When I'm asleep my brain is still in motion. I sort of see it like little pieces of fiber that are connecting. It's incredible how active my mind is when I'm supposed to be laying asleep . When I'm asleep my brain is active and, and going around. When I'm awake in the day, my brain is like this; when I go to sleep at night my brain is like this. Just waking up awake and sleeping, it's-- kind of tapers off to this just waking up point again. When you're asleep you're pretty much awake, but you don't know it. When I'm asleep, I think my cells are resting. Your brain needs time to recover and rest and let synapses heal. I think the stress is just too great for us nowadays. If we don't get a minimum of seven hours sleep, we're in serious trouble. My body needs R E S T ! It needs to take off its job. It does a lot. Sometimes I'm willing to face things when I'm asleep that I might not really want to deal with when I'm awake. Maybe sort of a kinda sexual dream, if you will, with maybe someone it shouldn't be with Maybe I'm attracted to somebody and in my dreams I'm really flirtatious, then if I come across this person again I think I'll flirt a little bit more. My dreams sometimes are just like maybe scenes from stuff I watch--you know--like Star Wars or Batman the Animated Series. And so I'm seeing like scenes from-- that it's like scene after scene
after scene that it's like.... I was sort of driving around in a small clown car of some reason talking to Albert Einstein, Newton and I remember specifically them telling me that two plus two did not equal four. I'm flying through like an endless hole, and I actually feel like if I'm actually falling Well, that's a good question. Where does my mind go? I don't really know. Mine is searching for solutions. It can't be ON all the time. My mind's awake, but I'm sleeping. I don't know about dreams. I think it's important. Maybe it's not that important. Sleep and dreams are such an insight into yourself and your own challenges. Amazing! [Chuckling] Ah, Hello!
I'm Carl Zimmer Thank you all for coming out for this evening of an exploration of sleep. Ah--I'm sure that all of you like myself have asked a lot of those questions that we just saw and actually tonight we're gonna be able to talk with three of the world's experts on sleep, people who study sleep for a living and in three really remarkably different ways. We're going to learn about how animals sleep. How does a bird sleep exactly? We're gonna eavesdrop on a rat's dream. And we're also going to watch what happens when human sleep goes really, really wrong. So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce our guests.. our speakers. The first one is Dr. Niels Rattenborg. Dr. Rattenborg has made groundbreaking discoveries. Dr.. Rattenborg's made groundbreaking discoveries on the animal sleep, including birds. He's at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Germany. He's taken a red-eye to join us, but he seems to be absolutely awake. Our next panelist will be Dr. Matthew Wilson. Dr. Wilson is a neuroscientist at MIT and a researcher at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, where he has the particular expertise of eavesdropping on rat dreams. And our final panelist will be Dr. Carlos Schenck. Dr. Schenck is a renowned sleep clinician. He's a psychiatrist and he's a researcher at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Center where he specializes on bizarre sleep behavior. So, let's have a round of applause for all our panelists. And I'd also like to say hello to everyone who's watching on the livestream You're you're in the audience here. You're you're Part of a much bigger group, and we welcome you all. So Niels, I thought we could start by talking to you about human sleep and animal sleep. And I believe you brought a really nice picture of a human and a coral to kind of put this into context if we could have that picture. So, here we have two animals, the human (us) and the coral. Maybe you could tell us a bit about sleep in the animal kingdom. I mean, we all have seen our dogs or cats sleep, but I mean how widespread is sleep among animals? Yeah, well one approach to understanding the purpose of sleep in our brain and sleep in general is to look at how different types of animals sleep. Do all animals sleep the same way? Are there some animals that don't sleep? And by studying animals ranging from simple organisms such as this brain coral to more complex organisms, we may gain insight into the function of sleep, both in general and in our brain. So, does a coral sleep? Well, they retreat into their calcium house in the daytime, so these corals might actually be sleeping while the awake, I presume awake, human is observing them. Right... and flies? There's a lot of work studying fruit flies in the last 10 years, and they've been shown to clearly engage in sleep. They have many parallels with sleep in human's sleep . . . in mammals. They . . .their sleep becomes more fragmented when they get older, there're changes in the brain chemistry and expression of genes that are very similar to those in humans. And this is proven to be a very powerful organism in which to try to gain insight into the function of sleep, because in the fruit fly, you can manipulate the genome, you can turn genes on, you can turn genes off, you can induce mutations, and look at how that affects their sleep. And if you find some gene that's very interesting that affects their sleep, then you can look in mammals to see if it plays a similar role; and that can give us clues to the purpose of sleep. Now, you study a much closer relative to us than brain coral. You study birds. um How did you get interested in studying birds? And why do you think they're important for helping us to understand sleep in general? Yeah, I actually worked first with humans and then went to study birds. And birds are an extremely exciting group in which to study sleep because they're the only taxonomic group that has evolved sleep patterns very much like ours and those observed in the rest of the mammals. Why don't you tell us about what our sleep . . our basic sleep pattern is and then talk about how birds are like that? So, in humans and other mammals, we engage in two general types of sleep and these are measured by looking at changes in brain activity in the sleeping human. There is REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep. During this state, the brain actually is exhibiting a pattern of activity that's very similar to that observed when we're awake. But we're unresponsive. We're clearly asleep. Then, there's another state called non- REM sleep. Which the brainwaves are markedly different and When you look at the brainwave activity of a bird that's sleeping, they do the same thing. They exhibit both these states. They have REM sleep, their eyes dart around, their brain is very activated very much like when they're awake. They lose some muscle tone, just like we do. Maybe, if you have a cat, sometimes if they sleep on top of a television when they enter REM sleep, they lose muscle tone and they roll off the TV and fall on the floor. That's one way to see this at home. Try it out. Try it at home, yes. and if you have Dogs will often move their paws and whimper as if chasing rabbits, and they're in REM sleep. But, so these two sleep states that we have birds have them also; and they don't have similar sleep states because they share a common ancestor that had the same sleep states. They seem to have evolved these patterns independently. So, the mammal could get the RAM non REM sleep, birds get it, too? Yeah, so the closest living relatives to birds are the crocodiles and other reptiles, and they don't show these two distinct states. They clearly sleep. Crocodiles probably don't dream, at least the way we do. I don't know. We'll find out. So and now you found one really amazing difference between us and birds, which is I mean when we go to sleep, the lights are all out in the sense that our whole brain is involved in sleep; whereas with birds. it's not always the case, right? Yeah, birds can do a very interesting thing and that is they can sleep with one eye open. This had been observed decades ago But nobody had really addressed what was the function of sleeping with one eye open. Now, this might seem like an obvious question, and the obvious answer would be that they're watching for something dangerous while sleeping. You can imagine that sleeping is a very dangerous state to engage in, especially if you live with predators; and so, we were interested in testing whether birds use this to watch for predators. And maybe I can just back up one second and talk about the image that's currently on the screen. For many animals, there really is this fundamental conflict between the need to be awake and also the need to get their sleep. An interest in this conflict dates back thousands of years as shown in the legend depicted in this piece of art. According to this legend, in order to stay safe while sleeping, one crane in a group would stay awake holding a stone and If he started to fall asleep. He would relax and drop the stone and thereby awaken everybody and that's how they were thought to keep themselves safe. Now, there's absolutely no scientific evidence that the cranes do this, but as I was discussing birds can sleep with one eye open; and when they have one eye opened, the