Matthew Walker

So these drugs come in to your system and unlike the sedative sort of baseball bat to the cortex, which is Ambien, these drugs are much more elegant.

They go down towards the brainstem and they just dial down the volume on wakefulness

And then they step back and they allow the antithesis of wakefulness to come in its place, which is this thing called naturalistic sleep.

And people sleep longer.

So as a scientist, you and I, perhaps skeptics, would then say, well, so you increase sleep, and I have four words for you.

Yes, and so what?

Just because you increase sleep, it doesn't mean that it's functional sleep.

It could just be like the old notion of junk DNA, that it's epiphenomenal sleep.

It's not functional sleep.

There was a study out of Wash U, and they took 85-year-olds and above, and they gave them one of these Dora's drugs.

It's a drug called Belsomra, B-E-L-Somra, to play on good sleep or beautiful sleep, chemical named suvarexant.

And randomized placebo control, what they found is that when they took the drug, yes, these older adults slept longer.

They had more deep sleep.

But then what they did was clever.

Before and after the night of sleep, they drew blood because we can now measure markers of beta amyloid and tau protein circulating in the bloodstream, which are these two markers of Alzheimer's disease.

Why is that relevant to the glymphatic system?

It's relevant because two of the pieces of metabolic detritus that the cleansing system washes away at night, beta amyloid and tau.

And sure enough, what they found was that not only did the adults sleep longer with these sleeping medications, they also had a greater clearance of beta-amyloid and tau within the bloodstream.

So this was the exact opposite of the Ambien study, which was where they were seeing an impairment in the glymphatic activity.

Here in humans was a study with the Web 3.0 sleep medications, Stuvorexant.