Nested compressed co-representations of multiple sequential experiences during sleep

Animals encounter and remember multiple experiences daily. During sleep, hippocampal neuronal ensembles replay past experiences and preplay future ones. Although most previous studies investigated p/replay of a single experience, it remains unclear how the hippocampus represents many experiences without major interference during sleep. By monitoring hippocampal neuronal ensembles as rats encountered 15 distinct linear track experiences, we uncovered principles for efficient multi-experience compressed p/replay representation. First, we found a serial position effect whereby the earliest and the most recent experiences had the strongest representations. Second, distinct experiences were co-represented in a multiplexed, flickering manner during nested p/replay events, which greatly enhanced the network’s representational capacity. Third, spatially contiguous and disjunct track pairs were bound together into contiguous conjunctive representations during sleep. Finally, sequences spanning day-long multi-track experiences were p/replayed at hyper-compressed ratios during sleep. These coding schemes efficiently parallelize, bind and compress multiple sequential representations with reduced interference and enhanced capacity during sleep. Liu et al. unraveled several hippocampal neural ensemble coding schemes that efficiently represent numerous daily experiences during sleep by prioritizing the most recent and earliest events, multiplexing co-representations and compressing day-long sequences.