19 ms·

Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain

252 points by anishkothari 13y ago

tokenadult 13y ago
Science Now, the news service affiliated with the journal Science, has a write-up on this report, http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep-ultimate-brainwasher http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep-ulti... and that links to the abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373 of the published study itself.
- elwell 13y ago
  I definitely prefer direct links to research publications over news outlets.
- anishkothari 13y ago
  Thank you for these links, I wish the BBC article included them. Here's the press release from the University of Rochester, where the study was conducted: http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3956 http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3956
tannerc 13y ago
Can anyone with better knowledge of such things explain why this has to occur during sleep? Is there just too much going on during the day to dedicate physical and mental resources to this type of cleaning?
- jared314 13y ago
  > [Dr Nedergaard] told the BBC: "This is purely speculation, but it looks like the brain is losing a lot of energy when pumping water across the brain and that is probably incompatible with processing information."
  - XorNot 13y ago
    The question on everyone's mind now is, can you bypass that need?
    - scotty79 13y ago
      We'd need some chemical that can cross blood brain barrier, get into the cells and refactor most harmful subtances that build up there. Not an easy task.
    - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
      I have a sneaking suspicion that would be like pumping oxygen directly into the blood and then trying to hold your breath - even though you technically don't need to breathe, millions of years of evolutionary tricks will make sure you do. Try telling your brain that it does not need to sleep after 72 hours just because you have cleared up the toxins
      - twistedpair 13y ago
        "like pumping oxygen directly into the blood and then trying to hold your breath - even though you technically don't need to breathe" It's not that simple. You need to get gases in and OUT. You also need more than O2. You need to clear CO2 as well as lactic acid and other biproducts. Some CO in the mix greatly assists exchange. Simply bubbling 02 into your blood is going to kill you with a blood clot. And, RBC's actually curl up into a cylinder shape in your pulmonary capillaries to maximize gas transfer, unlike when they're flying around your circulatory system. Pick up a physio textbook, they're a fun read.
      - toomuchtodo 13y ago
        Actually, this would work. But O2 isn't the problem, the CO2 is. You'll need a process to filter the CO2 out of your blood, as that's what causes your body's breathing reflex to occur. If you could filter the CO2 from the blood stream, while also providing O2, you would literally not need to breath. "Intravenous Oxygen Injection For Patients Who Cannot Breathe" http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247295.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247295.php
- scotty79 13y ago
  I wonder if sleepwalkers have this cleanup system working normally just and the part that supposed to shut off the muscles is not working properly.
  - jared314 13y ago
    That was my understanding of both sleep walking and sleep paralysis. The parts of your brain that activate during REM dreaming would cause you hurt yourself if GABA and glycine didn't shut off your muscles, thus putting your body into the bio-equivalent of park.
- j-g-faustus 13y ago
  I have no better knowledge, just parsing the reports: The cleanup is more effective during sleep because the channels that transport waste from the brain expand 60% in volume, and the brain cells themselves shrink by a similar amount to make room. I suppose that the brain cells can't shrink that much while retaining their full function.
  - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
    It is not the neurons themselves, but the the glial cells that keep those very large and (potentially) active neurons healthy. Presumably the glial cells must partially shut down in order to physically shrink, thus the neurons must notch down their activity as well.
Locke1689 13y ago
Same old story, primitive stop-the-world GC ;)
- fsckin 13y ago
  Have you tried the new polyphasic garbage collector?
  - Ygg2 13y ago
    It is very toxic.
- daenz 13y ago
  Maybe that's the solution...have so much memory that you only need to GC once every 24 hours...for 8 hours :)
  - applecore 13y ago
    That's pretty much how trading systems work.
    - guerrilla 13y ago
      That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate please?
sillysaurus2 13y ago
A "toxin" is something which is toxic to a system. But our knowledge of the brain is so primitive that we can't reasonably claim to know which chemicals are toxic at tiny, long-term dosage levels, unless it leads to death. There is no evidence that it's possible to die directly from sleep deprivation. Therefore this seems a dubious headline.
- foobarbazqux 13y ago
  If you don't sleep for long enough (about 7 days), you'll start to have visual and auditory hallucinations and also delusional thinking. You'll also experience severely reduced effectiveness of just about every system in your body. You might not die if you don't sleep for a year (say), but you'll probably get permanent brain damage.
  - sillysaurus2 13y ago
    The point of science is to never fall back on claims like "you'll probably get permanent brain damage" unless it's known what brain damage you may get, along with bounds on a confidence interval. Otherwise we're just philosophizing.
