Halassa Lab
Project 4
The sleeping brain trades off maintaining a state supporting homeostasis with interruptions to handle external contingencies. These interruptions are adaptive, yet little is known about their neural substrates. Taking note that human sleep interruption exhibits associative and contextual components, we develop analogous paradigms in mice and discover that these features rely on the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, respectively. Electrophysiological recordings in sleeping mice reveal a feedforward amygdala circuit for transforming conditioned cues to sleep interruption signals. This process is under top-down control by the prefrontal cortex, which allows sleep to go uninterrupted in neutral contexts. Overall, our work shows a prefrontal to amygdala pathway for adaptive sleep interruption, extending the notion of top-down executive control to decision making during sleep.
Address
Tufts University School of Medicine
Neuroscience Department
136 Harrison Ave., Boston, MA 02111
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