Access

News and Views

Nature Neuroscience 11, 126–128 (1 February 2008) | doi:10.1038/nn0208-126

Crossing borders: sleep reactivation as a window on cell assembly formation

Douglas Nitz & Stephen Cowen

Learning is believed to be a result of plasticity in synaptic architecture, but few studies have shown this directly. A new paper explores a mechanism that shapes the formation of associative connections between neurons in behaving animals. The impact of a scientific observation can be judged by how well it spans different levels of description. One successful example of this is the observed sensitivity of neurons in area LIP to average movement direction among a group of randomly directed light-point stimuli.