February 18, 2014 • 16 mins
The Night Janitors of the Brain: Do you think other species ever look at humans and raise an eyebrow at the amount of sleep we need? Do cockroaches and eyelash mites leave messages on our foreheads in microscopic Sharpies? Perhaps "I just popped on an apex predator's head." We may be the most successful species in existence, but that doesn't mean sleep is just another one of our "choices" as a human being. It is a necessity for survival, even though it requires immobility and vulnerability. Prepare to meet the night janitors of the human brain.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuffed with all your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie Wins.
The last time you managed to score a full night
of sleep last night for the first time in nights glorious,
(00:24):
Like you wake up feeling like a new person, you do,
you really wake up feeling refreshed. I was able to
get a pretty good night's sleep myself last night because
I slept alone on the couch, um, because the toddlers
is it still has a cold and ends up sleeping
in the bed, and so you get the night migration. Yeah.
And then of course once the toddlers in the bed,
they just kind of like turn like a like a
(00:47):
turbine all night. Um. And then this case also coughing,
So I knew I had the podcast hit the couch.
Full night's sleep. Woke up so much, so much better,
like actually able to to think about the topics that
we were recording today and to some degree articulate those thoughts. Yeah.
I'm always amazed by what the sort of powers that
can bestow upon you when you have a good night's sleep,
(01:09):
and sometimes I wake up thinking, oh I'm back. Oh
yeah you hey you Julie, I know you. Yeah. It
really were a different person when we've had a full
night's sleep. We were we're in a since our best person.
Like I think back to times where I would try
to do something either um mentally intense or creatively intense,
by staying up ridiculously late at night to work on it.
(01:32):
Be it like you know, school project or you know,
a bit of fiction I was trying to write. And
now nowadays I I just I look back and just
complete disbelief, Like why would I try and do that
on the last remaining bit of energy that I had
in my my noggin when I could have had a
full night's sleep, woken up and tackle the fresh Because
you're young and foolish. Exactly, That's just what it goes. Um.
(01:54):
I actually was thinking about those, thinking about how we
humans require so much sleep. In some ways, it feels
really ridiculous, right because we're these apex predators. So far,
we're we're dominating out there among other species. And then
I think I wonder if tiny dust mites with their
tiny sharpie scrawl things on my head while I'm sleeping
(02:15):
at night, like I just pooped on this apex predator's
head ha ha ha and laugh at us. Why does
this giant being needs so much sleep? It rules the planet,
and yet it decides to just shut its eyes and
drift off into La la land for a large portion
of its time here on Earth. Yeah, in a very
vulnerable position. Right, You're immobile, You're vulnerable, and this for
(02:36):
our ancestors would have been pretty risky business. Yeah. I mean,
you get into believe we're discussed in the past, like
the theories about our dreams about falling. It's a leftover
from days when when falling from your your your perch
of slumber in the trees would probably mean something would
eat you. I love that theory. I think it's really interesting.
(02:57):
Um so, yeah, I mean does bring up this idea
that is there more to sleep than meets the eye,
just then consolidating some of our memories or making us
feel refreshed, as there's something going on in the background
that is essential to survival. Yeah, and I mean, and
clearly it's essential. We've talked before about you know, can
we have a cure for sleep? Are their ways to
artificially achieve what sleep does for us. And the hard
(03:21):
answer is no, you can sort of, you can kick
that can down the street a little bit, but eventually
you're gonna have to go to sleep or the consences
are going to grow more and more dire, leading up
to hallucinations and death right. As we will discover, there
is no substitute for the night janitors of the brain
and what they do, and we'll talk about that in
a minute, but before we get into that, let's talk
(03:43):
about the awe inspiring an energy draining splendor that is
the human brain. What sets us apart, why we need
to rest so much, because if you think about it,
um our brain is taking up about the energy. So
if you equate that with like the world energy sources,
we'd be like the brain would be like the U
S and China. Yeah, just glowing there in the night.
