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New Study: Sleep Is Literally a Deep Clean for Your Brain
It doesn’t take a PhD to figure out that sleep is essential. Anyone who’s struggled to get through the next day after a late night out can tell you that.
But researchers are constantly adding interesting new additions to the long list of reasons we sleep, from cementing new learning, to scrubbing the emotional charge from painful memories, to preventing you from having crabby fights with your partner (yes, this has been scientifically proven).
And now a team out of Boston University has added yet another reason to the list, and it’s particularly bad news for those who don’t manage to get enough shut eye: Sleep physically washes toxins, including those that can lead to Alzheimer’s, from your brain.
A carwash for you brain
The new study published in the journal Science and highlighted in Wired (hat tip Kottke) builds on earlier studies with mice that suggested sleep physically cleans out toxins that build up around the brain due in its normal functions. Was something similar going on with humans? Biomedical engineer Laura Lewis asked a bunch of study subjects to take a snooze in an MRI machine to find out.
“What she discovered was that during non-REM sleep, large, slow waves of cerebrospinal fluid were washing over the brain. The…
