his conference aimed to provide a forum for the review and discussion of recent developments in the neurobiology of sleep and sleep disorders. The topics presented addressed basic and clinical research issues including biochemical, physiological, molecular biological, as well as pathological aspects, and are inherently interdisciplinary. We hope that this conference brought together the expertise of different disciplines and filled the gap among the seemingly widely different approaches and experimental paradigms. In this regard we asked each speaker to integrate his or her presentation with those of the other participants and also to allow enough time for the audiences to participate in a subsequent short discussion or question-and-answer period.

e tried to make this conference a small but significant milestone towards unraveling, based on solid experimental evidence, the most conceptual and theoretical issues in sleep research.