    - mattdmrs 13y ago
      Science is slowly getting to those conclusions: > Taken together, these changes in brain and body are further evidence that sleep deprivation is a chronic stressor and that the resulting allostatic load can contribute to cognitive problems, which can, in turn, further exacerbate pathways that lead to disease. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049506002289 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049506...
    - foobarbazqux 13y ago
      Well, it's a testable hypothesis. We will probably never test it in humans or higher mammals due to ethical concerns.
      - 13y ago
greenyoda 13y ago
Wikipedia has a decent article on the glymphatic system, which clears waste products from the brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system The brain and spinal cord have no lymphatic circulation, which handles waste removal for the rest of the body.
batgaijin 13y ago
I always wondered about how split-brain theory would work into this... I mean there are stories of people with half their brain removed who are fully functional (I think? I can't find a source atm). I wonder what would happen if half your brain could be on/off and switch? Also you'd think that any mutation optimizing for time awake would have decimated the other creatures? I don't get how evolution has conquered everything but sleep.
- whateverfor 13y ago
  There are actually animals that sleep half a brain at once: all the marine mammals. A dolphin can't just fall asleep underwater (it will drown), so it sleeps half at a time. There are creatures that sleep very little (Giraffes, etc.) But there's large benefits to sleep, and for most animals it's worth the cost, especially since you don't want to burn piles of calories during non-peak hunting/foraging hours anyway.
- soneca 13y ago
  On that post about a bird that fly for 6 months in a row there were a discussion about the sleep in animals. Some of them are able to sleep alternating one half sleeping and the other aware of the environment. And there is speculation if that bird could sleep while flying. I think half brain awake is not enough to have a fully functional life. I also heard about people losing part of their brain and adapting to deal with it. But that doesn't mean a brain doesn't need that part. It is like the fallacy of using only 10% of the brain. The brain is very well used and optmized for performance, if you lose part of it, it would adapt to compensate what is missing, but it will not be optimized anymore. Disclosure: just guessing here, I have no scientific knowledge or background at all to support these claims of mine.
  - dkersten 13y ago
    In the case of the bird, it may not need fully optimized brain to fly. So it might be acceptable to have reduced brain performance as a tradeoff for longer awakeness, especially if you could recharge under reduced performance and then go back to fully awake (and rested).
dbecker 13y ago
"The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up," Sure sounds like part of the wake-sleep algorithm, which is impressive given that the wake-sleep algorithm was named in the mid-90s.
- samstave 13y ago
  What about meditation? Does mediation allow for "asleep" like cleanup activities whilst in the "awake" state?
  - pstuart 13y ago
    That might be more akin to reducing bus contention.
- dsrguru 13y ago
  > "The brain ... must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up" As any lucid dreamer can tell you, there's also a third option--asleep and aware.
  - nikatwork 13y ago
    Not to mention hypnagogic / sleep paralysis - mind awake, body asleep.
    - jotm 13y ago
      Except both of these are rare occurences that last a short while - it would probably be very detrimental to have lucid dreams or sleep paralysis every night for months/years.
      - nikatwork 13y ago
        Oh I find sleep paralysis very unrestful. The point is though, there are more mental states than "awake/asleep". And let me tell you, sleep paralysis is not always rare...
Miyamoto 13y ago
Awesome. One very (very very) small step closer to creating a pill to help the flushing process so we may sleep less, or not at all.
- jessriedel 13y ago
  Seems unlikely. Essentially all animals with a brain sleep, even flies. You'd need to find a pill that could do something that not one animal was able to evolve to do over hundreds of millions of years. Something that was extremely calorie intensive is all I can imagine.
  - wtvanhest 13y ago
    I appreciate your logic, but there is a wide variety of needed levels of sleep among different animals, and even among different individual humans which tells me that some are more efficient than others at sleeping (maybe clearing toxins?). As efficient as evolution is, the ability not to sleep as much may not be a huge determinant in reproduction. Just 100 years ago, people worked all day, then relaxed and slept. There was little to no demand for not sleeping at all from a survival standpoint. The main reason people want to stay awake all night now is to work more and advance their careers. You don't need that for survival. Further, Pharma companies have done some amazing things. While I agree that it is unlikely soon, I am confident that if humans are around in 200 years, it becomes much, much more likely.
    - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
      What is likely to be true is the pharmaceuticals will allow a conscious choice among a menu of tradeoffs, on a daily basis. Such tradeoffs might be possible now, for those with sufficient discipline, but switching between very different ones is too hard.
    - jessriedel 13y ago
