Sleep promotes branch-specific formation of dendritic spines after learning

You need to ask your doctor if this is regular sleep or drug induced sleep like most stroke patients get in the hospital. Will lucid dreaming help and does your doctor know anything about that?
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/344/6188/1173

• ne 2014
• > Yang et al., 344 (6188): 1173-1178

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Science 6 June 2014:
Vol. 344 no. 6188 pp. 1173-1178
DOI: 10.1126/science.1249098

1. Guang Yang¹,²,
2. Cora Sau Wan Lai¹,
3. Joseph Cichon¹,
4. Lei Ma¹,³,
5. Wei Li³,
6. Wen-Biao Gan¹,*

+ Author Affiliations

1. ¹Skirball Institute, Department of Neuroscience and Physiology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA.
2. ²Department of Anesthesiology, New York University School of Medicine, New York, NY 10016, USA.
3. ³Drug Discovery Center, Key Laboratory of Chemical Genomics, Peking University Shenzhen Graduate School, Shenzhen, 518055, China.

1. ↵*Corresponding author. E-mail: gan@saturn.med.nyu.edu

• Abstract
• Editor's Summary

How sleep helps learning and memory remains unknown. We report in mouse motor cortex that sleep after motor learning promotes the formation of postsynaptic dendritic spines on a subset of branches of individual layer V pyramidal neurons. New spines are formed on different sets of dendritic branches in response to different learning tasks and are protected from being eliminated when multiple tasks are learned. Neurons activated during learning of a motor task are reactivated during subsequent non–rapid eye movement sleep, and disrupting this neuronal reactivation prevents branch-specific spine formation. These findings indicate that sleep has a key role in promoting learning-dependent synapse formation and maintenance on selected dendritic branches, which contribute to memory storage.