Your Brain's Nightly Cleanup Process

Your brain is literally eating itself right now and that's exactly what's keeping you alive.

Every night while you sleep, your brain activates specialized cells called microglia

that start consuming the connections between your neurons. They're munching on synapses like

tiny Pac-Men, destroying up to fifteen percent of your neural connections. Sounds terrifying,

but here's the twist. This process called synaptic pruning is actually essential for learning and

memory. Throughout the day, your brain creates thousands of new connections as you

experience things. Most of these are useless noise. So at night, your brain goes

into cleanup mode, deleting the weak connections while strengthening the important ones.