Comment by sak5sk
6 years ago
Does this "waste" accumulate indefinitely if you are constantly lacking sleep, or does it get flushed out in full every night you get a good night's sleep? So say I had a crappy sleep schedule for 3 days, but on the 4th day I slept a lot and feel very rested. Did the last night's cleaning take care of all the accumulated waste?
Articles and studies I've seen suggest that it takes more than one night to get caught up and that some things become seriously intractable if you are routinely short of sleep.
That's interesting, I wonder if this harvard study on "catching up on sleep" accidentally shows in some way how much sleep is required to flush out the toxins? They stated, "10-hour sleep opportunities consistently restored vigilance task performance during the first several hours of wakefulness."
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/2/14/14ra3.abstract
I looked at the link. They actually were also having people stay up longer, so I don't think you can conclude that.
The brain also "resets" during sleep. As part of that process, it shrinks substantially.
Aa you do stuff during the day, synapses swell as they see repetitive use of the same pathways. This reinforces those ideas or actions, crowding out other things. In order to restore short term memory formation and the ability to learn new things, your brain has to reset at night.
There's also interesting research on two proteins, amyloid and tau, that accumulate faster when people are sleep deprived. They are both associated with Alzheimer's.
One of them rapidly resolves when you get caught up on sleep again. The other doesn't.
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I imagine there are second-order effects of sustained e.g. amyloid saturation.