The Synaptic Homeostasis hYpothesis (SHY) is a leading theory of sleep function which claims that sleep is the price we play for learning. According to the hypothesis, sleep serves to renormalize synaptic strength, counterbalancing a net increase of synaptic strength due to learning (plasticity) during wakefulness. Moreover, SHY predicts that synaptic renormalization should not be uniform across all synapses, but that certain synapses (“memories”) must be protected from renormalization.

In this talk I will present statistical analyses from multiple studies designed to test SHY. The data from these studies use brain imagining methods (electron microscopy, 2-photon-imaging) to measure synaptic strength at the level of individual synapses.