Everyday Habits That Make You SMARTER: How To Master Memory, Focus & Learning | Dr. Gina Poe

what is the relationship between sleep and learning which is I think one of the most certainly for me one of the most important things yeah you actually have to have sleep in order to consolidate the things that you've learned during the day and integrate the items into your schema of the world and you also need sleep in order to refine what you know reducing the power of things that you now know are not true in light of the new information and to refresh your synaptic circuitry in your brain so that you can fit new things in the next day okay so sleep is implicated both in memory retention and erasing memory yes talk to me about what is the importance of forgetting so I I forget a lot a lot a lot I am very distressed by how much I forget but my wife will often say I wish I had your brain because I don't get hung up on things yeah so even though it is like I'm not kidding it's so much traumatic for me the amount of information that I encounter versus what I retain but I don't get stuck emotionally yeah and I think you actually probably retain more than you think you may not be it's not how it feels but yeah you may not be able to call it to mind the specific names of things but I believe I believe you've probably integrated these things into your schema and how you view the world what is the schema exactly so it's a kind of a loose term to see say how you view the world how things fit into the story that you build in your brain of what the world is about and so for example there's a schema we have of Christmas and what it involves there's all kinds of pieces of information in that schema or the schema of what a university is or a schema of what a center of town looks like and so we have things that may or may not be in any particular town but we have an idea of what a town center should look like you know so are you familiar at all with the idea of chunking yeah yeah it's kind of like chunking yeah for people that don't know explain what chunking is oh boy I think you could probably explain it better than me but it's it's a way to simplify the World by um sticking related things together in a chunk that's pretty good okay on the money I think the idea comes from chess so where a chess master will look at a board and he's not seeing the individual pieces they just see that setup of where you are versus where I am means that we're at this point in the game roughly and that these moves have been played and these moves are yet to be played which is how they're able to play so many games at one time I have a feeling though I'm certainly not an expert in this that this is part of the problem that AI will face as we try to get to general intelligence the thing that we call common sense I have a feeling is is largely tied to not only the things you can infer but how much you can reduce something to a set of like Christmas it's not exactly Christmas snow the glow of Christmas lights maybe a dude in a red coat cookies you know and it could be a lot of different things but yet there's some overarching organizational principle that we put things in so hearing you tie that to sleep that we're constantly updating that schema yeah um why is that so important well I mean what we learned throughout our lives um changes us and it should because we are constantly evolving our knowledge as new things get known we change where we live and we need to update our schema with the new place that's home instead of the old place if we go to the old place and knock on that door or try and walk in it would be bad right so we need to constantly update our schema with new information and in fact that does get harder as we get older because just to update the schema just to update the schema and possibly one of the reasons why that gets harder is because our sleep starts to degenerate degrade a little bit now it's variable whose sleep gets worse at what age but we do know that we wake up more often we um have fewer big deep slow waves of slow wave sleep and we are more prone to get sleep apnea which was really makes us wake up a lot and so our sleep just the quality can get bad and then the updating of our schema doesn't work as well and that means that we can't learn new things as the world changes around us as as easily so I would do you know is is it the breakdown of sleep that causes the breakdown of brain plasticity or is it just that the brain moves through phases and when you're younger you're super plastic and as you get older just gets more and more rigid that's a good question and I don't think we know the answer to that yet we do know a lot of things change with age and aging but we don't know if they are linked to sleep the two go hand in hand so much but we do know that those who have the worst cognition when they're older also have the worst sleep so again yes which is causing which um a bit like progression but it's a positive feedback the positive feedback loop so but if you can arrest sleep degradation you could probably arrest dementia as well okay that's very interesting all right so then as we tease that apart walk us through what are the phases of sleep right uh and what are we doing in our lives that begin to disrupt those phases right um so the first phase we go into when we're dozing is called stage one and that's a lot of alpha in our brain which is 8 to 11 Hertz activity and is it a quieting down or a revving up of the mind it's a I guess it would be considered perhaps a quieting down there's actually no change in neural activity but it's a change in pattern of activity um so let me ask sorry and we will go through all these stages but I find this very interesting so the brain doesn't end up conserving energy while we sleep which would have been my sort of childhood thought yes oh my brain is going offline right but is it I'm assuming the difference between conscious activity and subconscious activity or even during the day is my brain activity primarily subconscious that's a difficult one we don't really have a good physiological definition for what subconscious is interesting yeah so um I think our subconscious is working all day long in terms of what we Define as the subconsciousness just thoughts and feelings and gut feelings and emotions that occur beneath our perception of how we feel or what we're thinking um if I showed you a brain scan of somebody spaced out yeah they're totally in the default mode Network yeah they're driving to work but they're not really aware because they've done it so many times and I showed you a brain scan of somebody in phase one maybe is the closest would you be able to tell the difference like is it obvious this person is daydreaming versus this person is sleeping yeah yeah they're different yeah and even daydreaming I mean it depends on what you're daydreaming about right um what your brain is going to be doing which parts of your brain are going to be activated interestingly the very first research project I ever did before I was involved in Brain Research I was just working in a research lab was for pilots who were flying a really difficult flight simulator at Northrop aircraft Corporation and these are really good test pilots and we gave them a really difficult problems to solve while they were flying uh flying the simulator and then we'd freeze and blank out their screen and ask them questions about their awareness or situational awareness about how much fuel they had and all of that where the bogeys were how far away they were from base and those that were doing the best had the most of this Alpha Rhythm which is the dozing Rhythm so while flying yes the ones that were doing the best were the ones that were most relaxed in their brain pattern and the ones that were doing the worst were the ones that looked most alert awake engaged involved that's really isn't that interesting now would you call that the Zone yeah I think that's what you would call that they were in the zone that's really interesting so needless to say I'm not a fighter pilot uh I don't play professional sports but I do play video games and every now and then you find yourself in a position where you can just read the map effortlessly you know where people are going to be it feels so different it feels awesome first of all yeah your reflexes your ability to just Intuit where things are going to be happening at that's really interesting that that most closely mimics the first stage of sleep I would not have guessed that I know very interesting okay so stage one we're in we're in an alpha wave phase yeah uh which you would liken to being more relaxed relaxed yeah okay but we're we are asleep at that point no it's called stage one because it's a transition between wakefulness and sleep actually we have found in my research lab that one of the things that turns off one of the first things that turns off quote unquote off or changes mode is the hippocampus which is involved with learning and memory and that goes to sleep minutes before the rest of our brain does even though in the night I'm going to be consolidating my memories yeah so I say turned off but in fact it's not turning off it's just turning off to learning new things coming in from the outside world okay so that was one of the questions I was going to ask you later but this now feels like the perfect time can we learn things at night could I play a calculus book and wake up uh better at math it would not be no that would not be a good idea just there's nothing that you can do if you're sleeping that's awesome you really want to turn off to the outside world in order to consolidate the things that you learned all day long so there is a just like there's a time for everything there's a season for everything you want to turn off what's coming in from the outside world so that you can process what you already have interesting I have a conundrum for you okay I work a lot while I love what I do it can be very stressful and in uh the last few years I've been working so much that it was just completely disrupting my sleep and it was miserable it would take me eight hours to get five hours of sleep I'm just really not fun and there were times where if I was getting my hair cut if I stopped moving I would just start falling asleep yeah absolutely miserable I hated it yeah and I'm somebody who prioritizes sleep so I'm not I don't have an alarm set nothing I'm going to bed but I just could not shut off my brain I couldn't get into that where I was I felt relaxed enough to to fall asleep or I would fall asleep but then wake up after one to two cycles and then I would be awake for two hours is about normal right and then so by the time I fell back to sleep I'm just I did not feel good I was tired all the time so one day I don't remember what made me try this I started listening to an audio book out like a light yeah I would wake up fall back to sleep within 30 seconds I mean just magically delicious right yeah but I've got the outside world coming in yeah so it's not a pressing out these so I think what that did that audiobook is it helped distract your mind from the loop it was in like oh I've got to do this and this and I I did I tell somebody to do this or um so it distracts your mind from those alerting and alarming things that were keeping you awake and instead Let The Trail Of Consciousness follow this story that wasn't going to affect you one way or another and that was enough to allow your parasympathetic nervous system to relax as you relaxed and enjoyed the story and then sleep could just take over and I do the same thing I don't do podcasts because I'm interested in every story um I just I just play a kind of a Mindless little video game on you know a math video game and your mind doesn't spark back up when you put that down and go to sleep you know um no you know I just basically think the video game for making me sleepy and just I don't do a lot I don't you know take my thing and walk to another room and put it away I just lay it down and sometimes I don't even get that far it falls onto my pillow yes okay so stage one alpha relaxed we can begin to tune out the outside world and our alerting mind begins to quiet the hippocampus switches into some other internal mode and could you can you actually see the hippocampus change its wave pattern electrical what do we yeah is it a wave pattern or an electric it is a electrical wave pattern okay so same yeah got it okay and then how long are we in stage one so we're in stage four just for a few minutes you know five minutes very quick yeah yeah very quick and then we go into stage two which has um called K complexes and spindles which are bigger waves that where all the neurons are silent and then they're all active at the same time and then spindles are a little buzz of activity that come once every 10 seconds or so and they last about one and a half seconds something like that it's 10 to 15 cycles per second and it starts small and it builds up and then it goes small again unless you smoke weed and then you get these weird monster spindles yes that we're unsure what they do which will be something I'm sure we will get into later because I have a wife that likes to partake yeah yeah uh okay so the the brain is pulsing which is very interesting that's is that because of the need for the glial system to clean out yeah that's actually mostly happening in the deeper stage of sleep we call it okay so this is different yeah this is stage three so stage two is what we're talking about now so what's the pulsing then so the K complexes are um we don't know exactly in in animals they are married to something that also starts during that state which is called p waves these are Big excitatory drives from inside of our own brain stem that go to our forebrain so um K complexes and p waves may or may not there's some controversy be the same thing but they're big glutamatergic drives it also happens because our Thalamus which is our Gateway of Consciousness it's kind of sitting right in the middle of our brain and allows the outside information to reach our cortex it relays it it starts to close and become more hyper polarized more negative and what does that mean that means so when okay so our neurons are electrical as well as chemical and the inside of the neuron is very negative related to the outside the electrical potential is very negative and when outside information comes in it's excitatory so it actually makes the inside of the cell more positive and then when it gets to a threshold when it gets so positive it gets to a threshold which is negative 55 millivolts then it fires an action potential a whole lot of things that are voltage dependent open up so sodium channels open allow a lot of sodium to come in to really depolarize and that's called an action potential and those each one of those are the ways one neuron communicates with the next neuron and how our whole brain works together and why we can see these electrical patterns because the more neurons that are involved in firing at the same time the more our electric roads that are out here on our school can see this positive potential go by and then as they're all filing silent and becoming negative together you can see this negative potential and so um do you uh so if you had to guess is there a metronome effect going on is it trying to synchronize something it's um it is kind of like a metronome in that it's also a positive feedback so you have the all the neurons firing at the same time and then there's a bunch of other things happen once they fire they there are things like clothes that are deactivated and then everything becomes negative together and then when it becomes negative enough there are other voltage dependent channels that open and all becomes positive and then do we have this kind of synchronicity when we're awake in some places yeah for example if you're walking or doing anything rhythmic moving your body there's a lot of synchronous in your spinal cord that allows that to be a rhythmic normal movement fishes swimming um they're so interesting but we don't yet know why that metronome is going off we don't but when I started 30 something years ago we really didn't we thought maybe it was just something that was a signature of something else going on but now we know that actually that synchronous firing and synchronous silence that happens during this non-rem we call it non-rem slate stage of sleep could be the thing that actually cleans our brain and these p waves these big excitatory p waves Target a different part of our brain than our Thalamus during wakefulness targets and the part of the brain that it targets is out in in the parts of the brain that form our schema where cortex talks to Cortex instead of outside world talking to and this is coming from the brain stem comes from the brainstem The excitatory Urge comes from the brain stem and it targets out these cortical cortical connection okay so I imagine this is very conserved over Evolution yeah it appears to be um yeah zebrafish uh we there are animals that don't have much of a cortex but they still have sleep that's really interesting so there's probably something very ancient very primordial that this is going to end up being tied to versus something in the neocortex which is more a higher level cognition probably not memory um or would it be because I guess every animal would need to go hey I learned this food is here this movement where that thing's a predator yeah okay so even fruit flies completely false in my apartment no no I mean they it may the reason why we can't measure the same brainwave activities through to a in a fruit fly is because even though they have a lot of neurons that help them move and interact with the world they're not layered in the same way so in our cortex all the neurons are lined up kind of and then these electrical potentials that I'm talking about work like a battery you know you um when the battery is lined up the right way you can see the electrical potential but if they're all jumbled relative to one another even though they might all be firing and Silent at the same time the the way that the electricity is Flowing is this way in this neuron and this way and that neuron waves cancel each other out so we can't see it but right okay so that's stage two um is what stage is memory consolidation happening versus forgetting I assume there are different stages yeah um so that stage two is part of consolidation those big excitatory waves and those sleep spindles where is where our cortex is telling other parts of our cortex or our hippocampus which is kind of the short-term memory structure is telling our cortex hey this is what I learned today and and teaching it um and so that happens in that stage two in stage three uh that's when we have those big slow waves that sweep through regularly stage two we have those K complexes which are big waves but they come you know once every 10 seconds or so and sleep spindles which come once every 10 seconds or so but in that deep slow wave stage of sleep they're coming all the time there's still each one comes once a second or so but um but that's probably where they're all firing together and they're all quiet together and that's creates when the neuron fires not only these are