Sleep-dependent upscaled excitability, saturated neuroplasticity, and modulated cognition in the human brain
- Leibniz Research Centre for Working Environment and Human Factors, Germany
Abstract
Sleep strongly affects synaptic strength, making it critical for cognition, especially learning, and memory formation. Whether and how sleep deprivation modulates human brain physiology and cognition is not well understood. Here we examined how overnight sleep deprivation vs overnight sufficient sleep affects (a) cortical excitability, measured by transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), (b) inducibility of LTP- and-LTD-like plasticity via transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), and (c) learning, memory and attention. The results suggest that sleep deprivation upscales cortical excitability due to enhanced glutamate-related cortical facilitation and decreased and/or reversed GABAergic cortical inhibition. Furthermore, tDCS-induced LTP-like plasticity abolishes while the inhibitory LTD-like plasticity converts to excitatory LTP-like plasticity under sleep deprivation. This is associated with increased EEG theta oscillations due to sleep pressure. Finally, we show that learning and memory formation, behavioral counterparts of plasticity, and working memory and attention, which rely on cortical excitability, are impaired during sleep deprivation. Our data suggest that upscaled brain excitability, and altered plasticity, due to sleep deprivation, are associated with impaired cognitive performance.
Data availability
The data files generated in this study are publicly available at https://osf.io/kve6d via Open Science Foundation (OSF).
Article and author information
Author details
Mohammad Ali Salehinejad
Funding
No external funding was received for this work
Ethics
Human subjects: This study conformed to the Declaration of Helsinki guidelines and was approved by the Institutional Review Board (ethics code: 99). Participants gave informed consent and received monetary compensation.
Copyright
© 2022, Salehinejad et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 4,194
- views
-
- 820
- downloads
-
- 40
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
A two-part list of links to download the article, or parts of the article, in various formats.
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Sleep-dependent upscaled excitability, saturated neuroplasticity, and modulated cognition in the human brain
eLife 11:e69308.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.69308
