Matthew Walker

And I think philosophically what that tells me, and by the way, for people who are listening, thinking, gosh, I think I'm probably one of those people.

Statistically, I think you're more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than you are to have the deck to, Gene.

Think about what that tells us, Eric.

It tells us that there is a moment in biology, in the evolution of this thing called the sleep physiological need that has changed such that mother nature has found a genetic way to zip file sleep.

You can essentially compress sleep from seven to nine hour need down to five to six hour need.

to me that is absolutely fascinating so now the race is on what are the mechanisms that control this you know how do we understand them I'm sure much to my chagrin society would like to then say okay is there a pill that I can take to basically zip file my own sleep and then it becomes an arms race in my mind which is

then all of a sudden six hours becomes the new sort of eight hours.

And then everyone is saying, well, six hours is my need.

Well, I'll go to four hours.

And then it's this arms race of de-escalation of sleep.

Anyway, I'm going on and on.

Does that sort of help give you a sense of sort of two of the, what I feel are fascinating areas?

Yeah, I think there's really quite comprehensive evidence suggesting that the brain has this cleansing system, like the body has one, the lymphatic system, the brain has one, the glymphatic system named after these glial cells that make it up.

And I think there's been evidence from multiple groups across multiple different species types, from mouse models all the way up to human models,

suggesting that there is a state-dependent control of the brain cleansing system, which is a fancy way of saying if you are awake in light non-REM, deep non-REM, or perhaps you're just quiet and you're resting in your wakefulness.

The glymphatic system is not switched on at the same rate across all of those different brain states.

And I think the overwhelming evidence so far, using different techniques in different species from different groups, is that sleep is a preferential time.

It's not an exclusive time.

It's a preferential time when that brain cleansing system kicks into gear.

Because as some people have, I think, argued, and you could say it's hyperbolic, but wakefulness is low level from a biochemical perspective.