Dr. rer. nat. Nicolas Lutz

Dr. Nicolas D. Lutz is a neuroscientist whose work explores how sleep shapes cognitive function and immunological processes. After completing his studies in Biology at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Interdisciplinary Neuroscience at Goethe University Frankfurt and the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, he obtained his Ph.D. at the University of Tübingen where he focused on the role of sleep in human memory formation. As a postdoc, he moved to the Institute of Medical Psychology, LMU Munich, to continue his research in sleep and memory, and extend it to immunological aspects and physiological need states such as hunger. Dr. Lutz is also actively involved in teaching lectures, courses and seminars and is a member of several international societies and networks.

Sleep and Memory

Project Leader: Dr. rer. nat. Nicolas Lutz

Over the last decades, research has established a central role of sleep for the formation of long-term memory. Sleep-dependent transformation of initially labile memory representations into more stable forms is accompanied by a reorganization process that not only improves memory quantitatively but supposedly also entails qualitative changes. Our research focusses on investigating the formation of abstracted, more general, memories representing the “gist” of experiences, which have been linked to the formation of cognitive schemata, problem-solving, predictive coding, gaining insight and creativity. We mainly examine these questions in healthy participants using behavioral and electroencephalographic techniques.

Publications:

Lutz, N. D., Harkotte, M., & Born, J. (2026). Sleep’s contribution to memory formation. Physiological Reviews, 106(1), 363–483. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Himbert, J., Palmieri, J., Kurz, E., Raposo, I., Yang, X., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2025). Long‐term visual gist abstraction independent of post‐encoding sleep. Journal of Sleep Research, e70106. Read more

Yang, X., Miao, X., Schweiggart, F., Großmann, S., Rauss, K., Hallschmid, M., Born, J., & Lutz, N. D. (2025). The effect of fasting on human memory consolidation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 218, 108034. Read more

Martínez-Albert, E., Lutz, N. D., Hübener, R., Dimitrov, S., Lange, T., Born, J., & Besedovsky, L. (2024). Sleep promotes T-cell migration towards CCL19 via growth hormone and prolactin signaling in humans. Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, 118, 69–77. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Martínez-Albert, E., Friedrich, H., Born, J., & Besedovsky, L. (2024). Sleep shapes the associative structure underlying pattern completion in multielement event memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 121(9), e2314423121. Read more

Miao, X., Müller, C., Lutz, N. D., Yang, Q., Waszak, F., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2023). Sleep consolidates stimulus–response learning. Learning & Memory, 30(9), 175–184. Read more

Pitsillos, T., Wikström, A.-K., Skalkidou, A., Derntl, B., Hallschmid, M., Lutz, N. D., Ngai, E., Sundström Poromaa, I., & Wikman, A. (2022). Association Between Objectively Assessed Sleep and Depressive Symptoms During Pregnancy and Post-partum. Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, 2, 807817. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Admard, M., Genzoni, E., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2021). Occipital sleep spindles predict sequence learning in a visuo-motor task. Sleep, 44(8), 1–18. Read more

Lutz, N. D., & Born, J. (2019). Sleep to make more of your memories: Decoding hidden rules from encoded information. Sleep Medicine Reviews, 47, 122–124. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Lemes, E., Krubitzer, L., Collin, S. P., Haverkamp, S., & Peichl, L. (2018). The rod signaling pathway in marsupial retinae. PLOS ONE, 13(8), e0202089. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Wolf, I., Hübner, S., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2018). Sleep strengthens predictive sequence coding. The Journal of Neuroscience, 38(42), 8989–9000. Read more

Lutz, N. D., Diekelmann, S., Hinse-Stern, P., Born, J., & Rauss, K. (2017). Sleep supports the slow abstraction of gist from visual perceptual memories. Scientific Reports, 7(1), 42950. Read more