ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2014
Sleep spindles and intelligence: evidence for a sexual dimorphism.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 92 citations in OpenAlex.
- A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Biological Sex Differences in Sleep Spindles and Slow Wave Activity in Adults With and Without Insomnia.Journal of sleep research · 2026Pooled it
- The DYNAM-O Toolbox: Characterizing Individualized Neural Signatures in Sleep EEG.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Sleep spindle density increases in patients with severe obstructive sleep apnea after 6 months of treatment: a longitudinal study.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Differences in sleep spindles and polysomnography in humans: a meta-analysis on the influence of age, sex, and cognitive ability.Frontiers in sleep · 2026Review
- Threshold Values of Sleep Spindles Features in Healthy Adults Using Scalp-EEG and Associations With Sleep Parameters.Annals of clinical and translational neurology · 2025Observational
- Multivariate prediction of cognitive performance from the sleep electroencephalogram.NeuroImage · 2023Article
- The sleep and wake electroencephalogram over the lifespan.Neurobiology of aging · 2023Article
- Owner-rated hyperactivity/impulsivity is associated with sleep efficiency in family dogs: a non-invasive EEG study.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Hierarchical fusion detection algorithm for sleep spindle detection.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- The sleep EEG envelope is a novel, neuronal firing-based human biomarker.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Overnight dynamics in scale-free and oscillatory spectral parameters of NREM sleep EEG.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Association of polygenic risk for schizophrenia with fast sleep spindle density depends on pro-cognitive variants.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2022Article
- Attachment towards the Owner Is Associated with Spontaneous Sleep EEG Parameters in Family Dogs.Animals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2022Article
- Sex Hormones, Sleep, and Memory: Interrelationships Across the Adult Female Lifespan.Frontiers in aging neuroscience · 2022Review
- Nonrapid eye movement sleep characteristics and relations with motor, memory, and cognitive ability from infancy to preadolescence.Developmental psychobiology · 2021Review
- Auditory stimulation during sleep suppresses spike activity in benign epilepsy with centrotemporal spikes.Cell reports. Medicine · 2021Article
- Longitudinal Analysis of Sleep Spindle Maturation from Childhood through Late Adolescence.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- A set of composite, non-redundant EEG measures of NREM sleep based on the power law scaling of the Fourier spectrum.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Behavioral and Neurophysiological Correlates of Dogs' Individual Sensitivities to Being Observed by Their Owners While Performing a Repetitive Fetching Task.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Age-related differences and sexual dimorphism in canine sleep spindles.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
11 authors at 6 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sleep spindles are thalamocortical oscillations in nonrapid eye movement sleep, which play an important role in sleep-related neuroplasticity and offline information processing. Sleep spindle features are stable within and vary between individuals, with, for example, females having a higher number of spindles and higher spindle density than males. Sleep spindles have been associated with learning potential and intelligence; however, the details of this relationship have not been fully clarified yet. In a sample of 160 adult human subjects with a broad IQ range, we investigated the relationship between sleep spindle parameters and intelligence. In females, we found a positive age-corrected association between intelligence and fast sleep spindle amplitude in central and frontal derivations and a positive association between intelligence and slow sleep spindle duration in all except one derivation. In males, a negative association between intelligence and fast spindle density in posterior regions was found. Effects were continuous over the entire IQ range. Our results demonstrate that, although there is an association between sleep spindle parameters and intellectual performance, these effects are more modest than previously reported and mainly present in females. This supports the view that intelligence does not rely on a single neural framework, and stronger neural connectivity manifesting in increased thalamocortical oscillations in sleep is one particular mechanism typical for females but not males.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.