Local sleep in awake rats

By V. Vyazovskiy, Umberto Olcese, Erin C. Hanlon, Yuval Nir, Chiara Cirelli, Giulio Tononi. Nature, 2011

857 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In an awake state, neurons in the cerebral cortex fire irregularly and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings display low-amplitude, high-frequency fluctuations. During sleep, neurons oscillate between ‘on’ periods, when they fire as in an awake brain, and ‘off’ periods, when they stop firing altogether and the EEG displays high-amplitude slow waves. However, what happens to neuronal firing after a long period of being awake is not known. Here we show that in freely behaving rats after a long period in an awake state, cortical neurons can go briefly ‘offline’ as in sleep, accompanied by slow waves in the local EEG. Neurons often go offline in one cortical area but not in another, and during these periods of ‘local sleep’, the incidence of which increases with the duration of the awake state, rats are active and display an ‘awake’ EEG. However, they are progressively impaired in a sugar pellet reaching task. Thus, although both the EEG and behaviour indicate wakefulness, local populations of neurons in the cortex may be falling asleep, with negative consequences for performance.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/44546ecd20e88a36f996aa42b42ff574b6cec9bb

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Sleep and the Price of Plasticity: From Synaptic and Cellular Homeostasis to Memory Consolidation and Integration (2014, background): “The underlying cellular mechanisms remain unclear, but the recent identification of ‘‘local sleep’’ during wake offers some clues (Vyazovskiy et al., 2011).”
Waking State: Rapid Variations Modulate Neural and Behavioral Responses (2015, positive): “…supporting the hypothesis that these sudden, but brief, cessations of cortical activity are detrimental to behaviorally relevant cortical operation (Vyazovskiy et al., 2011) (however, in another recent study the presence of slow oscillatory events in the somatosensory cortex was not detrimental to…”
Regional slow waves and spindles in human sleep. (2011, positive): “In addition, local circuits may exhibit OFF periods even during wakefulness while the animal is performing a task (Vyazovskiy et al., 2011).”
Neural Circuitry of Wakefulness and Sleep (2017, positive): “Similarly, rats kept awake for several hours have increasingly frequent periods of focal slow waves that correlate with worsening performance on a motor task (Vyazovskiy et al., 2011).”
Cortical membrane potential signature of optimal states for sensory signal detection (2015, background): “…(e.g., movement) states (Bennett et al., 2013; Erisken et al., 2014; Fontanini and Katz, 2008; Polack et al., 2013; Poulet and Petersen, 2008; Reimer et al., 2014; Schneider et al., 2014; Schö lvinck et al., 2015; Vinck et al., 2015; Vyazovskiy et al., 2011; Zagha et al., 2013; Zhou et al., 2014).”