Topic: adaptive sleep

The sleeping brain is in a constant tradeoff between maintaining its quiescent state, thought to support homeostatic processes, and interrupting it to deal with external contingencies such as threat. While evidence suggests that sleep interruption is an associative contextual process, little is known about its underlying neural substrates. Here, inspired by evidence that sleep interruption in humans relies on associative and contextual components, we develop a paradigm in mice to identify its circuit mechanisms. By training mice on an active avoidance task variant, we discover that auditory co