electricity and neurochemicals that are released but also when it fires when all the sodium is rushing into the cell the cell expands because it brings water with it and so it's actually all the cells are expanding and Contracting at the same time which could create a pump like action pumping out the debris and the waste into our lymphatic system to clean our brain and that yeah that is probably one of the functions of stage three specifically yeah of stage three specific okay so when we think about neurodegenerative diseases um you hear a lot about uh beta amyloid plaques building up Tau proteins things like that one where do those come from and B it seems like because I know we were talking earlier but also knowing your research that as we get into like really bad neurodegenerative diseases they're also going to massive sleep disruption yeah um so yeah what what are the amyloid plaques what are the Tau proteins why do they matter why do we have to clean them out every night do they serve a function are they all bad like what's up guys it's Tom bilyu and if you're anything like me you're always looking for ways to level up your mindset your business and your life in general that's exactly why I started impact Theory a podcast that brings together the world's most successful and inspiring people to share their stories and most importantly strategies for success and now it's easier than ever to listen to impact theory on Amazon music whether you're on the go or chilling at home you can simply open up the Amazon music app and search for impact Theory with Tom bilyu to start listening right away if you really want to take things to the next level just ask Alexa hey Alexa play impact Theory with Tom bilyeu on Amazon music now playing impact impact Tom bilyu on Amazon music and boom you're instantly plugged into the latest and greatest conversations on mindset Health finances and Entrepreneurship get inspired get motivated and be legendary with impact theory on Amazon music let's do this no no no we need them we we couldn't survive or learn or do well without them it's kind of like I guess you could sort of think of it as making the mess on our desk as we work during the day right and um we need that to do the business that we're doing but we also need to clean it up um every night so that the next day we can come in and be organized and efficient and know where things are so um so it's a normal part of being awake because phosphorylating this towel and it helps us to carry things where they need to go same with amyloid proteins we have to have them but it's one that become a mess misfolded and a mess that if we don't clean it up it starts to Gunk up our office of our brain and then we can't find anything and um our neurons aren't working like they're supposed to because it's less and less efficient that stuff is very interesting to me especially as it relates to metabolic disease and whether Alzheimer's is metabolic disease in the brain I'm curious before we get into stage four how much of what's going on in here is tied to metabolism because I know if you mess up your sleep you're going to notice it immediately in your metabolic response it really is the first thing that gets messed up is your metabolism and you get four in the morning you get hungry for junk food because your body says I'm not efficiently processing you know energy anymore and I need more of it so the one of the first things that happens when we go to sleep is we convert the free adenosine that's been freed through the process of of um metabolism um it gets built back into ATP which have these packets of energy that our whole body uses so that is a very important part and when we sleep deprive ourselves our adenosine builds up and up and up and up the longer awake that's what caffeine does it blocks The receptors for this adenosine so we don't know how long we've been awake and we don't feel the signal that we're sleeping but it doesn't caffeine doesn't help us to change free adenosine back to ATP and that happens very slowly and inefficiently when we're awake but really well and quickly when we're asleep that's interesting so basically you're is is the adenosine like a hormone where the body's like I'm gonna do this because I need you to go back to sleep and so it's just sort of a clock and it just produces it and it knows ah you'll hit this sense that I must go to sleep and then cool cool like it's done a job I'm gonna take it all back and then okay you're awake and I'm gonna pump it back out or does it have some other function and sleep is just a byproduct it's it's freed up because of the process of energy use so um ATP adenosine trisphosphate when we um utilize the ATP it basically kicks that off it kicks that off interesting and the next and then it goes from triphosphate to die diphosphate to monophosphate to to just free adenosis and then we grab it again and we grab it again wow mitochondria are working hard to talk about a very simple thing that I have never put together okay that makes a lot of sense uh that's why power naps are power naps because you can quickly grab some of that free adenosine turn it into ATP that is so interesting okay that makes better than better than a cup of coffee because it's actually building background energy okay so the cup of coffee is bamboozling you so you don't feel that you're tired but the power nap is actually creating ATP with the free adenosine so you're lowering the level that tells you that you're tired yes and you're actually producing energy yeah very interesting but I also know that you've talked about that some people naps don't work yeah so why that seems weird we don't know we don't know yet at um it's also true that some people don't get all of the health benefits of exercise they're just a variety of people out there yeah I know really yeah I've never heard that yeah yeah some people you know they can exercise all they want they could train for a marathon and they're they're it's not doing the repair and benefits for the body at other people because so that's really interesting I should not be surprised everything we're so individualized different from that is horrifying to think that you could be doing all of that because I absolutely despise working out I could be doing all that work and not seeing all of the benefit I'm sure you get some but yeah I'm sure you get this very interesting yeah okay so uh there's more to go into there but I think it's probably better to wrap up stage four and then we can sort of circle back and get into some of these things especially what we can do to optimize this stuff right um stage three stage four they're really the same thing they've been collapsed into one um because so you guys can talk about four stages anymore oh no the fourth stage being REM sleep but it's not called stage four it's just called REM rapid eye movement sleep yeah so you're still technically in stage three no you've just completely switched out of stage three and you're in a completely thing entirely REM sleep is also called paradoxical sleep because our cortex looks like we're awake and there's so much activity is that why it's not considered stage four it's just so different yeah stage one two three are all kind of sort of degrees of depth are are Thalamus that thalamic gate becomes less and less aware of the world outside of us um I don't know that's maybe a misnomer too it's not even stage two and stage three are so different from one another to in terms of what neurotransmitters are there and what's not there so we did say oh this is how you're marching into sleep but in fact we now know as of recently that stage two and stage three are entirely different as different from one another as wakefulness is from any other state as well yeah okay that's unexpected yeah okay and then stage four is different than all of them yes and it looks like we're more wakeful so yeah describe what is going on in rem yeah why is it so weird why do we dream I mean this is the weird one right we're again closed to the outside world instead we're internally generating uh our own reality and that reality is unreal you know it's some things that can't happen in the outside world what we do know is we are in turn generating an internal State this dream state all of these dreams and what those dreams allow us to do is things that we can't do during wakefulness fly or um um you know become monsters or fight monsters or play out all kinds of scenarios in fast kind of forward motion that we can't do and if we did we might put ourselves at risk but because we're safe in our beds um not acting out our dreams we can safely do these things and so um yeah it helps our brain to expand and be imaginative and work through complicated problems and put things together that don't make any sense during wakefulness when our logic and judgment decision-making brain is you know Reigns well hopefully Reigns um instead we can play out all kinds of crazy scenarios that may allow us to put things together that we wouldn't otherwise that'd be interesting so is are you saying that your hypothesis is that by having what I'll call a narrative component I don't know if you'd use those words but by having a narrative component we go into a more creative state where we can connect ideas that somehow when we wake is going to be used well yeah so that's the really cool thing about this dream state is our brains are learning we are it's learning from the dream state in the dream state we are learning and our brain is learning from itself but not in the way that I'm consolidating memories in quote-unquote learning this is a different type of learning it's it's it's an it's you're creating new knowledge but from the things you already know uh well we can measure the synapses and the synaptic strengths and which synapses are strengthened and which are weakened interesting so I'm when you say learning you mean mechanistically yeah neurons are wiring together yeah in the same way that they would if I I want to learn a math problem or how to solve a math problem and those neurons would be strengthened yeah I mean it's really powerful they call it plastic State and so it's just as plastic as when we're most alert and weight learning the best in during the daytime but the one thing that you can do during that dream state you can't do during wakefulness is you can do Erasure so you can delete and eliminate Pathways that no longer work for us or are redundant and that happens during REM only during REM sleep yeah I don't understand why that would happen while I'm telling myself some acid-induced Bizarro narrative I mean I don't remember many of my dreams but the one I remember is they're so weird that I'm just like yeah how is this the time and place that I'm going hey you know that thing you don't use that anymore let's prune that out yeah do we have any sense of why those two happen at the same time yeah I think it's because um well one thing that needs to happen is we need to we need to prune those redundant pieces of information away otherwise we would just saturate our brains with irrelevant pieces of information and even wrong things that we should tag at least to say yes I used to believe this but now I know it's wrong so it's REM sleep that you can reduce the weight of those things so it's not the first thing you think of when you know someone asks you you know where did you park your car yesterday it's um or last night it's not the place you parked it last week or the month before it's where you parked it yesterday so you need to prune those things away so so you know what's current and what's here now so it's the novelty encoding parts of your brain that need that get pruned and the reason why that's possible is because that's the state in which uh brain stem area called the locus cerrillas which provides norepinephrine another word for it is noradrenaline to our brain that only lets us it's only puts us in the go mode it only puts us in the strength and strength and strengthen when we're awake when we're asleep it's gone and so that's the only time during REM sleep it's when it's really gone and you can say yes to these things and know to these things be selective it's kind of like you know during the daytime you you have a housewarming party and your guests are bringing all kinds of things into your house right house plants and and dishes and all of that and yes you accept all of these things when you're awake um but you unwrap them in your um when you build proteins in that stage two and stage three sleep and then during REM sleep you put them where they go and you throw out the things that they replace at least new things replace man this is so interesting to me I have a hypothesis for you okay let me know this is going to be so absurd but I love talking to people that really know their stuff so you can correct me where I go wrong uh when I'm teaching students about business yeah I'm always trying to get them to understand that you have all these dots your Market what you're trying to sell them what you think they want how you think you're going to get there the state of the economy all this stuff and your job is to connect those dots with a narrative which I'll call your schema for how to move your business forward right the problem is the only thing I can tell you is that your schema is wrong but you need one in order to move forward with conviction yeah and if you don't move forward with conviction then you'll fall prey to what most businesses fall pray to which is doing nothing is the only sin so if you do nothing you'll get bowled over by all the other people that find a way to move forward with like real conviction yeah and so when you are getting your team on board you're gonna only talk narrative you're going to talk about how the dots connect but when you're alone you need to come back out to just dots and see if there's another way to connect these in a more efficient narrative yeah and so getting them to understand the brain is a predictive engine and when you are able to predict the outcome of your behaviors you're closer to ground truth when you can't predict the outcome of your behaviors you have a flaw in the model yeah man I'm grasping at straws here but this makes a lot of internal sense to me that if in the REM State what my brain is doing is going your schema is held together with this narrative yeah but for a minute I need to come back out to just dots there's no logic and so when I hit that point where it's just dots I'm having these weird dreams I got a dream Once where it was raining corpses no idea what that meant um but I'm I'm back out to there's there's no coherent logical cohesion between these right but my brain is now removing things that haven't been serving me yeah and then is going to reconsolidate all this back into a updated schema When I Wake yeah exactly I think that's really interesting if that holds true like that really makes sense to me from just how the world works yeah very interesting very interesting okay so now talk to me is there a correlation between either or both schizophrenia and a dreamlike state or psychedelics in a dreamlike state yeah yes the answer is yes um so schizophrenia is long-interested sleep researchers because it's the hallucinations are so much like what hallucinations we experience When We're Dreaming and so it was thought to be a a dream like state right um interestingly the only real difference that you can see in the brains of people with schizophrenia well there are two things one is during wakefulness your gamma which is the cortical cortical connectivity is slightly different in frequency it's just it changes a little bit almost as though we're being more driven by an internal cortical cortical connection like we are during REM sleep and then the second is we don't have those beautiful sleep spindles that I talked about so people explain to people so spindles are way too connected to intelligence yeah I always get very uneasy with stuff like this or I want to know can I can I yeah make more of them right well the reason why you probably get uncomfortable is because we don't really have a good grasp of what intelligence is we just um we know there are different kinds of intelligences and we know that our ways of testing them are very very flawed but but intelligence is broadly speaking what you talked about earlier which is a way to absorb information process it form a schema and use that schema the next time you encounter the world so it's a way to um use what you know in a very efficient fashion perhaps is the way you could think about it if you had to guess if you could turn a dial and increase the amount of spindles that somebody has would they get smarter yeah I yes however that qualify that it's not just spindles like you said cannabis you know increases the length of spindles and can almost replace all of REM sleep with spindles but it's what's going on during those spindles the timing is everything so it's when neurons fire in relation to spindles it's the neurochemicals that are present or apple absent during spindles that allows us to reshape our schema and so um so it's not just the rhythm itself it's what's going on in the background of that Rhythm or on top of those rhythms or because of those rhythms that's that's the important thing so I I think I'm a little wary of devices for example that's going to externally cause your brain to cut to fire in a 10 to 15 Hertz spindle fashion because if the rest of your brain isn't doing what it's supposed to do it's not in the state it's supposed to be in it's not going to do you any good and in fact it probably could do more harm than good it's interesting I've heard you talk about that then you know the brain one the systems are never that simple it's like there's redundancies in the systems and uh depending on context it could be doing seeming to do the same thing but in fact it's actually doing the reverse so all very very complicated but going back to schizophrenia and psychedelics yeah um so what have we found is it a dreamlike state and that's why they're hallucinating and the wires are just getting crossed or I think a dream like State because that stage two sleep spindle State isn't doing what needs to happen which is updating your schema with the information that you learned during the day so why would that result in hallucination so yeah I I just had a really fascinating conversation with an undergraduate at UCLA who's really interested in schizophrenia and sleep and it might be that your distal cortico cortical communication is happening without instruction so it's without that instruction say where the hippocampus can tell the brain this is what we learned today this is now we gotta tag this with false and this is true and we've got to refresh and all of that happening during that those sleep spindles when the cortex is teaching the I mean the hippocampus is teaching the cortex what it knows instead you're staying in perhaps a rem-like state in that you're doing all these a free associations you're backing out you see the dots and not the schema anymore like you said and but that's happening without the organization step of this is what I've learned today first so so the brain is talking to itself but the brain doesn't recognize I'm talking to myself