The Glymphatic System

[Stephen Whiteside]

The Glymphatic System


I take myself to bed for slumber tight.
My brain removes the toxins, through the night,
That build up as I cogitate all day,
Like piles of rubbish, getting in the way.

I sleep, and all my brain cells start to shrink.
They have no need to contemplate or think.
Spaces open up around each one
Through which my CSF* can start to run.

It washes past my neurons like a tide.
Those chemicals have nowhere they can hide.
Just like debris riding on a river,
They’re carried far away, into my liver,

And there they’re rendered harmless in a jiff
Allowing me another wholesome sniff
Of Life when I awake, and face the dawn,
My mind as fresh and clean as new mown lawn.

Scientists have seen the brains of mice
Work just like this. (I know it isn’t nice
Subjecting them to such experiments,
But it’s useful, so I’m sitting on the fence.)

The brains of mice are very much like ours.
It’s likely human brains would share these powers
To flood themselves, and wash out all the junk
While their owner’s snoozing soundly in their bunk.

*Cerebrospinal fluid


© Stephen Whiteside 20.10.2013

[Neville Briggs]

Good poem Stephen.

What about dreaming, how does that come into the brain renewal actvity ?

[Robyn]

Fascinating stuff Stephen... makes a really interesting poem!

[Stephen Whiteside]

Thanks Neville, Robyn.

Yes, I wondered about dreaming too. It wasn't mentioned in the article I read, which is quite interesting in itself.

[Stephen Whiteside]

I did wonder if somehow dreams were a by-product of shrunken, temporarily dysfunctional brain cells - not a very romantic way to look at dreaming, I know. I'm sure it's all vastly more complicated than that.

[warooa]

Interesting . . . I read recently they did a study that showed that research causes cancer in rats

[Stephen Whiteside]

Yeah, but they lost all the data, because they left it out on the bench overnight and the rats ate it.

[Stephen Whiteside]

Getting back to dreaming, it also occurs to me that if you are woken suddenly from sleep, you can start thinking pretty efficiently pretty quickly if you have to - depending on the stage of sleep you are woken from. For example, I remember being on call for neonatal intensive care, and having to think pretty quickly at 3 in the morning. What happens to the brain cells and the glymphatic system under these circumstances? How quickly can the cells re-expand? How well can they perform in their shrunken state? More research, more mice!

[Neville Briggs]

This is just guesswork, but I think of dreaming as being like the de-fragmenting function on the computer. It seems to somehow sort out all the clutter and can make the " filing system " of the brain more efficient for finding things stored there. For a while anyway.

[Stephen Whiteside]

Don't know much about the de-fragmenting function, Neville.