Dr. Martin Picard

And we have some thoughts as to why this is.

I want to start by saying we don't know what mitochondria do when we sleep.

Like do mitochondria sleep?

You lose consciousness and the body, you know, goes into this hypometabolic restorative state.

And yes, there's glymphatics and, you know –

garbage clear out in the brain, which I suspect might have an energetic effect.

If you have garbage in your brain, probably the brain becomes less efficient.

So it needs to burn more energy to do the same thing.

So maybe the reason why the brain clears out stuff and why that's an important part of sleep is for an energetic purpose, right?

So we just finished an experiment where we had people come in the lab for 24 hours, sleep into the lab, and Evan Cholson, a student in my lab, is analyzing those data.

And I think for the first time, we'll be able to know, what do mitochondria do when you fall asleep and you go into this hypometabolic state and you're kind of conserving energy?

How is energy reallocated?

So we see sleep as a two-arm mechanism.

process, one, it slows some things down.

If the heart beats 10 times less per minute, that's a lot of energy.

Every time the heart contracts, systole, diastole, both contraction and relaxation cost energy.

And then if you do this 10 times less per minute, that is a bunch of energy that can be reallocated, redistributed.

So we suspect that there's three main buckets of energy expenses that the body needs to sustain at some point in time.

One is vital.

You need to keep your heart beating at your resting heart rate, the brain function, your kidney.