Breathing Plays Role in Memory Formation During Sleep

Researchers in Germany have determined that breathing patterns while sleeping help coordinate neuronal activity associated with memory formation.

During sleep, different regions of the brain transmit information between one another as part of memory retention, but the mechanism of this process is not well understood. Most research into the process has focused on correlated activity patterns within the brain.   Recently, however, Ludwig-Maximilian University (LMU) neuroscientists Prof. Anton Sirota and Dr. Nikolas Karalis have shown that it is instead breathing that acts as the coordinator, synchronizing activity across different brain regions.

The team took large-scale, in vivo, electrophysiological recordings from thousands of neurons across the limbic system in mice and found that respiration coordinated neuronal activity in the hippocampus, medial prefrontal and visual cortex, thalamus, amygdala, and nucleus accumbens.

“Thus, we were able to prove the existence of a novel non-olfactory, intracerebral, mechanism that accounts for the entrainment of distributed circuits by breathing, which we termed “respiratory corollary discharge,” says Karalis, who is currently research fellow at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel.”

Sirota adds that their findings suggest the existence of a previously unknown link between respiratory and limbic circuits and are a departure from the standard belief that breathing modulates brain activity via the nose-olfactory route.” The mechanism mediates the coordination of sleep-related activity in these brain regions, which is essential for memory consolidation and provides the means for the co-modulation of the cortico-hippocampal circuits synchronous dynamics.

The study, entitled, “Breathing coordinates cortico-hippocampal dynamics in mice during offline states,” was published recently in Nature Communications.