Goal(s) in the NOM
Exploring how/whether meditation changes sleep at the physiological (sleep onset period; sleep micro and macro-architecture), behavioral (responses to external and somatosensory input) and mental (dreams, consciousness during sleep) level.
Education
Habilitation to supervise PhD students (HDR) (2021); PhD degree, Brain-Cognition-Behaviour Doctoral School, University of P. et M. Curie, Paris (VI) (2010); Master in Neuroscience, University of P. et M. Curie, Paris (VI) (2007)
Experience
Throughout her career, Delphine Oudiette has helped transform dreams from a purely subjective, inaccessible phenomenon into something that can be studied experimentally. Together with Isabelle Arnulf, she pioneered original ways to access and study dream content, working with patients whose unique sleep peculiarities offer a direct window into the dreaming mind (sleepwalking, REM sleep behavior disorder, lucid dreaming). Her research also showed that wake and sleep are not all-or-nothing phenomena but points along a continuum, with boundaries far more permeable than once thought. Challenging the long-standing behavioral disconnection dogma, – that sleepers cannot physically respond to external stimuli-, her team demonstrated windows of responsiveness across multiple contexts: in pathological conditions like sleepwalking, in altered states like lucid dreaming, and even in healthy individuals across most sleep stages. Using clustering methods, her team has also mapped the mental landscape of the wake-sleep transition: she discovered that mental states were not tied to traditional vigilance states and that the brain can generate the same conscious experience across wake and sleep. Together, Oudiette’s work challenges the classical sleep–wake dichotomy, suggesting similar states of consciousness can emerge in both wakefulness and sleep in varying proportions. Her expertise in sleep and hybrid states (mixing wake and sleep properties) will be useful to better understand the impact of meditation on the sleep/wake continuum.
Select Publications
- Shared mental states across wakefulness and sleep. Decat N, Le Coz A, Sénéchal J, Scellier-Dekens I, de Verville H, Herzog R, Lejeune FX, Arnulf I, Andrillon T, Oudiette D. Cell reports. Accepted
- What is sleep exactly? Global and local modulations of sleep oscillations all around the clock. Andrillon T, Oudiette D.Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2023 Dec;155:105465. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105465.
- Embracing sleep onset complexity. Lacaux C, Strauss M, Bekinschtein T, Oudiette D. Trends in Neurosciences 2024. 47(4):273-288. doi: 10.1016/j.tins.2024.02.002
- Behavioral and brain responses to verbal stimuli reveal transient periods of cognitive integration of the external world during sleep. Türker B, Musat EM, Chabani E, Fonteix-Galet A, Maranci JB, Wattiez N, Pouget P, Sitt J, Naccache L, Arnulf I, Oudiette D. Nat Neurosci. 2023 Nov;26(11):1981-1993. doi: 10.1038/s41593-023-01449-7.
- Real-time dialogue between experimenters and dreamers during REM sleep.Konkoly KR, Appel K, Chabani E, Mangiaruga A, Gott J, Mallett R, Caughran B, Witkowski S, Whitmore NW, Mazurek CY, Berent JB, Weber FD, Türker B, Leu-Semenescu S, Maranci JB, Pipa G, Arnulf I, Oudiette D, Dresler M, Paller KA. Curr Biol. 2021; 31(7):1417-1427.e6. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.01.026.