Brain Advance Access published online on October 26, 2005
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awh647
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1 Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. Compared with waking state attention, volition and semantic processing play a minor role during sleep. Thus, investigating declarative memory formation during sleep may allow us to isolate mnemonic core processes. The most feasible approach to memory formation during sleep is the analysis of dream memories. Lesion and imaging studies have demonstrated that encoding of declarative memories, i.e. consciously accessible events and facts, depends on operations within the rhinal cortex and the hippocampus, two substructures of the medial temporal lobe. Successful memory formation is accompanied by a transient rhinal-hippocampal interaction. Consequently, the ability to memorize dreams may be related to mediotemporal connectivity. Therefore, we recorded EEG during sleep from rhinal and hippocampal depth electrodes implanted in 12 epilepsy patients (eight women, mean age 41.1 ± 6.4 years). They were awakened during rapid eye movement sleep (REM) and asked to recall their dream. Via coherence analyses we show that rhinal-hippocampal connectivity values are approximately twice as large for patients with good dream recall versus those patients with poor recall. This suggests that rhinal-hippocampal connectivity is a key factor in determining declarative memory formation.
Received April 5, 2005
Revised August 24, 2005
Accepted August 30, 2005
Article
Rhinal-hippocampal connectivity determines memory formation during sleep
2 Department of Epileptology, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany; F.C. Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands; Department of Neurology, Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
3 Department of Neurosurgery, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany
Juergen Fell, E-mail: juergen.fell{at}ukb.uni-bonn.de
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