Child Development Center, University Children's Hospital Zurich, Zurich 8032, Switzerland.
Neuroscience Center Zurich (ZNZ), University of Zurich, Zurich 8057, Switzerland.
Nat Commun. 2017 May 22;8:15405. doi: 10.1038/ncomms15405.
It is hypothesized that deep sleep is essential for restoring the brain's capacity to learn efficiently, especially in regions heavily activated during the day. However, causal evidence in humans has been lacking due to the inability to sleep deprive one target area while keeping the natural sleep pattern intact. Here we introduce a novel approach to focally perturb deep sleep in motor cortex, and investigate the consequences on behavioural and neurophysiological markers of neuroplasticity arising from dedicated motor practice. We show that the capacity to undergo neuroplastic changes is reduced by wakefulness but restored during unperturbed sleep. This restorative process is markedly attenuated when slow waves are selectively perturbed in motor cortex, demonstrating that deep sleep is a requirement for maintaining sustainable learning efficiency.
据推测，深度睡眠对于恢复大脑高效学习的能力至关重要，尤其是在白天活动活跃的区域。然而，由于无法在保持自然睡眠模式完整的情况下剥夺一个特定区域的睡眠，因此在人类中缺乏因果证据。在这里，我们引入了一种新的方法来聚焦于运动皮层的深度睡眠，并研究了专门的运动练习引起的行为和神经生理可塑性标记物的后果。我们表明，在清醒状态下，进行神经可塑性变化的能力会降低，但在不受干扰的睡眠中会恢复。当在运动皮层中选择性地干扰慢波时，这种恢复过程明显减弱，表明深度睡眠是维持可持续学习效率的必要条件。
