The 2024 Nobel Conference Sleep, Unraveled is happening October 1 & 2. No ticket required. Watch in Christ Chapel or online at the conference website.
This year an interdisciplinary panel of experts to explore the centrality of sleep for human physical health and mental wellbeing. The conference will delve into the neurological and psychological processes of sleep, the cultural evolution of sleep practices, and the implications of a twenty-four-hour convenience society that leads to permanent sleep deprivation.
Marishka Brown
Sleep and Circadian Health: A National Research Agenda
Sleep is equally as important as nutrition and physical activity when it comes to preventing negative health outcomes. The National Center on Sleep Disorders Research (NCSDR) supports research, technology innovation, training, health education, and other activities that promote sleep health and that advance scientific knowledge of sleep and circadian disorders.
Mary Carskadon
Clock, Hourglass and Teen Sleep
Sleep is regulated by two intrinsic factors: circadian rhythms (clock) and a homeostatic drive (hourglass). The circadian clock is set later in teens, and the sleep drive across waking builds more slowly for adolescents. These findings indicate that changed biological processes allow teens to stay awake later and longer, even though they still need the same amount of sleep as before. Learn more about the research and the social and psychological factors facing adolescents that contribute to teen sleep challenges.
Tricia Hersey
Rest as Portal for Justice
Tricia Hersey’s book, Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto outlines the dangers of a “grind-culture” that normalizes stress, anxiety, and pressure, and illustrates how rest is a serious public health, racial justice, and spiritual issue. Her ongoing attention to the liberating power of rest led her to establish the Nap Ministry, a pioneering movement that helped spark growing global attention to rest.
Maiken Nedergaard
What Happens When We Sleep – The Glymphatic System
A macroscopic pathway in the central nervous system, the glymphatic system facilitates the clearance of interstitial waste products from neuronal metabolism. The glymphatic system is only active during sleep. This circulation represents a novel and unexplored pathway for understanding the biological necessity for sleep.
Amita Sehgal
Using a simple animal model to understand how and why we sleep
Sleep remains a major mystery of biology. Why we spend approximately a third of our lives sleeping and what it is that makes us sleepy are major questions about sleep that lack satisfactory answers. However, what happens during sleep to facilitate awake performance and promote health? Driven by the successful use of Drosophila [fruit fly] for deciphering molecular mechanisms of the circadian clock, her team developed a Drosophila model to address molecular and cellular underpinnings of sleep.
Robert Stickgold
Sleep, Memory and Dreams: Pulling It All Together
Sleep, memory, and dreaming are intertwined. Sleep provides a mechanism of reprocessesing the memories formed during the preceding day, stabilizing some and strengthening others and takes a current concern seen in its memories from the day and seeks out older, often only weakly related memories, and tests whether these newly discovered associations might be helpful in solving our current concerns.