Neuroscientists at the University of California, Riverside in the Journal of Neuroscience provide for the first time a mechanistic explanation for how deep sleep (also called slow-wave sleep) may be promoting the consolidation of recent memories.
During sleep, human and animal brains are primarily decoupled from sensory input. Nevertheless, the brain remains highly active, showing electrical activity in the form of sharp-wave ripples in the hippocampus (a small region of the brain that forms part of the limbic system) and large-amplitude slow oscillations in the cortex (the outer layer of the cerebrum), reflecting alternating periods of active and silent states of cortical neurons during deep sleep. Traces of episodic memory acquired during wakefulness and initially stored in the hippocampus are progressively transferred to the cortex as long-term memory during sleep.
Using a computational model, the UC Riverside researchers provide a link between electrical activity in the brain during deep sleep and synaptic connections between neurons. They show that patterns of slow oscillations in the cortex, which their model spontaneously generates, are influenced by the hippocampal sharp-wave ripples and that these patterns of slow oscillations determine synaptic changes in the cortex. (Change in synaptic strength is widely believed to underlie learning and memory storage in the brain.)
The model shows that the synaptic changes, in turn, affect the patterns of slow oscillations, promoting a kind of reinforcement and replay of specific firing sequences of the cortical neurons - representing a replay of specific memory.
https://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/36493
How the brain consolidates memory during deep sleep
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