Recharge.

We have 25000 laps to run our F1 car. Dogs got only 5000.

25000 are the approx number of day-night cycles we humans will live – if we can reach 70 years of life.

There’s reasonable argument that the human body is designed to live well beyond 100 years – but let’s leave that for later.

These 25000 laps means 25000 repetitions of the brain cleaning activity – sleep. This is a drain on the brain. And to recharge the brain – we have compiled the recharging function within the sleep function.

In other words – we recharge when we sleep. Most animals will use sleep to recharge – but some animals like Bull Frogs have peculiar sleeping habits.

Dogs are not higher intelligence beings like us. And therefore their brains need lesser work to clean the house. A full night of sleep should suffice !

It’s ridiculous how much these dogs nap in the day…

But have you noticed how much they nap ? Short bursts of deep sleep and then back to wake – at least 5-10 times a day !!

The little 10 min naps they take during the day – that’s recharging. You’ll notice this with human kids also – their brains get tired easily – and the plug back in for a recharge with sleep.

These dogs are just smarter than us – they know how to use eyelids better – they sleep in the day too.

This recharge – is the scrub. The clean-out of gunk from the perivascular spaces in the brain.

These little protein gunks collect in the folds of fat where blood doesn’t reach. And to remove them the brain does a little pressure trigger which pushes the CSF into these folds – collects the proteins and exchanges them to the blood. It’s matched to our blood pressure so the two liquids can exchange this gunk.

Yes – it’s quite phenomenal and exactly the way you are imaging it. Read more about it in the book.

This pressure trigger happens at remarkable efficiency around 3hz of the brain’s electrical activity. The brain displays a peculiar long amplitude low frequency ‘rhythmic’ behavior.

There is really only one way to take the brain there – deep sleep. Also called delta waves.

The human brain needs 117-124 mins to complete 1 X REM. The deep sleep stage is included in this. The timings change as you move from one REM to the next REM – but the first cycle cannot be finished sooner than 110 odd mins.

The 2 hour afternoon siesta comes from here.

Why do melatonin tablets not work ??

The lap our car takes – that day-night cycle is called the circadian rhythm. Our brains are hardwired with a natural clock – and we unintentionally disturb it by forcing it to follow our worldly understanding of time – the clock with GMT.

That is why air travel across zones gives us headaches, bad sleep and sometimes even diarrhea – the circadian rhythm is the key contributor to the brain doing its job in the wake cycle.

And this wake cycle performance is directly impacted with sleep cycles.

And our sleep cycles are directly impacting our work efficiency- which will be inevitably tied to our moods and emotional memories. These wake cycle events will forge the coming up sleep program – and boy there’s so much backlog already !

This is why that recharge is not taking effect with melatonin or any other medical intervention. The brain will not sleep – unless motivated to. You can trick the brain to do almost everything else – but the true sleep functions are not activated unless the brain itself decides to do this.

And that ability – comes from its state of charge. (how much more to be charged/cleaned)

Like your wireless mouse refusing to connect on low battery – the brain’s sleep function is impaired because of the high negative sleep.

To put this into perspective – a low voltage signal to a processor will work fine when new. But as the circuit degrades over time – the nano level drop in current (electrons) will cause errors in the data reaching the processor.

One such error that frequently happens to our high performing brains – is sleep debt. The processor between our ears doesn’t get recharged because there’s just so much debt already !

And the stressful wake cycle is only adding more.

…the stressful wake cycle is only adding more.

A solution – take time out to sleep. Just like gym.

1 REM in the day can deduct as much as 7 days of sleep debt. It’s really not fair to do the math – but if your brain has been accumulating 10% debt over the last 10000 days – you know what you have to do.

We aren’t fish – we have eyelids. We can sleep in the day. All land animals do.