A summary of the main findings:

1) Drift in population activity in the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) is happening all the time, regardless of the task, even during sleep. This means it's an inherent property of the network, not something driven by perceptual change, motivational state, etc.

@MolemanPeter @beneuroscience

It would support autobiographical memory, I suppose.

Related?... When I was a young man, there were no cellphones. If I had to wake up at a certain time, I could do so with surprising accuracy. On road trips, my friends would rely on me.

I can't do that any more but to this day I play a related game with myself... The first thing I do every single morning when I wake up is try to guess the exact time. 🙂

@dsmith @MolemanPeter

Fun game! A friend did a study asking human participants how long they had slept right when they woke up...have to dig up the results.

@beneuroscience @MolemanPeter

Please share if you find it!

To tap any sort of memory-while-sleeping capability, it's tough to find a measure with few covariant influences.

I've always fancied that (with black-out curtains which I no longer have) my wake-up game might have some actual capacity to calibrate/educate my what-time-is-it capacity.

@dsmith

I checked and it's not published. Turns out it was actually a study to validate the use of an automated sleep tracker and they wanted to compare to participant reports of perceived time slept. Could have made a whole timing study out of it!