Our scientific interests are mainly, but not exclusively related to sleep research, more specifically to the relationship between sleep, behaviour and psychological phenomena. Sleep is an ancient component of the mammalian behavioural repertoire which has been being preserved in its original form during the course of evolution. According to our opinion sleep provides a perfect insight so as to understand human behaviour. Sleep and sleep-related phenomena (sleepiness, dreaming, sleep disorders) are great challenges for scientists of different speciality, though questions regarding sleep and dreaming are popular not only amongst scientists. The popularity of these topics stimulate scientific activity but also impose a responsibility for preserving the thin border between the exact and provable statements on one side and pseudo-scientific activity on the other side.
We define our scientific activity by three main features. The first one emphasises the connection between brain and psychological phenomena. This means that we endeavour to reveal human behaviour and psyche in relation with neural mechanisms. That concerns both our questions and methodologies. Besides describing the psychological variables which are both hardly to define and to quantify we also attempt to consider objective variables which are related to the operating brain. In our point of view this provides an easier orientation between psychological factors with slight outlines. The inherited behaviour called sleep constitutes nearly 1/3 of human life being the most common altered state of consciousness. Consequently our knowledge about the psychic events and their relations to the neural processes will be incomplete until we do not expand the study of these contingencies to sleep. Hence sleep research is a specific case and fruitful approach of the body-mind problem. The changes of consciousness experienced during sleep are accompanied by the increasingly measurable changes of brain functions. This enlarges the possibility of unravelling the relationship between psychic and brain functions.
As we emphasise the relationship between neural and psychological processes our work is close to the paradigm of cognitive neuroscience. Nevertheless we do not postulate the absolutism of information processing while describing psychological phenomena. Instead of this we exploit and improve the results and approaches of affective neuroscience which is less represented in current scientific streams. According to our view the cognitive and affective factors are on the same platform and they interact. The cognitive one does not represent the absolute basis of the affective and vice versa. Both of them can be related to neural operations, while their separation seems to be artificial expressing rather the mainly referred human-model of the society. Along with others we endeavour to map psychological phenomena related to neural operations and to understand the nature of these relationships. Nevertheless we do not engage the current disciplinary differentiation between cognitive and affective neuroscience, we only claim to reductionism.
There is another disciplinary separation between neurobiology and psychophysiology. Regarding our methods we belong to psychophysiology but in our theoretical approach we rather prefer modern neurobiology. The considerable achievements of neurobiology allow us to reveal the most challenging hitherto hidden relationships by using classic psychophysiological methods. New knowledge offer new horizons in applying classical methods. That is now we know even better what to search and how to look for it.