Breathing: The master clock of the sleeping brain

Date:
January 24, 2022
Source:
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universita"t Mu"nchen
Summary:
Neuroscientists have shown that breathing coordinates neuronal
activity throughout the brain during sleep and quiet.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
LMU neuroscientists have shown that breathing coordinates neuronal
activity throughout the brain during sleep and quiet.


========================================================================== While we sleep, the brain is not switched off, but is busy with "saving"
the important memories of the day. To achieve that, 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 not well 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 persistent 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 performed 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 olfaction-independent way. "Thus, we were able to prove the existence
of a novel non-olfactory, intracerebral, mechanismthat 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," underlines 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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========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Nikolaos Karalis, Anton Sirota. Breathing coordinates
cortico-hippocampal
dynamics in mice during offline states. Nature Communications,
2022; 13 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-28090-5 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220124103856.htm

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