12 ms·

If 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

by robg 3y ago

If 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 ago
  Am 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 ago
      Does this comment have nothing to do with the thread, or are we missing something?
      - zarathustreal 3y ago
        [flagged]
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - Culonavirus 3y ago
    People learn in school, then after they estabilish their career, they have kids and other interests and this and that and they get intellectually stuck. Don't grow. Don't learn new things in their field of (supposed) expertise... I see this ALL THE TIME. Now if middle aged programmer refuses to learn new things, it's annoying to work with them, but you'll survive. If a middle aged physician refuses to learn new things, you're kinda fucked. Sadly, the amount of physicians out there who don't keep improving is pretty large given the importance of their job. Yes, the "pretty large" part is mostly anecdotal - my experience and experiences of my friends and family - but if I see the stuck programmers in my field, I'm pretty convinced there must be quite a few of the stuck physicians. So yeah, 10 years in medicine? Seems like a brand new paper to me. I expect that knowledge to bubble its way to your average physician some time around 2040.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      That’s why I am on hackernews though? If nobody posted that paper 8 years ago I’d be surprised.
      - yorwba 3y ago
        5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20622712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20622712
- d_sem 3y ago
  You are missing the context of age demographics. For example: in the United States of America about 63% of the population is over the age of 32 which represents roughly 200 million Americans which graduated Highschool before the year 2010.
  - telesilla 3y ago
    And the majority of whoever is teaching university or even high school right now probably graduated themselves before 2015, when the article was published.
- dEnigma 3y ago
  > so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school. So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).
  - robg 3y ago
    Exactly, my kids are in elementary school and I’ve been talking with superintendents and high school principals. It’s straightforward to teach kids about the brain as a muscle and sleep as critical to rest and recovery to best power cognition. The glymphatic system gives a clear mechanism and yet I haven’t found many places where it’s being taught as a core part of how to best use your brain. Sleep is still considered a nice to have for brain performance, not a driver of working smarter.
  - Hrun0 3y ago
    Ok I think I got confused. I thought OP meant that they will win the Nobel for this specific publication. I guess I should have slept more
- thfuran 3y ago
  I'm about the median age in the US and wouldn't expect anyone less than a decade younger than me to have been taught it in school unless they went for a degree in a related field, and possibly not even then. 2015 is after I finished grad school and something like a decade after I'd last taken a class where it might have been taught if it had already been around for enough years to make it into the curriculum.
  - robg 3y ago
    Great points, I got my Ph.D. in neuroscience 20 years ago. There were disparate theories for why we sleep but no mechanistic description. Most of the research not specifically relevant to my own took 10-20 years to become influential. I’d be surprised if most textbooks for neuroscience-related fields being published today are including the glymphatic system, including psychology / psychiatry and medicine.
moffkalast 3y ago
I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night? Or at least reduce the hours required. If we could solve this we could just stay awake perpetually and instantly gain a 30% longer lifespan as it were.
- someplaceguy 3y ago
  > I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night? Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain. I think some types of learning and memory formation also happen during sleep, right?
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain. ...Lucid daydreaming button, anyone? Maybe not lucid if it's the exact same as normal sleep, but I'm sure that if such a thing more exist, you'd be able to adjust exactly how it affects your brain.
    - plasticchris 3y ago
      But your brain is disconnected from your body during dreams, to keep you from flailing around. Sometimes you even wake up before the block is lifted and can’t move. So controlling such a device would be difficult.
      - LoganDark 3y ago
        You're describing sleep paralysis, right? It's not so much a disconnection as it is an inhibition. Attempts to move most of your muscles are blocked, but external stimuli still get in. You know, once upon a time someone started the washer while I was presumably in REM, and I started to hear something in my dream. When I woke up, it only took me a couple minutes to realize that what I had been hearing in the dream was some greatly slowed-down version of the washer that had just been started, since I guess my dream time was travelling faster than real time. I think the only reason it didn't wake me up is because I'm used to sleeping through the sound of the washer running and may even normally filter it out. That's just the first time that someone managed to turn it on in the middle of my actual dreaming phase.
magicalhippo 3y ago
It makes me sad as my SO struggles a lot with sleep. It's been years since she's had a good nights sleep. Sadly her issues are mostly psychologically rooted due to past trauma, while all the treatments seem to be geared towards "simple" physical issues. She's tried contacting various sleep clinics here and they've all said they can't help. She struggles a lot with falling asleep, she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration while trying to sleep or sleeping, and if she falls asleep she almost always have nightmares, which significantly reduces the quality of the sleep even if they don't always wake her up. One issue is that when you're that close to the limit of what is no longer bearable, it's hard to just try things. For example, I've been thinking exposure therapy might help for her sound and light sensitivity, but she's not convinced it'll help and doesn't want to try potentially sleeping even worse for many weeks. Which I understand, but...
- danielscrubs 3y ago
  Sounds too simple but high doses of vitamin C before sleep removed all of my stress induced nightmares.
  - magicalhippo 3y ago
    Interesting, most sources I could find say vitamin C should make you less sleepy.
- michaelkeenan 3y ago
  I know you've probably already tried lots of things, and you're also inundated with ideas from others, but: Here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving insomnia: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ And here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving nightmares: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares Prazosin is the standard drug for PTSD-related nightmares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin
  - infradig 3y ago
jannyfer 3y ago
I must be spending too much time on HN. I recognize this exact comment from a month ago.
- ifyoubuildit 3y ago
  I was thinking the same thing, but I wasn't sure how long ago it was.
  - MrDresden 3y ago
    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39335425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39335425
- robg 3y ago
  I’m thinking it should be pinned to the top of any sleep post!

