Finding the cells that put our brain to sleep
摘要
长期以来，睡眠研究认为大脑皮层只是被动接收深层脑区信号。纽约爱因斯坦医学院的神经科学家Geoffrey Terral等人近日在《自然》发表研究，发现皮层中一类仅占抑制性神经元约1%的细胞群，激活后可使小鼠入睡。研究表明，皮层不仅能感知慢波节律，还能自行启动该节律，足以促进睡眠，挑战了传统观点。
For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York.
The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals that triggered them originated elsewhere. In a recent Nature study, Terral and Renata Batista-Brito, who runs the lab, report a population of cortical cells that challenges that assumption.
These cortical cells make up only around one percent of the cortex's inhibitory neurons, and switching them on in a mouse puts the animal to sleep. “What our work shows is that the cortex can not only see this rhythm but also initiate it by itself, and this is sufficient to promote sleep,” Terral said.
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