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Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

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Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#41

Post by bmelton »

mrzool wrote: post #27
bryondowd wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an interesting concept. I wonder what the trade-off would be. How much efficiency would it cost to clean the brain continually rather than in a dedicated sleep cycle? Would it even be possible to process these toxins while maintaining consciousness? I'm sure there could be huge benefits for many modern lifestyles to trade heavily on reaction speed and/or lightly on IQ for 50% more waking hours. Or even 25% mo…

Why force things? I don't want 50% more waking hours. I enjoy my sleep tremendously.

I suspect (but do not know) that you enjoy your sleep because of its restorative effect. If you could obviate the need for the restorative effect, and instead just always feel newly restored, would you still enjoy going to sleep for no reason?

Personally, I dislike the need for sleep. I put it off for as long as I can manage, and try to get as little of it as I can get away with. For me, I have a hard time functioning well with less than 4 hours a night, but anything more then 5.5 hours and I feel like I've thrown the day away. The idea of voluntarily checking out from the world isn't as relaxing to me as picking up a book to read, or learning something new, or doing something productive that isn't work/startup-related.

Either way, I assume that nobody would force you to take a drug that you didn't want to take.

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#42

Post by djsumdog »

gdubs wrote: post #29

I'm currently reading Arianna Huffington's "The Sleep Revolution". If you're interested in more stuff like this, it's pretty good. It's definitely made me more mindful of winding down and night and getting plenty of sleep. One thing in particular that stood out is the rise in cortisol associated with lack-of-sleep, and cortisol's relationship to gaining fat; having hit a couple of rocky weeks sleep due to young kids…

There have been two Vox articles about people who are biologically late sleepers are often viewed as "lazy." It's sad considering the current state of sleep deprivation throughout the western world.

I hate being up early for work. I am 9am scrum since our team is spread out over the planet and it's truly painful. The right attitude is not "you should get to bed at a reasonable time," since I often get bursts of productivity between 11pm and 4am. I'm probably the most productive in that window.

Choosing jobs and career paths based on your sleeping pattern (and overall heath) should be encourage more over money or benefits or retirement or all of those other bullshit traps:

http://khanism.org/perspective/trapped-in-the-cubical/

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#43

Post by [deleted] »

gdubs wrote: post #29

I'm currently reading Arianna Huffington's "The Sleep Revolution". If you're interested in more stuff like this, it's pretty good. It's definitely made me more mindful of winding down and night and getting plenty of sleep. One thing in particular that stood out is the rise in cortisol associated with lack-of-sleep, and cortisol's relationship to gaining fat; having hit a couple of rocky weeks sleep due to young kids…

[deleted]

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#44

Post by slmrnz »

bjornsing wrote: post #40

I'd be very surprised if it turns out that there's not a major "computational" element to sleep. Sure, it may be difficult to circulate fluid through a waken beings brain, but I think evolution could have managed. If the "computational resource" is needed for something else though (like running backprop over your neural networks or something :P)... That to me is the only reasonable explanation for the huge evolutiona…

Reminds me of the good old days of defragging a Windows hard drive :)

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#45

Post by nsxwolf »

bovermyer wrote: post #33
nsxwolf wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I see "toxins" I just stop reading. I assume the article is an ad for a juice cleanse.

This seems... extreme, to me. Completely ignoring a thing because of an imperfection could narrow one's depth of experience.

It's mostly involuntary by now. My BS detectors have been trained on that term my whole life. It's in the same category in my brain as "homeopathic".

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#46

Post by erikj »

slmrnz wrote: post #44
bjornsing wrote: post #40

I'd be very surprised if it turns out that there's not a major "computational" element to sleep. Sure, it may be difficult to circulate fluid through a waken beings brain, but I think evolution could have managed. If the "computational resource" is needed for something else though (like running backprop over your neural networks or something :P)... That to me is the only reasonable explanation for the huge evolutiona…

Reminds me of the good old days of defragging a Windows hard drive :)

It's more like stop-the-world garbage collection.

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#47

Post by e40 »

bcherny wrote: post #13
jwilliams wrote: post #11

A related and quite recent piece of research - Stimulating toxin cleanup via brain stimulation using pulsed light. Has been used to treat Alzheimer symptoms in mice models. Last I heard was being fast-tracked to humans. http://news.mit.edu/2016/visual-stimulation-treatment-alzhei... "This treatment appears to work by inducing brain waves known as gamma oscillations, which the researchers discovered help the brain sup…

For those that prefer research in podcast form: http://www.radiolab.org/story/bringing-gamma-back/

A great podcast, btw. That specific episode and in general.

I wonder if this brain hack will have unwanted side effects. That is, I wonder if using the light trick could cause the normal processing to either not happen or happen less often.

This is really exciting research, though, and I really hope it is effective in humans like it is in mice.

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#48

Post by e40 »

Overtonwindow wrote: post #5

Random thought: Could dreams be a result of the processing of toxins? In the same way some "toxins" cause us to hallucinate etc. so too could these toxins, as a side affect of processing?

I read somewhere in the last 10 years that dreams were practice for real life situations. After hearing that, when I awake in the middle of a dream, I always test that hypothesis, and sure enough, sometimes is quite plausible.

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#49

Post by joshumax »

nsxwolf wrote: post #45
bovermyer wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems... extreme, to me. Completely ignoring a thing because of an imperfection could narrow one's depth of experience.

It's mostly involuntary by now. My BS detectors have been trained on that term my whole life. It's in the same category in my brain as "homeopathic".

Even if it's not recommending a juice cleanse, whenever I see the word "Toxin" in an article without context I assume that the post was most likely written for the layman and as such probably sacrifices accuracy for ease-of-comprehension.

Re: Brains Sweep Themselves Clean of Toxins During Sleep (2013)

#50

Post by zip1234 »

mabbo wrote: post #3

> The process is important because what's getting washed away during sleep are waste proteins that are toxic to brain cells, Nedergaard says. Evolution found a nice little optimum in sleep that works pretty well- use less energy during a time of the day that isn't a very efficient time to be awake while also cleaning out the brain. This could be interesting for future research. Could we find chemical means to remove…

Or maybe some sort of mechanical pumping system? If it takes too much energy away from the brain to both remain awake and clear those proteins, a mechanical pump that is powered externally could solve that energy problem. (I'm only half joking--we already have mechanical means of replacing other biological functions such as a dialysis machine).
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