36 comments

[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 47.0 ms ] thread
Long live healthy sleep for brain health, and thank goodness light exercise helps this same glymphatic system.
I slept around 5 hours last night split up into two periods because my baby daughter woke up crying from fever and wanted to play / was hallucinating / etc. She's totally fine now but I am wondering if there is a correlation between dementia and having kids.
I wonder if a 30-min nap improves the situation. But I need to tell the brain to hold the flushing until the nap.
Good to know that the brain finds a way to flush itself while awake. I think I've become pretty good at putting unused parts of my brain to sleep while awake. My brain is like that of a dolphin now.

But on rare occasions (like a couple of times a year), I get migraine auras and stuff disappears from my field of view. Can last about an hour. I feel like that's my visual cortex falling asleep.

Rest in peace to all the college dudes covering the whole syllabus within 24 hours of the exam
anecdotally, i never feel better than when i haven't slept. spent 8pm tuesday -- 8pm thursday this week awake nursing cheap energy drinks, and not only could i manage a higher-than-usual level of focus, i was genuinely content.

bombed a midterm halfway though, but at least i felt good about it.

So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
[This is one of those article titles that would really benefit from adding one more word.]
> For example, what you don't want to do is NOT take amphetamines at testing if you had used them to study;

Hard disagree there. If you get any anxiety during the test it's better to take it only while studying.

Exogenous ketones (such as BHB salts) are known to help with glymphatic drainage in the brain during sleep. I've used them extensively and have noticed improved sleep with nearly a doubling of the time spent in REM stage.
So... can we trigger it manually? I'd love to be able to lay down and press the 'flush brain' button.
hmm.. this is interesting... the article says "spinal fluid exits the cerebrospinal fluid (csf) flows out of the brain... I wonder where it discharges these waste products. I ask because it is believed we have a sort of chimney on our backs. I think I read this on the article of the Irish lady who could detect alzheimers years before any modern medical detection systems. But maybe it is discharged in the gut? via the mesentery, the new organ they finally named fo rthe stuff that holds our intestines together. If anyone knows where it is discharged, please comment, I'm interested in this, because I do prolong waterfasts every 3 months, and I strongly believe the brain drains waste into my mouth during that time, because the taste in my mouth is godawful, but if there are other exit points the brain discharges waste, we probably need to know about them.
My pet theory is that dreams are the brain booting up/shutting down and the equivalent of old analog TVs that have the flash of static and bloom/collapse on the screen when turning off/on.
Sometimes when I get a really bad migraine and poor sleep together, I can literally feel a flushing feeling in my head once I can fall asleep.
As a chronic undersleeper, good thing I don't drive!
> The scientists found that during these lapses, a wave of cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flows out of the brain

> Lewis and colleagues showed that CSF flow during sleep follows a rhythmic pattern in and out of the brain

> Most significantly, they found a flux of CSF out of the brain just as those lapses occurred. After each lapse, CSF flowed back into the brain.

I can't believe the authors of the article didn't address one of the most obvious questions: Where does the CSF flow to and where does it flow back from? It's not like there are pipes leading out of the brain, or the CSF will just leave my brain through my ears or anything, will it?¹ What happens with the waste products? (¹ Though it would be kinda funny if this was where snot comes from.)

EDIT: Wikipedia's got the answer:

> Clearing waste: CSF allows for the removal of waste products from the brain,[3] and is critical in the brain's lymphatic system, called the glymphatic system. Metabolic waste products diffuse rapidly into CSF and are removed into the bloodstream as CSF is absorbed. When this goes awry, CSF can become toxic […]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid

Could this be why SNRIs help some patients mitigate ADHD symptoms?
Could ADHD be caused by a broken flushing response? Lots of flushing followed by intense focus caused by the tabula rasa?
Even if this is a possible factor it most certainly would not be the only cause.
I hope that the actual medical field starts taking note of this.

My wife still has to work 24 hour shifts with no sleep, performing emergency surgeries no matter how long it has been since she slept. During residency only a few years ago she and her co-residents were almost weekly required to do 36 hour shifts (on top of their regular 16 hours per day, 5 day per week schedule) and once even a 48 hour shift when the hospital was short staffed.

Of course I’m sure they won’t. No one cares if doctors are over worked.

It is well estabilished that after 24 hours without sleep, the mental capabilities are similar to being lightly drunk. 36 hours is considerably more drunk.

If you were driving a truck in EU, you would have several mandatory 8h stops by then.

Need a cron job to flush that cache
In high school a friend of mine told me about "microsleep" and how your brain will oscillate into it if you're under-rested. This would align with that theory.
That is very interesting. I have a somewhat related issue with sleep cycles. This issue, waking around 3:00am every morning then not going back to sleep until 6 or 7am, is not really a productive sleep cycle. I read somewhere that taking a spoon of sugary substance, like Raw Honey, MCT or Collagen, before going to bed can replenish the brain of this energy, so it becomes easier to fall asleep. I've been trying it with two to three spoons of honey, right before hitting the sack to see if it can help me fall asleep again. It seems to be having a somewhat positive effect as it does not take me too long to go back to sleep.
What I’m picking up here is that if I can just get an automated CSF circulator installed I won’t need to sleep or get distracted when I’m tired. That was the point of this article, right?