Penny Lewis Keynote Speaker

Leading expert on sleep, memory, and mental health
She is the author of 'The Secret World of Sleep: How the nighttime brain creates consciousness'
Her TEDx talk 'Sleep-Engineering: Improve Your Life By Manipulating Your Sleep' has had 1.8 Million views

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Penny Lewis's Biography

Professor Penny Lewis is a leading expert on sleep, memory, and mental health.

Dr. Lewis’s research team examines ways in which the sleeping brain processes information, and how this can be nudged in order to improve memory, enhance creativity, and improve mental wellbeing. They are also working on ways to slow down the aging process by artificially boosting sleep oscillations.

The lab is particularly interested in triggering the brain to practice memories during sleep. This ‘brainwashing’ can strengthen target memories, helping the brain to make new connections and think creatively. It can also be used to make upsetting memories less bothersome and may eventually be used in treating Depression and PTSD.

Penny frequently appears in the media and has featured on BBC Horizon, The Times, Life, The Atlantic, All in the mind, BBC Reel, and NPR’s Fresh Air to name a few. She is the author of ‘The Secret World of Sleep: How the nighttime brain creates consciousness’ and also presents the popularly acclaimed Sleep Science Podcast. Her TEDx talk Sleep-Engineering: Improve Your Life By Manipulating Your Sleep has had 1.8 Million views.

Sleep engineering for health and cognition:

This talk gives a an easy overview of how Sleep Engineering can be used to boost health and cognition. It includes Sleep Engineering to slow down ageing, Sleep Engineering to reduce emotionality of upsetting memories, and Sleep Engineering to selectively strengthen target memories. It can be tweaked to include Sleep Engineering for creativity as well. The talk is based on my TED Talk and New Scientist short course.

How sleep changes our memories:

This talk is more specifically focussed on memory and how memory replay in sleep leads to consolidation and how we can manipulate this to boost memory. We will cover the concept of spontaneous memory reactivation in sleep (essentially the brain practicing), and the classic finding that a night of sleep boosts the speed of a simple finger tapping sequence by up to 20%. We will discuss Targeted Memory Reactivation, in which the cueing of memories in sleep leads to memory reactivation and consequent memory benefit. We can then go into how such reactivation benefits creativity/emotional processing/complex problem solving - as desired. We can also discuss the link between memory reactivation and dreams.

Tackling Depression and PTSD with Sleep Engineering:

This talk will explore the importance of sleep for mental health, including Depression, PTSD, and Schizophrenia. We will discuss ways in which Sleep Engineering is aiming to manipulate our sleep in order to treat these conditions.

How sleep boosts your creativity:

This talk will focus on how sleep is beneficial not only for strengthening memories, but also for making novel links between different types of information and extracting the gist from corpuses of experience or knowledge. I will present a model of how Non-REM and REM sleep work synergistically together to perform these processes and to build our mental model of the world.

How to optimise your sleep:

This talk will go over the basic ways that you can optimise your environment and habits in order to get better sleep. Things like darkness, quiet, temperature, comfortable bed, sleep hygiene, and diet/foods to avoid will all be discussed. Many of these will be familiar - but it does sometimes help to have them all discussed together in one easy to follow talk. We can also discuss the various technologies that exist to monitor and hack sleep.