Nature Neuroscience
- 9, 1169 - 1176 (2006)
Published online: 27 August 2006; | doi:10.1038/nn1758
Arm immobilization causes cortical plastic changes and locally decreases sleep slow wave activityReto Huber1, M Felice Ghilardi2, Marcello Massimini1, Fabio Ferrarelli1, Brady A Riedner3, Michael J Peterson1 & Giulio Tononi11
Department of Psychiatry, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53719, USA. 2
Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, CUNY Medical School at City College, New York, New York 10031, USA. 3
Neuroscience Training Program, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53719, USA.
Correspondence should be addressed to Giulio Tononi gtononi@wisc.edu or M Felice Ghilardi mg79@columbia.edu Sleep slow wave activity (SWA) is thought to reflect sleep need, increasing after wakefulness and decreasing after sleep. We showed recently that a learning task involving a circumscribed brain region produces a local increase in sleep SWA. We hypothesized that increases in cortical SWA reflect synaptic potentiation triggered by learning. To further investigate the link between synaptic plasticity and sleep, we asked whether a procedure leading to synaptic depression would cause instead a decrease in sleep SWA. We show here that if a subject's arm is immobilized during the day, motor performance deteriorates and both somatosensory and motor evoked potentials decrease over contralateral sensorimotor cortex, indicative of local synaptic depression. Notably, during subsequent sleep, SWA over the same cortical area is markedly reduced. Thus, cortical plasticity is linked to local sleep regulation without learning in the classical sense. Moreover, when synaptic strength is reduced, local sleep need is also reduced.
MORE ARTICLES LIKE THIS These links to content published by NPG are automatically generated.
|
