Sleep

Here's one reason to get a good night's sleep: to clear the brain of all the junk that has accumulated during the day.

A study in the journal Science suggests that the brain's waste removal system is active during sleep.

 

“This study shows that the brain has different functional states when asleep and when awake. In fact, the restorative nature of sleep appears to be the result of the active clearance of the by-products of neural activity that accumulate during wakefulness,” said the study author.

 

Brain imaging experiments in mice showed that the waste removal system in the brain called the glymphatic system pumps cerebral spinal fluid through the brain's tissue, moving toxins into the circulatory system and eventually the liver. The brain's cells even shrank by 60 per cent to allow the spinal fluid to remove toxins more freely.

 

The fluid also flushed out toxins such as amyloid proteins, which accumulate as plaques and cause degenerative brain disorders such as Alzheimer's disease, twice as fast when mice were asleep than when they were awake. The glymphatic system is 10 times more active when we are asleep than when we are awake.

 

“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. You can think of it like having a house party. You can either entertain the guests or clean up the house, but you can't really do both at the same time.”   

                                       

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