Mathematical Modeling and Dynamics of Human Sleep, by Christina Athanasouli, Georgia Tech

Abstract: Sleep-wake patterns exhibit great variability as we age. For example, toddlers tend to nap during the day, while most adults only sleep at night. The timing of human sleep is strongly modulated by two main processes: 1) the 24-hour circadian rhythm, our internal biological clock, and 2) the homeostatic sleep drive, our sleep need or sleep debt. In this talk, I will discuss the physiology of human sleep and mathematical models that generate sleep-wake patterns, as well as the fundamental mathematical tools we employ to understand the dynamics of these models. We’ll see that as we vary parameters associated with the circadian system and homeostatic dynamics, the average number of sleep episodes per day changes in a very interesting structure giving us an insight about the mechanisms that govern transitions in sleep behavior.