Thalamic Spindles Promote Memory Formation during Sleep through Triple Phase-Locking of Cortical, Thalamic, and Hippocampal Rhythms

While the interaction of the cardinal rhythms of non-rapid-eye-movement (NREM) sleep-the thalamo-cortical spindles, hippocampal ripples, and the cortical slow oscillations-is thought to be critical for memory consolidation during sleep, the role spindles play in this interaction is elusive. Combining optogenetics with a closed-loop stimulation approach in mice, we show here that only thalamic spindles induced in-phase with cortical slow...