(04:05):
Yeah yeah, yeah. To think about the mammalian brain is
specifically the human brain. I love the analogy that we've
touched on in the past of the ice cream cun
You have the basic brain as the scoop of gray
matter up there on the cone and and for you know,
most creatures, that's that's all you need. It takes care
of all ther your your basic functions, but for us,
(04:29):
humans especially, we need a little more. We need a
little extra scoop on top of that. Yeah, it's true.
If we trace the brains evolution from fish to amphibians, too, reptiles,
to mammals and finally humans, we see that the parts
of the brain that have grown the most and human
beings are the neo cortex, specifically the prefrontal cortex, and
mammals were given this upgrade, the second scoop, if you will,
(04:52):
that neo cortex, so we could deal with all sorts
of things parenting, mathematics, language, and humans. So it's really
important to our survival. So now think about this. As
reported in the journal Science, researchers who have examined preserved
samples of cerebral cortex from humans and several species of
a report that in particular region, in a particular region
(05:14):
of the prefrontal cortex. Now this is the area that
contributes to abstract thinking again sophisticated cognition. Neurons have more
space between them in the human brain than in the
brains of apes, and this extra space allows for more
room for connections between neurons and Why is that important
because we have about I don't know, two hundred billion
(05:35):
nerve cells which are connected to one another via hundreds
of trillions of synapsis. Yeah, and these are essentially microprocessors.
We've discussed how these work out before. They're they're both
memory storage and information processing elements. Uh, uh and uh
and they're essential to all this complex uh thoughts, all
(05:56):
the all these of all this computation that we're able
to achieve, all the uh this this management of information
across all of these different parts of the brain. Yeah,
this is crazy. One synapse may contain on the order
of one thousand molecular scale switches, and a single human
brain has more switches than all the computers and routers
(06:17):
and internet connections on Earth. And that's from Stephen Smith,
who is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology. So
what we're saying there is that that is a lot
of electricity going on in the old noggin and a
lot of wear and tear. So what is what happens
with all of that use? Yeah? I like to think
of think of this in terms of an old house
(06:39):
that that hasn't had a lot of electrical upgrades. To it,
but the individuals living inside it, their electrical needs have
evolved over time. There they have more and more gadgets
they need to be plugged up. They have more and
more just just chunks of their entertainment system that need
to plug into the wall and plug into this, that
and the other, and so eventually get these overpowered uh
um outlets where with all these power strips aga into
(07:00):
power strips. Uh And because that's essentially one of the
things about about the evolution of the human brain, it
doesn't as much takeaway old stuff is just pile on more.
It's just this this ice cream cone that's uh at
times seems a little toppling. Yeah, and of course you
have by products from that, and we'll talk a little
bit more about that, but before we do, we're gonna
take a quick break, and then we'll find out about
(07:20):
this night janitor who's coming to clean away the debris
and positively even the disease. The night Genitor is coming
for you. All Right, we're back, and I think we
all have experienced what happens when we over tax our brains.
(07:42):
Your little nappy poo coming on, or just absolute mental exhaustion. Yeah,
you just it's harder to string your thoughts together. It's
harder to uh to prepare for a podcast, much less
performed one. It's harder to put up with things too.
It's hard to be patient with people with toddlers, with
though with whatever your circumstances are. You just feel a
(08:02):
little more trapped in the maze rather than wandering the labyrinth.
It's harder to learn new things to write, because that's
what happens when you're sleeping, and you get the formation
of new neuronal connections and the pruning of old ones.
So we know that there is a lot of up
keep going on, But what about all that mental exercise? Again,
those byproducts, because if you look at the human body,
(08:24):
the lymphatic system, you will see that when the body's
muscles exert sustained energy, they create toxic byproducts in your
muscle cells. And this is according to Maria Konokov reading
for The New York Times, the lymphatic system serves as
the body's custodian. Whenever waste is form, it sweeps it clean.