half of the brain connected to that eye is kind of in a wake or slightly drowsy state and so we were interested in learning whether they can actually choose when to sleep this way or when to sleep with both eyes closed because they don't sleep only this way they spend a lot of time sleeping with both eyes closed; and so, what we wanted to do was find a way to make them feel a little nervous when they were sleeping. Just a little edgy. A little edgy. And so, we thought about various ways . . . you know, show them a cat or something. But And while we were trying to figure out how to test this, I was observing some of our ducks that we were studying in the laboratory and I saw that two of them at night were floating in the water next to each other; and while they were doing that, they were closing the eye that faced each other and opening the eye that was facing out from each other. And that right then and there the birds designed the experiment for us People often say oh, that's such an elegant study, and I have to say well It came from a bird brand Did you acknowledge the Ducks in your paper? Oh? So So this is this is the experiment kind of the effort of the way yeah? The upper image shows the actual experimental apparatus and so what we did is we literally put our ducks in a row and We did this because it's been shown in many animals that the animals at an edge of a group spend more time being vigilant like antelope in Africa if they're at the edge of the group they lift their head up and Interrupt their feeding more frequently than the ones in the center Presumably the ones at the edge feel more exposed and more at risk of being eaten because the predator would get them first so we put our ducks in a row and What we found was a very? Dramatic effect of where they were in the group the birds that were in the more central positions that were flanked by ducks on either side They spent most of their time sleeping with both eyes closed and both halves of their brain But when the birds were positioned at the end of the row they Switched and they spent much more time sleeping with one eye open, and they showed a profound preference for directing that open Eye away from the other birds as shown in the cartoon at the bottom, so this clearly showed that They have this capacity to sleep with one eye open And that it serves a function in allowing them to get some sleep without getting eaten And I believe we have an image of a seal as well if we could show that because this is so This isn't just limited to birds. I mean so so there are other situations where animals will switch off Yeah, it this seems to be a common trade among birds, but among mammals This type of sleep is only found in marine mammals its found in and the cetaceans the dolphins and whales in some of the seals the first seal shown in this image and also in manatees and In the case of this image. It's a first seal and what they do is the they have the awake? Half of their brain in this case the right half That's attached to the flipper down in the water and that flipper paddles and keeps them in a position that allows them to keep their nose above the surface and that way they can sleep and Breathe at the same time and this needing to sleep in and breathe is seems to be probably what's driving the Evolution of this type of sleep in marine mammals and so we mammals can afford we Sort of land mammals can afford to sleep with our whole brain Yeah, it's it seems that there there must be some trade-off For being able to sleep this way, otherwise. I I would expect it to be much more common in the animal Among mammals, but it seems to be restricted to these mammals living in a marine environment However There is evidence even in humans that sleep can be a local phenomenon in the brain although we're Behaviorally we're fully asleep Parts of the brain can sleep more deeply than other parts at the same time and a lot of our current thoughts about the function of sleep and Based on this local aspect of sleep were derived from these studies with the marine mammals and this Modulation of sleep intensity locally in the brain seems to be related to how we use certain parts of the brain during wakefulness So so a region we might be using a lot might go into a deep sleep yet when we're asleep. Yeah, so if Somebody did a certain task with their hand that part of the brain connected to that will sleep more deeply Afterwards and you can even do the opposite and their studies showing that if you immobilize an arm For a day then the part of the brain that controls that arm shows lighter sleep that night, so we're clearly Getting something out of sleep and in a way some of the demands in our waking life Make make us need to get more of it for those particular area, so there's something about sleep is it You know restoring our energy? I mean. Why would a choral or a fly need to sleep? You know like we do - and what did what's the currency there that we all? Want yeah, it's a great question I think One thing to keep in mind is that sleep may have had an initial primordial function perhaps in these coral or other simple organisms But that once an animal was Sleeping and as they became more complex other functions may accumulated during the course of evolution so Sleep in humans and sleep in birds may not be the same as in these animals, but I think to get back to birds I Have a bird bias. I kind of like them, but Okay This Fact that they independently evolved similar sleep States it really is an opportunity To understand the function of these states if we can figure out What it is that a bird brain has in common with a human brain? That should give us clues to what the function of these states are so clearly we have a lot of Mysteries still left to figure out even about human sleep We actually talked to one of the real pioneers of modern sleep research Roberts tickled of Harvard Medical School and posed a few questions to him about sleep And we're going to show you a video of some of his provocative answers There seem to be limits to the resolution of our dreams so if I ask you to picture A little German Shepherd next to a great big elephant it turns out that if I want to ask you to describe dogs ears You have to zoom in on your mind Because you don't have the resolution to see it so it might be that you just don't have enough resolution on your Imaginal screen on your mental image to see small letters you can read Large letters going by but try to close your eyes and picture is the phrase I'm doing fine How are you you sort of can't squeeze it into your mental image Everybody seems to think that their dreams have great meaning And that's what makes us so much want to share them I think what's going on when we're dreaming is that the brain as opposed to the mind is going through the events of our days and recalling memories and trying to find Associated memories from other times in our life that might be relevant so if the brain is looking for ways to put things together You want its bias to be shifted towards? Oh, that's really interesting so when you wake up the conscious equivalent of that bias shift towards towards value Is to say wow that was so meaningful, that's why your husband and my wife wakes up and said oh I had the most amazing dream I say that's nice, but what was the great insight, but to them and to me when I wake up They seem incredibly meaningful So Matt I I won't wanted to ask you I mean where do we stand now with dream research? I mean there have been so many ideas over the years You've had Freud with his ideas and other people who say oh, that's wrong dreams are completely random and meaningless What are dreams Well, you know I think that the trying to work that I do involves not the study of human dreams But of animal dreams, and you might ask animal dreams. What does that mean I mean? How do you how do you how can you tell when an animal is dreaming you can't wake them up And you know giving them a dream notebook or ask them what they dream. You know what they dreamt about You can but they won't really answer So you can have how could you actually study study animal dreams and the answer is to bypass? the mechanisms of dream deport go directly to the source and that is to record the activity of brain cells While animals are awake and having experience and then record the activity of the same cells while animals are sleeping and ask Essentially compare the patterns to the patterns that we see when animals are moving through the world experience in the world in the world Do they reappear in some form during sleep, so it's a direct measure of? Both the structure of brain activity and you know Niels mentioned that there are these sleep states in which? The structure of activity seems to be very different, that's how we define these sleep States Deep sleep these slow oscillations much of the brain seems to you know to be moving in lockstep Which is distinct from wakefulness when many parts of the brain are being driven? Based upon what you're doing what you're seeing in other words the brain when you're awake is Responding to the external world the brain during sleep seems to be responding to some internal world so how can we get at this? internal world you mentioned Freud and the idea that maybe we have you know different levels layers different types of brain activity that correspond to different Kinds of cognition that there