Topic: down states

The dorsal midline thalamus (dMT) is a group of non-sensory thalamic nuclei that has been implicated in arousal and in the homeostatic maintenance of sleep choreography. Neocortical slow oscillations and hippocampal sharp wave ripples (SPW-R) are the hallmarks of non-rapid eye-movement (NREM) sleep and reflect synchronous activation of neocortical and hippocampal neuronal ensembles, respectively. The dMT is reciprocally connected both with the neocortex and with the hippocampal system, however, little is known about their interaction during sleep. We performed large-scale unit recordings from

During NREM sleep and anesthesia, the cerebral cortex generates low-frequency synchronized activity, known as Slow Wave Oscillation (SWO). In this brain state, cortical neurons alternate between hyperpolarized Down states and depolarized Up states, which will travel from their source through cortico-cortical connections along the whole cortex. This makes the SWO an ideal model to understand cortico-cortical communication and disentangle local properties from those that are controlled by the network state.In this project, we built a computational model of coupled cortical populations under the