Dream Generation and Recall in Daytime NREM Sleep of Patients With Narcolepsy Type 1.

The less rigid architecture of sleep in patients with narcolepsy type 1 (NT1) compared with healthy subjects may provide new insights into some unresolved issues of dream experience (DE), under the assumption that their DE frequencies are comparable. The multiple transition from wakefulness to REM sleep (sleep onset REM period: SOREMP) during the five trials of the Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) appears of particular interest. In MSLT studies, NT1 patients reported a DE after about 80% of SOREMP naps (as often as after nighttime REM sleep of themselves and healthy subjects), but only after about 30% of NREM naps compared to 60% of daytime and nighttime NREM sleep of healthy subjects.

Contributi scientifici in memoria di Antonio Fusco.

Come si leggerà nell'Introduzione della sezione propriamente scientifica del Volume, il presente testo nasce dalla volontà e, soprattutto, dall'esigenza culturale di omaggiare il fu Prof. Antonio Fusco. Un debito scientifico ed umano che trova il suo locus naturale in questa prima parte del testo stesso, cui farà poi seguito la parte propriamente scientifica.

Judging health care priority in emergency situations: Patient facial appearance matters.

Rationale: Extensive research has shown that implicit trait inferences from facial appearance can bias everyday life in a pervasive way, influencing our decisions in different social contexts such as mate choice, political vote and criminal sentence. In situations characterized by time pressure and scant information, decisions based on inferences from facial appearance may have particularly critical and serious consequences, such as in emergency healthcare. No studies today have investigated this aspect in an actual emergency.

Structural organization of dream experience during daytime sleep-onset rapid eye movement period sleep of patients with narcolepsy type 1.

Study Objective: To assess the frequency of dream experience (DE) developed during naps at Multiple Sleep Latency Test (MSLT) by patients with narcolepsy type 1 (NT1) and establish, using story-grammar analysis, the structural organization of DEs developed during naps with sleep onset rapid eye movement (REM) period (SOREMP) sleep compared with their DEs during early- and late-night REM sleep.

Methods: Thirty drug-free cognitively intact adult NT1 patients were asked to report DE developed during each MSLT nap. Ten NT1 patients also spent voluntarily a supplementary night being awakened during the first-cycle and third-cycle REM sleep.

Cortical activation during sleep predicts dream experience in narcolepsy.

Objective: Narcolepsy type 1 widely affects the architecture of sleep with frequent fast transition to REM sleep at both nighttime and daytime sleep onset. The occurrence of repeated sleep onset REM periods over the Multiple Sleep Latency Test offers a unique opportunity to identify EEG patterns predictive of successful dream recall after short periods composed of only REM or NREM sleep. It also permits to disentangle state- from trait-like differences in dream recall, by using a within-subjects design.

Plastic reorganization of neural systems for perception of others in the congenitally blind.

Recent evidence suggests that the function of the core system for face perception might extend beyond visual face-perception to a broader role in person perception. To critically test the broader role of core face-system in person perception, we examined the role of the core system during the perception of others in 7 congenitally blind individuals and 15 sighted subjects by measuring their neural responses using fMRI while they listened to voices and performed identity and emotion recognition tasks. We hypothesised that in people who have had no visual experience of faces, core face-system areas may assume a role in the perception of others via voices.

Sleep habits, circadian preference, and school performance in early adolescents.

Objective: This study aimed to cast light on the relationships between sleep habits, perceived sleep problems and school performance in Evening-type (E-type) compared with Morning-type (M-type) early adolescents.

Methods: Comparison of questionnaire data of E-type and M-type adolescents random-selected from a large sample of eight-grade adolescents who took part in a national survey of competence in mathematics and science.

Results: The proportions of sleep problems that were observed to occur more than once per week and the frequency of struggling to fall asleep and/or falling asleep in distinct everyday situations were much higher in E-type than in M-type adolescents.

Age-related differences in sleep-dependent consolidation of motor skills in patients with narcolepsy type 1.

Objective: The influence of post-training sleep on the consolidation process of procedural (ie, visual and motor) knowledge has shown to be less effective in patients with chronic sleep disorders compared with healthy subjects. To ascertain whether the influence of the altered architecture of sleep in patients with narcolepsy type 1 (ie, with cataplexy: NT1) also varies with age, we compared the performance values of 16 children (aged from nine to 14 years) and 16 adults (aged from 24 to 51 years) on finger tapping task (FTT) after daytime and nighttime periods of sleep in the 24 hours following training.

Methods: All patients, who were drug-free and underwent continuous polysomnographic recordings, could take one or more naps after the training session (at 10 a.

Beyond the neuropsychology of dreaming: Insights into the neural basis of dreaming with new techniques of sleep recording and analysis.

Recent advances in electrophysiological [e.g., surface high-density electroencephalographic (hd-EEG) and intracranial recordings], video-polysomnography (video-PSG), transcranial stimulation and neuroimaging techniques allow more in-depth and more accurate investigation of the neural correlates of dreaming in healthy individuals and in patients with brain-damage, neurodegenerative diseases, sleep disorders or parasomnias.

Hippocampal slow EEG frequencies during NREM sleep are involved in spatial memory consolidation in humans.

The hypothesis that sleep is instrumental in the process of memory consolidation is currently largely accepted. Hippocampal formation is involved in the acquisition of declarative memories and particularly of spatial memories. Nevertheless, although largely investigated in rodents, the relations between spatial memory and hippocampal EEG activity have been scarcely studied in humans.

Can taking a nap during a night shift counteract the impairment of executive skills in residents?

