{"id":231619,"date":"2026-02-19T06:12:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-19T12:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/the-cells-that-never-sleep-how-slumber-lets-neurons-clean-up-and-stay-healthy"},"modified":"2026-02-19T06:12:43","modified_gmt":"2026-02-19T12:12:43","slug":"the-cells-that-never-sleep-how-slumber-lets-neurons-clean-up-and-stay-healthy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/02\/the-cells-that-never-sleep-how-slumber-lets-neurons-clean-up-and-stay-healthy","title":{"rendered":"The cells that never sleep: How slumber lets neurons clean up and stay healthy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-cells-that-never-sleep-how-slumber-lets-neurons-clean-up-and-stay-healthy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When HHMI Investigator Amita Sehgal started studying sleep 25 years ago, the topic elicited a yawn from most biologists. \u201cIn the year 2000, if I had suggested to my department that we hire people working on sleep, they would have laughed at me,\u201d says Sehgal, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. \u201cThe thinking was that sleep is not something that neuroscientists do; psychologists study sleep and dreams.\u201d Now, more than two decades later, sleep science has finally woken up.<\/p>\n<p>Biologists around the world are now studying sleep in everything from fruit flies to jellyfish to understand the fundamental molecular and cellular mechanisms that drive slumber and answer the age-old question of why we sleep.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSleep is widely conserved across the animal kingdom and so it must have some basic function that is the same across species, and so what is that?\u201d Sehgal says. \u201cWe\u2019re finally getting to a point where we are recognizing a few basic principles about sleep.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When HHMI Investigator Amita Sehgal started studying sleep 25 years ago, the topic elicited a yawn from most biologists. \u201cIn the year 2000, if I had suggested to my department that we hire people working on sleep, they would have laughed at me,\u201d says Sehgal, a molecular biologist and neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-231619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=231619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/231619\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=231619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=231619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=231619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}