Abstract
Long-term memory formation is a major function of sleep. Based on evidence from neurophysiological and behavioral studies mainly in humans and rodents, we consider the formation of long-term memory during sleep as an active systems consolidation process that is embedded in a process of global synaptic downscaling. Repeated neuronal replay of representations originating from the hippocampus during slow-wave sleep leads to a gradual transformation and integration of representations in neocortical networks. We highlight three features of this process: (i) hippocampal replay that, by capturing episodic memory aspects, drives consolidation of both hippocampus-dependent and non-hippocampus-dependent memory; (ii) brain oscillations hallmarking slow-wave and rapid-eye movement sleep that provide mechanisms for regulating both information flow across distant brain networks and local synaptic plasticity; and (iii) qualitative transformations of memories during systems consolidation resulting in abstracted, gist-like representations.
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Change history
11 September 2019
An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.
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Acknowledgements
We thank E. Bolinger for proof-reading a previous version of the manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Tr-SFB 654 “Sleep and Plasticity”, SFB 1233 “Robust Vision”). We apologize to all authors whose work, although relevant, we did not mention due to space limitations.
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Klinzing, J.G., Niethard, N. & Born, J. Mechanisms of systems memory consolidation during sleep. Nat Neurosci 22, 1598–1610 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0467-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-019-0467-3
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