Dr. Wendy Suzuki

They die.

You cannot function if you are deprived of sleep for too many hours in a row.

It's that critical.

Yet we happily watch too much Netflix at night and get only five hours of sleep when we could have had eight.

So what's happening exactly?

Why is it so important?

Well, there's so many different things.

I'm going to say two.

One is that we know that in regular healthy sleep,

There is activity in the hippocampus that helps you strengthen the memories that you have formed in that previous day.

It's called consolidation.

And it's so important.

If you shorten that, if you don't get enough, you are not consolidating your normal everyday memories.

And second...

It is the time during sleep when all the metabolites, all that garbage that your brain is producing, because all biological cells produce garbage, it gets kind of cleaned up through the cerebral spinal fluid that is flowing through your brain.

And if you do not get enough sleep, you build up garbage metabolites in your brain.

It's like you have a gunky brain.

And do you feel like, I feel like I have gunk in my brain when I don't sleep enough.

That is exactly what is happening.

Yeah, well, so I think the most...