Fun Facts!

Sleep Deprivation can lead the Brain to eat Itself

Sleep is important and the most needed by students and workaholics nowadays. Many people do not consider sleep important but rather a waste of time and thinks there would be plenty of sleeping when they meet their fate, death. They binge-watched to finish all episodes of their favorite dramas as if there is no tomorrow or some especially procrastinator worked overnight to do the assignments that were due tomorrow morning. What they do not know is having sleepless nights is an unhealthy thing to do. They are allowing their brain to eat itself literally and slowly decreasing their lifespan.

Sleep has a lot of benefits. It strengthens memory and neural connections, repairs muscles, replenish hormone and flushes away unused and miscellaneous information and only keeps the good stuff. You do not need to remember the name of your neighbor's new dog or kids. Your brain does not care so you forgot the name of that someone you met once. Your brain is not meant to store useless people and information. This unnecessary information is disposed of the Glymphatic system, a combination of glial cells and the lymphatic system. Glial cells or Astrocyte prunes unnecessary synapses and cleans worn-out cells and debris while the lymphatic system removes toxins and makes sure no foreign things enter into our brain. When we sleep, our brain cells expand to allow the lymphatic system to clean the debris using cerebral fluid, which bathes cells and tissues washing away toxins and wastes, and dump them into the bloodstream to be filtered by our body. So glial and lymphatic systems are both janitors of the brain. Also, the lymphatic system can remove beta-amyloid proteins because if it builds up it destroys neurons and can lead to Alzheimer's disease (a neurological disease that makes you forgetful and usually common to old people). Astrocyte breaks down more brain's connections and debris especially the large synapses but according to researchers said it is not harmful because mature and frequently used large synapses are like old furniture that needs to be cleaned thoroughly. But the dangerous part is that the microglial activity becomes more active than usual and a lot of studies had shown that increased microglial activity leads to neurodegenerative diseases.

So if you do not want to be forgetful at a very young age, stop binge-watching at night and let your body and brain go to sleep. Even if you have something to do important and need to pass it tomorrow, better sleep and use the above scientific explanation as to your excuse. Always clean your dirty mind every day by sleeping for the right amount of time, at least 7 hours straight.