yeah and so it's misinterpreting this is a signal coming from the outside yeah when in reality it's a signal coming from the inside yeah yeah that was the latest Revelation that I had um with this undergraduate it's people with schizophrenia the more schizotypic they are the more they can tickle themselves and you know that's revelatory explain what that means well because we can't tickle ourselves because when we do this to ourselves we are we have what's called an efference copy so our brain our motor cortex says I'm about to I'm doing this I'm getting close to my shoulder and we can expect it and the thing about tickles that it's an unexpected well one of the things about tickles it's unexpected and so um so we can't but if you don't have that feedback from the outside your brain telling you this is coming from inside of me and not from the outside that give me the chills yeah isn't that amazing so the they can tickle themselves so they have completely lost track is this inside or outside whoa do we have any sense of how you re-establish that connection I that one that's a micro circuit question and that's something that my lab is also looking to in a lot of other labs too but um so there are sort of two compartments of our neurons the the that are listening to the outside world uh so one the proximal compartment that's really close to the cell body is where the outside world talks to our our cortex and puts that new information and then the distal parts of the antenna which are called dendrites are where the cortical cortical information comes in and normally when we're awake our whole brain chemistry weights um things to be more attuned to what's coming in from the outside world and yes there can be definitely thankfully uh some modification of that based on our schema and the distal dendrites information where cortex is talking to Cortex but mostly the two compartments are very separated from one another they're physically separated from another they're chemically separated from another they're anatomically connect connectivity wise separate from each other and um and then during sleep during this REM State and the spindle State we switch from that internally or that externally focused novelty encoding uh proximal close to fell body circuit to paying more attention to what's going on from on in the distal cortical cortical circuit and so and what mitigates that what switches us from this to that is thing called interneurons which are inhibitory interneurons which during wakefulness kind of inhibit that cortical cortical input to some degree in a in a very regulated and rhythmic fashion that's what sets up that gamma Rhythm that I talked about that's different in people with schizophrenia is these interneurons and it's really these interneurons that seem to not be as viable in people with schizophrenia so if somehow you can restore the health of these interneurons and restore how they're connected with the circuit they can switch us from external to internal in a fashion that makes sense with what's actually going on in the world around and have we seen any impact on diet is anybody looking at that of course diet affects everything you know neurotransmitters um are and the cofactors the coenzymes are all part of that I don't know myself of any studies about diet but one thing that will definitely cause people with schizophrenia or the tendency to have schizophrenia to tip them over into a break is alcohol um and doesn't weed also have I've heard people say like yo-yo yeah yeah be very careful yeah and it's probably because it's messing up with those sleep spindles that we talked about and what's exactly what alcohol is doing alcohol no alcohol inhibits the um stage it it interferes with our sleep it makes our sleep not do what it's supposed to do so during those deep slow waves of slow wave sleep of the timing of things isn't right that alcohol affects our interneurons big time it's a Gaba Agonist which is an the neurotransmitter that imaginurons use and so it falsely clamps things down when they shouldn't be clamped down takes our forebrain off line which is why we become so it's part of the fun yeah part of the fun yeah but um but yeah so and and so it interferes with our sleep and I think if your sleep is already compromised when you have schizophrenia you don't have good sleep spindles in the first place it might be that you're able to hang on to reality just barely of tooth and nail by the few sleep spindles that you get and then alcohol wipes those out and so then you go from the edge of barely hanging on to tip over to the side of um hallucinations and oh that's so interesting this is a random side note but um I had a friend have a friend whose brother is paranoid schizophrenic and he said he spent like a year he had to move back home spent a year tracking his brother down finally found him his brother was convinced like the French or Italian government were after him and he was you know running from like underpass to underpass trying to like keep away from the satellites being able to read his mind well wait though against stranger uh he finds his brother gets him on back on his medication his brother then develops secondary depression and while taking the medication is able to explain this is less fun than being a paranoid schizophrenic because at least then I mattered then like the governments were after me I was like of central importance and every day my life mattered and I was running he stops taking his medication and and goes back onto the street right and I was like whoa yeah like there the the brain is complicated yeah and to think that I mean look it clearly is there's something just misfiring it's it's not working the way that it should yeah but I kind of got what he was saying oh I was like wow yeah to feel like I I matter more than anybody else and like everything is about me and governments are after me right I was like there that's spy versus spy yeah yeah I don't think we as humans need to matter to the whole world we just need I'm not trying to celebrate or say that schizophrenia sounds amazing not at all but I think this touches on a very basic human need which is that we need to matter to one another we need to matter to somebody and I think that's as a parent that's the best thing we can give for a child is the knowledge that we matter we matter to them at least and that we can make a difference in the world that our actions matter that you know we can make the world a better place and that they hope and expect us to do that and so that connection between it I mean uh we are social animals and just like other social animals we're not the only social animals in the world there are lots of social animals we need our clan we need each other and when we feel like we don't matter and nobody cares depression definitely sets in I think this was a major problem during the pandemic when we were isolated from each other especially those people who lived alone I mean wow that's we are social animals that is a fundamental part of who we are thank God for the telephone thank God for Zoom thank God for that we could at least see each other in some way and tell each other that we matter to one another but I I totally get what this friend of yours or this you know felt uh that's crazy yeah we and I think that maybe way one way to help people stay on their meds is let them know that they do matter show them that they do matter it's really well even if they're not the central of this Central you know character of this conspiracy yeah of this big government conspiracy if you matter to somebody your nieces and nephews you know your brothers and sisters your mother and father I think that could that could make the difference all right let's go dark for a second all right if we had to break somebody like really break them isolate them or deprive them of sleep uh I think sleep would do it faster can you kill somebody by not letting them sleep yeah that's bananas yeah well because oh gosh no one's never done well but I know of in humans um in other mammals it's five weeks something whoa I can't that does not sound fun no so what ends up happening what's the mechanism by which you want to break it's um because sleep has so many functions it's not even clear what what the mechanism is but do they get organ failure um yeah yeah multiple organ failure immune system degeneration lesions um sepsis um all kinds of different things would kill you it just kind of actually kind of like covid and other very bad viruses they target different organs depending on who you are and what state they're in so um so sleep deprivation will Target different organs and where you're most vulnerable will be the one that that hurts you faster wow what what does that process look like because you don't go from I'm a little tired to I'm dead like do they start hallucinating do they start um well people well I mean people have self-deprived or have been unfortunately deprived of sleep and hallucinations are part of it yeah um hunger oh um your metabolism goes haywire and you get super hungry and you'll continue to lose weight you'll lose weight with long-term sleep deprivation yeah even if you're eating yeah yeah whoa um so there was one women's magazine who talked to this researcher and said hey you know even though I could eat whatever I want and still lose weight if I lose anything no but she'll be ugly because your skin doesn't you know refresh and renew yeah I mean you'll be cranky and and just not look good not feel good it's it's it's not a good thing um and then type 2 diabetes insulin regulation goes Haywire one night a full sleep deprivation will set you on the path toward type 2 diabetes so um yeah you want to get your sleep no joke yeah I think actually probably the Nobel prize-winning discovery about the function of sleep being that it's important for every everything living creature is that it's it's metabolism I think it's the mitochondria and the repair of the mitochondria is that you're saying that will happen I will I think yeah I know a few researchers that are looking to sleep in mitochondria and I think that's that's the where the money is I mean cognition yes we all want to learn better and understand better but I think the essential life-sustaining function of sleep has to do with energy that's interesting so knowing the little bit about mitochondria that I know they have their own DNA uh what's going on at the level of sleep that would impact this little organelle that should have its own setup in its own system it repairs itself so why why does my as if I could exist without them but why does my sleep affect mitochondria so profoundly that you see a Nobel Prize coming yeah well okay so think of think of sleep as I think of it as a washing machine um if you don't or if you don't clean your clothes ultimately they'll get gunked up heavy dirty won't do their won't do their insulation function they won't help you function if you get sleep but it's messed up it's like putting your clothes in the washing machine but interrupting the cycle putting on the clothes soaking wet or whatever so one of the functions of sleep is to actually repair our DNA and if we can't do that when we're awake we just can't so we need to put it in the washing machine and we need to do the things that we do DNA repair isn't happening like at all times and it's primarily yeah well no interesting yeah so I understand how the brain cleans itself with that the pump that you're talking about where I'm basically expanding and contrasting and when I contract it it's um pulling things in and then when I expand it's letting everything wash out yeah so that I get how there's a mechanistic thing and that I could only do that when I basically put my body down so that I'm not going to fall off something or whatever while my brain is going through the cycle but at the DNA cellular level is there some resource that the cell has to do while it's awake and that it stops doing it yeah there's it's like like again like the washing machine there are things that need to be coordinated and together and timed well that metronome yeah it really is it's it's timing is everything um so things are happening during waking that allows wakefulness to be waking like norepinephrine allows us to be alert and awake and attending to the outside world um and then and when it's present while we sleep which happens sometimes um in insomnia especially stress related insomnia you can have sleep but your norepinephrine system is still going post-traumatic stress disorder also um you're in your sleep all of the elements that need to be there to do the job efficiently aren't there or things are in the way they're in the way that shouldn't be in the way so it's less efficient and doing its jobless well okay so now going back to mitochondria and the Energy System um sleep playing a primary role in that so I've heard people say that fat loss happens at night you think it happens when you're exercising but in reality it doesn't what what do you think is going on with the energy system at night that is so profoundly important well I actually don't know and that's why I think it's in the future yeah um so guessing there are different things never hormones cortisol growth hormone all of these things change with the sleep wake cycle and with a circadian cycle so again it's also better to go to sleep when you're circadian Cycles and your um sleep needs are are joined at the same time so better to sleep at night and expose ourselves to light during the day to help coordinate our circadian and sleep needs together so growth hormone is one of those things that gets released in a big bolus when we're asleep at the right time and if we miss that we won't have that big bonus of growth hormone and Bill bolus does a different thing than eeking out over time so even if it was the same amount over a 24-hour period very different impact than the same amount primarily over an eight-ish hour yeah and you can understand that because for example the reproductive cycle also depends on boluses of hormones being released at the right time if you get a bolus released at a time when the rest of your system isn't ready it won't produce for you know for fertile situation and um and if instead of a bolus you just eke out a little bit all the time you also won't develop the follicle and release the egg that sort of thing so there's a difference in a bolus versus just a little bit over time that um yeah and it has to be done in a coordinated fashion yeah that coordination thing that's coming up a lot yeah I had never really thought about that before that makes a lot of sense take the body offline coordinate everything all at once hey quick quick it's kind of like uh Disneyland I don't know why this is coming to me when they you know switch over all their lights and they turn on the Christmas season or whatever it's like all at night everybody descends really fast well nobody's there yeah yeah that's right if you tried all those workers you tried to do that with all those workers while the guests were in the park and it would be chaos right people couldn't find their rides the workers couldn't get to you know take down the big things they needed to take at down and bring in the big trucks to bring in the big Christmas tree or whatever at Disneyland you need that to be timed right exactly yeah very very interesting okay so talk to me about optimized sleep we it literally can kill you if you don't get it so how do we make sure that we're not just getting it but we're really getting it in the right way the right amounts yeah how do we prepare well you know our bodies are built to optimize our own physiology so if you listen to your body you'll be all right which so few people do myself included yes until I really started taking it seriously right yeah um if you're studying being calculus and you're trying to absorb this information and you get overwhelmed with a sense of sleepiness listen to your body put your head down on your textbook if you want to take a nap because during that time your brain is doing what it needs to do which is start to put these this new information into your schema and build it and if you deny yourself of that you won't learn as well similarly if you're feeling sick and you want to go to bed go to bed don't make yourself don't just take a bunch of pills and make yourself go through the day because that sleep is actually doing what your body needs which is restoring your immune system and helping it to work well similarly after getting a vaccine you know people feel a little sick often and and want a good night's sleep get that good night's sleep because it's been shown that if you don't get a good night's sleep after you get a vaccine it's 50 as effective if anything so listen listen to your body do what it says to do now I will say there was a a time when I was I don't know in my early 20s where my body told me stay up later stay up later stay up later and it got to the point where I had to set an alarm to make a 10 p.m movie oh wow I felt so weird yeah now thankfully my body then told me yeah not seeing the sunlight is very weird you need to flip your schedule and so I went back but that was really me doing what felt natural yeah and my schedule got pushed back back well I think that's because you weren't exposing yourself to the outside light in the morning like when it needs to be so so but that means that people can listen to their body and get in the wrong place yeah so when we think about sleep hygiene when we think about the optimal like what you would do with your kids to make sure that they were on track how would you have people shape themselves is it like the mornings coming to bed at a certain time yeah and I think you know back when we were more agrarian culture that wasn't a problem I mean we just couldn't do that much at night now we have computers and false lights and all of this stuff so yeah we can wedge ourselves into a into a bad place but yeah get outside in the morning expose yourself to that outside light there's nothing stronger than the sunlight even when it's behind a cloud um in resetting our circadian system does it count if you're looking out the window it yeah I mean just think of in terms of film you studied film right or you wanted to you you know the light coming through a window is great um for a camera versus false lights you have to spend a lot of energy to try and reproduce the same amount of it of light so does the light need to um actually touch your skin because it's my understanding that you do some of the UV light gets bounced back by glass and so that getting outside does make some difference I don't know how much amount you know what getting outside helps for a lot of other things that like converting to vitamin D that we can use um but the photons it's actually not UV it's blue light interestingly 470 um nanometers is that what it is that is the wavelength of that blue light that really activates our our eyes and that doesn't get filtered unless we have a blue light filter on our glass so um so yeah so that still would there might be other things the Sun hitting your skin it matters but you're still going to get that alertness signal just by getting enough blue light in your eyes yeah okay yeah um do you