Objectives: Long and repeated periods of sustained wakefulness constitute a serious problem for shift workers in general and for medical interns in particular. In a real clinical setting, we investigated whether taking a long nap can counteract the negative consequences of acute sleep deprivation on executive skills in residents.

Methods: Fifty-four interns at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of L'Aquila (Italy) participated in the study.

Prioritized Detection of Personally Familiar Faces.

We investigated whether personally familiar faces are preferentially processed in conditions of reduced attentional resources and in the absence of conscious awareness. In the first experiment, we used Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) to test the susceptibility of familiar faces and faces of strangers to the attentional blink. In the second experiment, we used continuous flash interocular suppression to render stimuli invisible and measured face detection time for personally familiar faces as compared to faces of strangers.

Narcolepsy with cataplexy mimicry: the strange case of two sisters.

We report on two sisters, 17 and 12 years of age, with clinical features suggesting narcolepsy with cataplexy (NC): daytime sleepiness, spontaneous and emotionally triggered sudden falls to the ground, and overweight/obesity. MSLT showed borderline sleep latency, with 1 and 0 sleep onset REM periods. HLA typing disclosed the DQB1*0602 allele.

Processing of invisible social cues.

Successful interactions between people are dependent on rapid recognition of social cues. We investigated whether head direction--a powerful social signal--is processed in the absence of conscious awareness. We used continuous flash interocular suppression to render stimuli invisible and compared the reaction time for face detection when faces were turned towards the viewer and turned slightly away.

Sleep-dependent consolidation of motor skills in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy.

Background And Objectives: This study investigated whether the altered organization of post-training sleep in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy (NC) is associated with a lower off-line improvement in the consolidation of motor skills compared with normal subjects.

Study Design: Fourteen drug-naive NC patients, fulfilling the international clinical and polysomnographic diagnostic criteria, and 14 individually-matched controls underwent training at a sequential finger tapping task (FTT) and were re-tested on the next morning (after a night with polysomnographic recording) and after another six nights (spent at home).

Setting: Training and retrieval sessions were performed in a controlled laboratory setting.

Sleep-dependent memory consolidation in patients with sleep disorders.

Sleep can improve the off-line memory consolidation of new items of declarative and non-declarative information in healthy subjects, whereas acute sleep loss, as well as sleep restriction and fragmentation, impair consolidation. This suggests that, by modifying the amount and/or architecture of sleep, chronic sleep disorders may also lead to a lower gain in off-line consolidation, which in turn may be responsible for the varying levels of impaired performance at memory tasks usually observed in sleep-disordered patients. The experimental studies conducted to date have shown specific impairments of sleep-dependent consolidation overall for verbal and visual declarative information in patients with primary insomnia, for verbal declarative information in patients with obstructive sleep apnoeas, and for visual procedural skills in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy.

Motor events during REM sleep in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy: a video-polysomnographic pilot study.

Objective: We carried out a systematic video-polysomnographic analysis of the number and type of motor events during REM sleep in narcolepsy-cataplexy patients with REM sleep behavior disorder (NC + RBD) but not clinical RBD (NC-RBD).

Methods: Twelve NC + RBD and 10 NC-RBD male patients underwent video-polysomnography (video-PSG). Motor events of different type and complexity (i.

Slow EEG rhythms and inter-hemispheric synchronization across sleep and wakefulness in the human hippocampus.

Converging data that attribute a central role to sleep in memory consolidation have increased the interest to understand the characteristics of the hippocampal sleep and their relations with the processing of new information. Neural synchronization between different brain regions is thought to be implicated in long-term memory consolidation by facilitating neural communication and by promoting neural plasticity. However, the majority of studies have focused their interest on intra-hippocampal, rhinal-hippocampal or cortico-hippocampal synchronization, while inter-hemispheric synchronization has been so far neglected.

How we remember the stuff that dreams are made of: neurobiological approaches to the brain mechanisms of dream recall.

Intrinsic and historical weaknesses delayed the spread of a sound neurobiological investigation on dreaming. Nevertheless, recent independent findings confirm the hypothesis that the neurophysiological mechanisms of encoding and recall of episodic memories are largely comparable across wakefulness and sleep. Brain lesion and neuroimaging studies converge in indicating that temporo-parieto-occipital junction and ventromesial prefrontal cortex play a crucial role in dream recall.

Overnight distribution and motor characteristics of REM sleep behaviour disorder episodes in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy.

Objective: The study aimed to examine the temporal distribution of episodes of REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD) over the night and their motor and polysomnographic (PSG) characteristics in patients with narcolepsy-cataplexy (NC).

Methods: Full-night video-PSG recordings of a continuous series of 37 drug-naïve NC patients with clinically-documented RBD were examined to detect the occurrences of RBD episodes (disclosed in 27 patients) and to classify their related PSG and motor behaviour features.

Results: RBD episodes occurred with comparable frequency in REM sleep periods of the first and second halves of the night, regardless of the length of REM periods, patients' age or disease duration.

Recalling and forgetting dreams: theta and alpha oscillations during sleep predict subsequent dream recall.

Under the assumption that dream recall is a peculiar form of declarative memory, we have hypothesized that (1) the encoding of dream contents during sleep should share some electrophysiological mechanisms with the encoding of episodic memories of the awake brain and (2) recalling a dream(s) after awakening from non-rapid eye movement (NREM) and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep should be associated with different brain oscillations. Here, we report that cortical brain oscillations of human sleep are predictive of successful dream recall. In particular, after morning awakening from REM sleep, a higher frontal 5-7 Hz (theta) activity was associated with successful dream recall.