References & Resources

Bibliography of Scientific Somnolence Research:

Mahowald MW, Schenck CH. Rem sleep without atonia--from cats to humans. Arch Ital Biol. 2004 Jul;142(4):469-78. Review.

Miyamoto M, Nishikawa H, Doken Y, Hirai K, Uchikawa O, Ohkawa S. The sleep-promoting action of ramelteon (TAK-375) in freely moving cats. Sleep. 2004 Nov 1;27(7):1319-25.

Rosanova M, Timofeev I. Neuronal mechanisms mediating the variability of somatosensory evoked potentials during sleep oscillations in cats. J Physiol. 2005 Jan 15;562(Pt 2):569-82. Epub 2004 Nov 4.

Sakai K, Crochet S. Role of the locus coeruleus in the control of paradoxical sleep generation in the cat. Arch Ital Biol. 2004 Jul;142(4):421-7.

Vyazovskiy VV, Ruijgrok G, Deboer T, Tobler I. Running Wheel Accessibility Affects the Regional Electroencephalogram during Sleep in Mice. Cereb Cortex. 2005 May 18; [Epub ahead of print]

Zhang JH, Sampogna S, Morales FR, Chase MH. Age-related changes in cholinergic neurons in the laterodorsal and the pedunculo-pontine tegmental nuclei of cats: a combined light and electron microscopic study. Brain Res. 2005 Aug 2;1052(1):47-55.

Abstract:

Common scale-invariant patterns of sleep-wake transitions across mammalian species.

Lo CC, Chou T, Penzel T, Scammell TE, Strecker RE, Stanley HE, Ivanov PCh. Center for Polymer Studies and Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, USA. cclo@brandeis.edu
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2004 Dec 14;101(50):17545-8. Epub 2004 Dec 6.

(available in full text free from www.pnas.org, and www.pubmedcentral.gov/)

Although mammals of different species have different sleep patterns, brief sleep-wake transitions commonly are observed across species and appear to occur randomly throughout the sleeping period. The dynamical patterns and functions of these brief awakenings from sleep are not well understood, and they often are viewed as disruptions (random or pathologic) of the sleep process. In this article, we hypothesize that brief awakenings from sleep may reflect aspects of the endogenous sleep control mechanism and thus may exhibit certain robust dynamical patterns across species. We analyze sleep recordings from mice, rats, cats, and humans, and we compare the distributions of sleep and wake episode durations. For all four species, we find that durations of brief wake episodes during the sleep period exhibit a scale-free power-law behavior with an exponent alpha that remains the same for all species (alpha approximately equal to 2.2). In contrast, sleep episode durations for all four species follow exponential distributions with characteristic time scales, which change across species in relation to body mass and metabolic rate. Our findings suggest common dynamical features of brief awakenings and sleep durations across species and may provide insights into the dynamics of the neural circuits controlling sleep.

PMID: 15583127 [PubMed - indexed for MEDLINE]