The up and down of sleep: From molecules to electrophysiology

Abstract

Alternations of up and down can be seen across many different levels during sleep. Neural firing-rates, synaptic markers, molecular pathways, and gene expression all show differential up and down regulation across brain areas and sleep stages. And also the hallmarks of sleep - sleep stage specific oscillations - are characterized themselves by up and down as seen within the slow oscillation or theta cycles. In this review, we summarize the up and down of sleep covering molecules to electrophysiology and present different theories how this up and down could be regulated by the up and down of sleep oscillations. Further, we propose a tentative theory how this differential up and down could contribute to various outcomes of sleep related memory consolidation: enhancement of hippocampal representations of very novel memories and cortical consolidation of memories congruent with previous knowledge-networks.

Keywords: Electrophysiology; Gene expression; Memory consolidation; Memory replay; Sleep.