The brain spends a third of your life cleaning itself. I want to know what happens when it can't.

I'm Aishani — a neuroscience researcher applying to doctoral programmes in sleep and clinical neuroscience for October 2027. I aim to answer a question that has not yet been tested in a longitudinal trial: if we actively restore slow-wave sleep architecture in adults at dementia risk, does glymphatic waste clearance measurably improve? And does that show improvement in slow cognitive decline?

The mechanistic story behind this is now well-documented. The glymphatic system which is a brain-wide perivascular network that depends on aquaporin-4 water channels at astrocyte endfeet, is the principal mechanism by which the sleeping brain clears soluble metabolic waste, including amyloid-β and tau, the proteins that accumulate in Alzheimer's disease. Glymphatic activity increases approximately twofold during NREM sleep. Every hour of slow-wave sleep lost across midlife measurably elevates dementia risk. The mechanistic chain from impaired sleep to dementia pathology is now established. What hasn't been done, and what I want to do, is test whether reversing that impairment reverses the downstream damage.

My proposed trial uses closed-loop acoustic stimulation, a validated home-based technology that detects slow-wave onset in real time and delivers precisely timed acoustic tones to enhance slow-wave activity. Participants wear a research-grade EEG headband nightly for twelve months while we track glymphatic function using a multimodal MRI battery i.e. DTI-ALPS, resting-state MREG, phase-contrast MRI — and plasma biomarkers including Aβ42/40 and p-tau217. The question is whether improving sleep is enough to move those numbers.

Outside the research I train Muay Thai, which I find genuinely clarifying in a way that sitting at a desk is not. I watch a lot of cinema — the slow, patient kind. I read widely: the history and philosophy of science alongside neuroscience, because I think empirical researchers who don't read philosophy of mind are missing something important about the questions they're asking [not a personal attack by the way :)].

This site is where I think in public. The research page is careful and sourced. The writing page is messier. Both are honest about what I don't know, which in this field is still quite a lot.

I enjoy being fully myself. This is a record of my thinking — the careful, sourced kind and the messier, half-formed kind.