Can sleep protect memories from catastrophic forgetting? Oscar C González, Yury Sokolov, Giri P Krishnan, Jean Erik Delanois, Maxim Bazhenov. eLife 2020;9:e51005

Continual learning remains an unsolved problem in artificial neural networks. The brain has evolved mechanisms to prevent catastrophic forgetting of old knowledge during new training. Building upon data suggesting the importance of sleep in learning and memory, we tested a hypothesis that sleep protects old memories from being forgotten after new learning. In the thalamocortical model, training a new memory interfered with previously learned old memories leading to degradation and forgetting of the old memory traces. Simulating sleep after new ...

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The impact of cortical deafferentation on the neocortical slow oscillation. Lemieux M, Chen J-Y, Lonjers P, Bazhenov M, Timofeev I. Journal of Neuroscience, April, 2014

During natural slow-wave sleep (SWS), brain activity recorded from electroencephalogram (EEG) is characterized by large-amplitude fluctuations of field potential, which reflect synchronous alternating periods of activity (cortical Up states) and silence (cortical Down states) across the thalamocortical system. Recovery of slow oscillations after extensive thalamic lesions and the absence of slow oscillations in the thalamus of decorticated cats pointed to an intracortical origin for this rhythm. If was suggested that thalamic neurons play a merely secondary role simply ...

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