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Brain waves appear to wash out waste during sleep in mice
- avocadocrush 3y agoRapid eye movement (REM) phase is particularly important for brain function. Deep phase is crucial for the body repair.
- v7engine 3y agocould someone eli5 this for me pls.
- samstave 3y agoThink of it as whilst awake all the experience and sensory input, nutrients(or lack) you experience throughout the day result in basically the brain doing all its activites and various parts, functions and syncopated waves/rthyms etc get out of phase. Much like you occasionally reboot your machine to flush and re-align memory etc... When you sleep, your sensory input systems are handed a surrogate (dreams) whist the rest of your brain gets back into phase with itself, and the idea is that this allows for an 'alignment' of sorts within the brain which allows for the cerberal fluids to more porously flow through the brain and carry away ionic and other molecules which freely float through the brain. As the rain washes the paths and the streets after a windy, dusty day... To allow for a fresh path where the previous wake-cycles experiences in molocules can be more properly absorbed into the brain and your neurons can 'take in' what happened all wake cycle.
- v7engine 3y agoThank you. Any recommendations on how long should I sleep for this process to kick off and get completed? Or does it happen all the time I am sleeping?
- samstave 3y agoIt happens all the time in the appropriate phase of sleep. So just get as much sleep as your body is saying "HEY BITCH!" Also - you will have more beneficial sleep in fully dark, no-screens (or other magnetic objects (cell phone, under pillow, for example) near head. make sure you dont have sleep apnia (make sure you have clear deep breathing when sleeping)....
- helpfulContrib 3y ago[dead]
- greggsy 3y agoIs anyone more knowledgeable able to interpret the paper beyond ‘brain waves wash toxins’? Are they actually responsible for the observed activity, or do they merely trigger some ‘flushing’ mechanism inherent to the cells? Or, are the waves a result of that process?
- malux85 3y agoWouldn’t it be cool if we could periodically trigger waves like this to refresh the brain and maybe require less (or no) sleep! I have no expertise in this area I’m just a dreamer :)
- d1sxeyes 3y agoDreamers have no problems here :)
- vasco 3y agoFor companies it'd be a dream. 1/4 more awake time is 1/4 more time to buy stuff and watch content and ads. Or work longer hours. Gonna go back to sleep now.
- kyleyeats 3y agoDefinitely get some sleep. Your post suggests you're getting less than five hours a night.
- samstave 3y agothe immediate use doesnt have to buy more shit. it could be used in endurance/focused events. high stress relief, traumatic brain injury - like immediate induce afte cte event in foot ball head trauma in car accident ODs etc... - When I was a baby, and I would get ill, my mom would calm me and put me to sleep - and I would sleep for an extended period and my mom would say that I would wake up fully well. If this could be induced in infants going through trauma's such as a surgery, where inducing natural brain-flush instead of pumping a tiny body full of "medicine" this might be great for their long term mental development outside of having medicines in them when growing extremely fast.
- achow 3y agoMore details at Washington Univ' site: https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/neurons-help-flush-waste-out-of-brain-during-sleep/ https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/neurons-help-flush-waste-out... Could not find any free access to the paper, even though the Univ' says "This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH); the BJC Investigators Program at Washington University; and the Neuroscience Innovation Foundation." These kind of grant funded research should be accessible at the least from the Univ' websites.
- VagabundoP 3y agoChecked and it was published through Nature: Jiang-Xie, LF., Drieu, A., Bhasiin, K. et al. Neuronal dynamics direct cerebrospinal fluid perfusion and brain clearance. Nature 627, 157–164 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07108-6 Every Uni should have access through your library system.
- gapan 3y agoI think the point was that every member of the public should have access to publicly funded research at least through the university's website, rather than at least everyone currently in universities should have access.
- throwaway81523 3y agoIs this news? Lookup glynphatic system. I thought it was known that it flushes out waste products during sleep.
- pulse7 3y agoSo garbage collection is not such a bad idea after all...
