Abstract

Abstract: The non-REM sleep EEG of schizophrenia patients consistently reveals abnormal thalamocortical sleep spindles and slow-waves. These oscillatory signatures constitute non-invasive, translational metrics of schizophrenia neurobiology, potentially illuminating mechanistic routes between risk factors, brain development, neural circuit dysfunction, symptoms and personalised therapies. However, grappling with complexity, heterogeneity and causality remains challenging.

I will introduce our approach to iterating between deep-brain, cellular-resolution neurophysiology in rodents and scalp EEG in genotyped volunteers and patients, most recently in young people with 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. Sleep does not hold all the answers, but I hope to make the case that integrating sleep neurophysiology into translational psychiatry can expedite understanding of the neurobiology of individual patients, optimising their diagnosis and treatment.

Biography: Prof Matt Jones trained as a neuroscientist at the University of Cambridge, the UK National Institute for Medical Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before establishing his research team at the University of Bristol. His lab strives to understand how distributed neural networks spanning hippocampus, striatum and prefrontal cortex process and store information, and how this processing becomes impaired in neuropsychiatric disorders. To do this, they record and modulate brain activity using arrays of electrodes in rodents, genotyped volunteers and patients, then apply computational modelling and analyses to try and decode the terabytes. Current projects include analyses of sleep’s contributions to cognition, the diagnostic and translational utility of sleep neurophysiology and the circuit architecture of psychedelic drug action. For detailed biography of Prof Jones, please visit: https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/persons/matt-w-jones