title: Rotating waves during human sleep spindles organize global patterns of activity that repeat precisely through the night.
abstract: During sleep, the thalamus generates a characteristic pattern of transient, 11-15 Hz sleep spindle oscillations, which synchronize the cortex through large-scale thalamocortical loops. Spindles have been increasingly demonstrated to be critical for sleep-dependent consolidation of memory, but the specific neural mechanism for this process remains unclear. We show here that cortical spindles are spatiotemporally organized into circular wave-like patterns, organizing neuronal activity over tens of milliseconds, within the timescale for storing memories in large-scale networks across the cortex via spike-time dependent plasticity. These circular patterns repeat over hours of sleep with millisecond temporal precision, allowing reinforcement of the activity patterns through hundreds of reverberations. These results provide a novel mechanistic account for how global sleep oscillations and synaptic plasticity could strengthen networks distributed across the cortex to store coherent and integrated memories.
authors.affiliation: Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, United States.
authors.forename: Lyle
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-5165-9890
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Muller
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States.
authors.forename: Giovanni
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-5308-926X
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Piantoni
authors.affiliation: Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, United States.
authors.forename: Dominik
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Koller
authors.affiliation: Department of Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, United States.
authors.forename: Sydney S
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Cash
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiology, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States.|Department of Neurosciences, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, United States.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Halgren
authors.affiliation: Computational Neurobiology Laboratory, Salk Institute for Biological Studies, La Jolla, United States.
authors.forename: Terrence J
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0622-7391
authors.initials: TJ
authors.lastname: Sejnowski
mesh_terms: D058256:Brain Waves; D002540:Cerebral Cortex / Q000502:physiology*; D000069280:Electrocorticography; D006801:Humans; D008568:Memory; D012890:Sleep; D062211:Spatio-Temporal Analysis; D013788:Thalamus / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: electrocortiogram; human; neuroscience; sleep oscillations; sleep spindles; spatiotemporal dynamics