This monograph is a synthesis of the ongoing efforts toward the understanding of neuronal mechanisms underlying sleep stages and different forms of paroxysmal (epileptiform) activities that preferentially occur during the states of drowsiness and slow-wave sleep. I have been interested in the neurophysiological basis of electrographic seizures since the 1960s, and this interest intensified during the early 1970s when I investigated spike-wave seizures during light sleep in behaving monkeys. This work inspired my idea that such seizures originate within the neocortex and set the scene for our recent intracellular work in vivo, throughout the 1990s. The journey continues this century, along the same conceptual lines, with new collaborators who have joined my team.

The two major topics of my laboratory are the neocortical and thalamic neuronal bases of sleep and of paroxysmal activities that mimic different forms of epilepsy in humans, more particularly absence seizures and Lennox–Gastaut syndrome. This is why sleep and these two forms of paroxysmal activities found a place of choice in the present monograph. Nonetheless, I have also attempted to relate these topics with a series of other forms of epilepsy. There are some edited volumes in which many authors express their views, sometimes discrepant, on sleep and/or epilepsy, but I decided to write a monograph because this may allow an expression of coherence, even if the views in this book might be, of necessity, biased by my ideas and personal experimental data.