The Secrets of Sleep

'"Sleep has been the Rodney Dangerfield of med­icine," says John Winkelman, medical director of the Brigham and Women's Hospital's Sleep Health Center in Brighton, Massachusetts. "It just gets no respect."'

A lot of neuroscientists I know, including myself, find sleep to be deeply interesting. But at this point in the development of our field, it's a difficult phenomenon to get a handle on.

edit: That the thalamus might be implicated in a sleep disorder is consistent (along with a bunch of other findings) with the Francis Crick's 'searchlight' hypothesis: http://www.pnas.org/content/81/14/4586.abstract