      All animals are extremely vulnerable when they sleep. Yet they all do it.
- 13y ago
jimgardener 13y ago
It would be nice if my computer did all scan/cleanup defrag ops after I shut it down and go to sleep
- mkessy 13y ago
  Well you can easily schedule it to do that... set it up to defrag and shutdown after you're done using it for the night.
_-_-_- 13y ago
When I hear "toxins", I think of a developer on a project I helped manage. He was having health problems so he had to take a 1-1.5 month sabbatical to India to be cleansed of toxins. If I remember correctly the end result was that he quit. While I do believe there that the body cleanses itself from toxins, and I can't say for certain whether the developer that left us got his toxins cleansed or not, this article and study smells of B.S. The second tip off is the quoted doctor's name: Dr. Nedergaard Scientists with Dutch/Scandinavian names always seem to produce the most crap science on average in my experience. I have no idea why, but I've noticed it. Especially when it comes to the "positive affects" of pot. I know that is an over-generalization, but someone should do a study on that to see if it's true. Preferably one without as many A's in his/her last name.
- anotheraccount7 13y ago
  Well the trophy for most BS per capita definitely goes to the Chinese.Unfortunately If I see a chinese name on an IEEE article and it's not from a reputable university, I skip it. As for clearing out toxins. It's been known for years that sleep clears free radicals from the brain. That's why very long term sleep deprivation can led to brain damage, and why if you take modafinil you aren't shielded from the physiological adverse effects of sleep deprivations (though mentally you'll be fine).
giardini 13y ago
Any implications for napping?
brickcap 13y ago
Fascinating. An average 60 year old man sleeps for 20 years (considering a normal 8 hr a day sleep) that is 1/3 of his life. A polar bear and some other hibernating animals sleep for half of their lives. Amazingly polar bear is cognizant enough to feed her baby while she is sleeping. Sleep also lowers the heart beat. It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number of hear beats. An elephant lives longer than a mouse because it's heart beats slower. Could that mean that people who live longer generally sleep more. Whales are known to live for a long time. Wonder how much they sleep.
- joshuahedlund 13y ago
  > It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number of heart beats. Please note that while there is some correlation it may not be strict enough to suggest that lowering your own heart rate will help you live longer. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does-every-species-get-around-a-billion-heartbeats-on-average http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does-every-...
drewcrawford 13y ago
This appears to have an interesting implication for FFI [1], a mysterious genetic disease that causes complete insomnia in adults and results in death. The final stage of FFI is dementia. It turns out that the β-amyloids that are cleared during sleep according to this paper, are associated with certain types of dementia in the general population [2]. It also turns out that certain sleep disorders are dementia predictor [3]. This is just a laymen's speculation, but this is suggestive that dementia may be a type of sleep disorder, that it could be caused by some interruption in the process demonstrated in this paper. And this is a stretch, but it is known that FFI is caused by a malformed prion protein, which is a protein that is deeply involved in various neuron-related functions. It seems possible that this protein is involved in the cleansing process in some way. If so, that would be a HUGE deal, because abnormal prion proteins are associated with a huge variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Basically, I have high hopes for future research. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502554 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502554 [3] http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781136 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781136
- drited 13y ago
  To expand on the dementia issue, poor lighting can lead to disturbances in circadian rhythm and issues with sleep. Fixing this may help with dementia. Further research needed in the area. Sources: http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20080610/bright-light-improves-dementia-symptoms http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20080610/bright-light-i... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3553247/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3553247/
- foxhill 13y ago
  is your third source accessible from anywhere that doesn't require an account? i'd like to read it.
  - drewcrawford 13y ago
    Paste the URL into Google. It seems that if your referrer is Google, no paywall for you.
hkon 13y ago
Does it flush the toxins if you take sleeping pills?
willstepp 13y ago
Why does everyone in this thread want to get rid of sleep? I like sleeping, and dreaming. 24-7 consciousness in the name of increased productivity sounds like a nightmare, no pun intended.
- Technophobe 13y ago
  How can you enjoy something you're not conscious of? What you likely enjoy is the 5-30 minutes as you're falling asleep, and the 5-60 minutes as you're waking up. If we could get the actual sleeping time to 1 minute, but keep the rest the same, surely that would be strictly better in terms of human utility.
TaiChiChaiTea 13y ago
As someone in their early 20s with a sleep disorder this freaks me out!
o0-0o 13y ago
The correlation is that toxins make you sleepy. No wonder I'm always napping. ;p

