Rotating waves during human sleep spindles organize global patterns of activity that repeat precisely through the night
Abstract
During sleep, the thalamus generates a characteristic pattern of transient, 11-15 Hz sleep spindle oscillations, which synchronize the cortex through large-scale thalamocortical loops. Spindles have been increasingly demonstrated to be critical for sleep-dependent consolidation of memory, but the specific neural mechanism for this process remains unclear. We show here that cortical spindles are spatiotemporally organized into circular wave-like patterns, organizing neuronal activity over tens of milliseconds, within the timescale for storing memories in large-scale networks across the cortex via spike-time dependent plasticity. These circular patterns repeat over hours of sleep with millisecond temporal precision, allowing reinforcement of the activity patterns through hundreds of reverberations. These results provide a novel mechanistic account for how global sleep oscillations and synaptic plasticity could strengthen networks distributed across the cortex to store coherent and integrated memories.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Nov 15, 2016
- Source ID
- 10.7554/elife.17267
Entities
People
- Dominik Koller
- Eric Halgren
- Giovanni Piantoni
- Lyle E. Muller
- Sydney S. Cash
- Terrence J. Sejnowski
Organizations
- Bial
- Harvard Medical School
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute
- National Institutes of Health
- Office of Naval Research
- Salk Institute for Biological Studies
- University of California