Sleepwalking, sleep talking, night terrors - how do they occur and why do some people have them more than others? Join us as we discuss with Professor Francesca Siclari her work looking at non-REM parasomnias and the link to dreaming. We discuss the various forms that non-REM parasomnias can take, how they differ between adults and children and what the potential consequences of them can be.  Find out more about Francesca and her research group here. Here are links to some of the studies: Conscious experiences during non-REM parasomnias Shared EEG correlates between non-REM parasomnia ..read more

To kickstart season 3 of the Sleep Science Podcast, we have asked the research group behind the podcast (NaPS Lab, in Cardiff) to answer some great sleep-related questions from our listeners. 1. 02:45 What is lucid dreaming? - Answered by Mo Abdellahi Lucid dreaming - Stephen LaBerge, 2009 Induction of self awareness in dreams through frontal low current stimulation of gamma activity  Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep  2. 06:16 Do dreams do anything for us? - Answered by Kyrillos Meshreky The brain as a dream state generator: Converging theori ..read more

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 different entirely?  3:43 2.    Can having daytime naps improve your memory?  5:24 3 ..read more

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 these animal models and the different advantages they offer for sleep research. We then move on to Chia ..read more

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 babies and what other methods are used to analyse and assess baby sleep.  We then look in depth ..read more

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 formation with or without sleep. Some counterintuitive results are presented and Professor Gan also s ..read more

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.  He also argues that behavioural approaches are much more effective even though clinicians tend to pres ..read more

In this episode,  we talk to Professor Tore Nielsen from the University of Montreal and Professor Mark Blagrove from Swansea University. In part 2 of this two part episode, we carry on our discussion about nightmares and talk about Tore's work on imagery rehearsal. A process where the dreamer rehearses their nightmares finding solutions to them in waking life in order to reduce stress and anxiety around nightmares and find more control in their dream life. Then we move on to lucid dreaming and how this differs from imagery rehearsal. We take a look at Mark's work on how lucid dreamers h ..read more

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 world as they fall asleep and why this might be. We also talk about Tristan's other work in resilience and ..read more

In this episode,  we talk to Professor Tore Nielsen from the University of Montreal and Professor Mark Blagrove from Swansea University. In part 1 of this two part episode, we talk about how both our guests became interested in the world of sleep and dreams  and then discuss what we actually dream about, from emotional REM dreams to non-rem dreams. We also talk about the different methods of collecting dream reports and the positives and negatives of these methods. We go on to discuss Tore's  fear extinction theory of nightmares, which proposes we dream about our fears in orde ..read more