Learning & Memory 11: 686–696 (2004)

Sidarta Ribeiro and Miguel A.L. Nicolelis

Reverberation, storage, and postsynaptic propagation of memories during sleep

The expression postsynaptic propagation of memories during sleep was chosen to designate the downstream dissemination of synaptic changes promoted by the wake–sleep cycle. The authors did not want to imply, however, that such propagation depends solely on postsynaptic events (such as zif-268 gene expression), as opposed to presynaptic mechanisms. For this reason, a better choice of words for the same concept is anterograde memory propagation during sleep.