is the conscious the unconscious those? The you know the deep hidden parts of the brain that that might influence behavior But we can't really articulate we can't talk about they That they're Available to us, but how would we actually measure them so again the strategy is using an animal model that? Actually as its benefit the inability to tell us or to report what they're dreaming so the rats rats Don't wake up in the morning and say you would not believe And if they could You know the way we would interpret that is that well that might be what you thought you dreamt about? But I want to know what you actually dreamt about and so you can be going directly to the source so putting very fine electrodes into the brains of Animals and in particular we focus on a part of the brain. That's involved in memory So you would think well I thought we were talking about dreams isn't dreams about perception what we experience the? you know and Just a little segue there. We you know we had talked about dreaming. We talked about dream sleep, and you'll mentioned You know REM and non-rem sleep And there's this misconception that dream sleep is really associated with REM sleep so REM sleep is with the rapid eye movement So I learned that's when you see me pause and you know Effective movements and clear that is dreaming that goes on there, and you know I'll discuss a little bit about those kinds of dreams But there is also Dream activity you can call it dream like activity during non-rem sleep, and that is the kind of sleep that would be Expressed not just birds mammals, but in flies and potentially every organism would have this kind of inactive sleep non REM sleep which Again, I'll point out there's so you're saying flies dream - they could dream - that dreaming is actually not it's not the province of a Specific dream state it may be something that actually emerged after the brain found some Usefulness in becoming inactive, so what happens when you kind of shut down you no longer attend to the external world the Brain isn't going to turn off the brain never turns off if the brain has turned off You're either under the influence of an anesthetic that is intentionally suppress brain activity Or you're in a coma you are you know in a sense in a state that is unnatural So anesthesia is more like a coma than sleep So when you're sleep your brain is very active It's not shut off in any way as you saw and you know some of the subjective descriptions that you know the kids They're talking about you know Their brains during sleep be reactive, and it's true. It is very active, but it's active in a very different way Maybe we could show Some of Matt's experiments next because they're just really amazing all right, so we're so we'll jump into it Yeah, and just as a little prelude here so the I thought we started Why don't you set it up for us right so so here? We are
so you can imagine you're sitting right now in the lab because this is exactly what we would see if we were sitting in the lab on the right hand side You see a top down as a video of what we call a maze with a long track. It's like a long, hallway It's about 10 meters long actually long for this rat. It would take this rat named You know maybe a minute or two actually to you know to fully go back and forth along this on the left What you're seeing is brain activity those little flashing lights each time you see a little flash That is the discharge of a single brain cell and the little colored regions Indicate different brain cells, so you're what you're seeing is in real-time. What in this kit 2 4 6 8 9 8 or 9 Individual brain cells are doing and will loop through this again Could you loop through that one again is the same way? What these brain cells are doing when in animals running on this little track? Now in this part of the brain this memory part of the brain called the hippocampus one striking thing that we see is that The pattern that you see on the left is going to depend upon Exactly where the animal is on the right in other words. There's a correspondence between what the brain is doing and where the animal is when the animal is moving so you can see that on the right the little the little dots or the You know the brain activity the single discharge of single cells is Mapped on to the maze so for instance you see in the lower left There are lots of blue points. That's because the blue cell It's not really blue. It just color-coded that way from the blue cell tends to fire whenever the animals in that part of the maze On the other hand you see the little cyan cell down in the lower, right And and we have places I should say we have place else too, so if like I was walking through my house You know exactly place L. Would fire as I went past the counter in my kitchen So you could so you could say well you know if I'm in there if I could record the activity of these cells Memory cells are cells that fire in certain places I could record them I might be able to tell just by reading your mind in a sense where you where you are Well, so if we go to the next video or the next video So let's just try that or you read the mind of a rat So now it's gonna be the same experiment the same data. You can see on the left That's that's the same brain cells firing away But on the right now instead of showing you where the brain cells fire when the animals on the mains instead We're decoding the activity we're guessing where the animal is just by looking at what's going on in the brain now? If you watch when the animal starts walking along the tracks see the little triangles there That's our best guess as to where the animal is and it does pretty Well the green circle is just there to kind of show you Where the rat is so our guest the triangles fall right on top of the circle where the animal is? But notice when the animal stops, and maybe we can just rewind well, you can actually see here animal stop it will rewind it Animal moving brain tells the brain tells you where the animal is Animal stops notice where the triangles go they stop firing They are they stop reflecting where the animal is you see them You see that little flash the triangles jumped across the track. It was just a fraction of a second very brief But the brain activity during those brief moments Instead reflect that where the animal is, but where it has been or where it could be animal is thinking about in a sense Things that are remote from its immediate experience night travel Yeah, time travel animal just it you know it's sitting briefly and what happens in this part of the brain It's they're part of the brain the paleo cortex Which includes these these brain areas that are critical memory for a motion for driving What you might think of as? More primitive behavior Well this part of the brain can shut off on a dime in just a fraction of a second it can go from being actively engaged taking information in from the outside world to Going into what looks remarkably like sleep? So these memory and emotional areas can go to sleep while the newer parts of the brain the neocortex the part of the brain, that's important for Keeping track of you know threats of monitoring the external world of making sure you get to where you're going The part of the brain that has to deal with the outside world That can be awake and this other part of the brain can be asleep so we can think of this state of just Thinking of what you're not attentive which is calling what you call Daydreaming almost now daydreaming might be if I you know if you're sitting there, and you know Wilson is not really Interesting anymore, I'm gonna. You know wondering what you know when I park my car now you start your mind starts to wander You start thinking about this your the memory parts of the brain that can now go back and retrieve past experience They've got more interesting. You've got that parking lot place out. I fire. It's there, but now the longer you remain in that state The further out the more you can actually think about remote from where you are right now And if you stay in that state line you say daydreaming at some point you may actually start to drift off into Sleep you may make a transition from this quiet wakefulness Into early non REM sleep, so you can think of non REM Sleep as emerging in a sense from what the brain naturally does when it doesn't have to you know doesn't have to Attend to the outside world that might only last a fraction of a second it might last 20 minutes it might last 20 hours it's it looks remarkably similar from the perspective of these parts of the brain involved in memory, so somehow these memory areas are trying to take advantage of this offline state and If we can just switch to the third video you can see this. This is going to be the same basically it's the same experiment You can see the activity of these brain cells on the left, but now The animals not running on the maze anymore He's not stopped on the maze any more than the lower right that little circle that you see there That's actually a rat curled up. They they kind of sleep in this little curled up posture. There's a rat. He's sleeping He's off now in another part of the you know another part of the room sleeping But these memory cells play cells are replaying His experience on the maze they're running through They're running through interestingly these little sequences short stretches. It's like a little snippet