Aurélie Stephan

I am a postdoc, mainly looking for signs of the arousal system in sleep and fascinated by sleep slow waves – which I hope to dedicate more time to, soon.

I have worked on sleep (mis)perception in patients with insomnia; a phenomenon in which subjects perceive to be awake during PSG clear-cut sleep. This can actually manifest in any individual who doesn’t present sleep complaints; however in patients with insomnia it is much more frequent, to the extent that some patients actually report having little to no sleep while presenting a sleep within the norm with standard PSG measures. This was previously referred to as “paradoxical insomnia”. In a recent work, using high-density EEG with serial awakening paradigm, we have shown how this was actually an accurate perception of the intrusion of fast EEG activity into sleep; which in patient was more widespread, could happen at any time of night and pervaded into REM sleep.

I am currently working on a project investigating the spatiotemporal dynamics of the awakening brain and how this process relates to the momentaneous sleepiness experienced upon awakening.