The geometry of cortical sound processing in slow wave sleep

During wake, sound-evoked and spontaneous neural activity of the auditory cortex evolve in distinct subspaces whereas anesthesia disrupts sound responses and merges these spaces. To evaluate if similar modifications of the sound representation geometry explain sensory disconnection during sleep, we followed large neural populations of the mouse auditory cortex across slow wave sleep and wakefulness. We observed that sleep dampens sound responses but preserves the geometry of sound representations which remain separate from spontaneous activity. Moreover, response dampening was strongly coordinated across neurons and varied throughout sleep spanning from fully preserved response patterns to population response failures on a fraction of sound presentations. These failures are more common during high spindle-band activity and more rarely observed in wakefulness. Therefore, in sleep, the auditory system preserves sound feature selectivity up to the cortex for detailed acoustic surveillance, but concurrently implements an intermittent gating mechanism leading to local sensory disconnections.