- aendruk 3y agoWhere sleeping is an acceptable cost.
- lwansbrough 3y ago1/3 of compute time spent on garbage collection is pretty inefficient!
- DANmode 3y agoHave you seen this volume of garbage?!
- steve1977 3y agoMaybe it's comforting to think that the time is not only spent with garbage collection. That's one part of sleep, but by far not the only one.
- pjerem 3y agoWell if it gives you an uptime of 80-110 years, that’s pretty useful.
- lelanthran 3y agoOnly in f it's exclusively for GC. If it's opportunistic GC, then it's simply running when nothing else is. IOW, we may need the sleep for a different reason, and that is when the load is low enough to allow the GC to run. Assume that we can trigger this while awake. This doesn't mean that we don't need to sleep for some other reason.
- flancian 3y agoWhat if it's garbage collection and NN training/backprop time? Then it starts sounding like a great deal to me at least.
- 3y ago
- russellbeattie 3y agoSo, if we could induce those brain waves we wouldn't need sleep? Maybe in the future our AirPods will have a "rejuvenate" feature which plays tones that cause sleep like brain waves to go through and clean out our neurons. Probably not... I think our brains are like LLMs. We train them on sensory input we perceive over time, building up a data model that is unique to us. The models may generate similar results, but each person's brains are wired as differently as the raw binary data stored in ChatGPT vs Llama or Gemini. Thus the cleaning mechanism is probably unique per person as well. But I don't really have a clue. It's just a logical inference.
- Jolter 3y agoI have an idea: if you induced those brain waves, you would technically be asleep. So you would not actually be magically given more awake time.
- samstave 3y agoinduction may cause a feeling of restedness, but unless the actual fluid pumps out the waste, you'd likely get diminishing, perhaps even damaging results if you over use it... like and "sleep spell" it has a cooldown that is needed for actual biological pumping time
- rpozarickij 3y agoI'd think that the brain isn't the only part of the human body that needs sleep/rest. Becoming immobile for such a long amount of time must have a much larger systemic purpose given that this is how our bodies evolved.
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y agoYour spine contracts during the day and releases while you sleep at night.
- pedalpete 3y agoWe don't know how to induce slow-waves yet, but lots of research around how we can increase the function. The mechanism is very not unique. Unlike other neuronal activity, the slow-waves are synchronous firing of neurons, and almost all brains respond to interruptions 30 degrees off the peak of the wave. It's much more health engineering than much of the medicine I'm aware of. We've been working on this for the last 4 years at https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com
- theaussiestew 3y agoThat's a really interesting scientific finding. From a personal experience, once I closed my eyes and actually observed this phenomenon. I could observe many spherical waves of light each pulsating, and not only that but I could feel the effect of each wave viscerally. It definitely felt healing. I wasn't sure what this was, was it the vibes of meditators around the world? Maybe this research finding is what I was observing.
- dynisor 3y agoAre you perhaps describing phosphenes?
- theaussiestew 3y agoNo I'm not. Please see my other comment where I make a physical analogy to why spherical expanding waves of light may be healing and restorative.
