Sleep and individual differences in intellectual abilities

Abstract

There is much evidence that sleep is important for maintaining optimal cognition in humans; however, the link between cognitive capabilities and specific brain activity during sleep is less clear. Recently, converging evidence suggests that brain activity during sleep is linked to interindividual differences in intellectual abilities. In particular, the sleep spindle, a component of non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep, seems to be related to sleep-dependent brain processes related to trait-like fluid intelligence. These differences may even arise during early childhood development, and changes in spindle characteristics with age could be representative of developmental differences in thalamocortical networks, which also produce measurable interindividual differences in performance on behavioural tasks. This review focuses on recent studies which have investigated the relationship between sleep and intellectual abilities in humans.