Scientists Discovered How Sleep Cleans Toxins From Your Brain

Scientists now know how cerebrospinal fluid cleans the brain as you sleep, removing toxins that could cause Alzheimer's. » Subscribe to Seeker! http://bit.ly/subscribeseeker » Watch more Elements! http://bit.ly/ElementsPlaylist » Visit our shop at http://shop.seeker.com No surprise: sleep is essential to being a functioning, healthy human being. And new research looks even further into how sleep actually helps us maintain clean brains—but what does that mean? Building on a study from 2013, a team of researchers at Boston University explored what makes sleep so special. The team got human participants to fall asleep inside an fMRI machine, which allowed researchers to measure the blood oxygen levels in the participants’ brains and show the flux of cerebrospinal fluid, or CSF. The researchers also measured the electrical currents in subjects’ brains using an EEG. CSF is a watery, clear substance that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. It acts as a little cushion that protects the brain and provides it with nutrients. Over the years, researchers have discovered more about not only the brain's sleep phases, but also how those phases are essential to information processing and memory formation. It’s not just during rapid-eye-movement (REM) sleep that the brain consolidates information and commits it to long-term memory. Brains do this during nonREM sleep, too. In humans, these two states of sleep—REM and nonREM—alternate throughout the night. NonREM sleep is divided into 3 stages, with the third stage being our deepest state of sleep, called slow wave sleep. And slow wave sleep in particular is essential to clearing out all the gunk in our brains. In this Elements, we explore how slow wave sleep helps rid your brain of toxins and what this research could mean for future efforts to combat neurodegenerative diseases. #sleepstudy #brain #neurology #REM #humanbody #Seeker #Elements #Science SICK Playlist - http://bit.ly/SICKplaylist ____________________ Rea