Non-REM sleep articles from across Nature Portfolio

An EEG study shows that cardiac signals support auditory regularity encoding in sleep and wakefulness. This highlights a mechanism optimizing unexpected stimulus detection based on the temporal cue provided by continuously monitored cardiac inputs.

The sleep drive builds with time spent awake. Tossell et al. show in mice that tiredness triggers neurons in the prefrontal cortex to instruct the hypothalamus to initiate nesting and then sleep itself, ensuring that sleep occurs in a safe place.

Non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep is associated with increased cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow in mammals, but this link has not been studied in birds. Here, the authors show that in pigeons, REM sleep is associated with activation of visual brain regions and a drop in CSF flow, suggesting that REM sleep functions occur at the expense of waste clearance during NREM sleep.

Sleep helps to stabilize long-term memories, possibly through the temporal synchronization of neuronal activity in different brain regions. Intracranial stimulation during sleep using prefrontal electric pulses, precisely timed with slow-wave activities in the medial temporal lobe, enhanced the coupling of neuronal oscillations across regions of the human brain and improved memory performance.

The ability to be woken from deep sleep by a sound (such as an alarm) is shown to be mediated by a specialized glutamatergic brainstem–mediodorsal thalamic pathway.

Barosensitive neurons in the medullary nucleus of the solitary tract can decrease wakefulness and increase non-REM sleep in mice through the same circuitry that regulates cardiovascular function.