Snek!
>Postdoctoral fellows Hiroaki Norimoto and Lorenz Fenk were recording brain activity in dragons during sleep and observed that events characteristic of non-REM sleep appeared to be initiated in a small and anterior region of the brain, whose exact identity was unknown. "Our initial goal was to study information processing during sleep," explains Norimoto. "Our approach was very explorative to begin with."
>"Interestingly, we found that the claustrum was also connected with areas of the mid- and hindbrain that have been implicated in the regulation of sleep in mammals. This is consistent with the idea that the claustrum may play a role in controlling brain dynamics characteristic of sleep," says Fenk.
>Indeed, the Laurent lab then showed that the claustrum underlies the generation of sharp waves during slow-wave sleep. The researchers found that uni-or bilateral lesions of the claustrum suppressed sharp-wave ripple production during slow-wave sleep uni- or bilaterally, respectively, but did not affect the regular and rapidly alternating sleep rhythm characteristic of pogona sleep. The claustrum is thus not involved in sleep-rhythm generation itself, but rather in generating a particular dynamic mode during non-REM sleep, which it then broadcasts widely in the forebrain.
https://phys.org/news/2020-02-hidden-enigmatic-mammalian-brain-area.html