- quesera 3y agoReflexively, that doesn't make sense. I cannot imagine perceiving ionic CSF flow with my eyes. But thinking about it more, maybe there is something to it? I'm wholly unqualified to speculate here, but I know computers and computers are exactly the same as everything in the real world, so let's go! ... - When restful and with my eyes closed, I definitely "see" waves move across my field of vision. My eyes see "black" (or dark gray) with slightly lighter edges that move and act like a wavefront in a fluid. There's distinct flow, and (minor) swirling and interference. I've seen these since I was very young, and I have no idea if it's a common thing or if it has a name. It must. I've mentioned it to a very small number of other non-experts but no one has ever recognized it. (I also sometimes see tiny colored tiles that light up in moving masses -- again rarely mentioned but never recognized, probably an unrelated phenomenon...) - I do not think these are simply phosphenes, because there is no external proximate stimuli. Though I suppose we all live in environments saturated with EMF, most of the time, and a proper test would require being in a very remote area (and that's probably not enough). Though if I can "see" the presence of EMF, I'm totally making some phone calls to Charles Xavier's people. - I've theorized that this was fluid in my eye (eyelid is too thin) moving around and refracting what little light is getting through in a dark room. But it also happens when I am completely still (though nothing in the body is ever completely still), and it also happens in complete darkness. - The "shape" of the waves does not resemble anything that could be related to blood vessels in the eyelid. And again, complete darkness. - So, is it possible that it's actually this ionic flow of CSF through the vision-sensing part of the brain? Not actually light coming through my eyeballs at all, but fluidlike electrical variations in the parts of the brain itself which are sensitive to the electrical signals normally coming from the optic nerves? I have no idea. But it's an fun new angle to consider in the idle moments while I watch the waves flow before I fall asleep. (That said, please feel free to correct my wild speculation if there's an obvious explanation that has not intersected my completely-unrelated fields of study! :)
- huppeldepup 3y agoThere is an mri greyscale clip that shows this process I saw a couple of years ago but could never find it back. It showed spinal fluid “washing” the brain. If anyone knows where I can find it, please link.
- speedylight 3y agoThere’s this one I just found - [https://player.vimeo.com/video/370150539?background=1](https://player.vimeo.com/video/370150539?background=1) https://player.vimeo.com/video/370150539?background=1](https...
- huppeldepup 3y agoThat one is the default google answer, but not the one I saw. Mine had a spine attached and there was no highlighting, the fluid movements were distinguishable in the scans. Thank you for trying.
- xeonmc 3y agothis? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8cgZn3aW3o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8cgZn3aW3o or this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEOviBqr_c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPEOviBqr_c EDIT: also https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=785729915751081 https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=785729915751081
- ineedaj0b 3y agoWe need to figure out what activity or thought creates waves most similar to the cleaning function. Maybe it’s dreaming? Dreaming by my experience is tedious and not restful… I have 4-6 dreams every night and never feel like I’m truly asleep. Shouldn’t be hard to figure out with an EKG and a decent graph to see what your aiming for.
- pjerem 3y agoIt’s not dreaming that is tedious. My understanding is that the brain always dream but that you only remember your dreams if you wake up during them. So, remembering 4-6 dreams would mean that you wake up (probably unconsciously) multiple times per night. It’s probably what is tiring rather than the dream itself. Disclaimer : I have no source and I may be wrong. It’s my understanding.
- ineedaj0b 3y agoI don’t feel physically tired in the mornings. I ran in high school 8-10 miles a day and would collapse, waking up dream free. Now I wake up refreshed but I’m sick of watching the same rehashed combinations of dreams. I can do lucid dreaming, but I’d just rather not dream at all
- deprecative 3y agoYou always dream. That's the thing. Unless something is seriously wrong you dream every night. You might not want to remember them but you'll dream all the same.
- ineedaj0b 3y agoMight be a symptom of my good memory? Shame. I like the memory but not the dreams
- dbtc 3y agomeditation
- 3y ago
- alexnewman 3y agoImagine I said this in a nice way. Haven't we known this for a while? Specifically during deep non rem sleep. For the lazy, what's new here?
- pkoird 3y agoKinda tangential but I've noticed that my most satisfying and restorative sleep is always followed by tons of eye goop the following morning. Maybe a kind of brain-waste?
- Hendrikto 3y agoThis has probably way more to do with how much REM sleep you get, which is said to be the most restorative sleep.
- luxuryballs 3y agoAfter learning this and reading about lion’s mane reversing plaque induced dementia in rats I started taking it as “brain washing detergent” before bed. It gives me some wildly vivid dreams and I always wake up more refreshed.
- slowmotiony 3y agoHow much?
- luxuryballs 3y agoI scoop about 2-3 grams
- tacocataco 3y agoI take herb pills, and I get crazy dreams if I don't drink enough water with them. Try chugging more water before bed or when you take the pills.
