| Abstract | Brief awakenings in humans and other mammalian species have been observed to follow a power law distribution, while intervening sleep episodes have an exponential distribution of durations. Such observations of the dynamics of sleep-wake regulation provide clues to the nature of the processes underlying sleep-wake cycles and the neuronal circuitry involved. Recent experiments reveal that the characteristic distributions of sleep and wake episode durations typically are not present at birth, instead developing during infancy in parallel with the development of neuronal circuits known to modulate sleep-wake cycles. I will discuss a mathematical model for sleep across postnatal development, combining approaches from stochastic processes and geometric dynamical systems theory to address questions concerning how these circuits generate and maintain sleep states. |
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