Interpreting human sleep activity through neural contrastive learning.

Chen Z., Zheng H., Zhou J., Zheng L., Lin P., Wang H., Busche MA., Behrens T., Dolan R., Liu Y.

Spontaneous memory replay during sleep is crucial for cognition but challenging to capture because distinct sleep rhythms hinder the generalization of wake-trained electroencephalogram (EEG) decoders. To address this, we developed the Sleep Interpreter (SI), which uses neural contrastive learning to isolate shared semantic content from background rhythms. We collected a dataset of 135 participants undergoing targeted reactivation of 15 semantic categories, yielding approximately 1,000 h of overnight sleep and 400 h of wake EEG. During non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, SI achieved high decoding accuracy for cue-evoked semantic responses, with accuracy peaking during slow oscillation and spindle coupling at 40.02% top-1 accuracy on unseen participants (chance 6.7%). We demonstrated SI generalizability in two independent nap experiments involving targeted and spontaneous reactivation, where decoded reactivations correlated with post-sleep memory performance. Finally, we implemented SI for real-time sleep staging and stage-specific NREM and REM decoding. The dataset and codebase are shared as open resources for future clinical applications.

DOI

10.1016/j.neuron.2026.03.028

Type

Journal article

Publication Date

2026-04-17T00:00:00+00:00

Keywords

EEG, contrastive learning, replay, sleep, slow oscillation

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