Sleep promotes branch-specific formation of dendritic spines after learning

By Guang Yang, C. S. Lai, Joseph Cichon, Lei Ma, Wei Li, Wen-Biao Gan. 2014

579 citations recorded by the source corpus.

To sleep, perchance to remember Many researchers believe sleep helps us consolidate our memories, but no one knows quite how. Yang et al. investigated the precise role of sleep in changing mouse brain structures (see the Perspective by Euston and Steenland). When mice learned motor tasks, small protuberances—or “spines”—formed on some of the dendritic branches of specific brain neurons. These spines represent the physical correlate of a memory. But the neurons grew and retained these spines better when the mice slept after learning the task. Neurons that fired during learning fired again during subsequent slow-wave sleep, allowing the mice to conserve the newly formed spines—and memories. Science, this issue p. 1173; see also p. 1087 In mice, synaptic connectivity changes after motor learning are influenced by sleep. [Also see Perspective by Euston and Steenland] How sleep helps learning and memory remains unknown. We report in mouse motor cortex that sleep after motor learning promotes the formation of postsynaptic dendritic spines on a subset of branches of individual layer V pyramidal neurons. New spines are formed on different sets of dendritic branches in response to different learning tasks and are protected from being eliminated when multiple tasks are learned. Neurons activated during learning of a motor task are reactivated during subsequent non–rapid eye movement sleep, and disrupting this neuronal reactivation prevents branch-specific spine formation. These findings indicate that sleep has a key role in promoting learning-dependent synapse formation and maintenance on selected dendritic branches, which contribute to memory storage.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience, Endocrine and Autonomic Systems, Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks (2016, background): “Recent evidence suggests that the mammalian brain may avoid catastrophic forgetting by protecting previously-acquired knowledge in neocortical circuits [Cichon and Gan, 2015, Hayashi-Takagi et al., 2015, Yang et al., 2009, 2014].”
Deep Generative Dual Memory Network for Continual Learning (2017, background): “Weight consolidation or freezing : Recent evidence from neuroscience also suggests that mammalian brain protects knowledge in the neocortex via task-speciﬁc consolidation of neural synapses over long periods of time (Yang et al., 2014; Benna & Fusi, 2016).”
NISPA: Neuro-Inspired Stability-Plasticity Adaptation for Continual Learning in Sparse Networks (2022, background): “This suggests that stable spines serve as substrates for long-term information storage (Zuo et al., 2005; Yang et al., 2009; 2014; Grutzendler et al., 2002).”
Continual Learning in the Teacher-Student Setup: Impact of Task Similarity (2021, background): “In neuroscience, much work has been done to understand the brain’s ability to consolidate learning from earlier tasks, thereby making it relatively robust to forgetting (Flesch et al., 2018; Cichon & Gan, 2015; Yang et al., 2014).”
Continual Relation Learning via Episodic Memory Activation and Reconsolidation (2020, background): “…inside the human brain, they reach a consensus that the formation of long-term memory relies on continually replaying and consolidating information (Tononi and Cirelli, 2006; Boyce et al., 2016; Yang et al., 2014), corresponding to the episodic memory and memory replay in continual learning models.”
Continual Learning via Bit-Level Information Preserving (2021, background): “Previous neurobiology evidences suggest that human brain may mitigate forgetting by synaptic consolidation[34, 33], which is the process of strengthening synapses that are crucial for certain knowledge or skills.”
The Consolidation and Transformation of Memory. (2015, unknown): “Furthermore, a role for sleep, specifically SWS, was suggested in the selective maintenance and promotion of the dendritic spines relevant to task performance (Yang et al., 2014).”
The restless engram: consolidations never end. (2012, background): “Furthermore, a role for sleep, specifically SWS, was suggested in the selective maintenance and promotion of the dendritic spines relevant to task performance (Yang et al., 2014).”
Memory consolidation. (2015, background): “in other brain areas, including the striatum, motor cortex, and visual cortex (Euston et al. 2007; Ji and Wilson 2007; Aton et al. 2009; Lansink et al. 2009; Yang et al. 2014).”
Neural ensemble reactivation in rapid eye movement and slow-wave sleep coordinate with muscle activity to promote rapid motor skill learning (2020, unknown): “Supporting this idea, recent imaging of dendritic spine dynamics during reach training has shown that new spines are formed during sleep following reach training [31].”
Plasticity during Sleep Is Linked to Specific Regulation of Cortical Circuit Activity (2017, background): “, 2017), the upscaling of selected synapses has been preferentially observed during SWS (Yang et al., 2014).”
Cellular and Systems Consolidation of Declarative Memory (2017, background): “…et al. 2015), olfactory/prefrontal/visual/motor cortex (Barnes and Wilson 2014; Ji and Wilson 2007; Peyrache et al. 2009; Ramanathan et al. 2015; Yang et al. 2014) and disrupting sharp-wave-ripples and thus replay during sleep leads to a deficit in hippocampal led consolidation (Ego-Stengel and…”