The brain, however, is out of reach of this system. Yeah,
(08:47):
we've we've we've keep adding all of the gear to
the old brain. But it's shut off from from the
rest of us. It's a it's it's it's not in
a position for servicing by the Lympic systems. So what's
going to clean it up? Who's going to clean it up?
The old idea is that that the brain rid itself
of metabolites and beta amyloids, these are actually associated with
(09:10):
Alzheimer's was that it broke it down and recycled it
at an individual level. But Mike ken Nindogrod, a Danish
biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at
the University of Rochester, didn't think that that made sense.
She thought, you know, the brain is way too busy
to be recycling all of its own energy. And she
suspected that the brain shared the same kind of system
(09:32):
that muscles and the lymphatic system have. Yeah, and it's
it makes perfect sense, right. Why would uh, why would
the brain have a different structure in place? I would
have a different system entirely. It seems like you would
have a system more in keeping with what the rest
of the body is doing to to carry out the
same task. But it was a mystery, right because you
know that the brain creates these byproducts. How in the
(09:52):
world are they ushered out? And why are they sometimes
sitting in your brain and collecting um. So this system
that she thought about is again similar to the lymphatic system,
but this one is predicated on the rebro spinal fluid
and what near de Guard calls the glymphatic system, and
that that gly glymphatic system is a nod to the
(10:15):
brain's cleil cells, which maintain homeostasis and protect neurons. So
what did she do? What would any good scientists do?
Go grab a bunch of mice and spy on them
while they slept. Yeah, that's just what's what they did.
They injected UM mice with fluescent tracers right into their
cerebro spinal fluids and this allow them to track where
the fluids are going during the course of their sleep. Yeah. Now,
(10:37):
during the mices waking hours, the cerebro spinal fluid barely
made it into the brain. But once they were asleep
and the sleep was induced, of course the brain cells
in in the mice shrunk and that made way for
a flood of the fluid, essentially hosing down the brain
of waste products. We're talking the waste products or proteins
that are toxic to the brain, and so it's turns
(11:00):
out that the brain's interstitial space, the fluid filled area
between tissue cells that take up about the brain's total volume,
is mainly dedicated to physically removing the cells daily waste.
So it's essentially a flood moving through just washing out
all the toxins. It's it's it's like the brain is
a is an office with drains on the floor, and
(11:23):
when everyone goes home in the evening, they just come
in with a fire hose and just start just just
just hose it completely down. It's true. Have you ever
seen the bathrooms that have like a shower and in
the toilet in the same area with as you say,
the drains. It's just a perfect way to kind of
get rid of all of the waste at the same time. Um. So,
I mean it's kind of a big deal because it
gives us a better idea of why humans require so
(11:45):
much sleep. Okay, it's not just refreshing or memory consolidation,
the removal of actual toxins from your brain, right, And
it's also a window into better understanding brain related diseases
like Alzheimer's because what they've seen at Alzheimer's pay stance
is that there is a build up of that beta
amyloid protein in the brains. So is the question, you know,
(12:08):
Morshley equals less brain disease. Possibly we don't know this yet,
but it is a It really is a big window
into this mystery of how the brain rids itself of
these toxic um byproducts. And again why sleep is so
incredibly important to our existence? Yeah, and and and again
I feel like, um, something we can both attest to
(12:30):
is the the arrival of a child in one's life
really drives that home for you, especially when you have
to to make that choice between should I say that
the kid is asleep, should I go to sleep too,
or should I try and stay up and carve a
little me time out of the remainder of the night.
I would find myself early on trying to do that, thinking, oh,
I'll just go to bed at you know, an hour
(12:54):
later and have that hour. But then you cut into
the amount of sleep you get, any wake up the
next morning when the toddler wakes up, When the child
wakes up, and uh, and and you're you're behind. It's
hard to catch up again. And then you find yourself,
just less able to process the world around you, less
able to to to tolerate even the little things to
annoy you. It's uh, it's definitely been. One of the
(13:16):
big lessons of getting older is that sleep is magnificent
and mandatory and and it's so frustrating that the children
don't don't understand that and don't want to sleep. They like,
they don't want to do it. It's the greatest thing
in the world. It's it's the best part of being human.
