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Comment by zip1234 | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe some sort of mechanical pumping system? If it takes too much energy away from the brain to both remain awake and clear those proteins, a mechanical pump that is powered externally could solve that energy problem. (I'm only half joking--we already have mechanical means of replacing other biological functions such as a dialysis machine).

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The brain has a mechanical pumping system, check it out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid#Clinical_s...

Wow, didn't know that--pretty amazing!

Along this line of thinking, if we knew exactly what was happening in the brain during sleep, could we speed up the process with mechanical/chemical means? Could we turn off brain functions to shrink the cells (or co-opt the existing sleep process and do this after one has fallen asleep), do the cleaning process (faster, while keeping the same effect) then wake up for maybe 30 minutes total of "sleep" a day? I personally don't think it's possible, at least for another century or so, because it's attempting to hack a body function and do it better (faster) than the body naturally does it (a dialysis machine is a poor substitute for a real kidney). Is there any example of a biomedical tech advancement where some part or mechanism in our body was augmented/replaced with something works better than the original?

The elbow surgery that baseball pitchers sometimes need. There were reports of pitchers throwing better afterwards, which led to young aspiring pitchers with healthy elbows requesting the surgery. I don't know much about the actual process, I was just reading an article about the ethics of operating on a normal elbow in order to gain some competitive advantage.

This doesn't sound far fetched at all. Small injuries are a way to focus the body to enter a recovery phase where the end result is a bone/tissue configuration that is strong and less likely to be repeat injured. Martial Artists have been practicing this type of body modification for centuries to bones, ligaments, muscles, and minds. I've experienced it through my own personal knee surgeries. And I wouldn't be surprised if in the future we offer body enhancements to healthy indivuals through surgery that will improve performance or long term health.

Tommy John surgery is what it's usually referred to, after the first pitcher to undergo the procedure in the 1970s.

It's pretty accepted that the surgery is not performance enhancing against the healthy baseline. Some pitchers come back throwing harder because they had significant impairment (wearing of the tendons) before.

You might be interested in the normal physiology of cerebrospinal fluid [0] and the disease hydrocephalus [1] that occurs when there is a blockage in the normal flow path. As a treatment for hydrocephalus, bypass shunts (made of tubing) are installed inside the skull that create a relief path for the fluid to flow. Unfortunately, they often get clogged with cells due to various scar formation and immune reactions -- designing better shunts is an active area of biomaterials research, and it's quite possible that an external pump could be an upgrade (though we first have to show that it has benefit...).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebrospinal_fluid

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrocephalus

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