Networks of Memory and Sleep

For us to function as humans our memories are crucial, but we do not want to remember everything in every little detail but instead we need to extract key information enabling us to deal with future events. This processing of memories – highlighting important events, extracting overlapping, salient information and deleting unnecessary data – is probably one of the main reasons why we need to sleep.

We are interested in investigating how sleep influences memory processing in whole brain networks and which factors such as novelty experiences can influence this processing. To achieve this we combine different approaches and investigate mice, rats and humans. In rodents we apply a variety of molecular, electrophysiology, and behavioral approaches such as calcium imaging, high-density silicon probes, tetrode drives and immediate early gene analysis. In humans, we combine functional magnetic resonanz imaging with classic polysomnography in the sleep lab. We use these methods to understand physiological sleep and memory mechanisms in healthy controls as well as investigate effects of disease with animal models and human patients suffering from e.g. depression and schizophrenia.

Contact:

Dr. med Lisa Genzel (M.D.)
Donders Centre for Neuroscience
Postbus 9101, Internal mailbox 66
6500 HB NIJMEGEN
The Netherlands
+31 24 3668495
lisa.genzel@hotmail.com
lisa.genzel@donders.ru.nl
http://www.genzellab.com

Secretariat:
Huygensbuilding, room HG00.137
Heijendaalseweg 135
6525 AJ Nijmegen
+31 (0)24 36 52633