Maria Konnikova | The New York Times
“Goodnight. Sleep Clean” was originally published in The New York Times in January, 2014 by Maria Konnikova, the New York Times-bestselling author of The Confidence Game (Viking/Penguin 2016) and Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes (Viking/Penguin, 2013). She is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, where she writes a regular column with a focus on psychology and culture, and is currently working on an assortment of non-fiction and fiction projects. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, where she studied psychology, creative writing, and government, and received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Columbia University.
In the article, “Goodnight. Sleep Clean”, Konnikova wonders why humans need sleep. Humans have been sleeping since the dawn of our conception, and although we may not think we are like animals, we are. So why was sleep considered to be a necessity for the human body? According to Dr. Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, “Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild, so it has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”
By delving more into the requirement of sleep, Konnikova reveals that sleep is essential in our brain’s physiological maintenance. “As your body sleeps, your brain is quite actively playing the part of mental janitor: It’s clearing out all of the junk that has accumulated as a result of your daily thinking.” She relates sleep to working out and how our body responds by sending our lymphatic system to clear out toxic byproducts produced from the result of anaerobic energy creation. Konnikova addresses that our brain doesn’t have its own lymphatic system. She then dives back into the research of Dr. Nedergaard who tells us how her team proposed a brain equivalent of the lymphatic system, a network of channels that cleared out toxins with watery cerebrospinal fluid. She called it the glymphatic system, a nod to its dependence on glial cells (the supportive cells in the brain that work largely to maintain homeostasis and protect neurons) and its function as a sort of parallel lymphatic system.
Konnikova goes on to talk about the physical implications of sleep and why we essentially need it and how socially we are unable to fill that requirement. “Some 80 percent of working adults suffer to some extent from sleep deprivation. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults should sleep seven to nine hours. On average, we’re getting one to two hours less sleep a night than we did 50 to 100 years ago and 38 minutes less on weeknights than we did as little as 10 years ago.” Konnikova introduces several statistics to show how Americans are ill-equipped to sleep and why its needs to change.
Finally Konnikova comes to her two solutions to sleep deprivation. One is to enchance that body’s sleeping metabolism in order to allow the “glymphatic system” to perform at its best, “a new generation of drug makers can work to create the best possible environment for the trash pickup to occur in the first place — to make certain that our brain’s sleeping metabolism is as efficient as it can possibly be.” Or we could “seek to mimic the cleanup-promoting actions of sleep in the awake brain”, or in other words, not have to sleep at all. Konnikova talks about research that can be enforced to enchance the cleaning process while we are awake, therefore eliminating sleep. It means we would never have to sleep at all.
What is Sleep? 