Understanding Sleep

What exactly is sleep and how does it work? Is what’s going on in our brains during sleep congruent with how we experience it? Explore the misconceptions surrounding what most perceive as a passive state. Dr. Lisa Genzel (M.D.) tours the physiology of sleep. She will introduce us to effective and ineffective sleep. How ‘off ’are we during sleep? And how critical is it for many bodily and mental functions such as metabolism, immune response, cognition, attention and memory? She challenges general perceptions of sleep and its role in our normal functioning. On the front line of leading research on memory and sleep, she broadens our understanding of sleep and its role in our lives.

About lecture series ‘Effective Sleep’

Some need little, others a lot. Many wish they had more. With so much to do and so much going on, is being asleep wasting our time? What ‘more effective sleep’ could mean for our waking hours is unchartered territory for most. Even though we spend a third of our lives in this state, what do we know about the biological functions sleep serves to compensate for? We explore cutting-edge approaches to understanding sleep as a part of downtime and look at interventions within reach to alter its role in our lives.

About Lisa Genzel

Lisa Genzel studied medicine at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich and in parallel worked at the Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry investigating sleep related memory processes in healthy humans. After graduating she stayed on as a post-doc for one year at the MPI working with patients with depression and schizophrenia, before moving to Edinburgh in 2012. In Edinburgh Lisa switched from the human field to basic rodents working with Richard Morris. In 2016 she came to the Donders Institute to start her own lab, which focusses on investigation of memory consolidation processes in rodents and humans especially the role of sleep. Her lab is embedded in the collaborate Memory Dynamics lab (joint effort with Francesco Battaglia).