Thomas Andrillon

Dr Thomas Andrillon has a long-lasting fascination for the human brain and how thoughts emerge from such a tiny piece of matter.

More particularly, Dr Andrillon focuses his research on understanding how modulations of sleep and vigilance constrain our brain's ability to produce sensations, decisions or actions. During his PhD, completed in 2016 at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, Dr Andrillon has shown that sleep is not an homogenous process and that the sleeping brain is far from being disconnected when we sleep. Rather, sleepers can flexibally process incoming stimuli, make decisions and even learn!

At Monash University, Dr Andrillon is extending this work to wakefulness and is examining how mind-wandering and day-dreaming affect our capacity to interact with our environment. Dr Andrillon's work is part of a broader inter-disciplinary focus on sleep, dreams, mind-wandering and consciousness including A/Prof Tsuchiya (Psychology), Prof Sean Drummond (Psychology), Dr Jennifer Windt (Arts) and Dr Bei Bei (Psychology).

Dr Andrillon's research interests lie at the interface between the "Memory and Attention" and "Sleep" programs for the Monash Institude of Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences (MICCN). 

Dr Andrillon is interested in understanding the neural mechanisms explaining our ability or inability to interact with our environment when we sleep our when our mind wanders.

To conduct his research, Dr Andrillon combines psychological experiments with electrophysiological recordings in healthy individuals and patients.