think it matters like time of day I've heard huberman and other people point out that like light is actually sort of qualitatively different early in the morning that sends certain signals to your brain yeah it does um so our circadian system is set so that when we see a bright blue light our circadian system says that's morning so if you keep yourself indoors all day long and don't go out until the evening and that's when you get the brightest light your circadian system says it's morning and it shifts everything so that that becomes your new morning your clock gets reset to that light is there any difference pre-sunrise post sunrise or doesn't matter so normally when you fall asleep at night say 10 o'clock at night you get a big surge of melatonin and that's the hormone of Darkness it's called um if you at that time expose yourself to Bright Light say you've just flown across the Atlantic and now what was 10 o'clock at night is now I don't know six o'clock in the morning um your your brain will reset your clock to that night it doesn't do it all at once it can't shift six hours at once with it it needs several days to do that but it will start switching things so that it says okay this is my new morning time and that's good we want that I went we want to be able to inform our brains of what time of day it is and reset that every day you have your actually own endogenous clock that will free run in absence of any light so if suddenly someone puts you into a cave you still would have a roughly 24-hour Rhythm it's generally most often a little more than 24 hours which is just very interesting I've heard that it's like 25 hours yeah not 25 that's a lot it's you know 24.1 to 12.4 yeah it's pretty close but a free running human will go to bed later and later and later every night just because our clocks are a little longer than the 24 hour Rhythm and so it needs to be reset every day yeah okay what time should we go to bed all right so if say you got up at a good time in the morning six seven why is that a good morning it well I'll say it's a good time just because that's when the Sun rises and that's when the rhythm of the earth is usually aligned for business and other things that you would need to do farming uh you know that's when you would be that's why it's a good time I mean actually if you're a shift worker and you work at night um don't go outside in the morning you want to keep yourself in darkness and just switch your whole circadian rhythm so that you expose yourself to Bright Light in the evening because that's when your circadian rhythm says okay this is morning and I'm going to be alert for the next 16 hours so don't shift workers though have a higher preponderance of cancer yeah but that's probably because they're incompletely able to do that so they've not quite switched over well and and that's often because unfortunately shift the shifts of shift work give them you know weekends off and so then then the weekend they want to be around their family we're social creatures they'll get up in the morning and and so every week your your circadian is going back and forth and back and forth or some crazy shift working jobs we'll have you four days on and three days off and um you know it's just that's not good so if you can actually set your whole life to this new time it's fine it's like you've moved to Europe I mean interesting it's fine now is there data around that because I would be very curious to see how the rates of cancer correlate to the rate the level of vitamin D yeah uh there are data there are data and so it doesn't matter this is really about if you fully shift your schedule you're going to be fine the rates of cancer are no not elevated anymore um so right if you fully sleep switch your schedule you'll you'll be okay you're all your clocks will be aligned now vitamin D is another question though that's another thing that you know that you get from the Sun you can take supplements though depends on how well you absorb those particular supplements what else you're taking in your nutrition at the same time and whether it blocks that absorption of vitamin D or not um so Orange Juice and vitamin D don't go together for some reason um in our guts yeah milk is fine um oil salt oil soluble things but water-soluble things don't no good yeah so um anyway so I would hypothesize that if you're able to replace everything that including social connections with that new schedule then hang out with other shift workers yeah have a shift working family okay so we assuming we get up at six or seven uh then we go to bed at so um so the healthy amount of sleep the healthiest on a population level is about seven to eight hours so seven and a half hours to eight hours with an adult children need more so even teenagers need more as our brains are developing we need there's a lot more demands on sleep that now that they need to they need but uh healthy adults about seven and a half eight if you put someone in a quiet dark room this is a study done at Wayne State University um and Henry Ford Hospital by Tim rears if you put someone in a semi-dark and quiet room with nothing else to do just a bed and them for 12 hours a day for a month every single day people will average out this is on average to 8 hours and 15 minutes of sleep per night and so you can't even oversleep you can't just say okay there's nothing else to do I'm just gonna sleep for 12 hours your body just won't do it you just body won't do it yeah you're it once your needs of sleep have been fulfilled you'll wake up so if you've been sleep deprived though you would have a period of time and that's what happened in this study the first week or two of the study people did sleep quite a lot more you know 10 hours of the 12 or more depending on how sleep deprived they were but once they fulfilled that sleep debt eight hours and 15 minutes and again on average some people slept a lot less some people slept a lot more but on average it was eight hours or 15 minutes so um so the population-based studies show that that if you just ask people in chunks do you sleep four hours five hours six hours seven eight nine nine plus those that have the lowest mortality were the ones that you know chose the seven o'clock so I mean seven hours eight hours also had low and six hours also had low but seven around seven was the best for for these adults um so does it need to be all at once can you break it up yeah I I there are a lot of cultures that break it up and they seem to be healthy um they have a nice snap in the middle of the siesta in the middle of the afternoon not too late to spoil their sleep that night um and they'll only sleep five or six hours during the during the night and then they'll make up with another hour and a half or so during the Siesta and that's fine and is it true that a sleep cycle is about 90 minutes yeah on average the first sleep cycle is more like 105 minutes or so 110 and then later in the night they're shorter but on average it's about 90 minutes all right so what happens then if you start pushing your sleep back is there any difference between so if I normally go to bed at 9 00 pm and then one night I go to bed at 11 PM is there going to be a problem yeah and does it matter if I just always go to bed at 11 am I going to be fine yeah again there's that alignment between circadian and homeostatic drive to sleep um yeah if you normally go to bed at 11 and wake up at um seven in the morning that's a healthy amount of sleep that's eight hours right and and then waking up at seven that's when you expose yourself to the bright light um versus those who go to bed at 10 wake up at six they're exposing myself to brighter light at six so the alignment between the Circadian and homeostatic needs for sleep are different so yeah so that's fine but pushing if I miss my normal bedtime by two hours am I creating a problem for myself you are creating a problem for yourself because you're misaligning you're circadian and homeostatic needs um and even if I get all so I normally go to bed at nine and I get seven hours of sleep I go to bed at 11. I still get seven hours of sleep you're saying just because I switched yeah what what is that knock-on effect well so so so say normally you wake up at six and you did that morning wake up at six but now you're going to bed at I don't know what to say ten to six eleven uh you can say you go to bed at midnight um that night two hours later you um your circadian rhythm is set to release your melatonin at the normal time you know 10 11 o'clock at night and once you're nicely asleep and it starts building up before that um and so it's trying to do that but you're still awake and you've got lights exposed and and so your melatonin release has been dampened and then when you go to bed two hours later you're already past that peak of your when your clock says you know let's release this melatonin and so your sleep will be missing that and you will miss all that growth hormone Surge and all of that that's why my wife says no matter what time I go to bed I wake up at the same time that makes sense because she's doing it as a one-off because what will end up happening my wife I will a little bit my wife more than me will stay up quite late on the weekends and so because the rest of the week she's on a normal cycle then she's like I still wake up at the same time yeah yeah it's her clock her circadian system waking her up very interesting so okay to encapsulate I want to get up at a good time I want to get light in my eyes um I'm gonna be all day I'm gonna be building up the adenosine which is going to cue me to go to sleep I want to go to sleep at roughly the same time uh because all of my circadian rhythms clocks everything are used to secreting the different hormones and everything at the same time and so if I'm awake like yeah hey you miss your window sorry um it's not like everything just shifts back on a one-off but I can shift my entire schedule if I want to but I do need to be getting somewhere around seven hours of sleep for optimal longevity yeah um and certainly I will say for Optimal Performance if you're not getting sleep it just feels so lame yeah God I hate being tired so much yeah do not understand people that chronically sleep deprive themselves that's just Madness yeah from where I'm sitting yeah yeah all right talk to me what's the difference between the Sexes do we have different sleep needs do we respond differently to perturbations yeah how does that all work out yeah and it seems to be true in every species we've studied there are sex differences and the amount and the pattern in which we sleep really yeah tied to hormones or what's causing them well you know yes in in so children as far as I know the studies that I've you know they before their hormones kick in they sleep about the same in their sleep needs are about the same once your hormones start kicking in um especially cycling hormones they definitely affect well so much including when we are sleepy and how much sleep we need so as we cycle as women cycle through the monthly cycle there will be times when sleep is more Elusive and that's probably adaptive and a good thing really yeah why I don't know maybe seeking a mate I don't know it's fast asleep by the way right yeah um and then uh or you know preparing a nest or whatever it is that's so interesting because it's across all animals yeah I'm very surprised by that so uh even flies really yes Whoa man I uh I don't have a hypothesis for that one so you don't male flies take more naps really yeah if they're already getting more consistent sleep why would they take more naps well so yeah I I I don't know it probably has something to do with the reproductive cycle and all the other things a female's body has to do in order to prepare the Next Generation to wake for that hour you know it's it's it's not like females flies don't sleep they sleep but there's other things that are going on also demanding there I've seen some of your um the talks that you give where you show people the different slides and this is where they're at and this part of their hormone cycle and it seems like there's only one part where they just diverge all of a sudden quite dramatically yeah what is that part of the cycle yeah and why what's going on what's Happening we don't know we don't know why um there's still there's a lot of people doing hormones and and sex differences and other people doing sleep in the two Fields haven't come together nearly as much as they need to so um yeah so during that one hormonal phase in rats which you know there's an equivalent in humans as well that's when our progesterone and estrogen levels are are very high and um that's when we're getting the least amount of sleep that's when in women We complain of the most insomnia but when you when they do sleep their sleep is super efficient and really high quality so that's when the spindles are aligning themselves across different areas of the brain that's when our slow waves which are cleaning our brain are even bigger in that high hormonal amplitude stage of our Cycles so yes we're getting less of it but it's more efficient which it might be another reason why different people need different amounts of sleep is maybe some people's sleep are is more efficient in doing the job faster than other people's I don't know it's very intriguing is there any research on a uh recent mother and how much sleep she gets like does she sleep more lightly because I know there are different phases of your sleep if you try to wake somebody up they won't wake up like they I know in rem they'll incorporate noises you've heard you say that kids will actually sleep through fire alarms yeah like loud fire alarms yeah um what do we know about that and sex differences is there anything yeah not much especially when you're talking about new mothers woefully small amounts of data um there's a lot of things that we don't know for example the cerebellum which is beneath our Thalamus it's um so we don't have that thalamic gate of Consciousness and our cerebellum it learns it's a really strong learning machine and it might be able to help us wake up even with small noises that are relevant to our survival or our Offspring survival so that might be why some people most people parents are lighter sleepers because they're cerebellum is attuned to the noises that their baby is making um and that's good that's adaptive right you you want that um not waking up when the fire alarm goes off those not super adapters that's children adults will and so again that's super dangerous for a kid like from an evolutionary standpoint you're out in the Serengeti we are not chilling in a house kids are very helpless in many many ways right so it is our our job as parents to be the ones to wake them up and carry them out of the burning house right um yeah but they have they have pictures just like all right you can stay knocked out I'm gonna do the things I need to do I know your parents are going to snatch you up yeah yeah interesting yeah is that preserved across species that young ones are way harder to wake up um yeah yeah the ones that you know social species interesting rats for example too yeah so it really might be tied to you know that somebody else is going to be looking out for you when you're an infancy yeah and on well it's it's it's not so much a confidence thing as there are some really important thing things going on essential things that are going on in your brain when you're developing so it's worth rolling the dice it's worth it you kind of have to in order for your brain to be continuing to develop and incorporating all the differences in the world we you know we're born into such different environments some of us are born with a silver spoon in our mouth some of us are born super poor on the dirt and have to walk miles to get water um so we really need to be able to adapt to the environment in which we're born and the bodies which are born with so you know some people are born without limbs you know you really don't want to dedicate whole big portions of your brains to a limb that doesn't exist right instead you want to repurpose it for something else during development we are incorporating the world that is actually around us into our brain and maximizing its efficiency so um so that happens through sleep I just talked about you know how we restructure our schema through sleep and that's happening in Spades when we're developing very intriguing um so going back to women and how different things are for them um talk to me about PTSD and the locus Aurelius yeah yeah blue spot yeah yeah so I know when things go wrong with that spot you can have all kinds of problems but I also know that estrogen is protective against it but I also know that women suffer from uh Stress and Anxiety more than men so start us explain the blue spot and then help us understand yeah estrogen's role in all of this yeah so the blue spot is um in our brain stem and it is one of the first relay places for all incoming sensory and stimulation so it'll wake us up it'll switch our attention from this conversation to if somebody's listening or watching this and something goes on in their house they're going to switch their attention away from what we're talking about to whatever it is and that's really good and it's adaptive because you know we need to be able to switch our attention yeah otherwise we're in trouble that's the locus surrealist it helps us to be alert and aroused and and reorienting as we need to it also as it's tonically firing helping us to learn from whatever we are engaged in so this conversation hopefully both of our local surrealists is is going and we're able to follow the conversation really well um but when it switches to a phasic you know sharp like with some that's when we need to switch our attention but right now it's tonically happening um so so it's responsive to stressors and what it does is it helps us to learn quickly from that stressor because what it provides to the brain all over the brain is norepinephrine which helps us to learn quickly and strengthen synapses it's only when it's not present that we can actually weaken those synapses after we've Consolidated what we've learned and changed our schema once once that's done you can erase those novel memories from the novelty encoding structures and our proximal dendritic tree and so we really need norepinephrine to be absent in order to be able to do that synaptic weakening it can't happen when norepinephrine is present when that blue spot is firing so the only time when the blue spot stops firing is during rapid eye movement sleep but that's something that we've known for you know since this 80s maybe and um but we've only ever studied it in males so we know that that's kind of Dogma the locus real stops firing in REM sleep that therefore REM sleep is able to allow us to reformulate our schema and erase those things that aren't necessary and we can strip the emotional intensity off of them that's right so for example if we're learning something that's emotionally um really relevant to us and and those emotions help us to learn those things um our local surrealist is firing helping us to learn that emotional memory it's during sleep that we can consolidate those all the facts to our