Reithler Joel, Sundby Kelsey K, Zaghloul Kareem A
Cognitive Neuroscience Department, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, Maastricht, the Netherlands.
Surgical Neurology Branch, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
Nat Rev Neurosci. 2025 Sep 17. doi: 10.1038/s41583-025-00971-w.
Memories shape our sense of self and enable adaptive behaviour based on prior experiences, yet the neural mechanisms underlying memory formation and retrieval are not fully understood. Building on work in animal models and the unique opportunities afforded by intracranial recordings, a growing number of studies have focused on the contributions of awake ripples (transient neural oscillations 20-100 ms long in the 80-150 Hz range) to human memory. Here, we review the body of evidence linking awake ripples to human memory and highlight relevant insights as well as unresolved discrepancies between studies. On the basis of previous evidence from work in animals that ripples may provide a biomarker for bursts of underlying population spiking activity, we suggest that examining the underlying spike content of ripples may help clarify their role in human memory and resolve these discrepancies. Recent support for this notion comes from human studies that, similarly to the prior animal work, relate patterns of neuronal spiking activity to ripples. Thus, our ability to understand the role of ripples in human memory may benefit from fully understanding these spiking events.
记忆塑造了我们的自我认知，并使基于先前经验的适应性行为成为可能，然而，记忆形成和提取背后的神经机制尚未完全被理解。基于动物模型的研究工作以及颅内记录所提供的独特机会，越来越多的研究聚焦于清醒状态下的涟漪（80-150赫兹范围内时长20-100毫秒的瞬态神经振荡）对人类记忆的作用。在此，我们回顾将清醒状态下的涟漪与人类记忆联系起来的证据，并强调相关见解以及研究之间尚未解决的差异。基于先前动物研究的证据，即涟漪可能为潜在群体尖峰活动的爆发提供生物标志物，我们认为，研究涟漪背后的尖峰内容可能有助于阐明它们在人类记忆中的作用，并解决这些差异。最近，来自人类研究的支持与先前动物研究类似，将神经元尖峰活动模式与涟漪联系起来。因此，我们对涟漪在人类记忆中作用的理解能力可能受益于对这些尖峰事件的全面理解。
