Sleep Cultures
  • Home
  • Bibliography
  • Research and Researchers
  • News and Notes
  • Quotations
  • Images
  • Links
  • Contact Us

The "mental janitor": sleep, waste and work

1/17/2014

0 Comments

 
An article by Maria Konnikova in the New York Times  provides an informative overview of recent work on sleep's role in our "brain's physiological maintenance." As reported in Sleep Cultures ("We sleep to clean our brains"), a team led by Maiken Nedergaard at the University of Rochester medical school have proposed that the sleeping brain is cleared of its daily build-up of toxins and celluar waste by what they call the "glymphatic system" -- a "network of channels that clear[s] out toxins with watery cerebrospinal fluid." 

Konnikova contextualizes her discussion with some interesting reflections on the function and history of sleep. She begins by noting, as many have done before her, that sleep is, on the face of it, an enormous -- and quite possibly dangerous -- waste of time. Here she echoes Allan Rechtschaffen's famous observation that, if sleep serves no absolutely vital purpose, then it is the greatest mistake evolution ever made. Happily, the notion of sleep as a cerebral clean-up operation, one that could not be performed while the brain is awake and attending to other matters, provides this apparently passive state with just such a sense of purpose. Indeed, the striking metaphors that Konnikova uses to describe sleep -- she calls it our "mental janitor" or "neural housekeeper" -- are indicative of the extent to which we tend to value sleep only inasmuch as it can be re-imagined as a form of labour. And if sleep is a kind of work, then, like all labour, it can be performed more efficiently. Konnikova ends the article by speculating about the possibility of new drugs that will "promote the enhanced cleaning power of the sleeping brain in a brain that is fully awake." Which is to say that at present sleep has a vital job to do, but its employment prospects are precarious; it may be only a matter of time before its cleaning duties are outsourced to wakefulness.
0 Comments



Leave a Reply.

    Archives

    December 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    June 2017
    March 2017
    January 2017
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014
    May 2014
    April 2014
    March 2014
    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    October 2013
    September 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013

    Categories

    All
    Art And Literature
    Body Clocks And Chronotypes
    Capitalism
    Cognition
    Conferences/events
    Crime
    Critical Sleep Studies
    Ethics
    History
    Humour
    Insomnia
    Philosophy
    Pleasure
    Politics
    Public Sleep
    Religion
    Sleep And The Human
    Sleep Environments
    Sleep Medicine
    Sleep Schedules
    Sleep Science
    Sport
    Technology
    Transport
    War
    Work

    RSS Feed