And you can pretty much do it all you want.
You can really sleep as much as you want when
(13:37):
you're when you're very young, and they inevitably don't want
to do it. It's the truth, because you know, babies,
toddlers with their clock in twelve hours or something, they
don't even think about it. They just pass out. And
then when you're a teenager, no big deal again, twenties,
a night of rockest drinking, you can still bound out
of bed, but at some point your body is going
to be like, I'm adjusting your sleep clock. Everything from
(13:58):
here on out matters. Yeah, I'm taking every second time
is ticking. So again we we we have to be
thankful for the night janitors. And I do love that
image of the night janitors moving in because it sounds
just a little creepy, these strange figures that that move
in through your brain while you're asleep, and they're they're
brushing away all the toxins, and it's it's a pretty
thankless job, right, And we take it for granted, right
(14:21):
because we think we just wake up at eight am
and the building is just happened to be cleaned overnight.
We don't know how it happened. We feel all fresh,
but yeah, they've been toiling away flushing out the toxins.
All right, So there you have it now. Sleep is
something that all of us do. So I know all
of our listeners out there have some little bit of
personal information to share about this this uh this idea
(14:44):
of the night janitors moving through our brains, clearing things out,
taking the toxins away, and indeed the mandatory nature of sleep. Uh.
So feel free to share your stories with us. What
has happened when you have tried to avoid sleep, or
worse yet, U you've found yourself in a vision where
you cannot get the sweep that your body needs. Yeah.
(15:04):
I read recently that Americans are getting an hour less
of sleep a night than they did something like two
decades ago, So there's definitely some sleep deprivation going on.
So you want to reach out to us, you want
to get in touch, well, you can find us at
the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
the mothership. That's our our main bigs. You'll find all
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(15:26):
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(15:47):
us an email, you can do so at below the
Mind at discoveries dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com.
Could you d you group? Could you duor
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, wasn't the stuffed with all your mind?
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie Wins.
The last time you managed to score a full night
of sleep last night for the first time in nights glorious,
(00:24):
Like you wake up feeling like a new person, you do,
you really wake up feeling refreshed. I was able to
get a pretty good night's sleep myself last night because
I slept alone on the couch, um, because the toddlers
is it still has a cold and ends up sleeping
in the bed, and so you get the night migration. Yeah.
And then of course once the toddlers in the bed,
they just kind of like turn like a like a
(00:47):
turbine all night. Um. And then this case also coughing,
So I knew I had the podcast hit the couch.
Full night's sleep. Woke up so much, so much better,
like actually able to to think about the topics that
we were recording today and to some degree articulate those thoughts. Yeah.
I'm always amazed by what the sort of powers that
can bestow upon you when you have a good night's sleep,
(01:09):
and sometimes I wake up thinking, oh I'm back. Oh
yeah you hey you Julie, I know you. Yeah. It
really were a different person when we've had a full
night's sleep. We were we're in a since our best person.
Like I think back to times where I would try
to do something either um mentally intense or creatively intense,
by staying up ridiculously late at night to work on it.
(01:32):
Be it like you know, school project or you know,
a bit of fiction I was trying to write. And
now nowadays I I just I look back and just
complete disbelief, Like why would I try and do that
on the last remaining bit of energy that I had
in my my noggin when I could have had a
full night's sleep, woken up and tackle the fresh Because
you're young and foolish. Exactly, That's just what it goes. Um.
