Amazing stuff! There is more to sleep/wake than the long known "slow, long-lasting waves"!
"For the first time, scientists have discovered that a small region of our brain shuts down to take microsecond-long naps while we're awake. What's more, these same areas 'flicker' awake while we're asleep. These new findings could offer pivotal insights into neurodevelopmental and neurodegenerative diseases, which are linked to sleep dysregulation. ..."
"... For the first time, scientists have found that sleep can be detected by patterns of neuronal activity just milliseconds long, 1000 times shorter than a second, revealing a new way to study and understand the basic brain wave patterns that govern consciousness. They also show that small regions of the brain can momentarily “flicker” awake while the rest of the brain remains asleep, and vice versa from wake to sleep. ...
Over four years of work, Parks and Schneider trained a neural network to study the patterns within massive amounts of brain wave data, uncovering patterns that occur at extremely high frequencies that have never been described before and challenge foundational, long-held conceptions of the neurological basis of sleep and wake. ..."
From the abstract:
"The most robust and reliable signatures of brain states are enriched in rhythms between 0.1 and 20 Hz. Here we address the possibility that the fundamental unit of brain state could be at the scale of milliseconds and micrometers. By analyzing high-resolution neural activity recorded in ten mouse brain regions over 24 h, we reveal that brain states are reliably identifiable (embedded) in fast, nonoscillatory activity. Sleep and wake states could be classified from 100 to 101 ms of neuronal activity sampled from 100 µm of brain tissue. In contrast to canonical rhythms, this embedding persists above 1,000 Hz. This high-frequency embedding is robust to substates, sharp-wave ripples and cortical on/off states. Individual regions intermittently switched states independently of the rest of the brain, and such brief state discontinuities coincided with brief behavioral discontinuities. Our results suggest that the fundamental unit of state in the brain is consistent with the spatial and temporal scale of neuronal computation."
Scientists find that small regions of the brain can take micro-naps while the rest of the brain is awake and vice versa (original news release) The study more generally shows how previously ignored fast brain waves define basic patterns of sleep and wake
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