by robg 3y ago

Hrun0 3y ago

> which is so newly discovered It says that it was published in 2015, or am I missing something?

infecto 3y ago
Am 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 ago
    Does this comment have nothing to do with the thread, or are we missing something?
    - zarathustreal 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
- Culonavirus 3y ago
  People learn in school, then after they estabilish their career, they have kids and other interests and this and that and they get intellectually stuck. Don't grow. Don't learn new things in their field of (supposed) expertise... I see this ALL THE TIME. Now if middle aged programmer refuses to learn new things, it's annoying to work with them, but you'll survive. If a middle aged physician refuses to learn new things, you're kinda fucked. Sadly, the amount of physicians out there who don't keep improving is pretty large given the importance of their job. Yes, the "pretty large" part is mostly anecdotal - my experience and experiences of my friends and family - but if I see the stuck programmers in my field, I'm pretty convinced there must be quite a few of the stuck physicians. So yeah, 10 years in medicine? Seems like a brand new paper to me. I expect that knowledge to bubble its way to your average physician some time around 2040.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    That’s why I am on hackernews though? If nobody posted that paper 8 years ago I’d be surprised.
    - yorwba 3y ago
      5 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20622712 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20622712
d_sem 3y ago
You are missing the context of age demographics. For example: in the United States of America about 63% of the population is over the age of 32 which represents roughly 200 million Americans which graduated Highschool before the year 2010.
- telesilla 3y ago
  And the majority of whoever is teaching university or even high school right now probably graduated themselves before 2015, when the article was published.
dEnigma 3y ago
> so newly discovered likely you didn’t learn about it in school. So with the slow pace knowledge makes it into the school curriculum, you likely wouldn't have heard about it in school unless you just left the system a year or two ago (if even then).
- robg 3y ago
  Exactly, my kids are in elementary school and I’ve been talking with superintendents and high school principals. It’s straightforward to teach kids about the brain as a muscle and sleep as critical to rest and recovery to best power cognition. The glymphatic system gives a clear mechanism and yet I haven’t found many places where it’s being taught as a core part of how to best use your brain. Sleep is still considered a nice to have for brain performance, not a driver of working smarter.
- Hrun0 3y ago
  Ok I think I got confused. I thought OP meant that they will win the Nobel for this specific publication. I guess I should have slept more
thfuran 3y ago
I'm about the median age in the US and wouldn't expect anyone less than a decade younger than me to have been taught it in school unless they went for a degree in a related field, and possibly not even then. 2015 is after I finished grad school and something like a decade after I'd last taken a class where it might have been taught if it had already been around for enough years to make it into the curriculum.
- robg 3y ago
  Great points, I got my Ph.D. in neuroscience 20 years ago. There were disparate theories for why we sleep but no mechanistic description. Most of the research not specifically relevant to my own took 10-20 years to become influential. I’d be surprised if most textbooks for neuroscience-related fields being published today are including the glymphatic system, including psychology / psychiatry and medicine.

