Lecture Details

Brain Rhythms of Sleep
Ivana Rosenzweig

Dr Rosenzweig is a Senior Lecturer at King’s College London where she heads Sleep and Brain Plasticity Centre. The mission of SleepCity laboratory is to generate new understanding of mechanisms behind serious neurological and psychiatric disorders, and to propose their treatment and prevention through utilisation of sleep neurobiology.
Dr Rosenzweig is also a practising clinician and she work as a sleep physician and a Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at the Sleep Disorder Centre at the Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospital where she runs the complex sleep and memory service.

Sleep serves a restorative function for the brain and cognition and involves dramatic changes to our perception, consciousness, cognition and health. We know that sleep is closely regulated, that it helps our cognitive performance, promotes learning and memory consolidation. Lack of sleep immediately affects our cognition, mood, and health. A long-term inability to sleep ultimately leads to death and yet the scientific community is still not entirely agreed on its purpose or function. The perpetual activity of the brain is largely supported by a variety of oscillations and rhythms it generates. Sleep and sleep stages are also characterized by specific brain oscillations, which, unlike those of wakefulness, are maintained free of external inputs. This means that a transient perturbation during sleep can have a lasting impact. This posits the state of sleep as a unique state for any potential therapeutic intervention in memory and brain plasticity/regeneration.