Matthew Walker

And we're an embodied organism.

We study the organism in silos, neurology, psychiatry, cardiology, you know, respiratory...

But they all interact.

And so I think what's lovely about your example is the reminder that if you don't study the body in this study of the glymphatic system, you could miss out a profound explanation that parsimoniously accounts for the head-scratching, I don't know why we're getting this result.

So that's a long way to come back to it.

But the same group that was the pioneer in the discovery of the glymphatic system, led by Macon Neddegaard at the University of Rochester,

He has gone on to then look to say, well, if this is a sleep-dependent process of brain cleansing during deep sleep, what about sleeping pills?

Because so many people are either taking or are addicted to sleeping pills.

And we've gone through it.

We're in the era of Web 3.0 with sleeping pills.

We started off Web 1.0, which were the benzos, the kind of temazepam, diazepam, lorazepam.

Then we went to Web 2.0, which was sort of the Ambien's Zolpidem, Linesta, Sonata.

And what was common about those two classes of drugs is that they both went after something called the GABA receptor in the brain, which is this major inhibitory receptor in the brain.

And essentially they were called sedative hypnotics because they sedated your cortex.

And when you take an Ambien, I'm not going to argue you're awake.

You're clearly not awake.

But to argue you're in naturalistic sleep, if you look at the physiology, is an equal fallacy.

So they made this interesting experimental hypothesis that when you take Ambien, you sleep longer.

And based on how you score deep sleep,

it would seem as though Ambien increases the amount of minutes that you spend in deep sleep.