a fragment of its experience Along the maze but notice a couple of things one is they're very fast and one thing about these Replayed memories during quiet wakefulness and during non-rem sleep is they seem to be compressed in time they run about ten times Faster than the animals actual experience and also if you look very carefully Notice the direction of that triangle the direction of the triangle indicates That's the direction the animal will be facing in while I was moving on the track well some of those little memory sequences Run in Reverse they go backward in time So it's as though During quiet wakefulness and during non-rem sleep the brain has the ability to go back revisit past memories to revisit these memories in a Compressed form and it's got a rewind button it can go forward or backward So you could ask why would you you know? Why would you want to? revisit memories in this peculiar form You get rid of time you can press it and you run it forward and backward well If you think about what's going on during these states? It's not just replaying memory But trying to do something that we think is probably more Fundamental and important to the animals and that is to learn from experience. How would you learn from your experience? How would you go back reevaluate maybe compare different things as Bob Stickle had mentioned in his little piece compare different experiences and to try to figure out The the fundamental challenge that we as organisms in these brains face And that is how does this world work? Well? What are the rules of the world because I'm gonna have to tomorrow I'm gonna have to go out into that world Encounter new things things that I haven't actually experienced, and I'm gonna have to make good decisions I'm gonna have to produce adaptive behavior under novel circumstances, and that's what we can do and Robots can't do they're great when you tell them exactly what to do and when they know Exactly. You know what what should be done. You give them anything new and They simply can't make those critical judgments, so do we need to program rod robots, so they can dream? Well the question is what would they what would they do if they were dreaming so clearly they would the first step would be? Let's go back first form memories Memories of experience where we keep track of a couple of things? One is we keep track of the order of events as they occurred because that's very important Order of that's very important. You know you're at a stoplight light turns green You go alright. That's Now you know and so in your dreams You might have this little sequence like those green cars move now. You might extend that there might be a longer sequence Okay, the light turns green if you don't go People start honking okay soon. This is now now and your dreams. You might be imagining it all but now That might be a simple rule that we would have to learn but one thing that's very important about these simple rules is One rule doesn't necessarily fit all circumstances They might be dependent on the context Context is just you know it might be where you are it might be the time of day It's just it's all of these additional things that Might change the nature of the rule so for instance that rule that I gave you Like turns green if you don't go you start. Honking okay? That's the general rules a rule that you know I might have learned growing up in a small town in northeastern, Wisconsin That rule applies now. I come to New York. It was a little bit different its Course you start honking then light turns green And so I learned that right different rules different context now the question is well. How do you you know? How do you tell a robot how to do that? well the robot has to both have experiences in both it has to be able to remember and you know and be able to express the time ordering of events figuring out how things actually happen and Then it has to do something that I think is unique its unique perhaps to Organisms that have exploit asleep, and that's be able to figure out What the what the significance is of this context are there really different rules for different places should I? Combine these should I figure out one rule or they're really two rules Well, wait a minute the thing is that you make dreams sound so practical and so reasonable. In MY dreams there are cactuses that turn into monsters, and I mean just, just, it's -- my dreams are crazy, so -- Well, so this is it again, so we're back to this misconception -- In New York, Cactuses do not turn into monsters. And that's because what you're describing to me is almost certainly a dream that you experience during REM. Ah, so and in round ram and ram now So I I didn't illustrate a rendering, but when we do the same experiment. We measure brain activity during REM. It looks very different and one of the key differences is There are memories that are replaying, but they're not compressed in time. They don't come in These small these small little fragments But rather they're played out in real time as though the animal is actually experiencing these events that there are other there That one can tell Niels pointed out that you know when you're awake and when you're asleep there are the you know very different brain States and You can tell when an animal is awake by just looking at the way the brain responds there are these oscillations rhythms that kick in There are certain rhythms that That correspond to being attentive to moving in the world other rhythms that correspond to being inattentive well during REM The rhythms are the rhythms that you would get if you were attending if you were moving through the world during realm As far as the brain is concerned. It's awake mm-hmm it just doesn't happen to be moving and it's in the REM State where now you see it's The animals are dreaming about things as though. They were actually happening now You know another point about this the non room, so we go back to the non REM what we think of it's more primitive perhaps a process of taking memory and experience Trying to learn from it maybe taking different experiences comparing them determining whether maybe there is this one rule Maybe it is you know light green. You know you better you better go or Cars will start honking, maybe that's the rule and everywhere I've gone That's the rule but now I come to New York and somehow things are screwed up. Why are they honking? The light is not turned green yet. There's something wrong. Maybe it's a context difference. Maybe you have to figure out What it is? about New York City that might That might you know Require that I form a special rule on context-dependent rule and another thing about the hippocampus the part of the brain I was talking about the you know that's involved in memory its replaying these things during sleep and that is that it is critically Involved in recognizing Context just knowing where you are Being able to figure out. Oh yeah, I'm you know at my home. Why because When I put all the pieces together what I see what I hear where I came from I know Where I am and so you can think about that as something that's very fundamental knowing where you are that may be sort of the anchor for context different rules in different places so We have REM. You know you're running through these longer sequences those of the actually experience in non-rem you have these little fragments And when we look at the fragments in non-rem They seem to relate to pretty much what the animal was just doing they're more mundane It's animal keeps running through the maze over and over and so a little fragment that you saw During non-rem sleep. It's mostly slow-wave sleep slow-wave sleep is the slow rhythm goes on Bob We know once a second brain is turning on and off Neil's point out different parts of the brain Might you know might show stronger rhythms as you pointed out Parts of the brain that you have really been using if you were you know if you're doing something during the day And you look during sleep those parts of the brain Maybe the visual parts of the brain if you involved in some visual processing might be going up and down. You know more vigorously Well, it's in those little fragments the little fragment that lasts about a second mm-hmm That's where you see these small memories being these Compressed memory fragments being expressed now. It's important about that is it says a That our experience can be broken up into little chunks You can think of memory as actually being a series of building blocks that are experience I kind of think of it like you know memory is like a big bag of Lego blocks You know where each one of our experiences can be built out of a series of these blocks? Now unlike Lego blocks which I can take and I can put together in virtually any way these memory Lego blocks Can only be matched with other blocks in which the pig and the flock? They you know they correspondent somewhere they can be associated. Maybe they're linked by a common emotion Maybe you know it's a it's a it's a common location mhm common queue, so Putting together a building a model of the world out of these memory blocks Requires a little bit of tension you have to go in take these little pieces maybe you try you know one piece happen when you flip them around and forward reverse and once you've built up a model I've got a new model for You know traffic in New York City Now that's non-rem