moffkalast 3y ago

I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night? Or at least reduce the hours required. If we could solve this we could just stay awake perpetually and instantly gain a 30% longer lifespan as it were.

someplaceguy 3y ago
> I wonder if eventually once this is more thoroughly researched there could be a way to induce constant cleaning instead of having to do it while unconscious at night? Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain. I think some types of learning and memory formation also happen during sleep, right?
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > Hopefully without having to induce those brainwaves, otherwise you might be able to do it during the day but you wouldn't exactly be conscious. But there's also the question of whether those brainwaves are doing more than just cleaning the brain. ...Lucid daydreaming button, anyone? Maybe not lucid if it's the exact same as normal sleep, but I'm sure that if such a thing more exist, you'd be able to adjust exactly how it affects your brain.
  - plasticchris 3y ago
    But your brain is disconnected from your body during dreams, to keep you from flailing around. Sometimes you even wake up before the block is lifted and can’t move. So controlling such a device would be difficult.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      You're describing sleep paralysis, right? It's not so much a disconnection as it is an inhibition. Attempts to move most of your muscles are blocked, but external stimuli still get in. You know, once upon a time someone started the washer while I was presumably in REM, and I started to hear something in my dream. When I woke up, it only took me a couple minutes to realize that what I had been hearing in the dream was some greatly slowed-down version of the washer that had just been started, since I guess my dream time was travelling faster than real time. I think the only reason it didn't wake me up is because I'm used to sleeping through the sound of the washer running and may even normally filter it out. That's just the first time that someone managed to turn it on in the middle of my actual dreaming phase.

magicalhippo 3y ago

It makes me sad as my SO struggles a lot with sleep. It's been years since she's had a good nights sleep. Sadly her issues are mostly psychologically rooted due to past trauma, while all the treatments seem to be geared towards "simple" physical issues. She's tried contacting various sleep clinics here and they've all said they can't help. She struggles a lot with falling asleep, she's exceptionally sensitive to sound and vibration while trying to sleep or sleeping, and if she falls asleep she almost always have nightmares, which significantly reduces the quality of the sleep even if they don't always wake her up. One issue is that when you're that close to the limit of what is no longer bearable, it's hard to just try things. For example, I've been thinking exposure therapy might help for her sound and light sensitivity, but she's not convinced it'll help and doesn't want to try potentially sleeping even worse for many weeks. Which I understand, but...

danielscrubs 3y ago
Sounds too simple but high doses of vitamin C before sleep removed all of my stress induced nightmares.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  Interesting, most sources I could find say vitamin C should make you less sleepy.
michaelkeenan 3y ago
I know you've probably already tried lots of things, and you're also inundated with ideas from others, but: Here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving insomnia: https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ https://lorienpsych.com/2021/01/02/insomnia/ And here's a psychiatrist's guide to solving nightmares: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/peer-review-nightmares Prazosin is the standard drug for PTSD-related nightmares: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prazosin
- infradig 3y ago

jannyfer 3y ago

I must be spending too much time on HN. I recognize this exact comment from a month ago.

ifyoubuildit 3y ago
I was thinking the same thing, but I wasn't sure how long ago it was.
- MrDresden 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39335425 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39335425
robg 3y ago
I’m thinking it should be pinned to the top of any sleep post!