Any implications for napping?
Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
61–70 of 98 posts
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#62When 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…
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).
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#63It would be nice if my computer did all scan/cleanup defrag ops after I shut it down and go to sleep
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.
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#64"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.
> "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.
Not to mention hypnagogic / sleep paralysis - mind awake, body asleep.
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#65Awesome. 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.
> a pill to help the flushing process
I'm afraid this will require nanobots.
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#66Fascinating. 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.
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#67"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.
What about meditation? Does mediation allow for "asleep" like cleanup activities whilst in the "awake" state?
That might be more akin to reducing bus contention.
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#68Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#69This 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
Re: Sleep Flushes Toxins from the Brain
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
> [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."
The question on everyone's mind now is, can you bypass that need?
You may not be able to ever totally bypass it, but my bet for reducing the need for it is meditation.