"Counting sheep PSG": EEGLAB-compatible open-source matlab software for signal processing, visualization, event marking and staging of polysomnographic data.

BACKGROUND: Progress in advancing sleep research employing polysomnography (PSG) has been negatively impacted by the limited availability of widely available, open-source sleep-specific analysis tools. NEW METHOD: Here, we introduce Counting Sheep PSG, an EEGLAB-compatible software for signal processing, visualization, event marking and manual sleep stage scoring of PSG data for MATLAB. RESULTS: Key features include: (1) signal processing tools including bad channel interpolation, down-sampling, re-referencing, filtering, independent component analysis, artifact subspace reconstruction, and power spectral analysis, (2) customizable display of polysomnographic data and hypnogram, (3) event marking mode including manual sleep stage scoring, (4) automatic event detections including movement artifact, sleep spindles, slow waves and eye movements, and (5) export of main descriptive sleep architecture statistics, event statistics and publication-ready hypnogram. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS: Counting Sheep PSG was built on the foundation created by sleepSMG (https://sleepsmg.sourceforge.net/). The scope and functionalities of the current software have made significant advancements in terms of EEGLAB integration/compatibility, preprocessing, artifact correction, event detection, functionality and ease of use. By comparison, commercial software can be costly and utilize proprietary data formats and algorithms, thereby restricting the ability to distribute and share data and analysis results. CONCLUSIONS: The field of sleep research remains shackled by an industry that resists standardization, prevents interoperability, builds-in planned obsolescence, maintains proprietary black-box data formats and analysis approaches. This presents a major challenge for the field of sleep research. The need for free, open-source software that can read open-format data is essential for scientific advancement to be made in the field.

The EEG correlates and dangerous behavioral consequences of drowsy driving after a single night of mild sleep deprivation.

OBJECTIVE: Here, we investigated the behavioral, cognitive, and electrophysiological impact of mild, acute sleep loss via simultaneously recorded behavioral and electrophysiological measures of vigilance during a "real-world", simulated driving task. METHODS: Participants (N = 34) visited the lab for two testing days where their brain activity and vigilance were simultaneously recorded during a driving simulator task. The driving task lasted approximately 70 mins and consisted of tailgating the lead car at high speed, which braked randomly, requiring participants to react quickly to avoid crashing. The night before testing, participants either slept from 12am-9am (Normally Rested), or 1am-6am (Sleep Restriction). RESULTS: After a single night of mild sleep restriction, sleepiness was increased, participants took longer to brake, missed more braking events, and crashed more often. Brain activity showed more intense alpha burst activity and significant changes in EEG spectral power frequencies related to arousal (e.g., delta, theta, alpha). Importantly, increases in amplitude and number of alpha bursts predicted delays in reaction time when braking. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study suggest that a single night of mild sleep loss has significant, negative consequences on driving performance and vigilance, and a clear impact on the physiology of the brain in ways that reflect reduced arousal. SIGNIFICANCE: Understanding neural and cognitive changes associated with sleep loss may lead to important advancements in identifying and preventing potentially dangerous sleep-related lapses in vigilance.

Sleep Enhances Consolidation of Memory Traces for Complex Problem-Solving Skills.

Sleep consolidates memory for procedural motor skills, reflected by sleep-dependent changes in the hippocampal-striatal-cortical network. Other forms of procedural skills require the acquisition of a novel strategy to solve a problem, which recruit overlapping brain regions and specialized areas including the caudate and prefrontal cortex. Sleep preferentially benefits strategy and problem-solving skills over the accompanying motor execution movements. However, it is unclear how acquiring new strategies benefit from sleep. Here, participants performed a task requiring the execution of a sequence of movements to learn a novel cognitive strategy. Participants performed this task while undergoing fMRI before and after an interval of either a full night sleep, a daytime nap, or wakefulness. Participants also performed a motor control task, which precluded the opportunity to learn the strategy. In this way, we subtracted motor execution-related brain activations from activations specific to the strategy. The sleep and nap groups experienced greater behavioral performance improvements compared to the wake group on the strategy-based task. Following sleep, we observed enhanced activation of the caudate in addition to other regions in the hippocampal-striatal-cortical network, compared to wakefulness. This study demonstrates that sleep is a privileged time to enhance newly acquired cognitive strategies needed to solve problems.

EEG and behavioural correlates of mild sleep deprivation and vigilance.

OBJECTIVE: The current study investigated the behavioral, cognitive, and electrophysiological impact of mild (only a few hours) and acute (one night) sleep loss via simultaneously recorded behavioural and physiological measures of vigilance. METHODS: Participants (N = 23) came into the lab for two testing days where their brain activity and vigilance were recorded and assessed. The night before the testing session, participants either slept from 12am to 9am (Normally Rested), or from 1am to 6am (Sleep Restriction). RESULTS: Vigilance was reduced and sleepiness was increased in the Sleep Restricted vs. Normally Rested condition, and this was exacerbated over the course of performing the vigilance task. As well, sleep restriction resulted in more intense alpha bursts. Lastly, EEG spectral power differed in Sleep Restricted vs. Normally Rested conditions as sleep onset progressed, particularly for frequencies reflecting arousal (e.g., delta, alpha, beta). CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study suggest that only one night of mild sleep loss significantly increases sleepiness and, importantly, reduces vigilance. In addition, this sleep loss has a clear impact on the physiology of the brain in ways that reflect reduced arousal. SIGNIFICANCE: Understanding the neural correlates and cognitive processes associated with loss of sleep may lead to important advancements in identifying and preventing deleterious or potentially dangerous, sleep-related lapses in vigilance.