252 points by anishkothari 13y ago

Science Now, the news service affiliated with the journal Science, has a write-up on this report, http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep-ultimate-brainwasher http://news.sciencemag.org/brain-behavior/2013/10/sleep-ulti... and that links to the abstract http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373 http://www.sciencemag.org/content/342/6156/373 of the published study itself.

elwell 13y ago
I definitely prefer direct links to research publications over news outlets.
anishkothari 13y ago
Thank you for these links, I wish the BBC article included them. Here's the press release from the University of Rochester, where the study was conducted: http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3956 http://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/index.cfm?id=3956

tannerc 13y ago

Can anyone with better knowledge of such things explain why this has to occur during sleep? Is there just too much going on during the day to dedicate physical and mental resources to this type of cleaning?

jared314 13y ago
> [Dr Nedergaard] told the BBC: "This is purely speculation, but it looks like the brain is losing a lot of energy when pumping water across the brain and that is probably incompatible with processing information."
- XorNot 13y ago
  The question on everyone's mind now is, can you bypass that need?
  - scotty79 13y ago
    We'd need some chemical that can cross blood brain barrier, get into the cells and refactor most harmful subtances that build up there. Not an easy task.
  - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
    I have a sneaking suspicion that would be like pumping oxygen directly into the blood and then trying to hold your breath - even though you technically don't need to breathe, millions of years of evolutionary tricks will make sure you do. Try telling your brain that it does not need to sleep after 72 hours just because you have cleared up the toxins
    - twistedpair 13y ago
      "like pumping oxygen directly into the blood and then trying to hold your breath - even though you technically don't need to breathe" It's not that simple. You need to get gases in and OUT. You also need more than O2. You need to clear CO2 as well as lactic acid and other biproducts. Some CO in the mix greatly assists exchange. Simply bubbling 02 into your blood is going to kill you with a blood clot. And, RBC's actually curl up into a cylinder shape in your pulmonary capillaries to maximize gas transfer, unlike when they're flying around your circulatory system. Pick up a physio textbook, they're a fun read.
    - toomuchtodo 13y ago
      Actually, this would work. But O2 isn't the problem, the CO2 is. You'll need a process to filter the CO2 out of your blood, as that's what causes your body's breathing reflex to occur. If you could filter the CO2 from the blood stream, while also providing O2, you would literally not need to breath. "Intravenous Oxygen Injection For Patients Who Cannot Breathe" http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247295.php http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/247295.php
scotty79 13y ago
I wonder if sleepwalkers have this cleanup system working normally just and the part that supposed to shut off the muscles is not working properly.
- jared314 13y ago
  That was my understanding of both sleep walking and sleep paralysis. The parts of your brain that activate during REM dreaming would cause you hurt yourself if GABA and glycine didn't shut off your muscles, thus putting your body into the bio-equivalent of park.
j-g-faustus 13y ago
I have no better knowledge, just parsing the reports: The cleanup is more effective during sleep because the channels that transport waste from the brain expand 60% in volume, and the brain cells themselves shrink by a similar amount to make room. I suppose that the brain cells can't shrink that much while retaining their full function.
- comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
  It is not the neurons themselves, but the the glial cells that keep those very large and (potentially) active neurons healthy. Presumably the glial cells must partially shut down in order to physically shrink, thus the neurons must notch down their activity as well.

