New research has discovered why sleep is so important to the brain: It not only flushes away the brain's waste products, sleep also consolidates your memory and protects you against the risk of Alzheimer's disease among other benefits.
You’re aware that the average person needs at least seven hours of sleep per night, and you don’t need another reminder that you haven’t quite met the quota all this time, thank you very much. Besides, what’s the big deal? You might need a coffee or two in the morning to kickstart your day but, on the whole, you think you’re coping all right.
To do all that – and more – your brain needs time to cycle through the four stages of sleep each night, according to Dr Rachel Sharman, a postdoctoral assistant with the Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute at University of Oxford:Your brain waves start to slow down from the short and fast waves when you’re awake. Physically, your eyes are rolling and your head is nodding if you’re still upright at this point.
Just what sort of toxins are being washed away? “Things like amyloids,” said Laura Lewis, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University. “Amyloids are proteins that have been implicated in Alzheimer’s disease. So, for someone who doesn’t sleep well, you don’t get this waste clearance.”And the medium, which the brain uses to detoxify itself, is the very liquid that it is suspended in: The cerebral spinal fluid.
But thanks to the brief period during the transition from deep sleep to REM sleep, when the hippocampus writes your temporary memories into long-term memory storage, “you can dredge up memories from yesterday that you might not even be aware of at the time”, she said. It is not good when your immune system is in overdrive when you haven’t got pathogens to respond to.
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