Northwest News
10:21 am
Mon April 2, 2012

Researcher Receives Funds to Study Why Humans Sleep

A scientist at Spokane’s Riverpoint campus has received a large grant to study one question: why do humans sleep? 

 “Why don’t you sleep on it” is a common adage to help with big decisions.  Scientists Jonathan Wisor is interested in doing just that.  Well, at least studying why that sleep is so necessary.  Dr. Wisor received a 1.3-Million dollar grant from the National Institutes of Health to study how the brain processes glucose, which the body uses as a primary energy source.  

Wisor : “The purpose of the grant is to test our hypothesis that the very function of sleep is to reduce the brain’s demand for glucose.”


Wisor: “It’s not that it’s running out of glucose, it’s not that it’s running out of fuel.  It’s that it needs to clean out the bio-chemical equivalent of soot and ash that build up when we are constantly using the brain when we are awake.”


Wisor: “This is like, this is sort of the holy grail of our research endeavor.”


Copyright Spokane Public Radio 2012