Locke1689 13y ago

Same old story, primitive stop-the-world GC ;)

fsckin 13y ago
Have you tried the new polyphasic garbage collector?
- Ygg2 13y ago
  It is very toxic.
daenz 13y ago
Maybe that's the solution...have so much memory that you only need to GC once every 24 hours...for 8 hours :)
- applecore 13y ago
  That's pretty much how trading systems work.
  - guerrilla 13y ago
    That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate please?

sillysaurus2 13y ago

A "toxin" is something which is toxic to a system. But our knowledge of the brain is so primitive that we can't reasonably claim to know which chemicals are toxic at tiny, long-term dosage levels, unless it leads to death. There is no evidence that it's possible to die directly from sleep deprivation. Therefore this seems a dubious headline.

foobarbazqux 13y ago
If you don't sleep for long enough (about 7 days), you'll start to have visual and auditory hallucinations and also delusional thinking. You'll also experience severely reduced effectiveness of just about every system in your body. You might not die if you don't sleep for a year (say), but you'll probably get permanent brain damage.
- sillysaurus2 13y ago
  The point of science is to never fall back on claims like "you'll probably get permanent brain damage" unless it's known what brain damage you may get, along with bounds on a confidence interval. Otherwise we're just philosophizing.
  - mattdmrs 13y ago
    Science is slowly getting to those conclusions: > Taken together, these changes in brain and body are further evidence that sleep deprivation is a chronic stressor and that the resulting allostatic load can contribute to cognitive problems, which can, in turn, further exacerbate pathways that lead to disease. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049506002289 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049506...
  - foobarbazqux 13y ago
    Well, it's a testable hypothesis. We will probably never test it in humans or higher mammals due to ethical concerns.
    - 13y ago

greenyoda 13y ago

Wikipedia has a decent article on the glymphatic system, which clears waste products from the brain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glymphatic_system The brain and spinal cord have no lymphatic circulation, which handles waste removal for the rest of the body.

batgaijin 13y ago

I always wondered about how split-brain theory would work into this... I mean there are stories of people with half their brain removed who are fully functional (I think? I can't find a source atm). I wonder what would happen if half your brain could be on/off and switch? Also you'd think that any mutation optimizing for time awake would have decimated the other creatures? I don't get how evolution has conquered everything but sleep.

