How waste pulses through your brain

摘要

This is how you clear your mind. Researchers have had the best look yet at microscopic vessels that take waste away from nerve cells in the brain. The first clear picture of this network, called the glymphatic system, came in 2012 from experiments in mice. The network seems to ramp up when we sleep, removing unwanted metabolic by-products and waste proteins like beta-amyloid, but many details, including the exit route this waste takes, are still unclear. To examine the system in people, Vesa Kiviniemi of the University of Oulu in Finland and his colleagues have developed a souped-up form of MRI scanning that takes 20 times as many photos per second. With this high resolution they followed the biological trash as it was flushed through the network.