Understand and Use Dreams to Learn and Forget
Andrew Huberman
0:00 - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,
0:02 where we discuss science
0:03 and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:06 [upbeat music]
0:09 I'm Andrew Huberman,
0:10 and I'm a professor of neurobiology
0:12 and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
0:15 This podcast is separate
0:17 from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
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0:22 to consumer information about science
0:24 and science related tools.
0:26 In keeping with that theme,
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2:58 Today we're gonna talk about dreaming,
3:01 learning during dreaming
3:03 and unlearning during dreaming.
3:05 In particular unlearning of troubling emotional events.
3:10 Now my interest in dreaming goes way back.
3:12 When I was a child I had a friend
3:15 and he came over one day and he brought with him a mask
3:18 that had a little red light in the corner.
3:21 He had purchased this thing through some
3:23 magazine ad that he had seen,
3:25 and this mask was supposed to trigger lucid dreaming.
3:30 Lucid dreaming is the experience of dreaming during sleep,
3:34 but being aware that one is dreaming.
3:37 And in some cases being able to direct one's
3:40 dream activities.
3:42 So if you're in a lucid dream
3:43 and you wanna fly, for instance,
3:45 some people report being able to
3:47 initiate that experience of flying.
3:49 Or to contort themselves into an animal,
3:52 or to transport themselves to wherever they want
3:55 within the dream.
3:56 I tried this device.
3:58 The way it worked is you put on the mask
4:00 during a waking state, I'm wide awake,
4:03 and you look at the little light flashing in the corner,
4:06 and then you'd also wear it when you went to sleep at night.
4:08 And indeed, while I was asleep I could see the red light
4:12 presumably through my eyelids.
4:13 Although, for all I know I had opened my eyes.
4:16 I don't know I was asleep.
4:17 And then, because I was dreaming
4:19 and I was experiencing something very vivid,
4:22 I was able to recognize that I was dreaming
4:24 and then start to direct
4:25 some of the events within that dream.
4:27 Now lucid dreaming occurs in about 20% of people
4:30 and in a small percentage of those people
4:32 they lucid dream almost every night.
4:34 So much so that many of them report
4:36 their sleep not being as restorative
4:39 as it would be otherwise.
4:41 Now all of this is to say that,
4:44 lucid dreaming and dreaming are profound experiences.
4:48 We tend to feel extremely
4:50 attached to our dream experience.
4:53 This may explain the phenomenon of
4:55 people who have a very intense dream
4:56 they need to somehow tell everybody about that dream,
4:59 or tell someone about that dream.
5:00 I don't really know what that behavior is about,
5:02 but sometimes we wake up and we feel
5:04 so attached to what happened
5:06 in this state that we call dreaming
5:08 that there seems to be an intense need
5:09 to share it with other people,
5:10 presumably to process it and make sense of it.
5:13 Now numerous people throughout history
5:14 have tried to make sense of dreams
5:16 in some sort of organized way.
5:18 The most famous of which of course is a Sigmund Freud
5:20 who talked about symbolic representations in dreams.
5:23 A lot of that has been kind of debunked.
5:25 Although, I think that
5:27 there's some interest in what the symbols of dreaming are.
5:31 And this is something that we'll talk about
5:32 in more depth today, although not Freud
5:35 in theory, in particular.
5:38 So I think in order to really think about dreams
5:42 and what to do with them
5:43 and how to maximize the dream experience
5:47 for sake of learning and unlearning,
5:49 the best way to address this
5:50 is to look at the physiology of sleep,
5:52 to really address what do we know concretely about sleep.
5:56 So first of all, as we get sleepy
6:00 we tend to shut our eyes, and that's 'cause there's some
6:03 autonomic centers in the brain, some neurons
6:05 that control closing of the eyelids when we get sleepy.
6:08 And then we transitioned into sleep.
6:10 And sleep, regardless of how long we sleep
6:12 is generally broken up into a series of 90 minute cycles.
6:16 These ultradian cycles.
6:18 So early in the night these 90 minute cycles
6:22 tend to be comprised more of shallow sleep
6:25 and slow wave sleep.
6:26 So stage one, stage two, et cetera,
6:28 and what we call slow wave sleep.
6:29 I'll go into detail about what all this means in a moment.
6:32 And we tend to have less so-called REM sleep, R-E-M sleep,
6:36 which stands for rapid eye movement sleep.
