Simon Titone

and 5 more

Functional connectivity (FC) during sleep has been shown to break down as non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep deepens before returning to a state closer to wakefulness during REM sleep. However, the specific spatial and temporal signatures of these fluctuations in connectivity patterns remain poorly understood. The goal of this study was to investigate how frequency-dependent network-level FC fluctuates during nocturnal sleep in healthy young adults using high-density electroencephalography (hdEEG). Specifically, we examined source-localized FC in resting-state networks during NREM2, NREM3, and REM sleep in the first three sleep cycles of 29 participants. Our results showed that FC within and between all resting-state networks decreased from NREM2 to NREM3 sleep in multiple frequency bands and in all sleep cycles. The data also highlighted a complex modulation of connectivity patterns during the transition to REM sleep whereby delta and sigma bands hosted a persistence of the connectivity breakdown in all networks, whereas a reconnection was observed in the default mode (DMN) and the attentional networks in frequency bands characterizing their organization during wake (i.e., alpha and beta bands, respectively). Finally, all network pairs (except the visual network) showed higher gamma-band FC during REM sleep in cycle three compared to earlier cycles during the night. Altogether, our results unravel the spatial and temporal characteristics of the well-known breakdown in connectivity observed as NREM sleep deepens. They also shed light on a complex pattern of connectivity during REM sleep that is consistent with both breakdown and reconnection processes that are network- and frequency-specific.