The Neuroscience of Sleep: How The Brain Controls Sleep
How does the brain control sleep? Why do our brains need sleep in the first place? What are the health benefits of sleep? Why do some animals sleep more than others? What are dreams and why do our brains generate them? Why is it so hard to fall asleep when you’re stressed or hungry? How did sleep evolve? In this video, we will explore the amazing science of sleep. We’ll see how specific brain regions, particularly the hypothalamus and brainstem, form circuits that make us fall asleep, stay asleep, and eventually wake up. We’ll look at the two primary stages of sleep and how they differ. I’ll explain the intriguing idea that sleep is actually a default state of the brain and that our brains have to actively keep us awake. -- If you want to get better sleep, check out Dr. Andrew Huberman's podcast (Huberman Lab) episodes on sleep: https://youtu.be/h2aWYjSA1Jc -- Thumbnail Brain Image Credit: Copyright © Society for Neuroscience (2017). -- Sources: - Sulaman, B. A., Wang, S., Tyan, J., & Eban-Rothschild, A. (2022). Neuro-orchestration of sleep and wakefulness. Nature Neuroscience, 1-17. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-022-01236-w - Caviglia, G. (2021). Working on dreams, from neuroscience to psychotherapy. Research in Psychotherapy: Psychopathology, Process, and Outcome, 24(2). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8451212/ - West, G. & Savage, V. (2021) Why do we sleep?. Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/a-quantitative-theory-unlocks-the-mysteries-of-why-we-sleep - Klinzing, J. G., Niethard, N., & Born, J. (2019). Mechanisms of systems memory consolidation during sleep. Nature neuroscience, 22(10), 1598-1610. - Friedrich, M., Mölle, M., Friederici, A. D., & Born, J. (2020). Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in infants protects new episodic memories from existing semantic memories. Nature Communications, 11(1), 1298.