In this episode, we speak with Professor Bob Stickgold, one of the most prominent researchers in the field of sleep science. Bob tells us about the early days of sleep research and how he and other scientists struggled to convince the world that sleep really is important for memory. He also talks about methodological subtleties to investigate the role of sleep on cognitive functions, the purpose of dreaming, and offline default mode processing in general, and what he sees as the most interesting future research directions of sleep.

Produced by: Eniko Simo

See Professor Stickgold's faculty profile here. His new book 'When Brains Dream' is here.

If you'd like to read more about the topics Professor Stickgold mentioned you can find some of his related publications here:

1) Karni and Sagi's 1994 Science paper on how sleep boosts visual discrimination
2) Bob Stickgold's 2000 Nature Neuroscience paper on sleep and the visual discrimination task
3) Matt Walker's 2000 Neuron paper on how sleep boosts performance on the finger tapping task
4) a sample of Erin Wamsley's work on dreams
5) a 2000 review, in Science, of Bob's early thoughts on sleep, memory, and dreams.

Glossary:
p-value = a statistical measure to test if the findings of an experiment are significant. 0.01 means a robust paradigm.

This recording is property of the sleep science podcast and not for resale

Check out our NaPS website to find out more about the podcast, our research and events.

This recording is the property of the Sleep Science Podcast and not for resale.

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