the rest of our brain to those distal dendrites and then during REM sleep when we can erase the the novelty of it the salience of it so that it's not something that just happened to us that day it's something that we've Consolidated and now we can erase from the novelty encoding circuitry so we can encode something new but it's with the lack of locus surrealist activity the lack of activity in the blue spot in REM sleep that we can do that and just recently my lab hasn't started to record from Locus realists in females and we find across the Ester cycle the locus realist doesn't completely stop firing during REM sleep in some phases of the cycle and the low hormonal phases of the cycle which would really not allow you to refresh your brain quite as well as you would otherwise and um I I don't know what the physiological importance of that is but uh given that that's the case that also might be why women are two to four times more susceptible to post-traumatic stress disorder because post-traumatic stress disorder is a disorder not a forgetting I mean that's too overly simplistic it's a disorder of not being able to relegate the past to the Past it's where these emotional traumatic memories stay in the present as though they just happened that same day and yes we're able to consolidate it but then we're not able to do the Second Step which is to erase it from this novelty encoding circuitry to allow us to learn new things after that instead hangs on to that traumatic memory at all the aspects of it the emotionality and the way it makes our heart beat fast and our skin sweat and all of that and so it just happened that same day so if your Locus illness is not stopping firing during REM sleep at certain phase cases of our hormonal cycle then REM sleep can't do what it's supposed to do which is to refresh that novelty encoding circuit that's our hypothesis and that's what REM is a trip very interesting okay so if your mission is achieving Excellence you must support your body introducing ag-1 this Powerhouse blend is packed with 75 premium vitamins minerals and Whole Food sourced ingredients that elevate your immune system uplift your mood and promote restful sleep ag1 is offering a great deal for our listeners one year supply of vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase don't miss this opportunity to optimize your health and truly be legendary uh in PTSD my stress levels remain elevated so I'm doing the this isn't important this is important thing in sleep yeah but I actually can't get to that this isn't important because my stress levels are still so high which is telling my body no no this remains Salient and so it becomes a generalized salience like do you end up overwhelming your short-term memory like if you're constantly just saying like yeah everything's important everything's important you can't strip anything away yeah does that have long term like as anybody looked at PTSD and victims and how they have trouble learning new things yeah so one of the things you can't learn for example is the context of safety you know you know so yeah that's that's not good um and in animals we they don't learn any kind of reversal based learning whatever what I mean by reversal learning is that was then this is now now my home is moved and now the place where my food is used to be is moved all of of that is reversal learning we call it reversal just because it's it's not necessarily unlearning because you might still remember where your food used to be but it's re-weighting I guess recontextualizing an example I've heard you use a lot which makes a lot of sense especially for people our age is that you hear the sound of a helicopter you're in War uh that's bad sound danger danger but when you go back home it could just be a news helicopter and so you have to re-contextualize the same sound yes and not have the same Panic response which is perfectly adaptive in the theater of war but at home you don't want to be diving under the table every time a helicopter comes by okay so that makes the prediction that anything that quiets that down should allow me to lessen hopefully eradicate PTSD so beta blockers is something I've heard you talk about um have we looked at how effective those are at they have been studies and I think there's what do beta blockers do so beta blockers block The receptors of noradrenaline which is the the neurotransmitter produced by the locus cerulus that blue spot which helps us to learn but whenever those beta receptors are occupied by norepinephrine that only allows us to formulate new memories and strengthen new memories and that doesn't allow us to weaken others so so beta blockers block that receptor so no adrenaline cap occupy it and then make the neuron think that there's no an orbinephrine here you know there's nothing important there's nothing stressful we don't need to learn anything new and I think the reason why many of those clinical trials failed is because they didn't quite understand that you do need the beta adrenergic receptor occupied by norepinephrine when you are learning something new like the context of safety but it's during sleep that you need the beta block the beta receptors to be not occupied by norepinephrine anymore so that you can do the loosening that's required for reassociating and recontextualizing something so very interesting so you need to give them at the right time I think and enough you also other clinical trials I think failed because they gave too low overdose and it didn't you know didn't occupy enough or didn't block enough of the beta receptors in the brain and if you looked at the research on psychedelics and trauma therapy I have it's really fascinating and the thing about psyched dogs many of them actually activate the serotonergic system and we don't even know which specific receptors serotonin is another neuroadrenaline is one neurotransmitter system serotonin isn't as a different one that is also on whenever we're learning um so the serotonergic system comes from all over the brain it comes over from the dorsal wrathane nucleus in the brain stem and that's another nucleus that shuts off during REM sleep so this neurodenergic system and the serotonergic system are normally off during REM sleep so psychedelics don't reproduce REM sleep because there are agonists of Serotonin however they might there are at least 15 maybe 21 different receptors for serotonin and each of them do a different thing in a different neuronal subtype in a different compartment of the neuron and so in in my model of the way things work the serotonin receptors out there at the distal dendrites were are cortexes talking to each other those are the ones that actually help dampen the effect of that on our response to the world outside so what they do when you occupy the serotoninergic receptors is they shunt out information coming in from the familiarity encoding horticocortical schema and don't allow that to dominate us anymore and instead it weights everything toward what's going on right now here and now so again there's lots of lots of different receptors but for that one in any case that's really important I think to be absent in REM sleep because that's when you want to be building those schema about the outside world if you don't have enough serotonin in your system then you're in then you perhaps are always you know too attuned to what's going on out there in the distal dendrites and not enough attuned to what's coming in from the outside and learning new things depression antidepressants or sergeantergic agonists it may help us to be more attuned to the world around us that as we're Awakening and walking around it but I would also suggest that maybe antidepressants should be stopped when we want to go to sleep because we need serotonin to be off in order to rebalance our system at night so um do ssris disrupt sleep they do they really do they actually block REM sleep pretty effectively depending uh on when you take it and how much you take it but also those studies haven't been done in people who are trying to learn something new so we don't know if it's 100 blocking REM sleep when someone is studying for an exam for example maybe that homeostatic need for Sleep overcomes the ssris blockage of REM sleep and you get beautiful REM just when you need it that's really interesting so um when you get people on different medications the amount most people are going to be taking it chronically it's so this is a reason that I'm very hesitant to take supplements when you start isolating things the number of knock-on effects that you can have is is pretty crazy but I've heard you talk about the importance of if you've just suffered something traumatic you need to understand this what you can do to block the encoding of that traumatic event and I don't want to pause your mouth but it's like hey if you can talk yourself down and get into a calm place before you go to bed great if you can't even getting drunk might be better than just going to sleep yeah why would that be true yeah we do want to learn from a traumatic experiences right we don't want to not learn what's dangerous out there for example but we don't want to hang on to that novelty of that memory for the rest of our lives we want to put it where it goes and then leave it right and access it when we need it the next time but other than that it's lying dormant and and I'm sitting there ready when you need it you don't want it to be there present and part of your life every single day and influencing every decision you make is that first night's sleep an important window for avoiding that yeah the the first couple of nights sleep it takes about a week to consolidate a memory and put it away yeah it um but that first couple of nights is when you actually um are hanging on to the memory until it's Consolidated you do do you don't want to erase it until it's really fully Consolidated fully entrenched in everything that you know and and in the way that it should be entrenched and then after that once it's Consolidated you want sleep to be able to um to reverse the weight of that salience so um so what happens in the first couple of nights when you've learned something really mind-blowingly new is you are consolidating it and and you hang on to it until that whole process is done and then you start erasing it from that novelty encoding circuitry so um so but in order to consolidate it and put it where it needs to go you need to rearrange the schema that are already there right so if you want for example to remember the specifics specific context of something that's scary and fearful instead of just generalizing it if you want to learn the specific context you want to put those memories where they go and that involves some weakening of some of the memories in that schema already in order to put the pieces of information where they go and you also need your novelty encoding proximal dendrites to be ready for that new those new pieces of information and all the refinements of them if that is already saturated with something then you can't learn anything but the simple relation in in-out relationship you know sound scary run right that's that's the simple ones so if you want to learn all of the pieces of the information the context and which is something scary happened you need your brain to be refreshed by the Sleep the night before and able to encode all the pieces of information and then able to write it out to the long-term memory structure and then able to refresh that novelty encoding circuitry again so the next day you can refine that with even more information more context as you think about the trauma that happened you can even contextualize it more you can talk it through with your friends and family they can help you realize that was then this is now this is why this happened you'll be able to learn these new things and these new pieces of context because you your sleep that first night was a healthy sleep so that's why you really need that sleep to be norepinephrine free because you can both write the new pieces of information into the context through that those sleep spindles and erase that novelty encoding context from from from the novelty encoding structures so that you can again recontextualize and relearn the next day and then after a few days of that a few nights of that you'll have done the job of con of writing out all those pieces of information your memory will be good your schema will be good and you can just completely erase that from your novelty encoding structure so that you can turn to your attention to something new so when I when you said it's better to even get drunk or stay up all night if your sleep doesn't lack that norepinephrine and serotonin then that first night then instead of doing you might be able to consolidate it but you're gonna you're gonna saturate your system with that that traumatic memory and create a positive feedback loop that just continues to re-entrench it as though it happened the same day every day yeah so I want to talk about that so um everything that you went through assumes everything is working well so get your sleep uh make sure that you don't have dysregulated stress response just in general but as somebody who I went through a period in my life where my anxiety was off the charts now it ended up being uh I'll call it 70 diet and so I no longer have generalized anxiety disorder right um but I know what it feels like to have a very disproportionate response to something and just be I don't understand what is going on so um if somebody were in a car accident let's say very traumatic moment um I know that historically people thought well you need to talk to somebody about it then the studies show that's actually terrible and you're just reinforcing it right um so one I'd love to hear what we know about how talk therapy over a traumatic event can actually just reinforce it right and then if we had somebody that has a disproportionate response and and their amplitude of stress does not match what happened yeah what kind of protocol if we had an infinite Pharmacy or maybe that is the right answer but yeah we have access to anything like they're gonna perfect compliance uh if we need drugs we have drugs like what would that protocol look like yeah so unless that talk therapy is teaching you something about how to contextualize that it it's actually really good to speak to a loved one after a traumatic event if they're helping you to be helping you de-stress and contextualize so one of the things that shuts the locus cerealis off fastest after a traumatic event is being able to learn from it so you know if you had a car accident and someone can say well yeah but you ran you ran the red light you say oh you're right I was texting I ran the red light I next time I'm never going to do that again I'm never going to text while driving and you was a drunk driver and I was just sitting at the right if you're just sitting in the red light and there's a drunk driver there's not much you can learn from it so now stress level through the roof yeah life's unpredictable oh my God I'm never gonna leave my house will not stop firing if there's nothing to be learned from it it it's still searching for what can I learn from that what can I learn from that so the way to um the way that I you know de-stress after such a random haphazard event is to take what I have a I have a world view where I believe that everything ultimately will work out for the best even if right now it looks terrible it will work out for the best and that helps me to de-stress because I know oh you know it's horrible now but with a Long View you know I'm gonna you know this is all these troubles are going to be over it's very interesting and and so that can help me calm down um and and talking to my mother always helped me with that because why she's had she had the wisdom of the years right I'm like you're gonna get better you're gonna get better you're gonna survive it's gonna you know you may be in the future you're going to be a transportation Minister and you're going to be able to make lights safer or reduce the amount of drunk driving because you're going to help you know with Psychiatry um you know so that is really profound so I am a growth mindset junkie and I've never understood that there was even like an actual brain mechanism happening behind the scenes but like you you and I have I think very different World Views but they probably serve the same function I literally just took a note prayer because I know that you pray and you've often referred to that as being something that you use to lower your stress that's really interesting when I think about how something like prayer could serve such a profound function to last from you know for thousands of years probably more yeah uh that's very giving you a universal world of view that takes you out of the immediacy of this moment and tells you something good will come from this yeah yeah the I'm gonna learn something I'm gonna get something feels like a really interesting trigger what I find so fascinating about it though it's just the thought but that thought somehow that context registers at a very deep limbic level that's right it does it does our Locus realis is connected it gets all kinds of inputs from our prefrontal cortex from our hippocampus from our learning and memory systems from our emotional systems and it feeds back onto our Lucas realism says okay it's okay now analog assist says okay it's all right I'll stop barking you know I'll stop alerting you it's it's gonna be all right that's cool yeah that's cool I love understanding the mechanisms to things when they're I guess is a known one okay very interesting so you have a world view you just had this car accident even though it was a drunk driver uh your world view kicks in you feel like it's going to work out for the better um what else would we throw in our protocol right um so if that's not enough that really might be enough it oh yeah whatever you you just need to quiet the the locus right right right got it sometimes it's not enough sometimes you have forgotten to go back to your world view or pray or you don't have people around you to remind you um that you know it's gonna work out uh then yeah well again like we were just saying it's something inside your own brain that you can that you can teach yourself so you can calm yourself down your mind can keep you well um your mind can keep you well that's a it's nice yeah mine can also make you sick yes exactly terrifying flip side right yeah I didn't make up that catchphrase that was the title of a TV show or not on TV it was an NPR show and when I was a child I used to listen to it all the time I love it yeah yeah your mind can keep you well I like that yeah um but if all those cat these things fail then I would you know stay up if you're if you have insomnia and because you can't figure this out and you are stressed be awake be awake until you can find it your way out of it um and some people maybe it's doing something super relaxing to get their mind off of it like um you were listening to podcasts a story get your mind off of this immediate thing listen to a nice story you know watch a nice movie read a nice book um or listen to you know get get a Storyteller to tell you a good story a