Thalamocortical Assemblies: Sleep Spindles, Slow Waves and Epileptic Discharges

During sleep, the mammalian brain generates an orderly progression of low frequency oscillations as the brain moves from sleep onset into deep sleep. This book explores the underlying neural mechanisms involved in generating these oscillations through interacting neural assemblies in the thalamus and the cortex. Sleep spindles are involved in the consolidation of experiences in long-term memory during sleep.

Written by two leading experts in the field, this book integrates the properties of ion channels, synaptic interactions, and intrinsic cellular mechanisms into biophysical models of neural oscillations in local circuits and distributed networks. In particular, the book focuses on sleep spindles and how they are highjacked by epileptic seizures

Reissued in paperback after being unavailable for many years, this revised edition of Thalamocortical Assemblies includes updates to each chapter, highlighting developments since its first publication. The book will be valuable to neuroscientists, neurobiologists, physiologists and computational researchers interested in sleep and memory processes.


About the Author
Alain Destexhe, Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience, Terrence Sejknowski, The Salk Institute for Biological Studies

Alain Destexhe is a Professor and Research Director at the CNRS (French National Center for Scientfic Research). He is Vice Director of the Paris-Saclay Institute of Neuroscience (NeuroPSI), one of the largest Neuroscience research institutes in France, and he is also the founder and director of the European Institute of Theoretical Neuroscience (EITN). He is a specialist of electrophysiology and computational neuroscience, and his research team studies brain states in general, such as the wake-sleep cycle, anesthesia, epilepsy and states of minimal consciousness. These subjects are investigated using a mix of experimental data and computational approaches, from mice to humans.

Terrence Sejnowski is a pioneer in Computational Neuroscience and recipient of the 2022 International Gruber Prize in Neuroscience. He is the Francis Crick Chair at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies and a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, San Diego, where he a co-director of the Institute for Neural Computation. He is also the President of the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) Foundation, which organizes the largest annual conference on artificial intelligence. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the National Academy of Inventors.