The brain at night: insights into the many functions of sleep

Far from being a passive state, sleep is a highly organized biological process in which the brain enters distinct activity modes with specific functions.

Beginning with the characteristic neural dynamics of different sleep stages, the talk explains how these states arise and why they matter. A central focus will be the role of sleep in memory processing: how newly acquired information is stabilized, reorganized, and integrated into existing knowledge.

The talk will also introduce recent findings on the brain’s nighttime waste clearance system which helps remove metabolic by products that accumulate during waking activity. By bringing together insights from neuroscience and psychology, the talk shows how sleep protects, shapes, and renews the brain and why it should be understood not as downtime, but as an active and essential part of brain function.

Dr. Svenja Brodt, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics

Svenja Brodt studied psychology and cognitive neuroscience at Saarland University and LMU Munich and completed her
doctoral training at the University of Tübingen on the topic of imaging human rapid neocortical memory formation. As a
postdoctoral researcher, she investigated the role of sleep for neocortical memory representations.

Since 2023 Svenja is a Max Planck Research Group Leader at the MPI for Biological Cybernetics and heads the Brain States for Plasticity group, with a focus on how different cognitive, neuromodulatory and consciousness states shape memory formation and consolidation.

For her work, Svenja was awarded the Biopsychology prize by the German Psychological Society as well as the Attempto prize by the Universitätsbund Tübingen.