Abstract

Sleep is essential for life. It serves a variety of purposes for ensuring brain health including memory consolidation, emotional processing and most importantly maintaining neural networks and synaptic plasticity. The newborn infant will spend over 16 hours asleep a day, the preterm infant even more. The nature, quality and quantity of sleep is very different to sleep at any other age, and sleep in the newborn is fundamental constructing networks in the brain and refining a picture of the outside world.

It is therefore important be able to investigate the relationship between functional connectivity and the sleep states in the developing brain, and how interrupted sleep could contribute to altered neurodevelopmental outcomes in vulnerable infants.

Our brains, however, do not develop in isolation; from the moment of birth the newborn infant will communicate with their primary caregiver. This interaction is fundamental in enabling the newborn infant to enter a secure internal state to interact and learn about the outside world. The earliest and universal form of caregiver-infant communication is affectionate touch.

This presentation will provide a rationale for studying sleep, functional connectivity and neural synchrony in the neonatal period and highlight two brain imaging technologies – diffuse optical tomography and dyadic electroencephalography – both of which have been used by our group to investigate dynamic functional connectivity in the newborn brain and neural synchrony between mother and infant during affectionate touch. As well as summarising work done so far, the presentation will summarise the potential (and challenges) of exploring sleep and touch in the preterm brain.