Sleep microstructure organizes memory replay

Recently acquired memories are reactivated in the hippocampus during sleep, an initial step for their consolidation1–3. This process is concomitant with the hippocampal reactivation of previous memories4–6, posing the problem of how to prevent interference between older and recent, initially labile, memory traces. Theoretical work has suggested that consolidating multiple memories while minimizing interference can be achieved by randomly interleaving their reactivation7–10. An alternative is that a temporal microstructure of sleep can promote the reactivation of different types of memories during specific substates. Here, to test these two hypotheses, we developed a method to simultaneously record large…

• NI
  National Institutes of Health

  Award: R01MH130367