Professor Katherine Johnson and Associate Professor Natalia Brumley
Lowe Theatre, L1, Redmond Barry Building, Parkville VIC 3052
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Welcome to the MSPS Colloquium with Professor Katherine Johnson and Associate Professor Natalia Brumley
Where should I spend my break, to help restore my attention?
Exposure to nature and its effects on the restoration of attention and mood has been widely researched, with mixed findings. One’s compatibility with the location of a nature break, how connected one feels with nature, and any changes in mood, may help explain this relationship. The effects of spending 15 minutes seated in a nature location on attention control, restorative experience, and mood, and the moderating effects of connectedness to nature and perceived restoration were examined in a recent study and the results will be discussed.
About Professor Katherine Johnson
Katherine Johnson is a Professor in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. She is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist researching attention control in infants, children, and adults. She has a special interest in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). She also examines the effects of exposure to nature and greenery on attention and wellbeing.
How poor sleep affects pain
Pain is widely known to disrupt sleep. In addition, compelling evidence has emerged to suggest that poor sleep has an even greater effect on pain perception. This opens a possibility to improve pain symptoms by treating sleep problems. However, there is a lot less clarity on the specific aspects of sleep that can be modified to improve pain and the populations that would benefit from various sleep interventions. This talk will highlight some of our recent experimental pain/sleep studies in healthy participants and chronic pain populations (osteoarthritis) aimed at mechanistically understanding the link between sleep and pain to inform sleep treatments targeting pain. I will discuss our results with respect to sleep duration, including in specific sleep stages, highlighting the role of NREM and specifically slow-wave sleep for pain. The talk will also touch on the neurobiological mechanisms that might underpin the link between sleep and pain. Finally, it will highlight significant sex differences in the relationship between sleep and pain, suggesting that females might be more vulnerable to the detrimental effect of poor sleep on pain.
About Associate Professor Natalia Egorova-Brumley
Natalia Egorova-Brumley is an Associate Professor at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. She completed her PhD in cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, and received postdoctoral training in pain neuroimaging at the Massachusetts General Hospital / Harvard Medical School. After moving to Australia, she worked at the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health before starting her own Pain and Cognition Neuroimaging Lab at the University of Melbourne. She combines cognitive and clinical neuroimaging lines of research to understand how pain impacts the brain and how cognition alters pain processing. She is currently a Dame Kate Campbell Fellow and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow, investigating the neurobiological mechanisms of the interaction between pain and sleep.