© BEA UHARTChristina Schmidt was catapulted into sleep research by an ad in a Belgian newspaper. She had earned her first degree in psychological sciences from the University of Liège in 2004 and completed an internship in a neuropsychology research lab under Philippe Peigneux as an undergrad. But at graduation, Schmidt didn’t have a concrete plan for her future.
Her grandfather saw the newspaper ad, placed by Switzerland’s Federal Commission for Scholarships for Foreign Students to announce open applications for research fellowships, and encouraged her to apply. On the advice of Peigneux, Schmidt wrote to a chronobiology lab run by Christian Cajochen at the University of Basel and secured the scholarship.
Inviting Schmidt to his lab “was a very good decision,” says Cajochen. While working in the Swiss lab, Schmidt studied the relationship between memorizing a difficult or easy list of words and subsequent brain activity during a nap. Subjects who memorized the challenging words displayed more sleep spindles, or quick bursts of brain activity in their EEG recordings—and more sleep spindles meant better post-nap recall of the word list.1 “If you’re doing a ...
