The team did indeed hear "bursts" of neuronal chatter during sleep--but only during a phase of sleep known as slow-wave sleep (SWS), the deep, dreamless periods of sleep. "It turns out that during slow-wave sleep there are these episodes where a lot of the cells in the hippocampus will all fire very close to the same time," says Wierzynski. In response, some cells in the prefrontal cortex will fire in near unison as well, just milliseconds later. "What's interesting is that the bulk of the precise spike timing happens during these bursts, and not outside of these bursts," he adds.
On the other hand, during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep, the previously chatty neuron pairs seemed to talk right past each other, firing at the same rates as before but no longer in concert.
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