now Maybe I I give that model at test run mm-hmm this might be what REM is involved so now I have a whole bunch of these memory Lego block models that I've put together and Now as I start to move through them trying to figure out well should I actually have perhaps one model? Do I need to so moving through these memory? models during REM might confer upon them this kind of bizarre confabulate or eli content or structure because it's not just about Revisiting memory or experience what I've just done It's not just about you know revisiting older memories, but it's putting them together moving through These models that have been built on memory in ways that attempt to figure out how things are connected One thing about you know in RAM different another difference between non REM and REM Sleep States memory and these associations some studies have been done looking at your tendency that connect unrelated things during When when when people are awakened during RAM or non REM if you're awakened during REM sleep? You are far more likely to be to make Novel associations to connect things together for instance just given symbol wordless. You're far more likely to connect things that were not really related During REM sleep than you are during non REM, and non-rem. It's pretty much. You know the way I you know the way I saw it is the way I remember it so let me so this is a great Opportunity to jump in to Carlos's work So you're looking at you you started your career a lot of your research looking at REM sleep gone really wrong Tell us about REM sleep behavior disorder Well as I've written in my blog for the World Science Festival And also in my books my entire career practicing sleep medicine has been involved with extreme sleep Which are the? parasomnias defined as the abnormal behaviors and experiences that accompanies sleep and really the Parasomnia is involved mixed states of sleep and wakefulness which are very hazardous experiences because if you're interacting with the actual environment with a lot of your brain still asleep You're really setting self up to injuring yourself or anyone in your vicinity So also with the parasomnias our basic instincts can be released And I'm talking about all our basic instincts sexual behavior feeding behavior aggression violence Exploration locomotion everything we can do in our waking lives can become unleashed in a very inappropriate way during our sleep So on September 11th 1982 when I started my practice of sleep medicine? The second patient I saw was a gentleman from Golden Valley Minnesota named Donald Dorf and Don complained of violent moving nightmares which is a beautiful description of REM sleep behavior disorder? For several several years he was acting out dreams that were very different from his previous dreams during his RBD dreams He was being confronted by unfamiliar people or even animals, and he had to respond by hitting back Or becoming very aggressive to protect himself or his wife He would also have sports dreams that were very Aggressive and in fact the dream that he had that led to his coming to see me was a dream involving American football he was a Halfback carrying the ball through the line of scrimmage and he lowered his shoulder to really anticipate an impact with a 280 pound lineman and When he came to he had actually lowered his shoulder into the dresser on the far side of his bedroom And his head hit the wall And he gashed himself and really needed a lot of stitches after all the blood had spilled on the ground He had no medical disorder no psychiatric disorder He had never been a sleepwalker earlier in his life, so this is the first type of parasomnia. He had experienced five nights later I decided to go to the Sleep Lab to be with the sleep technologist when we monitored him in a sleep lab And we saw something that was really unprecedented That during rapid eye movement sleep instead of displaying the usual mammalian paralysis Which protects people and other mammals from acting out their dreams Don had lost that paralysis And he had muscle tone muscle twitching and during each of his four REM sleep episodes He actually was twitching jerking around throwing punches kicking talking shouting swearing And we entered the room after each of these events he reported and immediately a dream and the action in the dream matched What we had seen so there's a beautiful correspondence between the dream activity that he was acting out and the behaviors that we observed and that was really the beginning of our identification of REM sleep behavior disorder known as RB D now fortunately We were able to come out with a medication through trial-and-error to calm him down And what was interesting is that the medication clonazepam? Which is a potent? benzodiazepine anticonvulsant That medication not only stopped the behaviors of RB D, but it restored normal dreams And so that has really piqued the interest of dream researchers because RB d is a dream disorder Almost as much as a behavior disorder of sleep so in terms of conceptualizing dream generation RB D is a really fertile area for Research and so with Don his bad dreams had gone away along with the bad behaviors And he was a very happy camper to play golf in his retirement Now as we started seeing more and more of these patients, and they were being reported around the world? After certain number of use years we realized that a lot of these men with REM behavior disorder Develop Parkinson's disease which is a classic neurologic disorder involving a resting tremor muscle rigidity? Slow down movements called brady kinesia and also a poor stability of your posture So they're really well defined signs and symptoms of Parkinson's disease Which involves a depletion of dopamine cells in the brain stem area called the substantia nigra Now we reported in the journal Neurology in 1996 that 38% of the men with REM behavior disorder Eventually converted to Parkinson's disease and nothing else now we're up to 81 percent conversion from REM behavior disorder Parkins disease and Centers from around the world are reporting that at least two-thirds of their patients convert so really this is actually an important development in neuroscience and neurology in terms of early intervention of people at risk for future Parkinson's disease and So this is launched really a major international effort in terms of identifying REM sleep behavior disorder patients and trying to develop Trials of what's called neuroprotective agents to delay Greatly or even event the future emergence of Parkinson's disease I should also point out that all this makes scientific sense because the cells in the brainstem related to Parkinson's disease Interact very very closely with the cells in the brain involved with muscle activity And the paralysis activity of REM sleep so a lesion that interrupts the paralysis Activity in REM sleep is a lesion that also can produce Parkinson's disease Just a matter exactly where that initial lesion is and you either get REM behavior disorder first and maybe a decade or two later Parkinson's disease or you get Parkinson's disease first and later run behavior disorder or you get both together so I think that that was a major kind of scientific revelation about RBD the good news for us is that we identified a Therapy that helped control these poor people hurting themselves and their wives and also restored normal dreams I think we should show the image of Mel label are really a most famous patient who almost killed his wife Now male was just the nicest guy in the world he had a dream one night And this is how he he slept for five years before he came to see us This is a home remedy. He had a belt around his waist he had a rope tethered around his belt attached to the bedpost This is his way of preventing himself from flying out of bed and running into the wall however It did not prevent him from hurting his wife Harriet, so one night He had a dream going back to his childhood days in Spooner, Wisconsin He was with his grandfather. They were pitching hay and they saw two deer running by them and And then the deer disappeared and suddenly a dole Reappeared and Mel smashed the dough with his pitchfork and its stun did the ER that was Blathering and he decided to put that poor deer out of its misery so in his dream He grabbed the deers chin of one hand and the top of the deers head with the other was they're about to snap its neck When Harry is screaming woke Mel up and fortunately? He stopped the process of almost snapping Harriet's neck well obviously he was extremely distressed and so was Harriet by this You know it's clear that in fact the stern magazine wrote an article 1988 called hunting deer under the blanket and the New York Times Sunday magazine in 2003 the man who mistook his wife for a deer so Extremely dangerous and life-threatening behaviors can occur with RVD the good news is that we can treat it The disturbing news is that it can lead to Parkinson's disease But the hopeful news is that it can lead to early intervention to prevent the progression to Parkinson's disease because the Parkinson's researchers for decades have been looking for the earliest marker of Parkinson's and where our beauty is it so it's generated a tremendous amount of interest in the Parkinson's disease research community And we now have an international REM sleep behavior disorder research group and it's