Festschrift in honor of Dr. Robert Stickgold, pioneer in sleep, memory, and dream research
SLEEP Advances January 1, 2026 Tony J. Cunningham, Erin J. Wamsley, JD Payne
A Festschrift honors Dr. Robert Stickgold's career, which transformed sleep from a passive state into an active component of memory consolidation, where reactivation and dreaming stabilize, abstract, and integrate waking experiences. His work established that sleep improves performance on visual discrimination and procedural memory, linked gains to Stage 2 sleep and spindles, and showed sleep extracts gist and transforms memories for future use. He developed the Nightcap device for at-home dream collection and the NEXTUP model of dreaming as creating novel meaning. Contributions from colleagues report that reactivation during wake fails to improve performance like sleep does, sleep restriction impairs memory discrimination in adolescents, total sleep deprivation impairs memory but recovery sleep enhances emotional content, and closed-loop auditory stimulation targets spindles without disrupting sleep.