For the first time, a research group led by Associate Professor Michael Lazar of the International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine, University of Tsukuba, discovered that the nucleus accumbens, a brain region involved in motivation, controls sleep arousal.
Everyone will often forget drowsiness when they are uplifted or immersed in something, and on the contrary, they will feel drowsy in unstimulated and boring situations.In other words, apart from sleep deprivation and physiological desires such as the body clock, emotional and cognitive factors are also known to affect sleep-wake behavior.Both have been thought to be regulated by different mechanisms, but the mechanism in the brain has not been clarified at all.
The research group has now analyzed the function of the nucleus accumbens in sleep-wakefulness through a series of experiments using mice.As a result, it was found that selective activation of specific neurons in the nucleus accumbens strongly induces sleep, and suppression increases the amount of arousal.It was found that the activity of these neurons did not change even after long-term awakening, but the activity of neurons decreased when motivational events such as favorite foods and mice of the opposite sex occurred, leading to arousal.Therefore, it was clarified that the activity of this neuron is important for sleep-wake control, and is particularly regulated according to motivation.
Paper information:[Nature Communications] Slow-wave sleep is controlled by a subset of nucleus accumbens core neurons in mice
