Prolonged wakefulness is thought to gradually increase 'sleep need' and influence subsequent sleep duration and intensity, but the role of specific waking behaviours remains unclear. Here we report the effect of voluntary wheel running during wakefulness on neuronal activity in the motor and somatosensory cortex in mice. We find that stereotypic wheel running is associated with a substantial re...

The pontine microinjection of the inhibitory neurotransmitter GABA and its agonist induced prolonged periods of wakefulness in unanesthetized, chronic cats. Conversely, the application of bicuculline, a GABA(A) antagonist, resulted in the occurrence of episodes of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep of long duration. Furthermore, administration of antisense oligonucleotides against glutamic acid dec...

Abstract Introduction Context serves as a retrieval aid and supports accurate recollection of elements within an episodic event. Associative links between the episode can be weakened via decontextualization. Memory traces are considered to decontextualized when they have undergone process that makes them less context-dependent more gist-like. Furthermore, sleep has been shown facilitate consoli...

The need to sleep grows with the duration of wakefulness and dissipates with time spent asleep, a process called sleep homeostasis. What are the consequences of staying awake on brain cells, and why is sleep needed? Surprisingly, we do not know whether the firing of cortical neurons is affected by how long an animal has been awake or asleep. Here, we found that after sustained wakefulness corti...

Many neurochemical systems interact to generate wakefulness and sleep. Wakefulness is promoted by neurons in the pons, midbrain, and posterior hypothalamus that produce acetylcholine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, histamine, and orexin/hypocretin. Most of these ascending arousal systems diffusely activate the cortex and other forebrain targets. NREM sleep is mainly driven by neurons in t...

Respiratory volumes and timing have been measured in 19 healthy adults during wakefulness and sleep. Minute ventilation was significantly less (p less than 0.05) in all stages of sleep than when the subject was awake (7.66 +/- 0.34(SEM) 1/min), the level in rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep (6.46 +/- 0.29 1/min) being significantly lower than in non-REM sleep (7.18 +/- 0.39 1/min). The breathing p...

Considerable evidence suggests that brain stem pedunculopontine tegmentum (PPT) cholinergic cells are critically involved in the normal regulation of wakefulness and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. However, much of this evidence comes from indirect studies. Thus, although involvement of PPT cholinergic neurons has been suggested by numerous investigations, the excitation of PPT cholinergic neur...

BACKGROUND The main symptoms of patients with idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) are cough and dyspnea. IPF leads to a restrictive lung disorder impacting daytime and nocturnal breathing patterns. In this pilot study we assessed the course of day- and nighttime respiration, oxygenation, and cough over a period of 8 months as well as differences between wakefulness and sleep in IPF patients. ...

Recent studies providing evidence for preserved awareness in some behaviorally unresponsive patients stress the need to improve diagnosis in patients with disorders of consciousness - and stress the possible dissociation between responsiveness and preserved consciousness. Because active paradigms can only bring information in the few cases where they return positive, a major effort is needed to...