July 21, 2008 - Findings May Have Important Implications for Treatment of Sleep Disorders and for Understanding Mood and Memory – SRI International announced that a research team has identified the first example of neurons that are activated in the cerebral cortex during slow wave sleep (SWS). The research, led by Dmitry Gerashchenko and Thomas Kilduff, will be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in a paper titled Identification of a Population of Sleep-Active Cerebral Cortex Neurons. The paper is available via the PNAS Web site starting July 21. The presence of slow waves in the electroencephalogram (EEG) is the distinctive “signature” of SWS and a type of activity that does not normally occur during wakefulness. For years, researchers have hypothesized that ‘slow-wave activity’ (SWA) is correlated with the recuperative properties of sleep and the brain’s ability to learn, in part, because brain cells are relatively quiet during this time. While populations of neurons activated during sleep have been identified in the forebrain and the hypothalamus, up until this point, neurons in the cortex have been seen as dormant. These new results show that a group of rare neurons are active, rather than at rest, during SWS... SRI International's Press Release -