(01:54):
I actually was thinking about those, thinking about how we
humans require so much sleep. In some ways, it feels
really ridiculous, right because we're these apex predators. So far,
we're we're dominating out there among other species. And then
I think I wonder if tiny dust mites with their
tiny sharpie scrawl things on my head while I'm sleeping
(02:15):
at night, like I just pooped on this apex predator's
head ha ha ha and laugh at us. Why does
this giant being needs so much sleep? It rules the planet,
and yet it decides to just shut its eyes and
drift off into La la land for a large portion
of its time here on Earth. Yeah, in a very
vulnerable position. Right, You're immobile, You're vulnerable, and this for
(02:36):
our ancestors would have been pretty risky business. Yeah. I mean,
you get into believe we're discussed in the past, like
the theories about our dreams about falling. It's a leftover
from days when when falling from your your your perch
of slumber in the trees would probably mean something would
eat you. I love that theory. I think it's really interesting.
(02:57):
Um so, yeah, I mean does bring up this idea
that is there more to sleep than meets the eye,
just then consolidating some of our memories or making us
feel refreshed, as there's something going on in the background
that is essential to survival. Yeah, and I mean, and
clearly it's essential. We've talked before about you know, can
we have a cure for sleep? Are their ways to
artificially achieve what sleep does for us. And the hard
(03:21):
answer is no, you can sort of, you can kick
that can down the street a little bit, but eventually
you're gonna have to go to sleep or the consences
are going to grow more and more dire, leading up
to hallucinations and death right. As we will discover, there
is no substitute for the night janitors of the brain
and what they do, and we'll talk about that in
a minute, but before we get into that, let's talk
(03:43):
about the awe inspiring an energy draining splendor that is
the human brain. What sets us apart, why we need
to rest so much, because if you think about it,
um our brain is taking up about the energy. So
if you equate that with like the world energy sources,
we'd be like the brain would be like the U
S and China. Yeah, just glowing there in the night.
(04:05):
Yeah yeah, yeah. To think about the mammalian brain is
specifically the human brain. I love the analogy that we've
touched on in the past of the ice cream cun
You have the basic brain as the scoop of gray
matter up there on the cone and and for you know,
most creatures, that's that's all you need. It takes care
of all ther your your basic functions, but for us,
(04:29):
humans especially, we need a little more. We need a
little extra scoop on top of that. Yeah, it's true.
If we trace the brains evolution from fish to amphibians, too, reptiles,
to mammals and finally humans, we see that the parts
of the brain that have grown the most and human
beings are the neo cortex, specifically the prefrontal cortex, and
mammals were given this upgrade, the second scoop, if you will,
(04:52):
that neo cortex, so we could deal with all sorts
of things parenting, mathematics, language, and humans. So it's really
important to our survival. So now think about this. As
reported in the journal Science, researchers who have examined preserved
samples of cerebral cortex from humans and several species of
a report that in particular region, in a particular region
(05:14):
of the prefrontal cortex. Now this is the area that
contributes to abstract thinking again sophisticated cognition. Neurons have more
space between them in the human brain than in the
brains of apes, and this extra space allows for more
room for connections between neurons and Why is that important
because we have about I don't know, two hundred billion
(05:35):
nerve cells which are connected to one another via hundreds
of trillions of synapsis. Yeah, and these are essentially microprocessors.
We've discussed how these work out before. They're they're both
memory storage and information processing elements. Uh, uh and uh
and they're essential to all this complex uh thoughts, all
(05:56):
the all these of all this computation that we're able
to achieve, all the uh this this management of information
across all of these different parts of the brain. Yeah,
this is crazy. One synapse may contain on the order
of one thousand molecular scale switches, and a single human
brain has more switches than all the computers and routers
(06:17):
and internet connections on Earth. And that's from Stephen Smith,
who is a professor of molecular and cellular physiology. So
what we're saying there is that that is a lot
of electricity going on in the old noggin and a
lot of wear and tear. So what is what happens
with all of that use? Yeah? I like to think
of think of this in terms of an old house
(06:39):
that that hasn't had a lot of electrical upgrades. To it,
but the individuals living inside it, their electrical needs have
evolved over time. There they have more and more gadgets
they need to be plugged up. They have more and
more just just chunks of their entertainment system that need
to plug into the wall and plug into this, that
and the other, and so eventually get these overpowered uh
um outlets where with all these power strips aga into
(07:00):
power strips. Uh And because that's essentially one of the
things about about the evolution of the human brain, it
doesn't as much takeaway old stuff is just pile on more.
