How Can We Be Sure That Sleep Is Working?

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Ken discusses the recent work in his lab that allows communication with subjects while they experience lucid dreams. This new paradigm opens many avenues to study the neuroscience and psychology of consciousness, sleep, dreams, memory, and learning, and to improve and optimize sleep for cognition. Ken and his team are developing a Lucid Dreaming App which is freely available via his lab. We also discuss much of his work on memory and learning in general and specifically related to sleep, like reactivating specific memories during sleep to improve learning.

• Ken's Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.
• Twitter: @kap101.
• The Lucid Dreaming App.
• Related papers
  • Memory and Sleep: How Sleep Cognition Can Change the Waking Mind for the Better.
  • Does memory reactivation during sleep support generalization at the cost of memory specifics?
  • Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep.

0:00 - Intro 2:48 - Background and types of memory 14:44 -Consciousness and memory 23:32 - Phases and sleep and wakefulness 28:19 - Sleep, memory, and learning 33:50 - Targeted memory reactivation 48:34 - Problem solving during sleep 51:50 - 2-way communication with lucid dreamers 1:01:43 - Confounds to the paradigm 1:04:50 - Limitations and future studies 1:09:35 - Lucid dreaming app 1:13:47 - How sleep can inform AI 1:20:18 - Advice for students