The Sleeping Brain in High Definition

Sleep is essential for our health. During sleep, the brain actively consolidates memories, regulates emotion, and clears metabolic waste; processes that, when disrupted, are implicated in a wide range of conditions including Alzheimer’s disease, depression, anxiety, and epilepsy. Understanding how sleep does this, and why it fails in disease, is one of the most important open questions in neuroscience.

We are developing a world-class platform to study the sleeping brain with unprecedented detail, combining simultaneous EEG, which captures the brain’s electrical rhythms in real time, with ultra-high field 7T MRI, which provides images of brain structure and activity at a resolution not achievable with standard scanners. Together, these two technologies allow us to see both when critical sleep processes occur and exactly where in the brain they originate, including deep structures that conventional imaging cannot resolve.

This matters because many of the brain regions most relevant to sleep-dependent health, the hippocampus, thalamus, and their connections, are precisely the structures that degrade earliest in Alzheimer’s disease, are dysregulated in depression, and generate seizures in epilepsy. By mapping their activity during sleep with new precision, we aim to identify signatures of healthy and disrupted sleep that can serve as biomarkers, treatment targets, and outcome measures for future clinical trials.