Hippocampal Ripple Diversity organises Neuronal Reactivation Dynamics in the Offline Brain

Sleep plays a key role in strengthening and reorganising our memories, a process called reactivation. But what does the brain reactivate: the most recent experiences, the older ones, or both? Castelli et al. studied ripples, brief activity bursts in the hippocampus, and found two types. Radsink ripples reactivate recent experiences, while LMsink ripples shift from older to newer ones. Together these suggest the sleeping brain uses complementary strategies to update memory.

Scientific Abstract

Hippocampal ripples are highly synchronized neuronal population patterns reactivating past waking experiences in the offline brain. Whether the level, structure, and content of ripple-nested activity are consistent across consecutive events or are tuned in each event remains unclear. By profiling individual ripples using laminar currents in the mouse hippocampus during sleep/rest, we identified ripples in stratum pyramidale that feature current sinks in stratum radiatum (Radsink) versus stratum lacunosum-moleculare (LMsink). These two ripple profiles recruit neurons differently. Radsink ripples integrate recent motifs of waking coactivity, combining superficial and deep CA1 principal cells into denser, higher-dimensional patterns that undergo hour-long stable reactivation. By contrast, LMsink ripples contain core motifs of prior coactivity, engaging deep cells in sparser, lower-dimensional patterns that undergo a reactivation drift to gradually update their pre-existing content for recent wakefulness. We propose that ripple-by-ripple diversity supports parallel reactivation channels for integrating recent wakefulness while updating prior representations.

an abstract image of a current source density plot with layers of the hippocampus behind it, and local field potential traces in front of it.
The average current source density (shown as a color-coded map) alongside the waveforms of local field potentials (white traces) associated with hippocampal ripples.
Citation
2025. Neuron 113:1-18
DOI
10.1016/j.neuron.2025.09.012
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