When asked to recall a humiliating experience of thirty years ago, the emotional brain of poor sleepers lights up as if it was happening right now. ‘That it works this way can be seen when people are asked to reminisce on embarrassing events that took place a long time ago. Worse than that: if they have a disturbed REM sleep all through the night they may wake up feeling even more anxious than when they went to bed. ‘In people with a restless REM sleep this reorganization does not work so well. The experience is retained, but the accompanying tension is not. In sound sleepers – people with a calm REM sleep – emotional events move from the emotional brain to the cognitive brain during that REM sleep. ‘A place for everything and everything in its place, is the expression, and this is literally the case when you sleep. ‘A genetic disposition to be a night hawk or an early riser, a tendency to take, or not take, naps, snoring – none of it has much to do with the susceptibility to insomnia. The tool is available for other researchers that want to cooperate. A web-based assessment tool for extensive insomnia and good sleep phenotyping has resulted in a growing database of, at present, 13000 people. An arsenal of ambulatory monitoring equipment is available. The sleep-lab has a unique setup for comfortable skin temperature clamping in humans. Human research tools include, in addition to the standard sleep-lab, brain imaging (high-density- EEG, MEG, fMRI on 1.5, 3 and soon 7 Tesla), transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), eye-tracking, computerized induction and assessment of task performance. We think it’s important to translate fundamental insights into applications to improve sleep, vigilance and daytime function. We aim firstly to elucidate factors that promote and disturb sleep at the systems level, notably insomnia, and secondly to investigate the brain mechanisms involved in the favorable and disruptive effects on cognition of, respectively, sleep and sleep disturbances. The Sleep & Cognition group investigates how sleep affects brain function during subsequent wakefulness, and how experiences during wakefulness affect subsequent sleep. Against the background of their 24-hour rhythm, driven by the circadian clock of the brain, sleep and wakefulness show a mutual dependency.
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