Sleep plays a crucial role in consolidating both declarative and motor memories. Declarative memory involves the acquisition and recall of facts and events, while motor memory pertains to our ability to acquire various skills such as shoe lacing or playing a musical instrument. While numerous studies have proposed the involvement of sleep oscillations and hippocampus in declarative memory, direct evidence regarding the neural basis for motor memory remains limited. For instance, it has remained unclear how the hippocampus contributes to the long-term formation of motor memories. My research focuses on motor learning and memory, especially investigating sleep-dependent mechanisms using in vivo electrophysiology, along with techniques like brain-machine interfaces and reach-to-grasp tasks in rodents.
During my presentation, I will discuss the ground findings from my post-doc research. 1. Sleep slow-oscillations (SO) and delta-waves (δ-waves) have dissociable and competing roles in memory “consolidation” versus “forgetting” during NREM sleep (Kim et al., Cell, 2019). 2. Applications of the novel SO-δ distinction for the recovery processing after brain injury, i.e., stroke (Kim et al., Cell Rep., 2021). 3. Two-stage role of hippocampal sharp-wave ripples in motor memory consolidation and cortical manifold (neural representation) learning (Kim et al., Nature, 2023).