whateverfor 13y ago
There are actually animals that sleep half a brain at once: all the marine mammals. A dolphin can't just fall asleep underwater (it will drown), so it sleeps half at a time. There are creatures that sleep very little (Giraffes, etc.) But there's large benefits to sleep, and for most animals it's worth the cost, especially since you don't want to burn piles of calories during non-peak hunting/foraging hours anyway.
soneca 13y ago
On that post about a bird that fly for 6 months in a row there were a discussion about the sleep in animals. Some of them are able to sleep alternating one half sleeping and the other aware of the environment. And there is speculation if that bird could sleep while flying. I think half brain awake is not enough to have a fully functional life. I also heard about people losing part of their brain and adapting to deal with it. But that doesn't mean a brain doesn't need that part. It is like the fallacy of using only 10% of the brain. The brain is very well used and optmized for performance, if you lose part of it, it would adapt to compensate what is missing, but it will not be optimized anymore. Disclosure: just guessing here, I have no scientific knowledge or background at all to support these claims of mine.
- dkersten 13y ago
  In the case of the bird, it may not need fully optimized brain to fly. So it might be acceptable to have reduced brain performance as a tradeoff for longer awakeness, especially if you could recharge under reduced performance and then go back to fully awake (and rested).

dbecker 13y ago

"The brain only has limited energy at its disposal and it appears that it must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up," Sure sounds like part of the wake-sleep algorithm, which is impressive given that the wake-sleep algorithm was named in the mid-90s.

samstave 13y ago
What about meditation? Does mediation allow for "asleep" like cleanup activities whilst in the "awake" state?
- pstuart 13y ago
  That might be more akin to reducing bus contention.
dsrguru 13y ago
> "The brain ... must choose between two different functional states - awake and aware or asleep and cleaning up" As any lucid dreamer can tell you, there's also a third option--asleep and aware.
- nikatwork 13y ago
  Not to mention hypnagogic / sleep paralysis - mind awake, body asleep.
  - jotm 13y ago
    Except both of these are rare occurences that last a short while - it would probably be very detrimental to have lucid dreams or sleep paralysis every night for months/years.
    - nikatwork 13y ago
      Oh I find sleep paralysis very unrestful. The point is though, there are more mental states than "awake/asleep". And let me tell you, sleep paralysis is not always rare...

Miyamoto 13y ago

Awesome. One very (very very) small step closer to creating a pill to help the flushing process so we may sleep less, or not at all.

jessriedel 13y ago
Seems unlikely. Essentially all animals with a brain sleep, even flies. You'd need to find a pill that could do something that not one animal was able to evolve to do over hundreds of millions of years. Something that was extremely calorie intensive is all I can imagine.
- wtvanhest 13y ago
  I appreciate your logic, but there is a wide variety of needed levels of sleep among different animals, and even among different individual humans which tells me that some are more efficient than others at sleeping (maybe clearing toxins?). As efficient as evolution is, the ability not to sleep as much may not be a huge determinant in reproduction. Just 100 years ago, people worked all day, then relaxed and slept. There was little to no demand for not sleeping at all from a survival standpoint. The main reason people want to stay awake all night now is to work more and advance their careers. You don't need that for survival. Further, Pharma companies have done some amazing things. While I agree that it is unlikely soon, I am confident that if humans are around in 200 years, it becomes much, much more likely.
  - comrade_ogilvy 13y ago
    What is likely to be true is the pharmaceuticals will allow a conscious choice among a menu of tradeoffs, on a daily basis. Such tradeoffs might be possible now, for those with sufficient discipline, but switching between very different ones is too hard.
  - jessriedel 13y ago
    All animals are extremely vulnerable when they sleep. Yet they all do it.
13y ago

jimgardener 13y ago

It would be nice if my computer did all scan/cleanup defrag ops after I shut it down and go to sleep

mkessy 13y ago
Well you can easily schedule it to do that... set it up to defrag and shutdown after you're done using it for the night.

