Sleep articles within Nature Neuroscience

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  • Brief Communication
    | Open Access

    It has been widely believed that a key function of sleep is to actively clear metabolites and toxins from the brain. Miao, Luo et al. show in mice that brain clearance is markedly reduced—not increased—during sleep and anesthesia.

    • Andawei Miao
    • , Tianyuan Luo
    •  & Nicholas P. Franks

  • Article |

    Xu et al. show that waking progressively disrupts neural dynamics criticality in the visual cortex and that sleep restores it. Deviations from criticality predict future sleep/wake behavior better than prior behavior and slow-wave activity.

    • Yifan Xu
    • , Aidan Schneider
    •  & Keith B. Hengen

  • Research Briefing |

    Sleep is typically considered as a state of behavioral disconnection from the outside world. Recordings of brain activity and facial muscle tone during sleep reveal that humans can respond to external stimuli across most sleep stages. These windows of behavioral responsiveness reveal transient episodes of high-cognitive states with electrophysiological signatures suggestive of a conscious state.

  • Review Article |

    Sulaman et al. detail the neuronal underpinnings of sleep–wake states and discuss their intersection with hunger, fear and thermoregulatory circuits. They propose a de-arousal model for sleep initiation and highlight lingering questions in the field.

    • Bibi A. Sulaman
    • , Su Wang
    •  & Ada Eban-Rothschild

  • Article |

    Tamaki et al. measured MRS changes in sleeping humans trained on a visual task. During NREM sleep, learning gains were associated with enhanced visual cortical plasticity that was also seen independent of learning. REM sleep stabilized plasticity only after pre-sleep learning.

    • Masako Tamaki
    • , Zhiyan Wang
    •  & Yuka Sasaki

  • News & Views |

    In 2008, Vyazovskiy et al. published a seminal study demonstrating that sleep induces a widespread downscaling of synapses that counters the synaptic upscaling that occurred during prior wakefulness. The study laid the groundwork for current research into the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of homeostatic neuronal network regulation during sleep.

    • Niels Niethard
    •  & Jan Born

  • Article |

    The authors show that during sleep, dreaming and specific perceptual dream contents can be localized to a posterior hot zone of the brain. By monitoring activity in this zone, they were able to predict dreaming in real time with high accuracy.

    • Francesca Siclari
    • , Benjamin Baird
    •  & Giulio Tononi

  • News & Views |

    While the relationship between motivation and sleep is intuitive, its behavioral and neural features are poorly understood. A new study tackles both issues, showing that dopaminergic neurons in the ventral tegmental area mediate this relationship.

    • Michael Happ
    •  & Michael M Halassa

  • Article |

    Motivated behaviors are critically dependent upon arousal but little is known about the neuronal mechanisms that coordinate motivational processes with sleep–wake regulation. The authors demonstrate that VTA dopaminergic neurons, which are central regulators of motivational processes, bidirectionally regulate sleep–wake states and sleep-related nesting behavior.

    • Ada Eban-Rothschild
    • , Gideon Rothschild
    •  & Luis de Lecea

  • Article |

    The authors show that artificially enhancing the temporal coordination between hippocampal sharp wave-ripples and cortical delta waves and spindles leads to the reorganization of cortical networks, an increase in their responsivity during recall, and memory consolidation. The study provides causal evidence for the role of hippocampo-cortical interactions during sleep in memory consolidation.

    • Nicolas Maingret
    • , Gabrielle Girardeau
    •  & Michaël Zugaro

  • Brief Communication |

    The authors used rewarding stimulations triggered by place cell activity during sleep to create a place preference for the related place field in mice once they woke up. This shows that an explicit memory trace can be created during sleep and demonstrates a causal role of place cells in spatial navigation.

    • Gaetan de Lavilléon
    • , Marie Masako Lacroix
    •  & Karim Benchenane

  • Article |

    The authors find that optogenetic stimulation of melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH)-expressing neurons in the lateral hypothalamus selectively extends the duration of paradoxical sleep episodes in mice. Activation of MCH fibers in the tuberomammillary nucleus leads to the release of GABA and a similar increase in paradoxical sleep stability.

    • Sonia Jego
    • , Stephen D Glasgow
    •  & Antoine R Adamantidis

  • Review Article |

    This Review article discusses in the context of learning and memory the function of sleep to earmark which daily event or information should be consolidated and which mundane information should be discarded, and how this 'memory triage' process is a selective and yet generalization process that can also bind features together in a non-congruous manner when they are recalled.

    • Robert Stickgold
    •  & Matthew P Walker

  • News & Views |

    Not only can the sleeping brain perceive sensory information, it can learn from this information, leading to changed behaviors the next day: it can come to associate a sound with a pleasant or unpleasant odor and react, both while still asleep and after waking, with a deeper or shallower breath. But classic ‘sleep learning’ remains just a dream.

    • Robert Stickgold

  • Article |

    The authors report that, during sleep, a task-related auditory cue biases hippocampal reactivation events towards replaying the spatial memory associated with that cue. These results indicate that sleep replay can be manipulated by external stimulation, and provide further evidence for the role of hippocampal replay in memory consolidation.

    • Daniel Bendor
    •  & Matthew A Wilson

  • Article |

    Although it is well-known that sleep can strengthen existing memories, this study demonstrates that people can acquire completely new associations (between distinct tones and pleasant/unpleasant smells) during sleep, which are preserved during the awake state.

    • Anat Arzi
    • , Limor Shedlesky
    •  & Noam Sobel

  • Article |

    Using silicon electrodes that can sample neurons in different layers along the length of the electrode, Mizuseki et al. find qualitative difference in the in vivo firing pattern of pyramidal neurons in the deep versus superficial dorsal CA1 layer of the rat hippocampus.

    • Kenji Mizuseki
    • , Kamran Diba
    •  & György Buzsáki

  • Article |

    The hippocampus has place cells that preferentially fire at a particular location of spatial arena. Dupret et al. report that place fields remapped as a result of goal-directed spatial learning and that sharp wave/ripple reactivation events seen during memory consolidation predicted the strength of subsequent spatial memory. Jeffery and Cacucci highlight this work in their News and View.

    • David Dupret
    • , Joseph O'Neill
    •  & Jozsef Csicsvari

  • News & Views |

    Vasopressin release increases late in sleep. Suprachiasmatic clock neurons modulate osmosensory synapses onto vasopressin neurons to facilitate osmoregulated vasopressin release, reports a study in this issue. This explains the increased late-night vasopressin release, and such facilitation prevents dehydration during sleep.

    • Christopher S Colwell

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