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Posted by gmays 10/31/2025

Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain(news.mit.edu)
619 points | 291 commentspage 3
assimpleaspossi 10/31/2025|
Maybe unrelated but, years ago, I had a job that had me criss-crossing the country by plane Monday through Friday and sometimes Saturday. So my sleep and the time zones and hotels could sometimes mess with me.

One day, I went to a grocery store and mid-turn onto another street, I forgot what city I was in. Worse, I was half a mile from my apartment in my home town.

hollerith 10/31/2025|
How long did it take you to orient or to get home (whichever one happened first)?
assimpleaspossi 10/31/2025||
It was very brief. Only a few seconds
bzmrgonz 10/31/2025||
hmm.. this is interesting... the article says "spinal fluid exits the cerebrospinal fluid (csf) flows out of the brain... I wonder where it discharges these waste products. I ask because it is believed we have a sort of chimney on our backs. I think I read this on the article of the Irish lady who could detect alzheimers years before any modern medical detection systems. But maybe it is discharged in the gut? via the mesentery, the new organ they finally named fo rthe stuff that holds our intestines together. If anyone knows where it is discharged, please comment, I'm interested in this, because I do prolong waterfasts every 3 months, and I strongly believe the brain drains waste into my mouth during that time, because the taste in my mouth is godawful, but if there are other exit points the brain discharges waste, we probably need to know about them.
jp57 10/31/2025||
Why do you think that the taste in your mouth is waste draining from your brain and not the result of some metabolic changes in your body from the fast? Ketosis is known to cause a metallic taste in the mouth, for example.
alfonsodev 10/31/2025|||
What I understood from youtube gurus, take it with a grain of salt, is that your brain is taking ketones as source of energy to preserve the little glucose that goes into the system, and as result it consumes less oxygen.

But I'm not sure the mouth taste comes from the brain's waste.

To some degree, if you had your brain inflamed by bad eating habits, fasting would revert that and make the flushing more efficient as well.

Again please take with with double grain of salt, since I don't even know inflame brain is a thing for sure, or the correct term.

canadiantim 10/31/2025|||
I believe it's discharged basically half directly into the venous system in the neck, the other half goes through the lymphatic/glymphatic system and ultimately also the venous system in the neck. That being said, that's just based on our very crude understandings and I'm sure there are other pathways.
kingkawn 10/31/2025||
The description of the mesentery as a single organ dates to the time of Da Vinci, at the latest.
kurisufag 10/31/2025||
anecdotally, i never feel better than when i haven't slept. spent 8pm tuesday -- 8pm thursday this week awake nursing cheap energy drinks, and not only could i manage a higher-than-usual level of focus, i was genuinely content.

bombed a midterm halfway though, but at least i felt good about it.

puzzlingcaptcha 10/31/2025||
It's not unusual to feel good after pulling an all-nighter. Sleep is when re-uptake of serotonin takes place, so if you interrupt it you end up with a surplus. Although there are also other possible explanations [1]

1. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2214505120

taeric 10/31/2025||
I'm assuming it is similar to the "runners high" people get at the end of a long run? You will feel very energized in ways that don't make sense. And if you don't force yourself to just lay down and pass out, you can keep going for longer than you would have thought. Will crash harder, though, if my experience is common.
barrenko 10/31/2025|||
Well, not sleeping through the night, you'll feel genuinely euphoric around dawn, it's one of the most immediate "cures" for clinical depression.
jcims 10/31/2025|||
I've got pretty bad ADHD and I find that my mind is more quiet, focused and productive on mornings after a night of 2-4 hrs of sleep than it has ever been on meds or anything else. It all falls apart by the afternoon, but for a while it's a nice feeling.
90ne1 10/31/2025|||
I see the same thing in myself.

I've attributed it to a my brain moving to power-saving mode and muting some of my anxiety / perfectionism tendencies. Does this explanation resonate with you at all?

kurisufag 10/31/2025||
That's possible. It feels a lot like the placebo component in drinking: if you're free to ignore one of the few things you need to /live/, it should be much easier psychologically to be carefree (similar to "oh, haha, i'm drunk, might as well get wacky").
rtaylorgarlock 10/31/2025|||
Age sounds like a factor here. I know zero long-term healthy ppl in 30s and beyond who act/think this way.
freedomben 10/31/2025|||
Indeed, as a 20 year old I would stay up all night pretty regularly for work and occasionally fun. At 40 I'm not sure I would live through it, at least not in a cognitive state where I could converse.
jtuple 10/31/2025|||
I've done a few all-nighters in my 30s and 40s, and they generally feel the same as my 20s. Still get that clear headed, high focus second wind around 4am that carries through until noon or so.

But, I definitely crash harder than I did in my 20s and need longer to recover after. In my 20s, would be fine if the next night was a normal one, now it takes multiple days.

It's definitely something I try to avoid at this age, as opposed to just being standard procedure back in college.

boogieknite 10/31/2025||
anecdotally i feel pretty good when im buzzed but reality is my performance is impaired. there is a teeter-totter of overconfidence and impairment where the liquid confidence actually helps more than the impairment impairs but its a sweet spot
kurisufag 10/31/2025||
sleep deprivation definitely reduces raw reasoning ability. in some cases, though (and this is true for getting buzzed as well) the trade-off is absolutely productive.
pedalpete 10/31/2025||
This is fascinating, and somewhat directly related to the work we do increasing slow-wave response during sleep.

For those who are not aware, slow-wave are the hallmark of deep sleep and closely linked to the flushing the glymphatic system, which is what they are referring to in this article.

We can't create slow-waves, but we can increase their effectiveness through precisely timed auditory stimulation. I'll be posting a Show HN next week which dives into the data of how this works, but if you want to know more, there is info on our website and links to over 50 published peer-reviewed papers. https://affectablesleep.com

This paper specifically looks at amyloid clearance as a result of this glymphatic flush https://doi.org/10.1093/ageing/afad228

While many people will point to "getting more sleep" that isn't really the answer. More time asleep does not automatically mean increased glymphatic flush. Additionally, as we age, the power of the pump gets weaker, and more sleep does not help with that.

We believe the focus on counting minutes of sleep misses the point of what makes sleep truly restorative and beneficial, which are the neurological processes, and downstream physiological changes as a result. This is why we talk about restorative function, and that should be the focus of sleep health, not time.

After all, you wouldn't measure your diet based on how much time you spend chewing, would you?

shahbaby 10/31/2025||
> For example, what you don't want to do is NOT take amphetamines at testing if you had used them to study;

Hard disagree there. If you get any anxiety during the test it's better to take it only while studying.

85392_school 10/31/2025||
Did you mean to reply to <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45772306>?
lazide 10/31/2025||
Huh? Care to explain?
handfuloflight 10/31/2025||
I can feel when this fluid hasn't properly flushed.
thimkerbell 10/31/2025||
[This is one of those article titles that would really benefit from adding one more word.]
cvoss 10/31/2025|
Or some parentheses. Is "due to" naturally left-associative or right-associative? I would have said 'right', which gives the unintended reading of the sentence.

Attention lapses due to (sleep deprivation due to flushing fluid from brain).

(Attention lapses due to sleep deprivation) due to flushing fluid from brain.

rickcarlino 10/31/2025||
Could this be why SNRIs help some patients mitigate ADHD symptoms?
cozzyd 10/31/2025||
As a chronic undersleeper, good thing I don't drive!
fsckboy 11/1/2025|
isn't chronic undersleep associated with dementia in old age? meaning, whatever you have to do, stop doing that.
Olshansky 10/31/2025|
Need a cron job to flush that cache
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