Dr. Matt Walker

One of the things that we found and we'll discuss is that deep sleep helps regulate your learning and your memory functions.

It helps start to move memories around in your brain and protect them and shift them from short term to long term.

Deep sleep, however, we've now discovered is critical for de-risking your Alzheimer's trajectory.

It's during deep sleep when you have a cleansing system in the brain that starts washing away the toxic proteins that build up by way of wakefulness.

And two of those toxic components are something that we call beta amyloid and tau protein, which are fundamental ingredients in the Alzheimer's disease brain equation.

Certainly I could then understand based on that litany of things that I've just provided.

And those are only a few of what deep sleep is doing.

You could imagine that's the stuff that I want to get.

And that's the thing that I need to optimize for.

Not true because there is REM sleep.

So just as you already elegantly demonstrated that stage one selective deprivation is very difficult because it's a de novo thing you have to pass through to get to the other stages of sleep.

Okay.

And I should have explained what happens to stage one.

I love.

So as we're going into stage one, obviously our eyelids are closed, but one of the first signs that we know as we're recording, I told you we're recording the electrical activity on the head with these electrodes, but I also said that we're measuring eye movement activity.

And as you're going into light stage one non-REM,

for reasons that, again, we have no idea why, your eyeballs start to roll in their sockets underneath your eyelids.

That change that we can start to see, we call them slow rolling eye movements, and they are the hallmark of you entering sleep.

And if you are lucky enough to have a partner, you can see this.

You can, you know, as they're falling asleep, you will see these bizarre... Now, granted, if they wake up,