Delphine Oudiette

Biography

During my PhD in cognitive neuroscience in Paris (supervised by Prof. I. Arnulf), I studied REM sleep behavior disorder and sleepwalking as a unique gateway to studying dreams—usually out of reach. I then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the United States (under Prof. K. Paller), where I investigated memory consolidation during sleep, using a novel method that involves reactivating specific memories through sensory cues during sleep (Targeted Memory Reactivation). I then pursued a second postdoc at the Paris Brain Institute (with Dr. M. Pessiglione), where I examined the paradoxical effects of motivation on physical performance. In 2018, I joined the Paris Brain Institute as a tenured research scientist, and today, I co-lead the DreamTeam, a dynamic group of researchers and clinicians dedicated to pushing the frontiers of sleep science.

Research

The traditional view holds that wakefulness and sleep are distinct and mutually exclusive. But my research, along with that of many others, reveals the existence of "hybrid states" where features of wakefulness and sleep coexist. These states can be pathological, such as sleepwalking, or physiological (e.g.  lucid dreaming, or sleep onset period). These hybrid states challenge our understanding of where sleep ends and wakefulness begins. Can we propose a new classification of conscious states? With my team, we’re exploring these questions by integrating multiple dimensions of sleep into a single experimental framework. We combine electrophysiological measures (high-density EEG, EOG, EMG), behavioral data (spontaneous or in response to external stimuli), and phenomenological assessments (subjective perception of sleep, mental content) with cognitive tasks (attention, memory, creativity).