It’s no secret that sleep – or the lack of it – can affect us personally and professionally, but just how big a role does it play in determining our ability to be creative, engage with others and contribute to our organisations and society as a whole? And what if a humble insect could help us unlock the mysteries of human sleep?

For this Engineering Reimagined episode, Aurecon’s Managing Director for Queensland, Evelyn Storey, talks to Associate Professor Bruno van Swinderen from the Queensland Brain Institute at the University of Queensland about the importance of sleep and how his research, using flies, is helping us to understand the role sleep plays in consciousness, creativity, performance and our overall health and wellbeing. Ultimately, we need sleep to not just survive, but to thrive. Beyond that, his research could help us better understand the role that artificial intelligence could play in the future.