bedtime story that takes your mind off of this this horrible thing that just happened allow your whole system to relax and then have a very good night's sleep most sleep is adaptive most people don't get PTSD from a traumatic event and that's because our sleep is most of the time doing what it's supposed to do but if you are you know for some reason you sleep deprived from the night before and you're super sleepy even though you you know you're wired you can go to sleep that's not good don't go to sleep wired I guess that's the the thing I'm trying to say don't go to sleepwire do something to calm yourself down so that your Locus realist can quiet and do what it's supposed to do during sleep do you meditate I I have tried for me it's prayer but I'm gonna say prairie yeah it is it's made of Teddy meditative so this may be too private I think by all means say nothing but um how do you pray yeah are you asking for something for yourself for others for protection love yeah I mean just knowing that there is an all-powerful being who cares about me who really helps and then secondly um prayer is also thinking being thankful so meditating I guess on all the things you're thankful for and you're grateful for so prayer reminds me of all the good in my life and the good and the people around me um and then also praying for people and four things helps me to not feel as helpless I don't feel helpless because I'm doing something right I'm asking God to who's all-powerful to intervene and to change things and that that very much helps me feel like I've done something it helps you know some people they like to write lists that also helps um me but that's a way to put the list in God's hands interesting so I'm not religious but I have been in situations before where something feels so out of my control I am desperate to appeal yeah to a higher power I get it go for it yeah it's uh even if you don't believe it do it yeah it makes you feel like oh I still have a thing I can do I totally get that uh has anybody looked at prayer and loneliness so I used to be religious and I remember that feeling of like I'm talking to somebody who's listening yeah they're powerful and loving it's a very nice feeling yeah it is I think the moment in my life there was a moment in life that I was the loneliest ever and I was crying and I just felt completely spun out of control and I heard this voice in my head that just said why are you crying I'm with you and it kind of Arrested my tears oh yeah that was a long time if I've ever heard god um but you know but it was like why I'm I'm here with you I'm like oh yeah I'm not alone I'm not alone I'm never alone so interesting yeah that's one of those things man they're so I have a thought that runs through my head frequently and long time listens to the show will have heard me say it many times but there is a god-shaped hole in all of us you need to fill up with something so all right we're I'm really starting to formulate a very useful understanding of how I can leverage sleep to whether it's strip the emotional resonance off of something whether it's free up my short-term memory so I can learn new things the consolidation uh the removing of the narrative from the dots and snapping back to just dots so I can update my schema that's really going to stick with me I love the way you said that it's really nice thank you it's gonna stick with me too nice it may be useful yeah um how do I supercharge learning so I'm I'm a big believer that we can all 100x our abilities but it doesn't happen by accident and so I'm always looking for an edge on how I can learn something better like is it naps is it yeah just meditating before I go to bed like how do we really make sure we remember what we learned yeah that's a good question and we don't really know how we tag the things that we want to remember and how we tag the things that we want to forget um there's a lot of automaticity to it that must be pretty good I think your brain is probably already optimized to learn great I really hope that's not true if this is optimized we are all in trouble I just throw a lot of time at it that's that's my only solution yeah which I really want to shorten that time right um so there's our cat but I don't think it's good enough shortcut it's not good in the long run so yeah it's it's probably good for cramming in one piece of information but okay we'll take it we'll take it right right um one study done in the 90s I believe it was that that while the person was learning something kind of mind-blowing they had a clock ticking in the background is very loud clock and then when they were in REM sleep the experimenter made that clock go back on again and so it did reactivate a lot of the pathways that we're learning um but what we don't know yet is what the Locos is doing is that just again reinforcing that one thing you learned and preventing it from being you know from disconnecting and becoming dots and making making it creative there was no creativity part of that study stuff is so complicated yeah so um so we still need to look at creativity and insight whether you that those people 20 better on that one thing that they were learning but they didn't test whether or not they could extract that and apply it to other situations but 20 better you know that goes that's a c to an a right if you're talking about a test um but you might also not be able to do the Erasure parts that you need to do you might be sacrificing other parts of other things that you learned the day before that for example and that you need to schematize instead of learn via just wrote man I hope somebody does some research on that because so my brain already starts worrying so all right let's say that each day I was going to pick one thing and I was going to study it for let's say 20 minutes and then I'm going to replay the clock ticking for five minutes during my REM cycle which let's say is tied to my Fitbit or whatever and so I know when I'm actually in rem yeah it triggers but it only triggers for a brief period so that theoretically I can still do all the other things yeah that would be really interesting I would just do that one night and just for five minutes yeah I don't know don't do it night after night uh you're gonna screw everything up and saturate your brain without one thing yeah that sounds about right you end up getting some advantage in one area but you end up sacrificing everything else yeah because you are competing against Evolution yeah Evolutions had a lot of time to figure things out but we were talking about this right before we started rolling camera there's a really interesting meme about here's what the Olympics looked like in 19 whatever 1921 here's what they look like in 1921 or 2021 and it is hilarious how much more advanced we are now so obviously as you pointed out it's not our biology our biology hasn't changed yeah but the cultural element that Stacks we've more belief because we've seen what's possible better equipment better training right we know what our bodies can do we can push it harder knowing that we're not going to rupture anything or if we do at least there'll be good Physicians on hand to help us heal yeah yeah man it's so interesting learning learning really is a superpower and memory is the thing that I've struggled with most profoundly in my life so and I'm always looking for things that can help with that yeah are there you might hate this question but are there drugs that help with memory yeah there's even one called mementine I mean yeah for memory right interesting have I never heard of this yeah it's esca side effects what's the on label use case so I I believe it's for uh dementia okay yeah app and it works somewhat somewhat um again nobody study these things in relation to sleep so what it does is it boosts acetylcholine by blocking The receptors that reuptake it acetylcholine is really important it makes you feel tired I mean that's um adenosine yeah yeah that's all right acetylcholine ACH is the yeah you're trying to cram the yeah you're right um yeah so acetylcholine you need it when you're attending to something it's pumping great and giving us great rhythms for learning when we're exercising so walking and learning is a great thing to do or running and learning is a great thing to do it's also really present in our brains when we're in Rapid Eye movements you're more likely to remember something that you learned while walking or running yeah yeah or Incorporated yeah because of the neurochemistry yeah because of the rhythms of our brain the Rhythm or the and the chemistry the chemistry sets up the Rhythm so interesting yeah wow I've never heard that before yeah I I have experience that you can get insights while walking which is very interesting yeah um but I did not know that you're more likely to remember something yeah yeah um yeah so actually sitting at our desk trying to learn something is probably not the best way to learn things really yeah that's interesting um is there evolutionary reason for that just that we would have always been moving I think so I think it's probably that's probably what it is um yeah I don't I don't know otherwise but um but we can create for example cats watching a bird fly around has a ton of that acetylcholine actually whenever we attend to something acetylcholine gets ramped up in that area of the brain that's we're using for that for that purpose so and then again during REM sleep we have a ton of acetylcholine in those areas of the brain that are trying to learn during slow wave sleep when we're cleaning our brains acetylcholine is gone it's completely gone so we need it to be absent when we're doing the cleaning process very interesting okay I'm gonna try to talk through something the side effects are oh please yeah acetylcholine is what every single one of our muscles uses our gut uses it um and it and so a lot of acetylcholine will will screw us up screw up our guts makes us feel awful in lots of ways so it does not sound like a good trade yeah yeah anything that makes me feel sick like even eating a meal too late which is actually something we didn't talk about when you talk about sleep hygiene for me even even stopping eating three hours before I go to bed I will feel the difference so I stop eating seven hours before I'm gonna go uh and it feels awesome yeah I love it yeah and I used to eat like literally choo choo swallow sleep yeah and uh when I stopped doing that I was like whoa this really makes a huge difference that's great I remember when my wife my wife had massive digestive issues and she kept saying you know I really think it matters like how much before I go to sleep that I stopped eating and I was like why it doesn't make sense yeah 100 definitely not it she's like no I really I really think it is and I'm gonna start stopping earlier and earlier and she settled on about three hours and when I started doing intermittent fasting just for other reasons had nothing to do with with how I was sleeping I found that it improved my sleep yeah that's just very very interesting yeah it is actually there was just a study out about um what eating a high protein meal will do it changes the way your gut a hormone your gut secretes that then travels to your that hormone travels to your brain it helps you sleep better protein I've heard that carbohydrate injuries help you sleep better I've never heard it about protein yeah I think that there's a lot of research that needs to be done yet um this was in flies and mice um but and then baby mice and baby humans sleep better if their tummy is full so but not adults not adults but well actually I'm trying to think of what studies have done with adults and being full and sleep but I know if you're working your digestive system that's not a good thing while you're sleeping but again I you know I think more studies need to be done to iron these things out why does it work in babies why is it different in adults we don't know it's very interesting you can understand why babies would need food in terms of just the rapid growth yeah especially no because they've got tons of body fat but I would imagine they're not accessing the body fat and they're eating a high sugar diet for sure while they're breast readily available energy yeah but sort of quick to go through the system very interesting yeah I mean there can't be enough studies on diet it's but it is a very difficult thing to do unless you can literally imprison people and only give them the food that you want them to eat because the compliance is so low yeah very interesting yeah right there's a complex idea that I want to try to talk through um nudge me if I go too far afield here but when you were talking you you made me realize that there are Concepts that are pre-embedded in the brain and one of the things that I find really important so I'm obsessed with what I was talking about earlier the brain is a prediction engine whatever it is whatever cool thing you're trying to do with your life you you really are trying to update your schema so that you better you get closer to ground truth and you're better able to to do only the things that are going to be effective and as a species what makes humans interesting and you made sort of an oblique reference to this earlier is that we we don't come pre-hardwired with everything we don't adapt to a limb that we don't have we are doing things based on the actual environment that we're in we could have been born into a lot of environments but we're actually in this one and so making sure that we're adapting to that so all right humans are the most adaptive of all the animals which is exactly how we've become the most dominant apex predator of the world has ever seen uh but at the same time we're not blank slates yeah so there are ideas that are embedded in the brain and I can't remember what you were saying but the note I took was right or false and true are categories of things that are innate and that our brain when we sleep is tagging things this is true this is false and I just thought whoa that has real implications in terms of as we all social media is sort of deranging this where we're losing a hold of and I don't mean it like in a political way but if if true and false are a category that the brain is looking for to tag something this is effective part of the schema this is ineffective part of the schema and adjust accordingly if you're reinterpreting the world based on true and false you better be right and so then it becomes a question of what are we using to tag things as true and false and this is where as somebody who teaches entrepreneurship I'm always trying to get people to understand if you don't have the right metric by which you judge the success or failure of a test you're going to be in trouble how close am I with that like category thing that the brain is doing yeah I think you're very close I have a good friend someone I used to work with whose World schema was built by his parents and his community and um but then he went to business school and he learned all kinds of new things that weren't quite fitting with that schema for example um you know what was what he was told was good for him he saw how the business world was just taking advantage of it and and using it to profit and not necessarily working out for his best interests but for the bottom line best interest or the business and um and then one day with one experience he his whole schema changed and he's no longer he he realized that all that schema was wrong I mean there was just huge holes in it it didn't align anymore and he saw how they could align and um and then he realized that he couldn't just trust his parents anymore he was an adult at that time and he couldn't just trust his community around him but there's a whole other world out there and forces at work that they didn't understand and that he didn't understand until that moment and so he had to shift his whole world view and then make a whole new schema and um so the way that we build the world is usually first we have to trust our parents our caregivers we'd have to trust and they if they say something's important or something scary you know we trust them because that's part of survival but there comes a point when we should start you know weighing things for ourselves and based on our experience and based on our own thoughts and based on what we've learned so that we are we are building a schema that makes sense to us and like you say you better be right um but if we're wrong we might be able to survive okay but not optimally it's really interesting so as you were saying that it made me realize okay you've got the categories of true false but the entire world view is going to influence the tagging of true and false yeah that's really interesting so what are other categories that the brain comes pre-hardwired with so it it doesn't give you your world view but it does give you category of you can determine this is useful this is not useful or this is true this is false have you thought about other categories that we come pre-hardwired with sure well we're we're pre-hardwired to learn who our parents are and to imprint on them so that we know who to trust and who to look for for comfort and for food and that is pre-hardwired we have this area of our brain or several areas of our brain that are trained to look for the caregiver and whether that caregiver is a good one or bad one doesn't matter we are hardwired to imprint on that person and to and to learn from them it can be really difficult when we're later when we were older to say that parent or that caregiver that I imprinted on did a terrible job and I don't want to be that and I don't want to marry that and I you know I select a partner it can be really difficult to fight against when we learn something new about the world and and get a bigger and a different world view that's wrong I don't want somebody to abuse me you know I don't want to find a partner who's going to abuse me like I was abused when I was a child and it's really hard because we've imprinted you know our brain and that critical period of imprinting has closed so it's it becomes a really hard thing it's not impossible absolutely it is possible but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of sleep what does that effort look like how do you begin because childhood trauma really freaks me out because of how long it echoes through people's lives and it seems for most people either because they won't adhere to a treatment protocol but it seems um intractable yeah it's is it intractable we have plasticity like you say we are able to learn new things but we need to be dedicated about it and Surround ourselves for example by people who aren't going to abuse you anymore and believe that that is the good thing and um we will always have that wiring that original imprint wiring but we can form new synapses and and make those synapses strong and stronger than the original ones were but if we have a process look like it's actually synaptic remodeling it's actually dendrites and axons practitioner yeah repetition repetition surrounding ourselves Again by this new world that we want instead of the world that we had and a dedication and attention to it every day and sleeping on it every night and um it's it's a long slew