What happens in our brain when we sleep? In a recent SWC Seminar, Dr Julia Harris discussed how inhibiting different populations of neurons in the brain during specific states of sleep led to effects that could shed light on the role of sleep in emotional processing. In this Q&A, she touches on what has already been known about the reasons why we sleep, her key findings, and what her lab will explore in future.

How can we uncover the way we learn and know things? Recent SWC seminar speaker, Professor André Fenton, has spent his career focusing on the deviations from expectations, the noise that can’t be explained. In this Q&A, he shares how this approach has led him to a new paradigm for thinking about cognition.

In a recent SWC Seminar, Prof Gilles Laurent shared his work on the neural dynamics in sleep and visual texture perception, using the Australian dragon and cuttlefish respectively as model organisms. In this Q&A, he elaborates on the routes that his lab took to researching these topics, the specific advantages of using these animals as model organisms, future plans, and more.