Learned Motor Patterns Are Replayed in Human Motor Cortex during Sleep

Only when we sleep are we innocent so they say! 😊

"... Scientists studying laboratory animals long ago discovered a phenomenon known as “replay” that occurs during sleep ... Replay is theorized to be a strategy the brain uses to remember new information. If a mouse is trained to find its way through a maze, monitoring devices can show that a specific pattern of brain cells, or neurons, will light up as it traverses the correct route. “Then, later on while the animal is sleeping, you can see that those neurons will fire again in that same order,” ...
However, replay has only been convincingly shown in lab animals. ...

That night, while [test subject] slept at home, activity in his motor cortex was recorded and wirelessly transmitted to a computer. “What we found was pretty incredible,” ... “He was basically playing the game overnight in his sleep.” On several occasions, ... T11’s patterns of neuronal firing during sleep exactly matched patterns that occurred while he performed the memory-matching game earlier that day.

“This is the most direct evidence of replay from motor cortex that’s ever been seen during sleep in humans,” ..."

From the abstract:

"Consolidation of memory is believed to involve offline replay of neural activity. While amply demonstrated in rodents, evidence for replay in humans, particularly regarding motor memory, is less compelling. To determine whether replay occurs after motor learning, we sought to record from motor cortex during a novel motor task and subsequent overnight sleep. A 36-year-old man with tetraplegia secondary to cervical spinal cord injury enrolled in the ongoing BrainGate brain–computer interface pilot clinical trial had two 96-channel intracortical microelectrode arrays placed chronically into left precentral gyrus. ... When decoded ... intracortical neural signals recorded overnight replayed the target sequence from the memory game at intervals throughout at a frequency significantly greater than expected by chance. Replay events occurred at speeds ranging from 1 to 4 times as fast as initial task execution and were most frequently observed during slow-wave sleep. These results demonstrate that recent visuomotor skill acquisition in humans may be accompanied by replay of the corresponding motor cortex neural activity during sleep."

Scientists find link between sleep and learning new tasks – Harvard Gazette Scientists believe it plays a role in how we learn and form long-term memories

Learned Motor Patterns Are Replayed in Human Motor Cortex during Sleep (open access)