Unlocking the mysteries of sleep

This course is an honors seminar for first-semester undergraduate honors students.
In this seminar we will explore what is known about sleep and delve into the many unknowns. Virtually every psychiatric disorder is strongly correlated with disturbances of sleep. Is disordered sleep the cause of these psychiatric disorders, or the effect? Is it possible to diagnose psychiatric disorders by looking at patterns of sleep over the long-term? Is it possible to objectively measure the effectiveness of psychoactive medications by looking at sleep instead of just asking a patient subjective questions? Could a measure of the quality of sleep lead to a metric of general health?

Prof. Higgins is the author of more than 50 publications and has been honored as a member of the 2012 and 2013 "Nifty fifty", a "Leading Edge" researcher, a da Vinci Fellow, and a visiting faculty member at a number of institutions. Prof. Higgins has received multiple teaching awards, and has been interviewed countless times for television, radio, and newspaper articles. His research involves an intersection between neuroscience (study of the brain) and electrical engineering (electronic circuits) which sometimes involves interfacing living brains with robots. You can read more in this 2012 bio from the Nifty Fifty.