Christina Anthanasouli: Multiscale modeling of sleep across human development

Human sleep changes in a systematic way across the lifespan, from fragmented sleep in infancy to delayed timing in adolescence and more regular patterns in adulthood. How do changes in underlying biological mechanisms lead to these differences in sleep patterns? In this talk, I will present mathematical models used to study the regulation of human sleep. I will begin with a simple conceptual model, which describes the interaction between circadian and homeostatic processes, and then move to models that represent the dynamics and interactions of neuronal populations involved in sleep and wakefulness. I will focus on how these models can be analyzed and how changes across development can be represented through changes in parameters or in the structure of the system. This approach allows us to study how sleep timing, consolidation, and variability change with age.