When you don’t sleep, your brain eats itself.

During sleep, the brain clears out unnecessary neural connections, meaning it ditches irrelevant information to make room for new, more valuable stuff. But this process also happens when we’re sleep-deprived—except it becomes far more aggressive. And that’s when disturbing changes start occurring in the brain, resembling serious neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s or other conditions caused by neural degeneration and synaptic breakdown.