process because during those critical periods it happens quickly it happens quickly because our brain said okay this is the time when we learn about who our parents are and what a caregiver looks like and um and so it that and once that critical period is closed and I call it critical period there is a particular time of release the window well with caregivers if you were if we were chicks baby chicks um it's at 17 hours after a closure after hatching that's brief so yeah um so for a couple of hours after that if you if you don't happen to encounter your mother until a hour 19 or 20. it's okay you'll still but if you encounter something at 17 hours that's not your mother like a something that's making a sound and moving away from you you're gonna imprint on that thing so there's a there's a it's so it's few hours I'm sorry for a few hours for um for a chick for humans of course it's going to be longer but we don't actually know what the exact critical period is yet there's there's some studies that need to be done language learning is another thing that our brains are set to learn um if we are born deaf we will still learn language it won't be the oral language we'll learn body language better we'll learn to lip read we'll learn sign language if it's given to us or the signs that the body language of our caregiver is giving us so our brain is set to learn and there is a critical period to that too if we are for example born into an English-speaking family and we try at age 35 to learn Chinese and that's the first time well not the first time but if during your critical language learning period in the first six months of life if you've never heard Chinese and all the sounds of it and it was never directed toward you and you were never told a story in that language you won't have built saved the synaptic path Pathways that were open during that period of time to hear all the different six months yes yeah before we're even babbling or just at the beginning of battling just listening to the sounds of these languages will change our brain and help us to preserve synapses that will allow us to always hear the sounds of that other language so that later when we try to actually pick it up ourselves we'll still be able to hear it and those people that were never exposed to it will have pruned those synapses away okay so really tight period for imprinting for language um what are what are some of the other phases and I will contextualize this so this really matters to me uh so impact Theory the reason this company is called impact theory is my theory on how to impact people at scale is through story so I tried just telling people think like this act like this you can build your own company do whatever you want two percent of people would take that advice and do something with it it was extraordinary to witness but I was just like what about the 98 that are doing exactly nothing with this information and how do we reach them yeah and that's when I really started getting obsessed with world view so I'm I'm going to assume you know nothing about my story so my last company was in manufacturing so we were in the inner cities so we had I had big brother for a kid that grew up in South Central as sort of a knock-on of going to USC uh and I watched him get consumed by his zip code Flash Forward 15 years later I now have a thousand employees that remind me of him and I'm like ah but I'm not a young kid anymore I know what to do with this and so realizing that the difference between the two percent the 98 the two percent had a growth mindset and they were willing to try things and deploy it but I had one guy in the two percent get in a fist fight with his friends because they were like you changed because you've started reading yeah and I was like you got in a fist fight because you read now he's like yes and I was like oh my God like this does not make any sense so then I was like okay I'm going to give up on adults and I'm going to focus on kids and I'm going to catch them at what I think of as the age of imprinting 11 to 15. you're not imprinting on your parents you're now imprinting from culture that I can influence I can't influence who your parents are but I can influence what your friends think is cool and so the whole idea of impact theory is to tell stories make video games that have actual real useful ideas at the core so the way that we sum it up is if in one of our stories a mentor gives the character advice you as the viewer can take that advice because it's real and so I want to know that that age of imprinting the 11 to 15 rough swag is actually a moment where I can influence people because Disney takes a younger approach and so they're going after like that 6 to 11 like really get them young it's just as a person that's not a form of entertainment that I find as interesting yeah so I'm really hopeful but there's something still you know going on here and we are still learning um in terms of what's possible yeah our brains are definitely still developing at age 11 to 15. not we as researchers yeah 11 to 15 we are still learning yeah yeah definitely and social learning is a big big thing at that time so it's great to surround yourself by people who um who like to read for example um at that age because even if you were came from a family which didn't do a lot of reading you can have that influence you because it's your peers and people you respect and like and admire who are doing this behavior that you can then engage in so absolutely it's possible the um the school system the reason why preschool is actually a really good age is because again that language learning if you have someone reading to you when you're a baby and you know what age one two three looking at you telling you you're a good person that's a that's also a really big critical period for language learning vocabulary learning it's not the end but it is a critical period do you know Jeffrey Canada no man I want this guy on the show so bad so he's one of the early Charter School people so Grows Up In Harlem says I'm going to fix the education system gets a full ride scholarship to Harvard goes into education spends I think a decade trying to fix it from the inside realizes never going to fix this from the inside starts these schools on the outside but largely based on a key Insight which is he asked why do middle income kids do well and lower income kids do poorly and he realize it's the number of words you hear by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative and I was like what and he said in a middle income household you hear roughly I think it's 5 million words and the ratio of positive negative is 70 positive 30 negative in the inner cities it's either 3 million or 2 million I can't remember it was dramatically less and the ratio is flipped it's 30 positive seventy percent negative yeah what that does to the language centers of your brain is so startling yeah and so he went on this crusade to get people who are about to become mothers you can wait till they actually had kids if you were about to become a mother he's he wanted you to start reading to your baby in utero and to keep breathing yeah once they were born and I was like whoa that's one of those insights about the brain that scares me yeah it scares me it it has become not that age but that idea has become the central mission of my life yeah if you can intercept people at the right time with the right idea in the right format you will change how their brain develops yeah yeah exactly how they see the world the entire scheme at those early early ages we're forming our schema of the world how the world works it's um it's really good to intervene early if you want someone not to be screwed up and to work better in this Society yeah no doubt but it's incredible I mean this this guy is probably one of the examples there are lots of people who are surrounded by horrible situations as they grow up and they're able to you know lock lock onto latch onto the one role model that's different and that's better and they're able to not reproduce that same bad situation in their own life when they're adults and it's a very inspiring story um but we actually really do even those people who say I did it all by myself there's always somebody or some influence somewhere that helped them for sure for sure all right what do you as you look at the research being done around sleep being done around the brain in general where where do you think this goes so you've already planted a flag on mitochondria the Energy System yeah um I I love a good hypothesis I completely understand you have no idea where this will all lead and you're super open to being wrong as a scientist I'm sure that just guides all of your thinking but what are what are some interesting areas that either you want to see studied or that you see some early research coming out that could be very meaningful yeah so drug addiction that's a powerful remodeler of the brain the drugs negatively and positively or only negatively well it's positive in terms of drug seeking behaviors right it requires the entire brain toward uh you know if you're a drug yeah you know but but it's a powerful rewiring of of your brain that I would like to see good ways to use sleep to rewire back to learn through sleep and processes restore the processes that happen during sleep so that we can be open to relearning the good way again and not to be so stressed so drug addiction is is one area PTSD is another something I'm really passionate about I've got some family members who have PTSD and lost a family member through PTSD so um so that's again another way that stress powerfully remodels the brain for the worse and I would like to figure out a way to make it so that sleep helps us be adaptive sleep helps us to adapt and do you see a path because is it just oh we just need to you know read a good book play a calming video game meditate whatever and then you're going to be fine or do you see like is AI going to play a role some of the brain feedback that people are getting I think biofeedback is going to help um people are very unaware of their own stress levels for example and and how they're processing things if we're able to tell them through a wearable that hey it looks like you are stressed right now you should probably do some relaxation exercises before you go to bed and then um yeah there's also a really interesting study where they cued people to learned something before they went to sleep and then gave him the cue during the dream yeah it was like a ticking clock it was a little different it was a tone they used um and and got people to dream about that thing um that they'd were trying to new thing they were trying to incorporate into their old schema and if they dreamed about it especially but actually everybody were better able to incorporate that into their the scheme of who they are uh again I wouldn't overuse this be careful but um so I think I think yeah um I don't know enough about AI but probably you know there's a way biofeedback at least to let people know what state they're in because they're oftentimes pretty much too much in their head and don't really know what their body is doing and how it's reacting so I'm going to follow up on something you just said So based on something I've heard you talk about before which is that if you understand the neuronal firing of a rat compared to where it's at in the Maze you can actually effectively read its mind and so knowing the look I'm not an expert on AI but I'm deep enough in it that I I understand where this is headed um that AI really will be able to take inputs if you put a device of sufficient Fidelity on the brain and let me read the brain patterns the waves the you know neurons that are firing that we'll be able to start to reconstruct what you're thinking about they've been able to get very rooted like if they tell you to think about a person's face it's pretty startling like how I mean it's not like a portrait but like you start to get a sense of what they're thinking about um I have a feeling that we're going to get pretty good at interpreting brain signals you'll need better sensors but when you have a company like neuralink where it's actually tapping into the brain combined with AI just recognizing pattern after pattern because what you'll do is you'll read people let's say a million people as wearables begin to be a thing and you'll say okay this person is doing this thing we get this readout therefore When I See This readout you're doing this thing and they'll be able to basically just reverse the you know the the direction that they're thinking about it and so that is as I think about biofeedback and I think about Ai and I think about just the ability to collect all of this data that you'll be able to get somebody with a PTSD or whatever and say okay you're about to go to sleep I'm going to visualize where your brain is right now how you're feeling and there's a Target and so you're going to start moving the okay this is a stress brain this is a calm brain and as you move it there the screen lights up or does something to reinforce that's right and people will be able to use that visualized biofeedback as a way to control their emotional state which is my fantasy as somebody that struggled with anxiety yeah I was like I really want a way to practice yes calming myself down which is how I found meditation which ended up being utterly transformational um yeah no I think exactly that that is the goal I think the the promise of these wearables is that they are measuring peripheral measures of heart rate variability for example temperature um skin conductance a lot of these things that are peripheral measures of what's going on with our autonomic nervous system that the thing that meditation is probably best at calming down so um so I think there is real promise because people again are kind of famously bad at reading their own bodies and so if you can give them a device that tells them you know there's a green window now you're good go to sleep that would be amazing um be very amazing so I um I am either just really dumb and when I work out I'm just terrible or I have a natural tendency towards muscular imbalances I fear it's column a uh and so I have many times ended up having like really chronic pain from um it's often been in my traps or my scalenes where I thought that I had a weakness in my traps and oh I need to get my neck stronger and my trap stronger but in reality it was my middle back was weak yeah and I went to see a physical therapist and he pointed it out he's like nope the problem's actually in your middle back and you're not stabilizing yourself and he was like fire your middle back muscle yeah and I'm like I'm firing it he's like no you're not I'm like I promise you I am and so he's like okay let me put biofeedback on you and he's like make it beep and I'm like okay I'm firing it and he's like if it's not beeping you're not firing the muscle and so learning to fire it was eye-opening at how different my body map of where that muscle was and where the muscle actually was I felt I used to joke with him I feel like I'm firing my heels to like get it that low in my back to just reach my mid-back right but once I learned how to do it yeah my ability to because it when I first started it would beep at you so when you fired it beep and then by the time I was done I could get it to go yeah and so I was like Wow and so realizing that once you hear or don't hear or in this case see or don't see you can make profound changes and you can fire things in this case a muscle that that truly felt out of my conscious control but slowly slow you're able to do it yeah if people could get a hold of their their autonomic nervous system and I don't know how much they'll ultimately be able to get a hold of but if you can get a hold of it it's pretty profound are you familiar with two malt meditation do you know Wim Hof no oh my gosh you're gonna love this so I can't believe he's real I've met him as far as I can tell he's been studied by science he can maintain a core body temperature even in ice and so we set all kinds of World Records for swimming under ice and he's his corneas froze and he went blind swimming under the ice thankfully he was with a diver who's able to pull him back up but like water that cold cold yeah uh and so he went into a laboratory setting and they measured his internal core temperature uh he can do that he can also take like a dime-sized spot in his palm and warm that up when people ask him to wow they injected him with an endotoxin and he was able to um muster an immune response so everybody was like okay it's just you you're a freak of nature it's like no I can teach anybody to do this so he teaches people so anyway the this concept of tumult meditation is that basically they can control their heart rate body temperature so things that we would say are normally outside needed right it's interesting I didn't know Houdini did that um yes things like that that there have been sort of the rare people throughout history that have been able to do but if through wearables AI we can give people a better way of doing that that's about as close to being a superhero as I can imagine getting I agree that kind of stuff is um I really hope that that ends up being a thing another thing that's very similar to that that I've heard you talk about I've always wanted to be able to do and I can't is lucid dream is lucid dreaming real oh yeah it's real I don't know if it's real good people that don't know what it is yeah what is it so it's a way to realize that you're dreaming and control your dreams or introduce a new element to it or um through some studies it says okay when you're in REM sleep we're gonna know and we want you when you hear this sound to incorporate this thing into your dream and when you've done it tell us by moving your eyes in a particular pattern so people some people can do that and they can do it about a third of the time of of when they go into REM sleep not all the time but a third of the time how does it not wake them up the second I tell myself I'm Dreaming I wake up yeah that's the thing do they train themselves uh so there is some controversy are they awake is there a good portion of their brain that is actually awake and able to respond if you're able to respond to the outside world here as a tone or whatever and and make control your body in a way I mean what how does that differentiate from wakefulness it might actually be weightless I said paradoxical sleep REM sleep is paradoxical because your brain looks like it's awake well it looks like it's awake during lucid dreaming too so how do you know someone's still asleep you don't um aetonia is really the only way which is when our muscles are actively inhibited so that we don't act out our dreams there's some indication that people who are lucid dreaming maintain that atonia but etonia is something that could also be dissociated from sleep people with cataplexy you know narcolepsy with cataplexy they will fall down with etonia while being perfectly awake so it's um it's controversial now having said that those dreams people would do lucid dreaming you know are very Vivid and they're different from Daydreams they're they're more active they're more Vivid I guess is