Neurons help flush waste out of our brains during sleep
More information (summarized here) on what is happening in our brains while we sleep is provided by Jiang-Xie et al.,, who show that active neurons can stimulate the clearance of their own metabolic waste by driving changes to ion gradients in the surrounding fluid and by promoting the pulsation of nearby blood vessels. Here is the Jiang-Xie et al.abstract:
The accumulation of metabolic waste is a leading cause of numerous neurological disorders, yet we still have only limited knowledge of how the brain performs self-cleansing. Here we demonstrate that neural networks synchronize individual action potentials to create ...