LMU neuroscientists have shown that breathing coordinates neuronal activity throughout the brain while sleeping and resting.
From: Ludwig Maximilians Universitat Munchen [LMU]
January
24, 2022 -- While we sleep, the brain is not switched off, but is busy with
“saving” the important memories of the day. To do this, brain regions are
synchronized to coordinate the transmission of information between them. Yet,
the mechanisms that enable this synchronization across multiple remote brain
regions are poorly understood. Traditionally, these mechanisms were sought in
correlated activity patterns within the brain. However, LMU neuroscientists Prof.
Anton Sirota and Dr. Nikolas Karalis have now been able to show that
breathing acts as a pacemaker that entrains the various brain regions and
synchronizes them with each other.
Breathing is the most constant,
enduring, and essential bodily rhythm and exerts a strong physiological effect
on the autonomous nervous system. It is also known to modulate a wide range of
cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and thought structure.
However, the mechanisms of its impact on cognitive function and the brain are
largely unknown.
The scientists carried out large-scale
in vivo electrophysiological recordings in mice, from thousands of neurons
across the limbic system. They showed that respiration entrains and coordinates
neuronal activity in all investigated brain regions - including the
hippocampus, medial prefrontal and visual cortex, thalamus, amygdala, and
nucleus accumbens - by modulating the excitability of these circuits in a way
that is independent of olfaction. “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.
“Our findings identify 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”,
emphasizes Sirota.
This 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. According to the authors,
these results represent a major step forward and provide the foundation for new
mechanistic theories, that incorporate the respiratory rhythm as a fundamental
mechanism underlying the communication of distributed systems during memory
consolidation.
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