Dr Volkan Uzungil investigates one of the brain’s greatest mysteries: sleep. Everyone needs sleep, but most of what happens in the brain during slumber remains unknown. How do our dreams shape our memories? Why do we sometimes wake with sudden clarity? In this interview, Volkan reflects on his journey into science, the challenges of research, and where the next discoveries in neuroscience might come from.

New research from Dr Kris Jensen and colleagues at SWC, UCL and the University of Oxford explores how the prefrontal cortex makes plans. Their work combines knowledge of neural processes known to occur in other brain systems with recent observations that different prefrontal neurons represent different steps of future behaviour. The result is a new theoretical model of how the prefrontal cortex plans behaviour, called a ‘spacetime attractor’, that is now published as a preprint.