During sleep, your brain cleans itself of toxins
Summary
- While you are sleeping, the brain uses cerebal spinal fluid to remove waste from your brain.
Details
- If you are tired, or don't sleep well, then your brain is clogged up with waste adn can not function optimally.
- Apparently you can either sleep adn clean up, or be awake and aware. not both.
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Quotes
When you go to sleep, all sorts of activities take place in your brain and body – and these are necessary for you to be able to function and focus. One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day. ‘During slow-wave sleep, your cerebral spinal fluid channels open up more and remove metabolic waste from your brain,’ Roxanne explained to me. Every night, when you go to sleep, your brain is rinsed with a watery fluid. This cerebrospinal fluid washes through your brain, flushing out toxic proteins and carrying them down to your liver to get rid of them. ‘So when I’m talking to college students, I call this brain-cell poop. If you can’t focus well, it might be you have too much brain-cell poop circulating.’ That can explain why, when you are tired, ‘you get a hung-over sort of feeling’ – you are literally clogged up with toxins. This positive kind of brainwashing can only happen when you are asleep.
Dr Maiken Nedergaard, at the University of Rochester, told one interviewer: ‘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