Profiles of Leading Women Scientists on AcademiaNet.
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Year of election: | 2009 |
Section: | Psychology and Cognitive Sciences |
City: | Tübingen |
Country: | Germany |
Jan Born is a neuropsychologist and sleep researcher. His early studies on the neuroendocrine mechanisms of sleep culminated in the fundamental insight that during sleep, the control of many hormonal processes runs completely differently to the way it does during wakefulness. These observations led him to tackle the ultimate raison d’être of sleep research, i.e. what is the function of sleep? Born answers this question with a future-minded hypothesis: sleep forms memory.
Here, memory is conceived as a general biological process that proceeds not only in neural networks but principally in all biological systems adapting to environmental stressors on the long-term. With this approach, Born's studies are not just trend-setting for modern sleep research, but they also form the basis of a new type of memory research, in which the biological principles of the relevant processes stand at the forefront. Basically, Born's approach follows on from an objective already considered by Freud, namely of characterizing the influence of sleep on consciousness using neural mechanisms.