Some are involved at night at the sleep lab, preparing the participant with the EEG, and staying overnight to monitor participants. How can interested STEM students get involved in this line of research? What advice would you give them?ĪJ: Because this project is so demanding, many students help during different parts of the project. I was trained in advance method for analyzing EEG and fMRI data, acquiring the skills I required for this master’s in physics at the PERFORM Centre. Throughout the internship, I was in charge of analyzing simultaneous EEG and fMRI data acquired during sleep and specific memory tasks. What inspired you to study this subject and get involved in the field?ĪJ: I completed an internship with Thanh Dang-Vu, Concordia University Research Chair in Sleep, Neuroimaging and Cognitive Health, and Christophe Grova, associate professor in the Department of Physics during the summer of 2015. It is very demanding because I have to monitor and study people’s sleep over two nights, as well as sleep deprive them. This is a big project involving many people, and the protocol is complex and uses challenging methods, including EEG, MRI and a sleep environment. What are some of the challenges you face in your research?ĪJ: The major challenge in my research is coordinating everything, from participant recruitment to data acquisition, which involves several platforms and imaging modalities, as well as managing challenging data analysis issues. ![]() Understanding these individual behaviours will help us prevent people from being sleep deprived, as well as help us promote good sleep hygiene. Moreover, this research will help us understand why some people are more vulnerable to sleep deprivation than others, and what brain mechanisms are involved in this vulnerability. This study will give us a better understanding of the mechanisms of ongoing activity in the brain, the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive functions and how the brain recovers after sleep deprivation. We can then compare the functional connectivity patterns after both a normal night of sleep and a night of sleep deprivation in order to see if sleep deprivation results in the reorganization of underlying brain networks. Moreover, studying how brain regions communicate between themselves during the brain’s resting state will allow us to assess the underlying architecture of brain activity. What are you hoping this project will achieve? And what effects do you see it having on people’s lives?ĪJ: Studying sleep recovery will shed light on fundamental processes that link sleep deprivation and cognitive performance. These events can be stimuli manipulated during specific cognitive tasks or neuronal discharges, such as different stages of sleep. The tests have different imaging modalities: the EEG, which provides a signal, gives a good temporal resolution, while the MRI, which produces an image of the brain, gives a good spatial resolution.Īcquiring fMRI data simultaneously with EEG data allows us to detect which brain regions are activated during specific events. This allows us to monitor brain bio-electrical activity (using EEG) at the same time as we measure the blood flow response elicited by neuronal activity (using fMRI). In our research we also combine a high-density EEG test - a cap with 256 electrodes - with a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) procedure. It measures how long different sleep stages are and detects sleep-specific EEG discharges and waves. This test is called an electroencephalogram (EEG), and it is essential for assessing the quality of the sleep of our participants. How does this specific image (top) relate to your research at Concordia?Īude Jegou: The cap in this picture is equipped with 64 electrodes and is a key piece of equipment we use for data acquisition at the PERFORM Centre’s Sleep Lab.ĭata acquisition is central to our research, and we use electrodes like these, placed on the scalp, to monitor the bio-electrical activity of the brain during the whole night. ‘This research will help us understand why some people are more vulnerable to sleep deprivation’ More specifically, the team is looking at how patterns of brain activity and the connectivity between different brain regions change with the quality of the previous night’s sleep. ![]() ![]() Master’s student Aude Jegou is on a research team looking at the effects of sleep deprivation on brain function in the state-of-the-art Sleep Lab at Concordia’s PERFORM Centre. Ever wonder why you have a harder time falling asleep on some nights but not others? Or how a bad night’s rest can affect your cognitive abilities?
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