Nature, Published online: 09 September 2026; doi:10.1038/s41586-026-10876-y In mice, a sparse population of sleep-active long-range inhibitory neurons in the neocortex promote widespread cortical synchronization and sleep, revealing a cortical mechanism that contributes to the regulation of sleep.

Frontal cortical tau pathology in aging humans is associated with reduced slow-wave travel during sleep. This reduced propagation is associated with poorer overnight memory retention, supporting a lin...

Recent memories are consolidated during sleep by spontaneous reactivation. However, whether and how memory reactivation affects sleep dynamics remain unclear. By tracking and modulating memory activit...

Chen et al. collect a large human sleep dataset and develop Sleep Interpreter, a cross-domain neural decoder trained with contrastive learning to align waking and sleeping activity and read out semant...

Thalamic bursts can awaken the cortex during wakefulness. Contrary to in-vitro–based assumptions, in-vivo NREM thalamic bursts lack rhythmic synchronization, and their failure to awaken the cortex ref...

Bergel et al. show that an infraslow rhythm connecting the brain and body during sleep is shared by lizards, mammals and birds, revealing an ancestral process and reshaping our understanding of the ev...

This paper describes the Simons Sleep Project, an open resource designed to accelerate research into the sleep and daily behaviors of autistic children using synchronized recordings from multiple wear...

Through continuous multiday recordings in rats, the authors reveal that hippocampal sharp waves reflect sleep need and define a homeostatically regulated sleep state that enables the hippocampus to di...

Activity of VTA dopaminergic neurons during NREM sleep facilitates motor memory consolidation and is coordinated with spindles.

Sleep is thought to be superior to wakefulness in consolidating memory, due to a hippocampus-driven process enhancing the contextual integration of events. We compared recall of associative memory in ...

Sleep involves continuous communication between the brain and body, yet the dynamics of peripheral signals during human sleep remain poorly understood. Here we tested whether gastric electrophysiology...

Yang et al. show that moments of failed attention we experience after sleep deprivation reflect brief ‘sleep-like’ episodes in the brain, corresponding to a brain- and body-wide event with altered bra...

Li et al. propose a conceptual framework to study the phenomenon of falling asleep based on electroencephalogram data. They show that a tipping point marks the brain’s nonlinear wake-to-sleep transiti...

Hemispherotomy is a neurosurgical procedure for treating refractory epilepsy by disconnecting a significant portion of the cortex. This study shows that the isolated cortex exhibits EEG patterns resem...

Animals and humans rely on their navigation skills to survive. However, spatial neurons in the brain’s “navigation circuit” had not previously been studied under real-world conditions. We conducted an...

The cortical mechanisms that actively suppress consciousness remain poorly understood. Here, we identify a specific subset of prefrontal cortical (PFC) neurons preferentially active under anesthesia w...

Reframing of arousal as a latent dynamical system can reconstruct multidimensional measurements of large-scale spatiotemporal brain dynamics on the timescale of seconds in mice.

The drive to sleep is inescapable but its biological substrate remains largely elusive. Until recently, the search for sleep centres in the mammalian brain focussed on subcortical neurons that promote...

The locus coeruleus has a specialized pathway to the brainstem that controls sound-evoked awakening from sleep.

Vigilance is increasingly conceived as a continuum, ranging from full alertness to deep sleep. Despite its fundamental role in cognition, behaviour, and health, reliable physiological markers of vigil...

Slow waves during sleep are fundamental for neural homeostasis, metabolic regulation, and waste clearance, and are known to be altered in neurodegenerative diseases. Sleep-like slow waves (SLSW) have ...

Nature - Human exploration is driven by two distinct neural mechanisms, a valence-independent rate signal and a valence-dependent global noise signal.

Xiao et al. show that brief bursts of hippocampal activity (ripples) help the brain link new experiences into an internal “mental map.” During rest, ripples engage a medial frontal brain region that o...

Slow waves mediate restorative functions of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep. To enhance slow wave activity (SWA, 0.5-4 Hz) non-invasively, we employed a novel neuromodulatory tool, Transcranial El...

Anticipatory eye movements during repeated movie viewing reveal when and what is remembered. Gaze patterns correlate with explicit reports, offering a method to detect memory for events without verbal...

Correlative and causal evidence implicate distinct genetically-defined and evolutionary-conserved hypothalamic neurons in regulating wakefulness, non-rapid eye movement (NREM), and rapid eye movement ...

Nature Neuroscience - Pathological neural communication drives the spread of the epileptic network and contributes to memory impairment in focal epilepsy. The authors show that closed-loop...

Background Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is characterised by behavioural variability and heightened inattention associated with increased mind wandering (MW) and mind blanking (MB). ...

The extent to which the sleeping brain can discern safety from danger is poorly understood. In mice, the authors show that centro-medial thalamic neurons detect threat-related sounds and selectively t...

Pathological neural communication drives the spread of the epileptic network and contributes to memory impairment in focal epilepsy. The authors show that closed-loop electrical stimulation in rodents...

Prolonged wakefulness leads to persistent, deep recovery sleep (RS). However, the neuronal circuits that mediate this process remain elusive. From a circuit screen in mice, we identified a group of th...

Locus ceruleus (LC)–derived norepinephrine (NE) drives network and behavioral adaptations to environmental saliencies by reconfiguring circuit functional connectivity, but the underlying synapse-level...

A set of neurons in the peri-locus coeruleus region controls arousal and avoidance states, providing an understanding of the neurobiological basis of arousal and exploratory behaviours.

Epilepsy is often associated with cognitive comorbidities that lack effective treatment options. In this Review, Gelinas and Khodagholy discuss how physiological neural networks involved in cognition ...