psychology & neuroscience
Unlocking the Secrets of Sleep By Sophia Marcom
Image by Jose Luis Navarro [CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0]
T
he average person spends about one third of their life asleep, yet our knowledge of what actually happens during this time is still limited. Sleep is incredibly important for physical and mental health, but scientists do not fully understand what actually happens in the brain that allows one to wake up feeling refreshed and focused. As such, scientists all around the world are attempting to unlock the mystery of sleep. Some of the answers can be found right here at UNC-Chapel Hill in Dr. Graham Diering’s neuroscience lab. Dr. Diering and his team study sleep as it relates to neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and Autism Spectrum Disorder respectively. The goal of their research is to develop a therapy to give individuals with sleep issues the benefits of a good night’s rest. However, in order to mimic the effects of a good night’s sleep, they must first identify what happens during sleep. Dr. Graham Diering, an assistant professor in UNC’s department of Cell Biology and Physiology, started out his career at the University of British Columbia in the early 2000s. Though originally interested in physics, he gravitated towards Dr. Graham Diering, PhD biology throughout his undergraduate years and completed a PhD in biochemistry in 2011. During his PhD, he developed a strong interest in neuroscience and learned that studying the intricacies of
the brain could lead to significant medical advances. Following this interest, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in a neuroscience lab at Johns Hopkins University from 2011 to 2017 before coming to UNC and starting his own lab. Dr. Diering’s research is geared toward understanding sleep disruption as it relates to diseases. While sleep disruption is a part of many diseases, his research focuses on Alzheimer’s and Autism Spectrum Disorder specifically. Dr. Diering’s goal is to better the lives of individuals with these diseases by improving their ability to sleep. He believes that poor sleep quality is a causative factor in the progression of these diseases. As he stated in an interview, “The idea is to develop some kind of a therapy to target sleep. But I want to be clear that the kind of therapy I’m talking about is not some sedative that would just make you want to lie down. I’m talking about some kind of therapy that would really give you the benefits of a good night’s sleep. A kind of a drug that’s based on detailed knowledge of what sleep is doing.” 1 The kind of medicine that Dr. Diering describes does not currently exist, so many people resort to sleeping pills that act as sedatives but are unable to mimic the benefits of natural sleep. With a deeper understanding of the basis of sleep’s restorative patterns, scientists could design revolutionarily effective medicines that would be useful in many types of diseases. While working in the neuroscience lab at Johns Hopkins, Dr. Diering came across a phenomenon that has helped him better understand brain activity during sleep: homeostatic scaling, which is when neurons adapt their levels of activity in response to certain stimuli by either increasing or decreasing their synaptic connections. The synapse is a small gap separating neurons through which neurotrans-
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