truly international four continents or involved their researchers and So we're really trying to help the Parkinson's researchers besides understanding more about the brain during sleep I think we can go to the video now, and I could show you some examples of RBD and other parasomnias So this is from our sleep center These men who are typically 50 years old and older? We don't know why this is a male predominant disorder by the way It's a big mystery, but this is what they do, and if you're sleeping by him as this man's wife You know these men generally wake up feeling rested in the morning the wives are wiped out They wiped out and the husband's say what why are you so tired didn't you sleep well like me and they said hey do you? mean Look what you did so these men they remember their dreams, but they don't know that they were acting them out And they feel rested in the morning, so I'm gonna show this again, so imagine if you're the wife Sleeping night after night and these episodes her Four or five nights a week so the you treat the man with this planet as a Pam And it's like giving the wife of sleeping pill as well Like the baby after his sleep is under control but a lot of these patients come to us saying we want to be believed we want to be validated people think we're Exaggerating and in fact. They're not in the video really is proof that there's no exaggeration here So let's go to the next video. This is a culture specific dream enacting behavior from Japan my colleague of nana, Tachibana in Osaka Apparently in Japan once a couple has a child The the wife leaves a bedroom with the child the husband sleeps alone and REM behavior disorder is detected Basically by yelling and screaming so this man had a dream He set up a home video, and he's the samurai warrior acting out a samurai warrior jury, maybe we can show that one again Please so here He is and and he only set up the video because he did not believe his wife, and he said all right Let's set it up and here's the proof and in fact He had to believe that his wife was telling the truth now. How long will he'd be doing this will he? Go at this all night long. Well. He killed the enemy so he doesn't have to do it again What's the point he did it enough to disturb his wife so let's shift gears to another parasomnia now and This is sleepwalking so this is from Delta non REM sleep The deepest stage of sleep the brain waves are the slowest we should show this again if we could so out of those Steepest stage of sleep when we have no clue about our environment our locomotor system gets activated our legs start moving we start standing and walking without any actual Awareness of the environment, and you can see how dangerous it is There she is sandy in our sleep lab about to fall out of the bed her legs are moving But she has no idea. Why and is so inappropriately I? Should give an anecdote of a patient of mine named Jan Who was a sleepwalker as long as she was walking in her life that's how she described it so after her divorce her nine-year-old daughter slept in the same room as Jan and So in preparation for sleep at night the the shades were drawn completely But then the daughter was horrified if two hours later the mother Jan had raised the the blinds Halfway was looking at the window now across the street from their home was a cemetery Jan was carrying on a conversation with the dead people in the cemetery asking them who's feeding you What are they feeding you doof? Do you feel lonely and there was a pause between the questions and the daughter realized she was engaging in a conversation? With the dead people in the cemetery and in her own mind she asked her mother at the time Are you awake and and Jan and very glazed Wei said yes? Well the daughter was so horrified by this that she never slept in to say move the mother again and in fact it even Mentioned a sin so she was a teen and my patient of course felt very very badly But that tells you how you don't have judgment you don't have the monitor Going in terms of your activity while you're sleepwalking you're engaging yourself and sleepwalking behaviors with the environment But you don't have any awareness. You don't really realize how inappropriate you are we can go to the next video now These are two patients with me scary this is very scary So are these night terrors they seem like mary terrors the first Was a woman in her early thirties second is a young girl five years old Screaming at night very loudly however these occurred multiple times every single night Night terrors even in children. Who are really most likely to have night terrors Maybe once a week once a month But they have multiple episodes every night tells you that something else is going on and these are nocturnal epileptic seizures Uh known as the great mimicker so if you have screaming at night and thrashing around They could be night terrors But the history of having multiple episodes every single night really tips to balance towards Epileptic seizures and in fact the brainwave activity in both the woman and in a young girl gave good evidence that there was epileptic activity going on and they needed anticonvulsant medication rather than and Clonazepam which is a benzodiazepine medication we can go to the next video if we could? Now this is a completely different parasomnia, and we're going to show this a second time This is a 23 year old woman who had been sexually abused during childhood by an older sister and if you look at her shoulders And we'll show it again the shoulders seem to be pinned down while there's a lot of pelvic movement And this really reflects muscle memory going over two decades Of the sister pinning her down on the shoulders to prevent this poor young girl from running away while there's genital stimulation Going on and here. We are talking two decades later, and she's recreating the abuse scenario of the Being pinned down and the pelvic stimulation, and this is really a very Disturbed kind of poor young woman who needs specialized psychiatric care, but it's in the realm of parasomnias, but it's a psychiatric Parasomnia, okay, we can go to the next video This is a lady who engages in sleep related eating disorder But please focus on her pinky because her pinky does something very peculiar every time she takes a bite out of her brownie First of all the pinky is spread off in the other fingers which is unusual in itself But she seems to be nibbling at her pinky and doing funny things when she saw this video She said I never eat that way when I'm awake never but with each bite of the brownie But let's show that her again if we could so we we call this sleep state dependent behavior Activation so it's specific to the sleep state And it really indicates. This is not normal wakeful eating so she takes a bite of the brownie and There goes the pinky So you know this is not someone who's fully with it in a wakeful mental mode whatsoever this comes out of intermediate non-rem sleep called stage 2 sleep And this is typical of sleep-related eating disorder most patients have episodes every single night, and they gain weight And they feel very much out of sorts from this eating behavior And this is called a final common pathway disorder that can be accessed through sleep apnea restless leg syndrome Medications like sleeping pills, or it can just run in the family and be a variation of sleepwalking But once it becomes well-established. It usually occurs every single night and with a lot of metabolic consequences obesity consequences and sleep disruption consequences And this is one of the tougher Parasomnias to treat although about 2/3 of the treated patients do respond very well to the therapy But you have to know what the underlying or associated sleep condition is like sleep apnea restless leg syndrome to identify the most effective therapy But you already got a glimpse of how our basic instincts can be released Inappropriately during sleep later on I will describe a very dramatic That made Canadian legal history involving sleepwalking and murder and I also described sexsomnia Yeah, so thank you for now now in terms of extreme sleep you know we might have a Sort of little contest going here you've got extreme human sleep But I think Neil's is got some extreme animal sleep that it's pretty amazing I mean just in terms of like The why don't you just tell people about the these birds particular burger you've been starting to say like in the wild? Yes, so recent technological advancements in microchip technology developed by a colleague and University of Zurich Alex Alexei vysotsky has allowed us to actually record brain activity And sleep related brain activity in animals in the wild and this is important for two reasons one We did the first study of an animal sleeping and in the wild in this case it was a slot And we found that sloths are not so slothful after all People previously thought they slept 16 hours a day some people said 20 hours a day But when we recorded their brain activity in the wild we found they only slept nine and a half hours a day over Six hours less than captive Schloss so that if finding in and of itself is important because it calls into question you know the the nature of sleep that we're recording in captivity or in the laboratory at least in terms of how long an Animal's it might not be too much to do in the lab, so Yeah, my guess. We don't exactly know the reason