How Not Sleeping Actually Kills You | Highlights and Annotations by Gistr.

Guiness Book of World Records: A reference book that lists world records of various achievements. glymphatic system: A waste clearance system in the central nervous system that removes metabolic waste products during sleep. cardiovascular disease: A class of diseases that involve the heart and blood vessels. neurodegenerative diseases: Diseases that progressively damage the structure and function of the brain and nervous system, such as Alzheimer's disease. animal models: Animals used in scientific research to study biological processes and diseases that affect humans. orthologs: Genes in different species that evolved from a common ancestral gene and have similar functions. gene editing: A set of technologies that give scientists the ability to change an organism's DNA. reactive oxygen species (ROS): Oxygen-containing molecules that are highly reactive and can damage cells. antioxidants: Substances that can prevent or slow damage to cells caused by free radicals, thereby protecting the body from damage. Research on fruit flies suggests that the gut is the primary organ affected by sleep deprivation, leading to death. This is due to a buildup of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the gut. While early studies implicated the brain, more recent research points to the gut's role in sleep deprivation-induced mortality. The exact mechanism in humans remains unclear. This segment details a crucial experiment using fruit flies to isolate the cause of death from sleep deprivation. The researchers used gene editing to manipulate sleep patterns in flies, demonstrating that gut damage, specifically the buildup of reactive oxygen species (ROS), is the primary cause of death, not brain damage as previously thought. The study's methodology and results are clearly explained, highlighting the significance of this finding. our brains have a third shift cleanup crew, it’s called the glymphatic system and it takes out the molecular trash that our central nervous system produces over the course of the day.01:18but it’s not just our minds that benefit. sleep also helps bolster our immune system, regulate hormones, build muscle, and promote healthy skin. they don’t call it beauty sleep for nothing, folks. now, if you’re like me, you’ve experienced a bit of brain fog, an inability to concentrate, or a tendency to get distracted after a terrible night’s sleep. one trio of studies prevented puppies from sleeping! and a sleeping puppy is one of the most adorable things you could ever see.! not cool,, scientists.! These puppies started to die within just a few days, but not before they developed some significant brain abnormalities..03:03to add insult to injury, these studies weren’t super useful to science, because it was impossible to tease apart whether it was the lack of sleep that caused their deaths, or the fact that the puppies were constantly being stressed out in order to be kept awake. in 1989, researchers at the University of Chicago turned to rats. in the team’s experiments, they paired up rats. one rat wouldn’t be allowed to sleep, and the other was the control. the two rats were placed together on a turntable over a container of water. any time the sleep-deprived rat dozed off, the table would spin and the rats had to move, or else be scooted into the water. a surefire way to wake up, whichever happened. meanwhile,, the control rat could sleep whenever it wanted, so long as its partner was awake. this meant that both rats experienced an equal number of stressful events, but the control rat was able to get way more sleep. in fact, it got about 70% of the sleep it normally would. which I would still count as sleep deprivation, but it’s way more than what the other rat got: about 9% of its normal if it's not the brain that causes sleep-deprived death, what organ is it? it turns out, at least for fruit flies, it's the gut. more specifically, it's the buildup of something in the gut, called reactive oxygen species, or ROS. and as the name suggests, ROS are oxygen-containing molecules that are highly reactive. in other words, they cause damage to other molecules, and you really don’t want them to get too carried away with that. but as scary as that might sound, it’s perfectly normal to have them inside of you. ROS are created by our body all the time, as our cells and the bits inside them do what they need to to keep us alive. our cells typically have a way of taking out the proverbial trash so these molecules can’t cause too much damage. but an overproduction of ROS can wreak havoc on cells, causing damage to DNA, proteins, lipids… all the important stuff. and when this research team was searching the tissues of their sleep-deprived fruit flies for biological side effects, they found a huge buildup of ROS in the gut. not the brain, and not the muscles, just the gut. but at this point, that finding was just correlational, so they wanted to see if the ROS was actually the cause of death. the