Image credit: Ketut Subiyanto (C00)
Cells in the brain are wired together like an electric circuit that can relay information from one area of the brain to the next. Even when sleeping, the human brain continues to send signals to process information it has encountered during the day. This results in two patterns of electrical activity that define the sleeping brain: slowly repeating waves (or slow oscillations) and rapid bursts of activity known as sleep spindles.
Although slow oscillations and sleep spindles are generated in different regions of the brain, they often happen at the same time. This syncing of activity is thought to help different parts of the brain to communicate with each other. Such communication is essential for new memories to become stable and last a long time.
In children, slow oscillations and sleep spindles appear together less frequently, suggesting that these co-occurring patterns of electrical activity develop as humans grow into adults. Here, Joechner et al. set out to understand what drives slow oscillations and sleep spindles to start happening at the same time.
The team used a technique called electroencephalography (or EEG for short) to study the brain activity of children, teenagers and adults as they slept. This revealed that slow oscillations and sleep spindles occur together less often in children compared to teenagers and adults. Moreover, the slow oscillations and sleep spindles observed in the children had very different physical characteristics to those observed in adults. Further analyses showed that the more similar the children’s sleep spindles were to adult spindles, the more consistently they appeared at the same time as the slow oscillations.
The findings of Joechner et al. suggest that as children grow up, their sleep spindles become more adult-like, causing the spindles to happen at the same time as slow oscillations more consistently. This indicates that brain circuits that generate sleep spindles may play an essential role in developing successful communication networks in the human brain. In the future, this work may ultimately provide new insights into how age-related changes to the brain contribute to cognitive development, and suggests sleep as a potential intervention target for neurodevelopmental disorders.