- robg 3y agoIf you have any doubts about sleep quantity and quality, worth reading about the glymphatic nervous system, which is so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4636982/ In short it explains, mechanistically, why poor sleep affects daily cognition, mental health, and age-related declines. Robust scientific theories explain more of the evidence. The glymphatic nervous system explains why sleep is so key to surviving and thriving. Maiken Nedergaard will end up winning the Nobel for its discovery.
- Hrun0 3y ago> which is so newly discovered It says that it was published in 2015, or am I missing something?
- infecto 3y agoAm I missing something? 2015 for a paper feels relatively new enough that people might not know about it and it might not be in school books.
- zarathustreal 3y ago[flagged]
- dartos 3y agoDoes this comment have nothing to do with the thread, or are we missing something?
- zarathustreal 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- art3m 3y agoI read about it few years ago in Matthew Walker's book "Why we sleep".
- niemandhier 3y agoNotably, synthesized waves generated through transcranial optogenetic stimulation substantially potentiated cerebrospinal fluid-to-interstitial fluid perfusion. No wonder Musk is interested in this area of research. This line indicates that with an optigenetic implant you can substitute sleep with something more efficient.
- Staple_Diet 3y agoI'm sorry but your comment is incredibly I'll informed. Not only because you think Musk is any where near the leader in the implant space, but more so that you don't understand optogenetics. The device referenced here was transcranial (i.e., non-invasive) but regardless optogenetics requires tagging specific neurons with an opsin (usually via viral vector). I'm sorry for being curt but this is the 4th or 5th neuroscience post in the last 72h that HN have blasted with shit takes. If I wanted misunderstood science I'd revive my Reddit account.
- deprecative 3y agoHN is great but it's only illusory that it has smarter people than Reddit. We're all just people rising to our incompetence to the limit the system allows.
- niemandhier 3y agoI am very aware how optogenetics works, I wasted some part of my live getting channelrhodopsins into cells to trigger neurons. Yes you are right one would probably use transient gene therapy tho make a modification like that, but transcranial methods are afaik for human adults less suitable since the structures lying above the stuff you usually want to stimulate are simply too thick, so a hypothetical sleep replacement machine would probably need to be an implant. That is unless you can use self-refocusing lasers or holograms for stimulation, but I do not see how one would do this unless you replace most of the skull with glass. The point with Musk was a joke more or less. Though it’s true that he is probably the only person both morally ambiguous enough to even try to build a dystopian sleep replacement machine and capable of getting funding for it. Maybe a Reddit account is a good idea.
- Havoc 3y agoI thought this was the prevailing theory anyway? Is this just confirming that?
- koenraad 3y agoI immediately start to think about the effect of smartphone related waves in the room while sleeping.
- im3w1l 3y agoBrain waves are approximately in the 1hz to 100hz range. While smartphone waves are much higher frequency. AC however is 50/60hz depending on country. Maybe I'm overly cautious, but I have a thick wire that runs right next to the natural spot for my pillow I very intentionally put the pillow on the other side of the bed.
- tombert 3y agoI was diagnosed with sleep apnea about six months ago. Once I started getting treatment for it (losing weight, cutting out caffeine, and an oral appliance) my life started getting dramatically better. I had never taken sleep very seriously prior to that and I feel extremely foolish for it. Life is 100x better if you get an appropriate amount of sleep. Everything becomes a little easier.
- mad0 3y agoHow did you recognize that it was sleep apnea? Have you snored at night?
- jajko 3y agoYou have dedicated facilities who let you sleep there and monitor you. But apnea can be easily seen, the person has gaps in breathing during some parts of sleep, gasping. Snoring can be one of the symptoms but reverse is not automatically true. My boss was diagnosed with apnea in his 30s. It was so bad they didn't believe his first test results and had to redo it, off the charts. According to him it literally killed his father. Once he started using the device for sleeping he had 100x more mental and physical energy, everything was just easier.
