Joe Rogan - Sleep Deprivation Causes Alzheimer's?

What's stunning to me is that six hours is so detrimental. I would have thought that would have been fine. Six hours is good. Like you get six hours? Ah, that's good. That's normal for me. Six hours is normal. Literally the minimum is seven. Yeah, seven to nine hours of sleep. Seven you need. Anything under seven is bullshit. Yeah, for the average... You really should get eight. There is a small fraction of one percent of the population that has a special gene that allows them to survive on about five hours of sleep. And most people, when I tell them this, they say, ah, I must have that. I'm one of those people. The chances of you being, you know, you're much more likely, for example, to be struck by lightning in your lifetime, the odds of which are I think about one in 12,500, than you are to have this incredibly rare gene that means you can survive on something around five hours of sleep. Really? Yeah. What is the gene? Well, it's a gene that seems to promote sort of, again, wakefulness chemistry within the brain that allows you to sort of maintain wakefulness in a more sustained way. And so we're only trying to understand right now what the actual biochemical mechanisms are in terms of the consequence of that gene, that gene mutation. But certainly it seems to exist that there are some of those quote unquote short sleepers. By the way, you know, we hear of these business leaders and even actually heads of state, and I'm not going to name any names, but I'll give you right now, but I'll give you two examples of the past. Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both were vociferous in their statement and their declaration of how little sleep that they would get. Both of them said four or five hours a night. And I think in part it was to paint this heroic ironclad status. Yeah. And many people would say to me, you know, Margaret Thatcher, you know, lifetime, well, sadly and tragically, Thatcher and Reagan both ended up getting Alzheimer's disease, you know, and we now know because of, it's during deep sleep at night that there is a sewage system in the brain that kicks into high gear and it cleanses the brain of all of the metabolic toxins that have been built up throughout the day, this low level brain damage. One of those toxic sticky proteins that builds up whilst we're awake is called beta amyloid. Beta amyloid is one of the leading causes of underlying the mechanism of Alzheimer's disease. So the less sleep that you're having across the lifespan, the more of that toxic amyloid is building up night after night, year after year. And I don't think it's coincidental that both of them ended up progressing into, tragically into a state of Alzheimer's disease. Wow. So it's good night sleep clean in that way in terms of deep sleep. That's stunning. Critical.