Why do we have to sleep? I am losing valuable life
hours here!
Anthony here for DNews, and I have always wondered
just why exactly we have to sleep.
Do you know how much I can do if I
never got tired. Scientists wonder about it too.
Every animal participates in
some form of sleep, even though it puts us
all in an incredibly vulnerable state;
Anything can get you, seems wasteful.
So, it must perform some
function that is so important it is worth the
trade-off of being killed by a predator
who is on a slightly different work schedule.
There are a few theories. One is that it
gives us more time to repair our muscles
and cells. One is that it lowers the amount of
energy we need and less energy means less
meals, means less hunting and gathering, which we can't
really do in the dark anyway. One of
the recent and most popular theories
has to do with memory
consolidation. when we sleep, our
brain takes everything we have seen and done
throughout the day and filters through it. Looks
for patterns, sifts through what it finds an essential
and decides what to turn into a memory.
And some experts think that dreams
are a sort of representation of that;
It's like a nightly clean up. We've seen
evidence of it. Studies show that if you get
sleep right after practicing something that takes
fine motor skills, like typing or
playing an instrument, it helps you retain that
knowledge faster. Missing a night of sleep
can mess with attention, awareness
reasoning, problem solving skills. But
the super weird thing is that even
without sleep body repair
happens. So where is the big benefit?
Researchers from the University of Rochester
think they found it. Turns out sleep
isn't just a mental house cleaning for your brain,
it's a physical one. Your body
has got a great system for flushing
all the unneeded stuff out that piles up;
It's called the Lymphatic System. But the Lymphatic
system does not extend to your brain.
And your think box keeps itself
locked up behind something called the Blood Brain
Barrier, which tightly regulates everything
that comes in and out. Your brain controls everything
so it keeps itself in a high security
area where it can't be contaminated.
But it has to get rid of its waste products
somehow, but we have never actually been able to
see how. But using new technology
called Two Photon Microscopy,
the Rochester researchers were able to see the
brain's disposal system. They're calling it
The Glymphatic System. It's this plumbing
system that pumps cerebral spinal
fluid through brain tissue and then flushes
it into your circulatory system and the
Lymphatic system just takes it from there.
And here is where sleep comes in.
The Glymphatic system seem to be about
ten time more active during
sleep in mice. It seems like
pushing all that CSF through its system
requires a lot of energy, so your brain
makes a choice: Run your body
or clean itself. That seems to
be why our brain uses as much energy
when we are asleep as it does when we are
awake. Not only that, it looks like
brain cells shrink up to 60%
during sleep, so all that
CSF can wash over it faster.
So what makes this flushing
process more important that cell
repair or forming memories? Well,
build up of waste is linked to serious
brain diseases, like Alzheimer's. If you
don't shut down every night, your
brain can't clean itself out properly
enough. I don't know, are you guys getting enough
sleep? Let me know down below, but don't brag
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