Center for Translational Neuroscience

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Center for Translational Neuroscience
Distinguished Speaker Series
Rayford Auditorium, Biomed II Bldg.
Tuesday, October 28, 12 noon
Sleep Learning and Memory Subimal Datta,
Ph.D. Director, Laboratory of Sleep and
Cognitive Neuroscience Professor of Psychiatry
and Neuroscience Boston University School of
Medicine Boston, MA
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Over the last four decades, an impressive number
of studies have shown that sleep confers a
beneficial effect on learning and memory. There
is now strong evidence in both humans and animals
to support the hypothesis that separate sleep
states are differentially involved in different
steps of memory consolidation. Research on the
mechanisms of sleep regulation has elucidated how
neurochemical and molecular activities of our
brain are tightly regulated by the different
states of sleep. Current multidisciplinary
research, from molecular to behavioral, has begun
to reveal the mechanism of sleep-dependent memory
processing. This lecture will provide some
critical new evidence to reconcile the
correlative and causal relationship between sleep
stages and memory processing.