It's just this this ice cream cone that's uh at
times seems a little toppling. Yeah, and of course you
have by products from that, and we'll talk a little
bit more about that, but before we do, we're gonna
take a quick break, and then we'll find out about
(07:20):
this night janitor who's coming to clean away the debris
and positively even the disease. The night Genitor is coming
for you. All Right, we're back, and I think we
all have experienced what happens when we over tax our brains.
(07:42):
Your little nappy poo coming on, or just absolute mental exhaustion. Yeah,
you just it's harder to string your thoughts together. It's
harder to uh to prepare for a podcast, much less
performed one. It's harder to put up with things too.
It's hard to be patient with people with toddlers, with
though with whatever your circumstances are. You just feel a
(08:02):
little more trapped in the maze rather than wandering the labyrinth.
It's harder to learn new things to write, because that's
what happens when you're sleeping, and you get the formation
of new neuronal connections and the pruning of old ones.
So we know that there is a lot of up
keep going on, But what about all that mental exercise? Again,
those byproducts, because if you look at the human body,
(08:24):
the lymphatic system, you will see that when the body's
muscles exert sustained energy, they create toxic byproducts in your
muscle cells. And this is according to Maria Konokov reading
for The New York Times, the lymphatic system serves as
the body's custodian. Whenever waste is form, it sweeps it clean.
The brain, however, is out of reach of this system. Yeah,
(08:47):
we've we've we've keep adding all of the gear to
the old brain. But it's shut off from from the
rest of us. It's a it's it's it's not in
a position for servicing by the Lympic systems. So what's
going to clean it up? Who's going to clean it up?
The old idea is that that the brain rid itself
of metabolites and beta amyloids, these are actually associated with
(09:10):
Alzheimer's was that it broke it down and recycled it
at an individual level. But Mike ken Nindogrod, a Danish
biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at
the University of Rochester, didn't think that that made sense.
She thought, you know, the brain is way too busy
to be recycling all of its own energy. And she
suspected that the brain shared the same kind of system
(09:32):
that muscles and the lymphatic system have. Yeah, and it's
it makes perfect sense, right. Why would uh, why would
the brain have a different structure in place? I would
have a different system entirely. It seems like you would
have a system more in keeping with what the rest
of the body is doing to to carry out the
same task. But it was a mystery, right because you
know that the brain creates these byproducts. How in the
(09:52):
world are they ushered out? And why are they sometimes
sitting in your brain and collecting um. So this system
that she thought about is again similar to the lymphatic system,
but this one is predicated on the rebro spinal fluid
and what near de Guard calls the glymphatic system, and
that that gly glymphatic system is a nod to the
(10:15):
brain's cleil cells, which maintain homeostasis and protect neurons. So
what did she do? What would any good scientists do?
Go grab a bunch of mice and spy on them
while they slept. Yeah, that's just what's what they did.
They injected UM mice with fluescent tracers right into their
cerebro spinal fluids and this allow them to track where
the fluids are going during the course of their sleep. Yeah. Now,
(10:37):
during the mices waking hours, the cerebro spinal fluid barely
made it into the brain. But once they were asleep
and the sleep was induced, of course the brain cells
in in the mice shrunk and that made way for
a flood of the fluid, essentially hosing down the brain
of waste products. We're talking the waste products or proteins
that are toxic to the brain, and so it's turns
(11:00):
out that the brain's interstitial space, the fluid filled area
between tissue cells that take up about the brain's total volume,
is mainly dedicated to physically removing the cells daily waste.
