects from sleeps involvement in weight gain to alcohol's effect on sleep. Thanks to those who sent in questions!List of Questions:1. What is it in general anaesthetic that completely prevents a patient from waking up mid-surgery? Is this a similar state to being in a deep sleep or is this differ...

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 th...

In this episode, we interviewed Professor Reto Huber, who leads a research group at the University Children’s Hospital, Zurich. Reto’s interests encompass sleep disorders, development, synaptic plasticity and regeneration. In this episode we discuss local sleep, a process whereby different parts of the brain express different depths of sleep or wake at different times. We consider the relationship of local sleep to phenomena such as sleep walking and sleep talking, and Reto explains a se...

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 in ...

In this episode, we talk to Professor Wenbiao Gan from the Neuroscience and Physiology and Skirball Institute at New York University School of Medicine.Professor Gan tells us about how he started to become interested in studying sleep and its impact on learning and memory.He talks about intriguing and hands-on ways to assess the formation and elimination of dendritic spines in the mouse cortex, and how different experimental tasks like running backwards on a treadmill influence spine fo...

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. ...