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Wakefulness is a state of arousal in which there is a conscious monitoring of the environment and there is potential for efficient responsiveness to external stimuli or threats. It is in contrast to the state of sleep in which there is reduced responsiveness to environmental stimuli.
A new study indicates that BNST GABAergic neurons modulate wakefulness over sleep and anesthesia, possibly in part through the ventral tegmental area descending pathway.
In vivo recordings show that a subset of supramammillary neurons that project to the medial septum are wake-active, and projection-specific manipulations reveal that this hypothalamic-septal projection contributes to wakefulness modulation.
Slow waves in sleep are crucial for homeostatic regulation of brain function. Here the authors show similar slow wave activity occurs during wakefulness in people with epilepsy to counter the impact of abnormal, epileptic, brain activity.
A multimodal study in comatose patients suggests that awakening was paradoxically more probable when EEG fluctuations were predictable and were integrated into a global recovery of every dimension (eye-opening behaviour, clocked control hormones).
Here the authors describe a biophysical layer-5 pyramidal neuronal model linking microscale spiking to macroscale complex dynamics, that predicts distinct burst dynamics and information processing across unconscious, dreaming, and awake states.
Calcium dynamics and their role in oligodendrocyte precursor cells (OPCs) are unclear. In this study, the authors show that calcium dynamics at the processes of OPCs are modulated by norepinephrine and influence OPC proliferation during arousal in awake adult mice.
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.
Two studies show that, compared with microglia in anaesthetized mice, microglia in awake mice show reduced surveillance owing to an increase in noradrenaline signalling.