So it's essentially a flood moving through just washing out
all the toxins. It's it's it's like the brain is
a is an office with drains on the floor, and
(11:23):
when everyone goes home in the evening, they just come
in with a fire hose and just start just just
just hose it completely down. It's true. Have you ever
seen the bathrooms that have like a shower and in
the toilet in the same area with as you say,
the drains. It's just a perfect way to kind of
get rid of all of the waste at the same time. Um. So,
I mean it's kind of a big deal because it
gives us a better idea of why humans require so
(11:45):
much sleep. Okay, it's not just refreshing or memory consolidation,
the removal of actual toxins from your brain, right, And
it's also a window into better understanding brain related diseases
like Alzheimer's because what they've seen at Alzheimer's pay stance
is that there is a build up of that beta
amyloid protein in the brains. So is the question, you know,
(12:08):
Morshley equals less brain disease. Possibly we don't know this yet,
but it is a It really is a big window
into this mystery of how the brain rids itself of
these toxic um byproducts. And again why sleep is so
incredibly important to our existence? Yeah, and and and again
I feel like, um, something we can both attest to
(12:30):
is the the arrival of a child in one's life
really drives that home for you, especially when you have
to to make that choice between should I say that
the kid is asleep, should I go to sleep too,
or should I try and stay up and carve a
little me time out of the remainder of the night.
I would find myself early on trying to do that, thinking, oh,
I'll just go to bed at you know, an hour
(12:54):
later and have that hour. But then you cut into
the amount of sleep you get, any wake up the
next morning when the toddler wakes up, When the child
wakes up, and uh, and and you're you're behind. It's
hard to catch up again. And then you find yourself,
just less able to process the world around you, less
able to to to tolerate even the little things to
annoy you. It's uh, it's definitely been. One of the
(13:16):
big lessons of getting older is that sleep is magnificent
and mandatory and and it's so frustrating that the children
don't don't understand that and don't want to sleep. They like,
they don't want to do it. It's the greatest thing
in the world. It's it's the best part of being human.
And you can pretty much do it all you want.
You can really sleep as much as you want when
(13:37):
you're when you're very young, and they inevitably don't want
to do it. It's the truth, because you know, babies,
toddlers with their clock in twelve hours or something, they
don't even think about it. They just pass out. And
then when you're a teenager, no big deal again, twenties,
a night of rockest drinking, you can still bound out
of bed, but at some point your body is going
to be like, I'm adjusting your sleep clock. Everything from
(13:58):
here on out matters. Yeah, I'm taking every second time
is ticking. So again we we we have to be
thankful for the night janitors. And I do love that
image of the night janitors moving in because it sounds
just a little creepy, these strange figures that that move
in through your brain while you're asleep, and they're they're
brushing away all the toxins, and it's it's a pretty
thankless job, right, And we take it for granted, right
(14:21):
because we think we just wake up at eight am
and the building is just happened to be cleaned overnight.
We don't know how it happened. We feel all fresh,
but yeah, they've been toiling away flushing out the toxins.
All right, So there you have it now. Sleep is
something that all of us do. So I know all
of our listeners out there have some little bit of
personal information to share about this this uh this idea
(14:44):
of the night janitors moving through our brains, clearing things out,
taking the toxins away, and indeed the mandatory nature of sleep. Uh.
So feel free to share your stories with us. What
has happened when you have tried to avoid sleep, or
worse yet, U you've found yourself in a vision where
you cannot get the sweep that your body needs. Yeah.
(15:04):
I read recently that Americans are getting an hour less
of sleep a night than they did something like two
decades ago, So there's definitely some sleep deprivation going on.
So you want to reach out to us, you want
to get in touch, well, you can find us at
the Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That is
the mothership. That's our our main bigs. You'll find all
of our podcasts, they're all our videos, Our blog post
(15:26):
links out to our various social media accounts. And oh,
by the way, if you listen to us on iTunes, uh,
go in there and give us some positive feedback, a
positive review, you know, a nice helping of stars because
that iTunes account has been around for a long time
and we can always use a boost in the algorithm
that's rates. Uh. And if you would like to send
(15:47):
us an email, you can do so at below the
Mind at discoveries dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Because it how stuff works dot com.
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