Rotating waves during human sleep spindles organize global patterns of activity that repeat precisely through the night

By Lyle E. Muller, Giovanni Piantoni, Dominik P. Koller, Sydney S. Cash, Eric Halgren, Terrence J. Sejnowski. 2016

196 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.17267.001

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “Both spindles and slow oscillations demonstrate characteristic spatiotemporal dynamics (Muller et al., 2016), and its properties determine synaptic changes during sleep (Wei et al., 2016).”
Cortical travelling waves: mechanisms and computational principles (2018, background): “These spindles systematically travel as global rotating waves from the temporal to the parietal to the frontal cortex (and are therefore called TPF waves) in intracranial electrocorticography (ECoG) recordings 13 .”
Propofol-induced loss of responsiveness reorganizes cortical traveling waves in the human brain (2026, unknown): “Through providing sub-threshold depolarization to individual neurons, traveling waves have been shown to modulate neuronal firing probability in local tissue 11,12 .”
Protocol for detecting and analyzing non-oscillatory traveling waves from high-spatiotemporal-resolution human electrophysiological recordings (2025, unknown): “1,2,29,30 34–36 Additionally, traveling wave properties have been shown to be functionally relevant in memory, 11,12,31,37 motor and speech behaviors 38,39 and vision.”
Macroscale traveling waves evoked by single-pulse stimulation of the human brain (2023, unknown): “Neural traveling waves are ubiquitous, showing important roles during development (Schoch et al., 2018), sleep (Muller et al., 2016), epileptic activity (Alarcon et al., 1997; Smith et al., 2016, 2022; Martinet et al., 2017; Yearley et al., 2024), cognitive states (Zhang et al., 2018; Mohan et al.,…”