- tombert 3y agoI was snoring, and in my case my wife told me there would be moments of kind of disturbing moments where I would stop breathing and then gasp multiple times a night. In my case, I was able to take a sleep test from a doctor which was basically just a pulse oximeter I wore while sleeping.
- feverzsj 3y agoIn case you didn't know, sleeping on your right side maximizes the clearance effect, while sleeping on your stomach minimizes it.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y agoWait.. was that in the paper or is there a different source for this?
- 10c8 3y agoCould you point us to the source?
- feverzsj 3y agoThe Effect of Body Posture on Brain Glymphatic Transport [0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/#!po=72.3529 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4524974/#!po=72...
- throw310822 3y ago[in mice]
- calf 3y agoI'm imagining a row of little mice sleeping on their right side in a lab experiment
- Solvency 3y agoAnd yet sleeping on your back contributes to snoring and sleep apnea. Humans. Just can't win can they.
- bluerooibos 3y agoCitation? I've always read that for humans it's better to sleep on the left, for digestion anyway.
- calibas 3y ago
- VinLucero 3y agoI wonder if anyone has done a study yet on how the Glymphatic nervous system is impacted by rTMS (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation) instead of drugs (pharmacological solutions). Anyone deep into this field around?
- pedalpete 3y agoWe're in the field, but with auditory stimulation, not rTMS. Glymphatic System activity is linked to the synchronous firing of neurons that define slow-wave sleep. If you interrupt the brain near the peak of a slow wave, the brain response is to increase this synchronous firing, increasing delta power, and the flushing of the glymphatic system. Monash University here in Australia is looking into the impact this may have on Alzheimer's prevention. There isn't a drug that I'm aware of that is as effective. You can do what we do with rTMS, light stimulation, haptics, etc. it's more about interrupting the brain than it is creating a slow-wave, as far as everything I am aware of in the current literature. We link to a few studies on our website https://affectablesleep.com https://affectablesleep.com - I'll be posting more links soon (we just launched our re-brand 2 days ago).
- k__ 3y agoWould be interesting to know if the waste that gets cleared out is similar to the wastes eliminated by autophagy.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoGreat, now how do I sleep inside a mouse?
- jncfhnb 3y agoI recall a study a while back that suggested sleep flushing toxins was the reason lack of sleep was fatal; and that they prevented it with some drugs In rats or something
- ww520 3y agoSounds like the brain is doing garbage collection during sleep.
- WXLCKNO 3y agoSimulation confirmed.
- euroderf 3y agoTry this metaphor: Your brain is a movie theater. When it's in use it's all bright lights and gripping soundtrack and shiny shiny. But once in a while you have to chase out the Observers and shut down the projector and then go grab a hose and ruthlessly flush out all the tracked-in mud and popcorn remnants and stepped-on gummy bears and who the hell knows what other gunk.
- BenFranklin100 3y agoOne of the traits/habits I’ve been fortunate to have/cultivate is daily afternoon napping. I can rest my head and fall asleep in minutes and then wake back up 15 minutes later feeling cognitively refreshed. I’ve done this since my teenage years and throughout adulthood. Short, intentional, regular napping is associated with a lower risks of dementia. This is different from increased, longer, napping seen in older adults. Longer naps in older adults is associated with Alzheimer’s. See this summary: https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/can-napping-make-you-smarter https://www.alzdiscovery.org/cognitive-vitality/blog/can-nap... It will be interesting to see if further research in humans can pinpoint a plausible causal mechanism in adult for both regular night time sleep and intentional short daytime napping. This might encourage companies to put in ‘sleep pods’ or at least remove the stigma of adult napping.
- euroderf 3y agoI find that even just 2 or 3 minutes unconscious still helps a lot. The Minimum Viable Nap is pretty minimal.
- Spastche 3y agothat explains why my brain is full of trash and I love sleep but rarely get it