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What Keeps a Sleep Expert Awake at Night?

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The fact we spend roughly one-third of our lifetime unconscious has piqued human curiosity for centuries.


The Ancient Greeks placed such value on sleep and dreams, that they were personified through the Gods Hypnos and Oneiroi. Sleep disorders, such as pavor nocturnus – or “sleep terrors” – have been recognized in medical textbooks from the 17th century. However, it was during the 20th century that sleep became a focus of experimental research, alongside a growing understanding of the human nervous system’s structure and function.


The emergence of neuroscience techniques to measure and assess human brain activity has advanced the field further. Now, we know more about the inner workings of the sleeping brain than ever before. And yet, there are still so many unanswered questions.


The Cognitive Neuroscience of Sleep Laboratory at the University of California Irvine combines novel techniques to explore the mechanisms by which sleep shapes human behavior. Headed by Dr. Eitan Schechtman, assistant professor of neurobiology and behavior, the lab’s ultimate goal is to understand how sleep benefits human cognition and emotional well-being.


In an interview with Technology Networks, Schechtman explained more about how his lab is pursuing this goal, addressing some of the common misconceptions about sleep and the questions that keep even a sleep expert awake at night. 

Molly Coddington (MC):

How did you become interested in the neuroscience of sleep and what are the key aims within your laboratory?


Eitan Schechtman, PhD (ES):

I’ve been fascinated with sleep long before I began my academic journey. The very notion that there is a third of our lives in which we are disconnected from our environment is difficult to wrap your head around. We take it for granted, but the fact that we are unconscious for much of the night is really quite bizarre.

From a scientific standpoint, sleep is a huge puzzle and one of the hardest human phenomena to study.

When you study memory or perception, for example, you highly rely on participants’ introspection. During sleep, except for dream research, there is no introspection and we scientists have to find alternative paths for research. My lab, the Cognitive Neuroscience of Sleep Laboratory, is focused on studying neural processes during sleep and we are excited by how challenging a task it is.


We have two main pathways for opening the black box of sleep. First, we use machine learning techniques, along with neuroimaging, to reveal the inner workings of the sleeping brain. Second, we use manipulations that drive brain activity towards certain forms of neural processing without requiring consciousness.



MC:
Can you discuss recent research highlights from your lab and how they contribute to our understanding of sleep?

ES:

Over the past few years, we’ve become really interested in how the rich worlds in which we live impact brain processing during sleep. It’s well established that memories benefit from sleep, but memories are such a complex phenomenon.


A memory isn’t this isolated bubble, completely separable from others as shown in movies such as “Inside Out”. They’re deeply connected one to another on multiple levels (semantically, temporally, causally and so on) – side note: this is better depicted in a movie like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”.


We’ve been interested in exploring how these connections impact what happens when you get some shuteye. While we sleep, the neural traces supporting memories are reactivated and benefit from that reactivation. What we’ve learned recently, is that when a memory is reactivated, this triggers up the memory network linked with it too.


Memories are isolated during sleep, just like they’re not isolated during wakefulness. It seems like memories have a full secret life during sleep, much as they do during wakefulness – they can interfere with one another, they can be strengthened independently of one another and they can even form new links during sleep. We’re just now starting to learn more about what drives each of these processes.



MC:
Is there a “big question” in sleep that you would love to answer through your research? 

ES:

One question that keeps me up at night – pun intended – is the relationship between sleep and mental health.


We know a lot about this link – virtually every psychiatric disorder is linked with abnormal sleep patterns and the relationship seems to be bidirectional and cyclic. We’ve all experienced the consequences of a terrible night’s sleep on our mood and emotional regulation capacity, so this is not just something specific to disorders.


What I’d really like to understand is the mechanism behind these benefits of sleep to mental well-being. We know quite a bit about how memories evolve during sleep, but far less about how sleep affects mental longevity. We’re currently exploring a hypothesis that reactivation during sleep – a phenomenon we understand relatively well when it comes to memories – also drives mental health.


The data is not there yet, but if we do find that activation of neural networks engaged in emotional regulation, for example, are engaged during sleep in a way that causally drives wake emotional states, it would be exciting to build on this knowledge for new treatments for affective disorders.



MC:
Your laboratory combines a variety of different methods to study how sleep shapes human behavior. For non-neuroscience folks out there, can you tell us a little bit more about those methods?

ES:

Most of the methods we use in the lab fall under the broad category of “neuroimaging techniques” – techniques for monitoring activity from the human brain non-invasively.


Methods such as electroencephalography  or functional MRI provide a lot of information about the inner workings of the sleeping brain, but the challenge is deciphering that data. One approach that we’ve adopted builds on machine learning techniques, which offer exciting new ways to process large datasets like the ones we collect.


The idea is quite simple – we identify patterns of activity in the sleep data that inform us about neural processing. For example, let’s say we record your brain activity when you do a memory task in the lab. Then, during sleep, we may see that your brain activity shows the re-emergence of patterns that are like the ones we saw while you were awake. That would be a way to monitor what your brain is doing as you sleep. The resolution we can reach is quite far from the mind reading you might see in movies, but it’s sufficient for us to develop clever experiments that tell us a lot about what the sleeping brain is engaged in.



MC:
Are there any misconceptions surrounding sleep or sleep research that you encounter frequently and think it’s important to address?  

ES:

There are quite a few misconceptions that people have about sleep. People tend to underestimate the importance of sleep for their health, cognition and mental well-being. I think there’s a growing appreciation of sleep’s importance, but most people are still reluctant to make the required compromises to prioritize their sleep.


It’s not so much a misconception – we all know that sleep is important – it’s more of a failure to translate that understanding into action. Along with a healthy diet and exercise, sleep should be prioritized for our benefit.


Another misconception I’ve heard quite a bit is that we all need exactly eight hours of sleep to function optimally. The truth is that there is not a set number of hours that are required – some people might need eight hours, some might need more or less. Furthermore, this can change from night to night and over time.

You’ll know you’ve reached the right amount for you when you don’t feel the need to get hours of catch-up sleep over the weekend.


MC:
Are there any “scientists to watch” or researchers that you admire in your field of research?

ES:

I’m an avid reader of the papers coming out in our field and luckily find myself inspired on a daily basis.


I’m most inspired by the new generation of researchers who are using novel methods to study sleep and developing new approaches that would have been deemed science fiction a few years ago.


I’ll mention just a couple of scientists who I follow closely, but there are at least a dozen others I can mention too. I’m a huge fan of Dr. Anna Schapiro’s work at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s a computational neuroscientist who used her exceptional computational abilities to bring together theoretical accounts of sleep and cognition and top-notch empirical work. Similarly, I love the work done by Dr. Monika Schönauer at the University of Freiburg, who keeps pushing the bar further and further in developing new techniques for decoding the activity of the sleeping brain. Many other names come to mind, but I’ll stop here.


One thing I love about working in our field is the comradery and teamwork within our tightly knit scientific community. We’re such a constructive and friendly group of scientists and we drive each other to succeed and push the envelope more and more. I feel like our progress as a field would have been much slower if our community had a competitive and combative culture as I’ve seen in other fields.