Breathe to Consolidate: Respiration as a royal pathway to the sleeping brain.

• Applicant: Dr. Thomas Schreiner
• Subject Area: Biological Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 492835154

Sleep is essential for the long-term storage of memories (memory consolidation). Contemporary models propose that sleep’s critical contribution to memory consolidation relies on an intricate interplay of neuronal rhythms in the sleeping brain. Cortical slow oscillations, thalamic sleep spindles and hippocampal sharp-wave ripples cooperate to facilitate information transfer between memory-related brain regions. However, identifying the mechanisms that orchestrate these rhythms has remained a major challenge and leaves a big void in the understanding of human memory. The core objective of this project is to critically advance our understanding of human memory consolidation by expanding the boundaries of traditional cognitive neuroscience from a brain-centred towards an integrative brain-body approach. To this end, the project will test whether respiration, which has been shown to impact neuronal rhythms, represents the long-sought pacemaker for memory consolidation, by clocking the interplay of sleep-related neuronal rhythms. We will address several key questions with the aim to identify and understand the impact of breathing on neuronal oscillations, their interplay and in consequence memory consolidation: Does respiration tie together sleep-related oscillations across distributed neuronal circuits? How does this coordinating role of breathing relate to memory reactivation and consolidation during sleep? Is the memory impairment in patients suffering from sleep-related breathing disorders related to a disruption of the organizational function of respiration? We will tackle these questions by combining respiratory recordings with surface and intracranial EEG, obtained from the key brain regions of memory consolidation (i.e. cortex, hippocampus and thalamus) and behavioural measures of memory consolidation. This unprecedented combination of brain-, body- and behavioural data will be complemented with cutting- edge experimental and analyses techniques (e.g. closed-loop targeted memory reactivation, multivariate decoding) as well as an interventionist approach, assessing the impact of pathological and recovered breathing on neuronal rhythms and memory consolidation in apnoea patients. Thereby, we will unravel a fundamentally novel aspect of brain-body interactions by introducing respiration as the royal pathway to the sleeping brain. Positioned at the interface of memory and sleep research, the proposed project will define a more comprehensive framework of how we form long-lasting memories and will kick-start a highly promising target for future research. Importantly, our endeavour will critically help to decipher the foundation of memory impairments in diseases comprising sleep-disordered breathing.

• DFG Programme: Independent Junior Research Groups
• Major Instrumentation: EEG-System
• Instrumentation Group: 3430 Elektro-Enzephalographen