Sleep preferentially enhances memory for a cognitive strategy but not the implicit motor skills used to acquire it.

Sleep is known to be beneficial to the strengthening of two distinct forms of procedural memory: memory for novel, cognitively simple series of motor movements, and memory for novel, cognitively complex strategies required to solve problems. However, these two types of memory are intertwined, since learning a new cognitive procedural strategy occurs through practice, and thereby also requires the execution of a series of simple motor movements. As a result, it is unclear whether the benefit of sleep results from the enhancement of the cognitive strategy, or the motor skills required to execute the solution. To disentangle the role of sleep in these aspects of procedural memory, we employed two tasks: (1) the Tower of Hanoi (ToH), and, (2) a modified version of the ToH, akin to an implicit Motor Sequence Learning (MSL) task. The MSL task involved the identical series of motor movements as the ToH, but without access to the information necessary to execute the task according to the underlying cognitive procedural strategy. Participants (n = 28) were trained on the 3-disk ToH, then retested on 5-disk versions of both ToH and MSL tasks. Half (n = 15) were trained and immediately tested at 8 PM and retested at 8 AM after a night of sleep. They were retested again at 8 PM after a day of wake (PM-AM-PM condition). The other half (n = 13) were trained and immediately tested at 8 AM, retested at 8 PM after a day of wake, and retested again at 8 AM after a night of sleep (AM-PM-AM condition). ToH performance only improved following a period of sleep. There was no benefit of sleep to implicit MSL. Our results show that sleep, but not wake, allowed individuals to extrapolate what was learned on a simpler 3-disk version of the task to the larger 5-disk problem, which included new elements to which they had not yet been exposed. Here, we isolate the specific role sleep plays for cognitive procedural memory: sleep benefits the cognitive strategy, rather than strengthening implicitly acquired motor sequences required to learn and execute the underlying strategy itself.

Increased GABAergic activity in the region of the pedunculopontine and deep mesencephalic reticular nuclei reduces REM sleep and impairs learning in rats.

Newly formed memories are initially fragile and require consolidation to be transformed into an enduring state. Memory consolidation may occur during increased postlearning REM sleep. REM deprivation during these periods (termed REM sleep windows [RSWs]) impairs subsequent performance. The pedunculopontine nucleus (PPT) and adjacent deep mesencephalic reticular nuclei (DpMe) have been implicated in the generation of REM sleep. Following 24-hr baseline recording, rats were trained on the 2-way avoidance task for 50 trials/day over 2 days and retested on Day 3. EEG was recorded 22 hr after training on training Days 1 and 2. Rats were injected with the GABAB agonist baclofen or saline into the PPT/DpMe region at 0300 to coincide with the start of a known RSW. Based on shuttle performance, saline rats were assigned post hoc to a learning group (LG) that avoided the footshock at least 60% at retest or nonlearning group (NLG) that performed below this criterion. Baclofen-injected rats were not assigned post hoc into separate groups as all rats performed below the learning criterion. PPN/DpMe infusions of the inhibitory GABAB agonist baclofen decreased REM and impaired subsequent memory performance. Normal GABAergic transmission in the PPN/DpMe may be necessary for REM to occur and for the consolidation of incentive learning.

Too much of a good thing? Elevated baseline sleep spindles predict poor avoidance performance in rats.

Sleep spindles may be involved in synaptic plasticity. Learning-dependent increases in spindles have been observed in both humans and rats. In humans, the innate (i.e., baseline) number of spindles correlate with measures of academic potential such as Intelligence Quotient (IQ) tests. The present study investigated if spindles predict whether rats are able to learn to make avoidance responses in the two-way shuttle task. Baseline recordings were taken continuously for 24h prior to training on the two-way shuttle task for 50trials/day for two days followed by a 25 trial re-test on the third day. At re-test, rats were categorized into learners (n=16) or non-learners (n=21). Groups did not differ in baseline duration of rapid eye movement sleep, slow wave sleep, wake or spindle density. For combined groups, spindle density in the 21 to 24-hour period but not at any other period during baseline was negatively correlated with shuttle task performance at re-test. Conversely, the learning-related change in spindle density in the 21 to 24-hour period, but not at any other time after the first training session was positively correlated with shuttle task performance. Rats in the non-learning condition have a higher number of spindles at baseline, which is unaffected by training. On the other hand, learning rats have fewer spindles at baseline, but have a learning-related increase in spindles. Extreme spindle activity and high spindle density have been observed in humans with learning disabilities. Results suggest that while spindles may be involved in memory consolidation, in some cases, high levels of spindles prior to training may be maladaptive.

Sleep spindles and learning potential.

The number of sleep spindles remains relatively stable within individuals from night to night. However, there is little explanation for the large interindividual differences in spindles. The authors investigated the relationship between spindles and intelligence quotient (IQ) in 3 separate studies. The number of spindles and sigma power were positively correlated with performance IQ (PIQ), but not verbal IQ (VIQ). The perceptual/analytical skills measured by the PIQ Picture Completion subscale accounted for most of the interindividual differences in spindles. Furthermore, there was a relationship between the rapid eye movements (REMs) of REM sleep and VIQ in individuals with higher IQ scores. A similar pattern was observed between spindles and PIQ. It was hypothesized that high-IQ individuals have more spindles that can support more complex cortical networks underlying perceptual/analytical abilities.