Department of Surgical, Medical and Molecular Pathology and Critical Care Medicine, University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy.
Laboratoire des Systèmes Perceptifs, Département d'études Cognitives, École Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.
Elife. 2022 Aug 16;11:e70633. doi: 10.7554/eLife.70633.
Sleep and plasticity are highly interrelated, as sleep slow oscillations and sleep spindles are associated with consolidation of Hebbian-based processes. However, in adult humans, visual cortical plasticity is mainly sustained by homeostatic mechanisms, for which the role of sleep is still largely unknown. Here, we demonstrate that non-REM sleep stabilizes homeostatic plasticity of ocular dominance induced in adult humans by short-term monocular deprivation: the counterintuitive and otherwise transient boost of the deprived eye was preserved at the morning awakening (>6 hr after deprivation). Subjects exhibiting a stronger boost of the deprived eye after sleep had increased sleep spindle density in frontopolar electrodes, suggesting the involvement of distributed processes. Crucially, the individual susceptibility to visual homeostatic plasticity soon after deprivation correlated with the changes in sleep slow oscillations and spindle power in occipital sites, consistent with a modulation in early occipital visual cortex.
睡眠和可塑性高度相关，因为睡眠慢波和睡眠纺锤波与基于赫布的过程的巩固有关。然而，在成年人类中，视觉皮层的可塑性主要由稳态机制维持，睡眠在其中的作用仍知之甚少。在这里，我们证明了非快速眼动睡眠稳定了短期单眼剥夺诱导的成年人类的稳态可塑性：剥夺眼的反直觉和短暂的增强在早晨醒来时（剥夺后>6 小时）得到了保留。在睡眠后表现出剥夺眼增强更强的受试者在前额极电极中显示出更多的睡眠纺锤波密度，这表明涉及分布式过程。至关重要的是，剥夺后不久视觉稳态可塑性的个体易感性与枕部位置的睡眠慢波和纺锤波功率的变化相关，这与早期枕叶视觉皮层的调制一致。
