The purpose of the Brain Talk Town Meeting is to open a dialogue between scientists and non-scientists. The meeting will start with a scientific presentation aimed at non-scientists, which will be followed by an open discussion period involving questions from the audience.
2024 Brain Talk: Optimal Sleep for an Optimal You
Gina Poe is the Eleanor Leslie Professor of Innovative Brain Research at UCLA. Her laboratory resides in the Department of Integrative Biology and Physiology with joint appointments in the Department of Psychiatry and Department of Neurobiology. Her internationally renown research investigates the role of sleep in memory consolidation, focusing on the different electrophysiological and neurochemical features characteristic of different states of consciousness and the actions of catecholamines, anesthesia, etc. on learning and unlearning. Her keynote is titled, “Sleep to change your mind” exploring the necessity of sleep-dependent neural plasticity in updating one’s cognitive schema with learning, in recovery from addiction and post-traumatic stress disorder or just changing one’s mind. She will later give a Brain Talk Town Hall engaging clinicians, basic scientists, and the public in discussion around the various functions of sleep, how sleep can go wrong in mental health disorders, and how sleep can be optimized.