_-_-_- 13y ago

When I hear "toxins", I think of a developer on a project I helped manage. He was having health problems so he had to take a 1-1.5 month sabbatical to India to be cleansed of toxins. If I remember correctly the end result was that he quit. While I do believe there that the body cleanses itself from toxins, and I can't say for certain whether the developer that left us got his toxins cleansed or not, this article and study smells of B.S. The second tip off is the quoted doctor's name: Dr. Nedergaard Scientists with Dutch/Scandinavian names always seem to produce the most crap science on average in my experience. I have no idea why, but I've noticed it. Especially when it comes to the "positive affects" of pot. I know that is an over-generalization, but someone should do a study on that to see if it's true. Preferably one without as many A's in his/her last name.

anotheraccount7 13y ago
Well the trophy for most BS per capita definitely goes to the Chinese.Unfortunately If I see a chinese name on an IEEE article and it's not from a reputable university, I skip it. As for clearing out toxins. It's been known for years that sleep clears free radicals from the brain. That's why very long term sleep deprivation can led to brain damage, and why if you take modafinil you aren't shielded from the physiological adverse effects of sleep deprivations (though mentally you'll be fine).

giardini 13y ago

Any implications for napping?

brickcap 13y ago

Fascinating. An average 60 year old man sleeps for 20 years (considering a normal 8 hr a day sleep) that is 1/3 of his life. A polar bear and some other hibernating animals sleep for half of their lives. Amazingly polar bear is cognizant enough to feed her baby while she is sleeping. Sleep also lowers the heart beat. It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number of hear beats. An elephant lives longer than a mouse because it's heart beats slower. Could that mean that people who live longer generally sleep more. Whales are known to live for a long time. Wonder how much they sleep.

joshuahedlund 13y ago
> It is generally accepted that all mammals have the same life span in number of heart beats. Please note that while there is some correlation it may not be strict enough to suggest that lowering your own heart rate will help you live longer. http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does-every-species-get-around-a-billion-heartbeats-on-average http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/5701/does-every-...

drewcrawford 13y ago

This appears to have an interesting implication for FFI [1], a mysterious genetic disease that causes complete insomnia in adults and results in death. The final stage of FFI is dementia. It turns out that the β-amyloids that are cleared during sleep according to this paper, are associated with certain types of dementia in the general population [2]. It also turns out that certain sleep disorders are dementia predictor [3]. This is just a laymen's speculation, but this is suggestive that dementia may be a type of sleep disorder, that it could be caused by some interruption in the process demonstrated in this paper. And this is a stretch, but it is known that FFI is caused by a malformed prion protein, which is a protein that is deeply involved in various neuron-related functions. It seems possible that this protein is involved in the cleansing process in some way. If so, that would be a HUGE deal, because abnormal prion proteins are associated with a huge variety of neurodegenerative diseases. Basically, I have high hopes for future research. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatal_familial_insomnia [2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502554 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17502554 [3] http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781136 http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/781136

drited 13y ago
To expand on the dementia issue, poor lighting can lead to disturbances in circadian rhythm and issues with sleep. Fixing this may help with dementia. Further research needed in the area. Sources: http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20080610/bright-light-improves-dementia-symptoms http://www.webmd.com/alzheimers/news/20080610/bright-light-i... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3553247/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3553247/
foxhill 13y ago
is your third source accessible from anywhere that doesn't require an account? i'd like to read it.
- drewcrawford 13y ago
  Paste the URL into Google. It seems that if your referrer is Google, no paywall for you.

hkon 13y ago

Does it flush the toxins if you take sleeping pills?

willstepp 13y ago

Why does everyone in this thread want to get rid of sleep? I like sleeping, and dreaming. 24-7 consciousness in the name of increased productivity sounds like a nightmare, no pun intended.

Technophobe 13y ago
How can you enjoy something you're not conscious of? What you likely enjoy is the 5-30 minutes as you're falling asleep, and the 5-60 minutes as you're waking up. If we could get the actual sleeping time to 1 minute, but keep the rest the same, surely that would be strictly better in terms of human utility.

TaiChiChaiTea 13y ago

As someone in their early 20s with a sleep disorder this freaks me out!

o0-0o 13y ago

The correlation is that toxins make you sleepy. No wonder I'm always napping. ;p