[APROPOS OF CIRCULATORY DISORDERS IN THE AREA OF SO-CALLED "LAST-FRONTIER" OF THE THALAMUS].
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ABSTRACT A hallmark of non-rapid eye movement sleep is the coordinated interplay of slow oscillations (SOs) and sleep spindles. Traditionally, a cortico-thalamo-cortical loop is suggested to coordinate these rhythms: neocortically-generated SOs trigger spindles in the thalamus that are projected back to neocortex. Here, we used intrathalamic recordings from human epilepsy patients to test this canonical interplay. We show that SOs in the anterior thalamus precede neocortical SOs (peak -50 ms), whereas concurrently-recorded SOs in the mediodorsal thalamus are led by neocortical SOs (peak +50 ms). Sleep spindles, detected in both thalamic nuclei, preceded their neocortical counterparts (peak -100 ms) and were initiated during early phases of thalamic SOs. Our findings indicate an active role of the anterior thalamus in organizing sleep rhythms in the neocortex and highlight the functional diversity of thalamic nuclei in humans. The thalamic coordination of sleep oscillations could have broad implications for the mechanisms underlying memory consolidation.
Neocortex
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Neuroscience of sleep
Sleep
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Thalamocortical (TC) pathways are still mainly understood as the gateway for ascending sensory-motor information into the cortex. However, it is now clear that a great many TC cells are involved in interactions between cortical areas via the thalamus. We review recent data, including our own, which demonstrate the generalized presence in rodent thalamus of two major TC cell types characterized, among other features, by their axon development, arborization and laminar targeting in the cortex. Such duality may allow inputs from thalamus to access cortical circuits via bottom-up-wired axon arbors or via top-down-wired axon arbors.
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For various reasons, the major research emphasis has been on reorganizations in cortical sensory representations. Evidence for subcortical plasticity has been much more limited, and it sometimes is questioned. Nicolelis and coworkers (4, 5) have provided some of the most convincing recent evidence for subcortical changes in the receptive fields of neurons in the somatosensory thalamus, and in this issue of the Proceedings they now provide results indicating that the rapid adjustments are partially mediated by feedback inputs from cortex (6). Thus, not only do changes in the sources of activation occur for neurons in the thalamus, but most surprisingly, many of the changes depend on the poorly understood network of feedback connections that descend rather than ascend the hierarchy of processing levels in the somatosensory system.
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