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New Insights Into How Sleep Helps the Brain to Reorganize Itself

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday October 04 2017, @06:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the made-me-sleepy-reading-it dept.

"exec" writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

A study has given new insights into how sleep contributes to brain plasticity – the ability for our brain to change and reorganise itself – and could pave the way for new ways to help people with learning and memory disorders.

Researchers at the Humboldt and Charité Universities in Berlin, led by Dr Julie Seibt from the University of Surrey, used cutting edge techniques to record activity in a particular region of brain cells that is responsible for holding new information – the dendrites.

The study, published in Nature Communications, found that activity in dendrites increases when we sleep, and that this increase is linked to specific brain waves that are seen to be key to how we form memories.

Julie Seibt, et. al. Cortical dendritic activity correlates with spindle-rich oscillations during sleep in rodents. Nature Communications, 2017; 8 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-017-00735-w

-- submitted from IRC

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  • (Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:27PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @07:27PM (#577144)

    Summary:

    The study, published in Nature Communications, found that activity in dendrites increases when we sleep, and that this increase is linked to specific brain waves that are seen to be key to how we form memories.

    Journal article title:

    Cortical dendritic activity correlates with spindle-rich oscillations during sleep in rodents.

    Despite all my rage I am still just a rat in a cage.

    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Wednesday October 04 2017, @10:33PM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Wednesday October 04 2017, @10:33PM (#577218) Journal

      This scientist just rodent to town; why should we pay any attention to such squeaks? That stuff just makes me angora anyway, and usually fur quite lengthy.

      And hair I sit, pushing a mouse around my desktop...

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:18PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 04 2017, @08:18PM (#577158)

    Cortical dendritic activity correlates with spindle-rich oscillations

    Does the paper contain a scatter plot of "cortical dendritic activity" vs "spindle-rich oscillations"?

    Fig 1
    - no scatterplot

    Fig 2
    - no scatterplot

    Fig3
    - "Sigma power density" vs "Dendritic Ca2+ power density"
    - "Sigma power density" vs " Layer 2/3 neuron Ca2+ power density"
    - "Sigma power density during slow wave sleep" vs "Ca2+ power density during REM sleep"

    Fig4
    - "change in sigma/beta power density" vs "change in Ca2+ power density"

    Fig5
    - "normalized fluorescence" vs "sigma power density"

    Fig6
    - "Dendritic Snychrony" vs "sigma/delta power density"

    Fig7
    - "spindle density" vs "sigma/beta/SO power"

    Apparently sigma (9-16 Hz) and beta (16-60 Hz) are spindle rich frequency ranges, and Ca2+ fluctuations is being defined as "cortical dendritic activity". So ok. I don't see why there isn't a plot of "spindle density" vs "Dendritic Ca2+ power density" though. This seems to be missing even though they clearly collected both types of data.

  • (Score: 1) by rylyeh on Thursday October 05 2017, @12:27AM

    by rylyeh (6726) <kadathNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday October 05 2017, @12:27AM (#577250)

    "Sorry honey - I've got a big test tomorrow. You don't mind 'Chaos and Fractals', do you?"

    --
    "a vast crenulate shell wherein rode the grey and awful form of primal Nodens, Lord of the Great Abyss."

  • (Score: 1) by pdfernhout on Thursday October 05 2017, @01:53AM

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Thursday October 05 2017, @01:53AM (#577273) Homepage

    Make sense -- when you sleep your brain may have a different rhythm of waves and then some neurons respond differently to the rhythms. Neat!

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
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