for the this difference And I think it can even go the other way that some animals Might be particularly fearful in the laboratory and sleep less than they do in the wild But it could be differences, and they don't have to forage They don't have some animals may feel safe in the lab and some may feel threatened So I think it can go in each direction but but to study things in the wild I mean you have to take all this equipment that you it's easy to use in the And you've got to take it outside and into some pretty extreme places Yeah it it is tricky our laboratory becomes a tent on a remote island or the back of a pickup truck in in in the the rainforest in Panama But the birds that we're really interested in studying now do some extraordinary things There are several species that you'll see in this image that engage in Periods of continuous activity lasting days weeks months maybe even longer There's a bird in the upper left corner the bar-tailed Godwit It's been shown that they fly nonstop for eight days from Alaska to New Zealand where they spend the winter and we actually have a map I believe yeah and there's that map and and this is showing a GPS track they put a device on these birds that could tell exactly where they were and you can see Alaska up on the top of the globe and they start there And they fly all the way to New Zealand without stopping at all and then they make Comparable long flights on the way back going via, China in this case So this raises the question well how do they get their sleep and every other animal sleep seems to be a daily? Phenomenon and very important as as we all know and as I know being quite jet-lagged today. You're doing great What happens if you try to keep a bird awake for a long time, I mean just say please leave me alone I need sleep I mean yeah, and we've actually recently shown with pigeons that if you take away just their normal daytime napping that they become very Sleepy and when we let them sleep and record their brain activity They they sleep much more deeply so the brainwave patterns respond Just like they do in humans and also We've shown that if you stimulate one part of the brain in this case we we had birds watch David Attenborough's the life of birds On TV With just one eye That's not fair We just covered one eye and showed them this show and the part of the brain Connected to that eye that watched the TV slept much more deeply so just like I had mentioned in humans the sleep seems to be Regulated in the bird brain depending on how different regions were used so sleep is clearly important for birds They need to recover and their brain responds the same way ours does But then if we can go back the the in addition to this bird the particles like God would There are other birds that engage in in long flights the the frigate bird on the top, right They go to sea to feed for several days lasting periods up to 12 days but surprisingly for a seabird Frigate birds cannot land on the water if they do they get wet and they can't take off and they drown and that's it And so they go just out to sea foraging for days or weeks and can't sit on the water so then again the question of do they sleep There also unlike our Swift's here the European Swift is is renowned for engaging in Long flights it's thought that other than the time when they're actually taking care of the nestlings that these Swift's are flying continuously It's even been shown They put that on their first night out the first night. They leave the nest first time they've ever flown They they actually go up into the sky and spend the night soaring up in the night sky with all the adult birds And it's thought that from that point on they may not land until they nest two or three years later and So when do they sleep? And there's also a bird ironically called the wide awake turn It's ironic because it's called that because it's call sounds like it's saying wide awake wide awake It's not because scientists have actually shown that it's wide awake, but maybe it's telling us something They're like the frigate birds they go out to sea, but they can't sit on the water They'll get wet and drown so again. When did they sleep and finally a bird that I'm flying to Alaska to study tomorrow morning at 4:00 a.m. is The one on the lower left the pectoral Sandpiper and this bird doesn't engage in long nonstop flights But we have some reason to believe that they engage in periods of constant activity during the breeding season Colleagues at our Institute have shown that they're active for two to three weeks Continuously around the clock 24/7 and in this case they seem to be doing it to get mates These the male's shown here He stays awake, and he chases all the other males away from his females and guards his territory Whereas the females they seem to sleep like other birds for several hours a night? so We suspect that they're not sleeping But we want to confirm this by recording their brain activity so so you're going to be you you've developed Equipment where you can do this we can actually Yeah, working with colleagues that develop the microchip technology We can record their brain activity And we've actually tested it on these birds a couple years ago so that it's all ready to go and we just need to collect the data, and I think You know on the one hand if Burt some of these birds are sleeping in flight that's Fascinating and maybe they're sleeping with one half of the brain at a time But it's these birds that might also Engage in extended periods of not sleeping that might be the really exciting ones because Again, it would just challenge what we know and think about sleep in general as being so important And it would raise the question well, how are they doing it? What is going on in their brains that allow them to suspend sleep? For this long period of time and if we can learn How they're doing this that might tell us something about the purpose of sleep in general? So we're not just studying these because they're cool and interesting animals But they might actually tell us something important about what sleep is doing for our brain? So we have a little time left, but Carlos. I you've talked about murder and sex How we cannot let you leave before you What I do for a living Yeah, well I deal with out of control eating sex and aggression I get paid for it And I do a video, and I wasn't arrested for it either you know Nice work if you can get it so we can show the image of Kenneth parks Kenneth James parks age 24 6 foot 5 inches tall 280 pounds The night of May 24th 1987 he was sitting in front of his TV in the living room had fallen asleep He woke up put on his shoes grabbed the set of car keys Left the house leaving the front door Completely wide open got in his car left leaving the garage door completely open he drove through the streets of Toronto 23 kilometers which is 14 miles went to the home of his in-laws Barbara woods and Donald woods and in the garage He took out a tire iron Went upstairs To their bedroom. He nearly strangled his father-in-law Donald Woods Before he went to his mother-in-law Barbara Woods He smashed her with a tire iron She had Blaine Beria brain bleeding, but he stabbed her six times with a kitchen knife And they stabbed through the heart killed her he then went To the door outside the door the two doors of their teenage daughters and they reported later that he was grunting in a very loud way like an Animal, and it was terrifying because any stop grunting and he started again Fortunately he there not he did not enter their room He left the home walked into a police station at 4:45 in the morning and he said I think I killed somebody I don't know what happened. I saw the face of Barbara woods It looked very sad to me, but I don't know what happened. I think I did something terrible the police made a very important observation He had cut the tendons of all his fingers the flexor tendons and the process of stabbing his mother-in-law and his father-in-law The kitchen knife must have slipped through his fingers, and he cut the flexor tendons he showed no pain he felt no pain and In the subsequent trial that was very important evidence to indicate that he was not really with it not awake Because people if they're awake will have incredible pain after cutting basically ten tendons of your hands now He was acquitted in the trial that it began a year later And this made Canadian legal history the first time the sleepwalking defense was successfully used in a murder case now people will say how could this be well the evidence was really compelling I reviewed the 1737 page court transcripts Which I analyzed in my book paradox lost and basically I think the jury got it right first of all he had a sleepwalking history at the age of 11 His mother caught him as he was about to leave the sixth floor window of their dwelling I mean he would have killed himself. He was always known to be a very very deep sleeper He also had an incredible family history of sleepwalking 20 first-degree and second-degree family relatives had Parasomnias, I mean it's just unbelievable and covering four different parasomnia sleepwalking sleep terrors sleep Talking and also sleep related eating disorders, so he had the infant an incredible family history He had the personal history and on top of that he had three major Precipitating factors for people with a vulnerability to sleepwalking