Odor perception is hypothesized to be an experience-dependent process involving the encoding of odor objects by distributed olfactory cortical ensembles. Olfactory cortical neurons coactivated by a specific pattern of odorant evoked input become linked through association fiber synaptic plasticity, creating a template of the familiar odor. In this way, experience and memory play an important ro...

The basal forebrain (BF) plays a crucial role in cortical activation [1, 2]. However, the exact role of cholinergic BF (ch-BF) neurons in the sleep-wake cycle remains unclear [3, 4]. We demonstrated that photostimulation of ch-BF neurons genetically targeted with channelrhodopsin 2 (ChR2) was sufficient to induce an immediate transition to waking or rapid eye movement (REM) sleep from slow-wave...

THE IMPORTANCE OF SLOW-WAVE SLEEP (SWS) DURING NOCTURNAL SLEEP IS WIDELY CONFIRMED. THE FACT THAT THE RATES OF CEREBRAL NEURAL FIRING are lowest during SWS, the length of SWS is correlated with the length of prior wakefulness, and the cerebrum is isolated from sensory input and from subcortical structures suggests that SWS is associated with tissue restitution.1 Recently, the recuperative effec...

Understanding the interaction between the nervous system and cerebral vasculature is fundamental to forming a complete picture of the neurophysiology of sleep and its role in maintaining physiological homeostasis. However, the intrinsic hemodynamics of slow-wave sleep (SWS) are still poorly known. We carried out 30 all-night sleep measurements with combined near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and...

Although pharyngeal muscles respond robustly to increasing PCO(2) during wakefulness, the effect of hypercapnia on upper airway muscle activation during sleep has not been carefully assessed. This may be important, because it has been hypothesized that CO(2)-driven muscle activation may importantly stabilize the upper airway during stages 3 and 4 sleep. To test this hypothesis, we measured vent...

During slow wave sleep (SWS), traces of neuronal activity patterns from preceding behavior can be observed in rat hippocampus and neocortex. The spontaneous reactivation of these patterns is manifested as the reinstatement of the distribution of pairwise firing-rate correlations within a population of simultaneously recorded neurons. The effects of behavioral state [quiet wakefulness, SWS, and ...

We investigated whether the interpretation of auditory stimuli as speech or non-speech affects audiovisual (AV) speech integration at the neural level. Perceptually ambiguous sine-wave replicas (SWS) of natural speech were presented to listeners who were either in 'speech mode' or 'non-speech mode'. At the behavioral level, incongruent lipread information led to an illusory change of the sound ...

Semantics are used to mark up a wide variety of data-centric Web resources but are not used to annotate online functionality in significant numbers. That is despite considerable research dedicated to Semantic Web Services (SWS). This has led to the emergence of a new Linked Services approach with simplified and less costly to produce service models, which targets a wider audience and allows eve...

The aim of this experiment was to compare the characteristics of mental activity during REM and Slow Wave Sleep (SWS). Forty dream reports and their mnemonic associations were collected from twenty subjects. The reports were analyzed for structure (number of temporal units, number of report multi-units, and narrative continuity), awareness (reality testing, subjective time), and content (self, ...

Geospatial Web services allow to access and to process Geospatial data. Despite significant standardisation efforts, severe heterogeneity and interoperability problems remain. The SWING environment leverages the Semantic Web Services (SWS) paradigm to address these problems. The environment supports the entire life-cycle of Geospatial SWS. To this end, it integrates a genuine end-user tool, a t...