I used to think of sleep deprivation as a bill I could pay later. A rough night, a strong coffee, and you push through. Most of the people I know operate this way. It's practically a badge in the rooms where founders and global executives spend time together.
A study published in Nature Neuroscience has made me reconsider that math.
Researchers at MIT and Boston University tracked 26 healthy adults through attention tests, once after a full night of sleep and once after a supervised sleepless night. The interesting part wasn't the expected finding that tired people perform worse. It was what was happening inside the brain at the precise moment attention failed.
During sleep, waves of cerebrospinal fluid move through the brain, clearing metabolic waste. After a sleepless night, those same fluid surges started appearing while participants were still awake, and they corresponded directly with the moments attention broke down. The brain wasn't malfunctioning. It was doing maintenance it never got to do. It just happened while the person was supposed to be focused.
The researchers described it as a "sleeplike moment" inside a waking brain. The person is upright, eyes open, technically present. But for a brief interval, the brain has turned inward.
Most high performers I know have built systems for almost everything: decision frameworks, communication rituals, and recovery protocols. But sleep is often treated as a variable to be managed around rather than as a foundation to be protected.
If the brain is quietly retreating inward during the moments we most need it to engage outward, and we have no reliable way to detect when that's happening to us, what are we actually optimizing when we treat sleep as negotiable?
What would change about the way you structure your days if you accepted that your attention isn't fully yours to command?
-Marc
+ Brigadoon organizes gatherings for founders, investors, journalists, doctors, designers, architects, and civic leaders. No PowerPoints, no panels, no name tags. Just a deliberately varied group in conversation, with radical curiosity as the only agenda, and an honest acknowledgment that the ROI is unknown, and that is exactly the point. More @ www.brigadoon.live.
March 25, 2026
