Cortically coordinated NREM thalamocortical oscillations play an essential, instructive role in visual system plasticity.

ABSTRACT: Two long-standing questions in neuroscience are how sleep promotes brain plasticity and why some forms of plasticity occur preferentially during sleep vs. wake. Establishing causal relationships between specific features of sleep (e.g., network oscillations) and sleep-dependent plasticity has been difficult. Here we demonstrate that presentation of a novel visual stimulus (a single oriented grating) causes immediate, instructive changes in the firing of mouse lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) neurons, leading to increased firing-rate responses to the presented stimulus orientation (relative to other orientations). However, stimulus presentation alone does not affect primary visual cortex (V1) neurons, which show response changes only after a period of subsequent sleep. During poststimulus n

SUBMITTER: Durkin J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5625927 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature