“Our sleeping brains”

Artist: Michaela Purcell
NeuroGrad Collaborator: Aishwarya Pathak

Abstract

Several studies have established that sleep spindles, the characteristic 11-15 Hz rhythms during the stage-2 Non-REM (NREM) sleep, facilitate the integration of short-term memories stored in the hippocampus across various cortical groups for long-term storage by a process called memory consolidation. Sleep spindles are known to be a potential biomarker of cognitive decline as they play a key role in learning and integrating the memories during the sleep across the lifespan. Recent work in our lab has suggested that sleep spindles aid the process of memory consolidation by travelling across the human cortex as rotating waves through long and short-range cortical white matter tracts by influencing cortical spiking activity instead of oscillating in phase-locked synchronisation as previous studies had suggested. Our current goal is to further understand the cortical spatiotemporal dynamics in sleep-based memory consolidation in human and non-human primate models which will allow us to explore the role of sleep spindles as a potential biomarker of cognitive decline in aging and neurodegeneration. In our art, we paint a non-human primate sleeping back-to-back with a human, thus showing a resemblance of primate model with human sleep-wake cycle which makes it a precise model to study sleep-based memory consolidation. In the background, we show the cortical spatiotemporal dynamics observed in the sleeping cortex in our study. The overall piece is 24 inches by 36 inches and the materials used are acrylic paint and canvas.