the first the first factor was that he had been sleep deprived 48 hours which is a known risk factor for sleepwalker second of all he had major physical stress he had played rugby on a very hot and humid afternoon in Toronto he was incredibly out of shape so Of what we call a physical stress and third yet emotional stress he had been a gambler had gotten into major debt And that was really weighing on him and really having an adverse effect on their marriage Also in the kind of witch's brew of his sleepwalking mind the next day He had organized a picnic a barbecue at his in-laws house so in the sleepwalking mind. He was driving to his in-laws He just happened to do it. Maybe 12 hours too soon in the wrong state of mind in other words the sleepwalking mind how the violence and the murder entered in we don't know but basically he had no motivation to kill his in-laws and in fact When he first met his future wife Karen she was a teenage runaway And he convinced her to go back to her parents so the hers in-laws were immensely Appreciative of them because he helped rescue their runaway daughter told her he go back to your parents He eventually married them And they considered him like a son in fact Barbara woods called him my gentle giant and in fact He murdered her, so there was really no reason at all for motive for murder He had been a sleepwalker he had the risk factors for that night and he had the family history and for that reason the the jury I think got it right by acquitting him the Prosecution in Canada can appeal a murder trial unlike the United States and on appeal the acquittal was was sustained it was basically supported and And unfortunately I heard that down the road he eventually did get divorce I think it was just too much of a strain on your marriage when your wife realizes You killed my mother you almost killed my father Although apparently he did well with clonazepam as therapy of his sleepwalking, but I think this is an extreme example of sleepwalking But it's unintentional behavior with tragic tragic consequences and obviously sleepwalkers should avoid the precipitating factors in terms of sleep deprivation Physical stress and deal there emotional stress the best way possible Let me conclude my section by talking about sexsomnia now in relation to our bt REM behavior disorder I think Sigmund Freud would have been very disappointed. He would have said my god What a great opportunity for sexual acting out your dreaming in REM sleep. You don't have the paralysis You know let the games begin, but the reality is There is no sexual acting out with REM behavior disorder in fact. There's a bias against sexual dreams. There's a bias for aggressive dreams Locomotion dreams sports dreams, but there's a bias against sexual dreams, and this has been demonstrated in a very nice controlled study from Italy But with sexsomnia actually is though during non-rem sleep when there is no dreaming And it really covers the whole gamut of sexuality in terms of sleep sex talking masturbation sexual assault including rape including other legal cases Involving children and adults and this appears to be a male predominant disorder although. We really don't know for sure It's just that the women complain about the men engaging in sexsomnia and they're the ones who come for help the men generally don't complain about their partners, and this is really a sociological question, I'm much more than a medical question and You know years ago the Kinsey Report kind of had a golden opportunity But it did not address any issue of sexual behaviors during sleep. Just sexual dreams, but sexsomnia also known as sleep sex can really be associated either with a long history of Sleepwalking night terrors sleep related eating in other words. It comes at the end of a long history of non-rapid eye movement sleep parasomnias Or its associated with sleep apnea people snore and it's called snore gasm by the way among You know we believe in really precise terminology We have sex Avenue and snore gasm but you have snoring and sexual behavior and for the bed partner the snoring is just as Disconcerting as a sexual behavior by God having sex when your partner is snoring. What is going on here, but it really reflects What was called a confusional arousal when you snore you have a partial awakening again a mixed state of sleep and wakefulness with very inappropriate behaviors so in during this mixed state induced by the sleep apnea you can engage in edie behavior aggressive behavior or a sexual behavior so the typical scenario for sexsomnia is either a long history of other parasomnias or a Relatively recent history of sexsomnia with sleep apnea and the good news like with most of the parasomnias that can be effectively treated After being properly diagnosed so I think with sexsomnia there's a dramatic parasomnia But it fits in with the whole realm of other parasomnias and a release of in sexual behaviors But the field of sleep medicine can diagnose patients and treat effectively most of the patients and for me as a physician This has been the most gratifying part besides all the discoveries It's really treating patients making them happy making their bed partners Happy allowing them to live during a day time without any adverse consequences from sleep. Gone bad So just in order to wrap things up Let's kind of look to the future how about each of you take a minute or two just to tell me? What question? You want to know the answer to about sleep? What is what is the burning question that you would really love to know? Let's start with you nails Can I sleep on it I Don't know They're you know we've talked about REM sleep, and we focused on the brainwave patterns, and what characterizes them But there are other aspects of REM sleep That occur again both in mammals and in birds that don't get much attention one of them is for some unclear reason during REM sleep we stop thermo regulating Birds who are hot while they're sleeping will pant during non-rem sleep, but when they enter REM sleep they stop Similar things happen in in mammals, so what is the purpose of this aspect of REM sleep? It's not getting much attention Well I think the you know the fundamental question it's the question you know how do we learn How do we you know how do we build these models of the world how do we? So you see sleeping as learning sleeping? Sleeping is learning in fact. You know you know just listening to the you know the these you know other presentations that really focused on behaviors that can occur during certain kinds of dream sleep non REM sleep, and I was you know making the connection between quiet wakefulness sort of thinking and non-rem dreaming And I realized he was important to point out that there's this there's this kind of connection that we've made between sleeping a particular non REM sleep and inactivity Not during thinking when you're sitting and thinking it turns out even in you know in animals they can think perfectly well When they're doing sitting quietly doing nothing or engaged in automatic behaviors, don't require attention that include eating? having sex turns out, that's You know their minds can wander when they have sex as well so it's when so that that there's this state that involves thinking while you can still engage an automatic behavior that can include things like driving there are systems in the brain that Are built to take over automatic behavior, and we're not doing that we can be thinking about other things Non REM sleep may carry all of the same baggage along with it the ability to Do things while you are? Thinking about other things So it's this connection between thinking sleeping dreaming and Learning and so the question a burning question. I have is impossible to show that what we dream Influences what we do not the other way around which is the way we tend to think about it We dream about what we remember well is it possible that what we dream about actually changes how we learn how we behave and there are these interesting connection between memory the areas of the brain involved in memory and imagination our ability to remember the past is linked to our ability to Imagine the future so you can think of dreams as a way I mean I don't know. What kind of future you imagine with your crazy cacti, but you can think it's nice in a way they are a process a process of imagining a world and perhaps Anticipating a world in which we are going to have to interact with and so the connection between not just memory not just learning but Creativity imagination all these things that we believe define what we are as uniquely sentient intelligent beings so it's Deeply embedded in my sense that that sleep is revealing something about what makes us unique and intelligent I? Would echo what Matt was talking about that I'm very curious about all the benefits of sleep on our waking lives because we know that Disturbed sleep has adverse effects on our waking lives So I'm really curious about the whole range the whole panorama of the benefits of good sleep on our waking lives So we can enhance it quite honestly, and and if in fact there are creatures out there that don't really need sleep What is it about their wakefulness? That is so intrinsically good for them that they don't need sleep, so I think that's an open question as well great well Let's give a hand to our panelists and wish them a good night's sleep