the way to say it um so it might be this in between different brain State that's not just regular REM sleep and the reason why I don't know if it's real good is because nobody has been able to record from the local cirillas for example or the dorsal rafae nucleus which we know shut off during REM sleep do they shut off when someone's in lucid dreaming they're awake they're on whenever we're awake so do they go on are we really is this state uh kind of a hallucinogenic kind of state that's more like wakefulness than sleep we don't know I would caution people to be cautious with it don't try and do it all the time because in fact if it's really more waking than sleep and it's serving sort of a waking function and not the sleep function then you're depriving yourself of real REM sleep when you're doing it so um and and all the good things that come from real REM sleep so so I I've I've lucid dreams I've been able to tell I'm in a dream and change it in some way it's great way to get rid of nightmares um but I also just let myself have a real dream and wake up and remember just part of it instead of the whole thing and because and so one of the new new bits of research that we're doing in the laboratory is being done by a graduate student named Raquel Guthrie and another graduate student named Ward Ward Pettibone and what they're doing is they are seeing in animals and in humans whether or not um the whole brain sleeps at the same time and is in the Sleep same same sleep State at the same time there's lots of evidence that animals that sleep unahemispherically sleep hemispherically one hemisphere is awake while the other is asleep people don't do that but we might be able to sleep you know one chunk of brain at a time for example or hippocampus Raquel showed in humans can be in asleep very long minutes before our cortex goes to sleep and so what is it doing it's it's doing this other brain wave pattern and it's not remembering and this is probably although we haven't done the study yet in people probably the reason why we don't remember what happened in the two minutes before we go to sleep so um you know you know if you're reading a book and you're falling asleep over the book you can read the same page four times over and over yeah over and over again right that's because you're hippocampus your memory you know immediate associative memory system is asleep and so your cortex is you're moving your eyes the working memory is in your cortex but it's not going into your long-term memory so um so that same thing happened during REM sleep can your hippocampus be in REM sleep while your cortex is in slow wave sleep or the opposite and maybe lucid dreaming is this part thing where you can somewhat respond to the world around you because there are parts of your Thalamus that's not closed can you remember dreams people who can remember of their dreams and tell it to you vividly is it because their hippocampus is not asleep actually it's awake and writing those new memories in even though you know and those who can never remember their dreams the hippocampus is in REM sleep proper so we don't know the answers to these yet there aren't enough people with electrodes planted in their brain that we can ask what is your dream and how did you change your memories we can't ask these things of animals um so we can't say yeah hey what did you dream about and we can see what their activity of their brain is and if it's not consistent with the world immediately around them but consistent with the world that they experienced the day before we can say hey it looks like that rat is running that maze we can't ask it you know were you dreaming about running the maze so it will actually replay the maze in its head yeah that's so interesting because dreams the ones you remember I I can't tell you a time where I've ever had a dream that was like the thing I learned I am dreaming about it's it might be something I'm stressed about but the dream is so surreal yeah that it's like is this about that it's good it's good that it's different I think that's again that backing out from the literal thing to the to the dots again um so it gives you a new way to interpret a new way to interpret it but the rats are doing it literally well they do some of it literally and some of it's in real life and so this is something that Ward is looking into how do we gain insights from from our dream state in rats he's looking in rats do rats that have gained insight and shown you that they've gained Insight by the performance did they did their dream sleep and non and non-rem sleep they look differently than rats that didn't learn anything do the rats are there rats with PTSD do they just replay the literal thing that happened to them and if they didn't get PTSD are they replaying portions of that but also you know incorporating in an abstracted ways yeah that's really interesting do you put much stock in dream interpretation I love dream interpretation just because I think that it tells us how it's it's kind of like interpreting a movie right it tells us how we're thinking about things I don't think it's necessary I think most people don't remember their dreams well enough to but but the stories that we make up about our dreams reflect you know who we are and where we are and what we're thinking that's interesting yeah if you ever had recurring Dreams yeah what one I'd love to hear what they actually were and I'd love to hear your breakdown of why recurring dreams is It Something That We're struggling with I think it is I think and some and some my recurring dream when I was a child was a couldn't run away from it it was so stressful and so fearful yeah it was it was awful and I told my mother about it and probably because she was listening to the mind can keep you well she said okay next time you have that dream do something different than you've been doing every time this past time these past times and I said okay what should I do she said oh and let's see what can you do think about it and I'm like oh I could I could go I could you know stab the monster I could hit it and she's like okay try it I know let's rehearse that so imagine that much as imagine yourself turning around and stabbing or hitting it and so I did that and then the next time I had that nightmare I was too afraid to actually turn around and stab it or hit it or touch it in any way but I was able to at least say no stopped and I was able to do something different it was just something different and knocked me I never had that recurring nightmare again I've had other recurring dreams flying for example it's a great recurring dream you know it's a lot of fun or being able to swim underwater you know what's the use of that I'm never going to be able to fly but you know but maybe it has something else to do maybe that nightmare of the monster was about an uncontrollable force in my life that I didn't have couldn't get away from and so in my dream the fact that I was able to do something against that Force may have allowed me to make a difference in my Waking Life too against that thing that I didn't even know was that was the thing that I was embodying in my dream but I could could take some control over it even if it's just saying no so that maybe during my Waking Life I was able to say no to this adult that was doing something to me and I don't I don't know I don't remember it back then but but um but it can be powerful our minds are extremely plastic when we're in the dream state of sleep and so even though I think the interpretation of our dreams may say more about of our our waking selves I think what happens during our dreams actually can change our minds can change the way we think about the world so again flying dreams I don't know maybe that's about power and about um you know feeling in control and able to do things that you couldn't otherwise do and so maybe it's a reflection of a sense of Elation that I had about learning new things like about the brain um yeah it's really really intriguing dreams are fascinating I don't remember nearly enough of mine um you probably remember just as much as you need to it's interesting maybe I used to remember more and because I find dreams so interesting and because I'm such a student and fan of narrative it's I always love like yeah they would just be so impossibly weird that I don't know there was something fun in the way that time can change or the way that things melt into something else or the way that it's like oh I'm talking to this cocker spaniel but I know it's actually my mom yeah and you're like what and it changes into your mom and then changes into your girlfriend it's like yeah so weird it is wonderful it's weird and wonderful and I understand why you want to and you know remember more of your dreams because it's like a free movie that is just fun yeah and that you are so wired into emotional yeah that it's literally plugged into your central nervous system yeah which is everybody anybody that's into like the metaverse and stuff like that's the fan see right that one day like you'll be able to actually experience these just impossible scenarios but actually experience yeah and you do when you dream yeah I so rarely remember mine now and I've never known like is it because I have a high stress life and that's why I don't remember them because I I used to have them a lot and I used to why I mean do we dream every night yeah no matter what no matter what okay yeah so I'm still dreaming clearly yeah uh but I almost never remember them it might be a really good sign that your sleep is super efficient you know and uh it can't again we don't know but it's quite possible that the dreams that you remember is because your hippocampus was actually awake maybe for the last half of the dream and able to sew that working memory all that stuff into a long-term memory and um so that that could be fine occasionally but if you're doing it all the time right your hippocampus is missing out on all the brain clearing things that you need to do so it could be a very good sign that makes sense you've talked about the thalamus a couple times I've heard you say in previous interviews that every time you do new research your sense of where the Consciousness is seated changes yeah uh are we currently settled on the thalamus do we not know what's the no no um I think Consciousness is an emergent process and so there's no one area that controls it is it a complexity thing you stack enough neurons and you're eventually going to get to Consciousness yeah yeah I think so and so I I think a outstanding question still is can an ant be conscious or is it in a colony that's conscience um is it all of these individual players working together is um yeah is a beehive conscious how does you know we transfer information one beef to the next and you see them pulse yeah oh yeah hard to say that they're not connected pretty rapidly right yeah and if you look at an individual neuron migrating to the spot it's going to go you can say well that that looks like a conscious being it's making decisions it's putting out its filipody you're here or there and then it's saying nah not that one I'm gonna go up here and then I'm gonna go over there and it looks like you're watching a snail you know go to the food or something like that or a place of safety and then if you think of you know the billions of neurons you have in your brain is each independent you know entities then then you think of it a city as your brain is a city or a universe rather than an individual I actually have a quote that I wrote down of you saying yeah yeah this is I find this really interesting you said and I quote it's almost like your brain is filled with billions of individuals making decisions and talking to one another it's almost as if our brain is a city or even a universe full of communicating entities that do different tasks yeah yeah that's heavy and so how does that brain filled with independent entities direct our body to do anything to be sitting here talking to you today it takes I don't know if it's just majority rules or what it is where's the will we have no idea but we do know Will has a lot to do with things for example the belief that you can change can make all the difference in the world between whether you do change where does that belief come from what is what is it that believes is it is it the the consciousness of all of these entities saying you know what we're just going to do it you know and where there's no home there's no little man in our heads saying you know this is what we're going to do now this this is what we are we're made of all these billions of neurons um yeah yeah that that's a trip to me the it's interesting I did not expect this theme to emerge in this conversation but the idea of uh the metronome of something that is conducting all of these incredibly complex things but when you think about each neuron really fighting for its own Survival looking for a connection [Music] um being self-directed in some way that I imagine we don't fully understand at this point yeah it's really interesting that a self-emergence now the one of the things that I find utterly fascinating about the brain is that if you cut the corpus callosum the thing that connects the two hemispheres for those who don't know uh you'll get two personalities yeah that's weird it is crazy isn't it I mean it's amazing and yeah the the the studies are so revealing about what what Consciousness is what do you take away from it how do you interpret that data uh well you know we do know there is lateralization to function like or language for the most of us is in the left hemisphere and our spatial relations is in the right Hemisphere and and the idea that these two areas one can dominate the other and make it do what it wants is really it's really interesting so this some of one of those unihemis or the Corpus callosin studies the man was describing trying to address himself in the morning and and you know button up his shirt and while his you know right hand was buttoning his left hand was unbuttoning so it was like these two Consciousness and does that mean that the left hemisphere just didn't know what the right hemisphere is doing just said hey why is my shirt you know why is it coming together I want to go to bed is the right hemisphere want to go to bed and the left hemisphere wants to go out into the world you know I don't know because the right hemisphere doesn't have the language when he talks about it he talks about what what he was trying to button up the shirt he says I was trying to button my shirt um if you were able to speak to his right hemisphere who would it say oh yeah that was silly I was trying to go to bed right it was interesting one of the studies that I heard about the one of the hemispheres was deeply religious and the other was a pure atheist I was like wow man in the same brain yeah and so you begin to realize that this is a competition of perhaps Rivals going on in the brain that there is some mechanism whether it's majority rule or what but something is happening and it happens so fast that you're unaware of it yeah and I feel like a stable me I feel a sense of I I have a self and yeah like this is one thing I've often thought about with alcohol is and look I've never been blind drunk the way a lot of people have yeah but I've never not felt like me yeah I've always felt I call this my OverWatch mechanism I've always felt like there's a me version above like I feel the silly impulses the way that everybody else is but I feel like I've got a guy sort of riding above it all yeah that's me yeah and so that idea knowing that it's actually super false and my brain is billions of these somehow cooperating things that come to some kind of consensus and can move me forward and cause me to react to like if I see a a hose out of the corner of mine I think it's a snake I'll jump back like so fast yeah or pulling your hand back from something that's hot before you have any sort of conscious awareness yeah I think it's incredible everything that you said also it's incredible that we wake up still me yeah in the morning considering how much is going on in our brains how different our brains are when we fall asleep how much plasticity happens with REM sleep how do we wake up still knowing who we are and feeling like we're the same person yeah um especially when I think about yeah how do we recognize a childhood friend is like oh yeah you're the same how do we say you're the same it's been 30 years since we saw them 40 years and how do we know that maybe they aren't maybe you both have changed together and that's why you recognize them I don't know anyway go ahead oh just did that you have a sense every cell in your body is turning over but there is a sense of you that does stay the same yeah I've thought about this with skin like if you get a sunspot or a liver spot or whatever they're called every cell in your body is turning over but somehow that stays yeah so like there's this day yeah scars I sort of get do the cells turn over in a scar I guess they must right yeah that's interesting yeah huh yeah well yeah I mean the I just recently learned from Aaron Schumann is in Germany that the rate at which proteins turn over in our brains so you know every seven days whoa you know our neurons are different because our every protein is turned over so oh that's startling yeah it is wow and I'd heard it was every seven years which is still incredible right but and so there must be something that's slower than protein turnover that takes longer but you know that's really interesting that must have implications in terms of neurodegenerative disease like if you could halt whatever is breaking down and make sure that the next round is healthy that's actually really encouraging from like a stem cell standpoint if things are turning over that fast I obviously I have no idea if that's going to end up being productive or not but oh very well could be really interesting yeah yeah Gina this is utterly fascinating where can people follow you I have I haven't Lab website I don't update it as often as I should so instead if you want to go to the department at UCLA it's the integrative biology and Physiology or just ibp.ecla.edu I will make sure that my lab website is tied to that and is and is linked but my Department's full of really great people doing super fascinating research and so I and all UCLA is I'm also part of the brain research institute bri.ucla.edu but either way ibp is is fine yeah I love it yeah thank you guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friends be legendary take care peace click here now to learn the most common sleep mistakes that are destroying your health I'm an evolutionary perspective sleep is the most idiotic of all behaviors you know when you think about it because firstly when you're asleep you're not finding a mate you're not reproducing

Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 262,464

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Gina Poe, Health Theory, Conversations with Tom, health tips, sleep, memory, learn faster, neuroscientist, Jim Kwik, sleep habits, insomnia, PTSD, sleep hygiene, sleep routine

Id: Or7CFDgfEYI

Length: 171min 23sec (10283 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 22 2023