Criticality of neuronal avalanches in human sleep and their relationship with sleep macro- and micro-architecture

Sleep plays a key role in preserving brain function, keeping the brain network in a state that ensures optimal computational capabilities. Empirical evidence indicates that such a state is consistent with criticality, where scale-free neuronal avalanches emerge. However, the relationship between sleep, emergent avalanches, and criticality remains poorly understood. Here we fully characterize the critical behavior of avalanches during sleep, and study their relationship with the sleep macro- and micro-architecture, in particular the cyclic alternating pattern (CAP). We show that avalanche size and duration distributions exhibit robust power laws with exponents approximately equal to −3/2 e −2, respectively. Importantly, we find that sizes scale as a power law of the durations, and that all critical exponents for neuronal avalanches obey robust scaling relations, which are consistent with the mean-field directed percolation universality class. Our analysis demonstrates that avalanche dynamics depends on the position within the NREM-REM cycles, with the avalanche density increasing in the descending phases and decreasing in the ascending phases of sleep cycles. Moreover, we show that, within NREM sleep, avalanche occurrence correlates with CAP activation phases, particularly A1, which are the expression of slow wave sleep propensity and have been proposed to be beneficial for cognitive processes. The results suggest that neuronal avalanches, and thus tuning to criticality, actively contribute to sleep development and play a role in preserving network function. Such findings, alongside characterization of the universality class for avalanches, open new avenues to the investigation of functional role of criticality during sleep with potential clinical application.</jats:p><jats:sec><jats:title>Significance statement</jats:title><jats:p>We fully characterize the critical behavior of neuronal avalanches during sleep, and show that avalanches follow precise scaling laws that are consistent with the mean-field directed percolation universality class. The analysis provides first evidence of a functional relationship between avalanche occurrence, slow-wave sleep dynamics, sleep stage transitions and occurrence of CAP phase A during NREM sleep. Because CAP is considered one of the major guardians of NREM sleep that allows the brain to dynamically react to external perturbation and contributes to the cognitive consolidation processes occurring in sleep, our observations suggest that neuronal avalanches at criticality are associated with flexible response to external inputs and to cognitive processes, a key assumption of the critical brain hypothesis.