Being awake while sleeping, being asleep while awake - Dr Thomas Andrillon

Sleep is classically described as an all-or-none phenomenon. Individuals would be either awake or asleep and unable to respond to their environment. However, recent research offers a more complex view. Sleep and wakefulness appear to be flexible neural states that can intermingle depending on environmental demands. For example, sleep can be shallower in some brain regions than others. In wakefulness, when individuals get tired, some brain regions can spontaneously fall asleep despite most of the brain staying awake.
Dr Thomas Andrillon will present neurophysiological evidence from human invasive and non-invasive recordings showing the flexibility of sleep and wakefulness. He will present how these local modulations of vigilance can impact sensory processing. The concept of local sleep provides an interesting framework to understand how we can sleep while maintaining minimal processing of our environment. It can also explain why we fail to respond to external information when we get tired.
Dr Thomas Andrillon is a Research Fellow in the Monash Neuroscience of Consciousness group based at Monash Biomedical Imaging. Before joining Monash University in 2018, Dr Andrillon obtained a PhD from the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. His research centres on the dynamics of consciousness and how cognition is modulated through wakefulness and sleep. At the interface of physiology and psychology, Dr Andrillon investigates brain recordings from individual neurons to whole-brain EEG recordings.

[@lisleigfried4660]

Excellent lecture