Sleeping our cares away

Dr Laura Jacobson is the Florey’s Head of Sleep and Cognition laboratory. She spends her waking hours considering the impact of ‘sleep architecture’ – how we sleep - and its links to learning and memory.

We spend a third of our lives asleep,” Laura says. “It’s not wasted time, it’s critically important.” Indeed, while we sleep our brain is busy testing connections, replaying key moments and reconfiguring itself.

While the vast majority of sleep research focuses on activating specific receptors to turn off brain cells to promote sleep, Laura is involved in a different line of research which concentrates on the orexin system in neurons that control our awake-sleep activity. Drugs known as dual orexin receptor antagonists (DORAs) target receptors that are activated by orexin when we’re awake.

Laura is particularly interested in how sleep and dreaming act as mechanisms that allow our brains to dump information.