{"doi":"10.3389/978-2-88963-565-8","title":"Local Aspects of Sleep and Wakefulness","abstract":"Slow waves, the hallmark of NREM (Non Rapid Eye Movement) sleep, are not uniformly distributed across the cortical surface, but can occur locally and asynchronously across brain regions.Their regional distribution and amplitude is affected by brain maturation and by time spent awake, mediated in part by experience-dependent changes in synaptic strength.Recent studies have shown that local low-frequency oscillations (<10 Hz) can also occur in REM sleep and during wakefulness, leading to region-specific cognitive errors.Local decreases and increases of slow wave activity in posterior brain regions have been linked to the occurrence of dreaming and to unconscious sleep, respectively.Finally, the coexistence of local sleep-like and wake-like patterns in different brain areas is characteristic of several sleep disorders and may offer insights into these conditions.Sleep is typically considered a global phenomenon that affects the whole brain uniformly and simultaneously.Along the same lines, sleep and wakefulness are usually treated as two mutually exclusive behavioral states, with hardly any grey zone in between.This 'all-ornone view' of sleep has dominated sleep research for a long time, and is neatly reflected in the current classification of sleep stages, in which an unambiguous label of either sleep or wakefulness is attributed to each 30-s page of sleep recordings [1].Undeniably, sleep and wakefulness are characterized by distinct behaviors, mental activity and responsiveness to the environment; they carry different EEG signatures and are influenced by specific neuromodulatory milieus [2].Nonetheless, research in the last decades has started to refine this simplistic distinction and to address important questions: Can sleep occur and be regulated locally?Is it possible for sleep and wakefulness to co-exist in different areas of the brain?If so, what are the consequences on cognition and behavior?In the present article we will review local aspects of sleep and wakefulness, outline cognitive and behavioral correlates and discuss clinical implications, with an emphasis on recent findings.","journal":"Frontiers research topics","year":2020,"id":134559,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9527,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":false,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2020-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[],"reference_count":54,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-18T23:16:24.540681Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}