6:38 And I'll talk about rapid eye movement sleep in detail.
6:41 So early in the night, a lot more slow wave sleep
6:44 and less REM.
6:45 For every 90 minute cycle that we have
6:48 during a night of sleep we tend to
6:51 start having more and more REM sleep.
6:55 So more of that 90 minute cycle
6:56 is comprised of REM sleep and less of slow wave sleep.
7:00 Now this is true regardless of whether or not
7:02 you wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom
7:04 or your sleep is broken.
7:07 The more sleep you're getting across the night,
7:09 the more REM sleep you're going to have.
7:11 And REM sleep and non REM, as I'll refer to it,
7:15 have distinctly different roles in learning and unlearning,
7:18 and they are responsible for learning and unlearning
7:20 of distinctly different types of information.
7:23 And this has enormous implications
7:26 for learning of motor skills,
7:28 for unlearning of traumatic events,
7:31 or for processing emotionally challenging
7:33 as well as emotionally pleasing events.
7:36 And as we'll see, one can actually leverage
7:39 their daytime activities in order to access
7:42 more slow wave sleep or non REM sleep as we'll call it,
7:46 or more REM sleep depending on your particular
7:48 emotional and physical needs.
7:50 So it's really a remarkable stage of life
7:52 that we have a lot more control and power over
7:55 then you might believe.
7:56 We'll also talk about lucid dreaming.
7:58 We're also gonna talk about hallucinations
8:00 and how drug induced hallucinations
8:03 have a surprising similarity to a lot of dream states
8:06 and yet some really important differences.
8:10 Okay. So let's start by talking about slow wave sleep,
8:13 or non REM sleep.
8:14 And I realized that slow wave sleep and non REM sleep
8:17 aren't exactly the same thing.
8:18 So for you sleep aficionados out there,
8:21 I am lumping right now.
8:22 As we say in science,
8:23 there are lumpers and there are splitters and I am both.
8:26 Sometimes I lump, sometimes I split.
8:28 For sake of clarity and ease of conversation right now
8:31 I'm gonna be a lumper.
8:33 When I say slow wave sleep, I mean non REM sleep generally.
8:37 Although, I acknowledge there is a distinction.
8:39 Slow wave sleep.
8:41 So slow wave sleep is characterized
8:43 by a particular pattern of brain activity
8:47 in which the brain is metabolically active,
8:50 but that there's these big sweeping waves of activity
8:53 that include a lot of the brain.
8:55 If you wanna look this up you can find evidence for
8:59 sweeping of waves of neural activity
9:02 across association cortex,
9:04 across big swaths of the brainstem,
9:07 the so-called pons geniculate occipital pathway.
9:11 This is brainstem, thalamus, and then cortex
9:16 for those of you that are interested.
9:18 Although, more of that is going to occur in REM sleep.
9:21 Now the interesting thing about slow wave sleep
9:24 are the neuromodulators that tend to be associated with it,
9:28 that are most active and least active
9:30 during slow wave sleep and here's why.
9:32 To remind you neuromodulators are these chemicals
9:35 that act rather slowly but their main role
9:39 is to bias particular brain circuits to be active
9:42 and other brain circuits to not be active.
9:45 These are like the music playlist.
9:46 So think of neuromodulators
9:49 and these come in the names of,
9:50 acetylcholine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine,
9:53 think of them as suggesting playlists on your audio device.
9:58 So, you know, classical music is
10:00 distinctly different in feel and tone
10:03 and a number of other features from like third wave punk,
10:06 or from, you know, hip hop, right?
10:10 So think of them as biasing
10:11 toward particular genres of neural circuit activity, okay.
10:15 Mellow music versus really aggressive fast music,
10:19 or rhythmic music that includes lyrics
10:21 versus rhythmic music that doesn't include lyrics.
10:24 It's more or less the way
10:25 to think about these neuromodulators.
10:28 And they are associated as a consequence
10:29 with certain brain functions.
10:31 So we know for instance and just to review,
10:33 acetylcholine in waking states
10:36 is a neuromodulator that tends to amplify
10:38 the activity of brain circuits
10:39 associated with focus and attention.
10:42 Norepinephrine is a neuromodulator that tends to
10:44 amplify the brain circuits associated with alertness,
10:47 and the desire to move.
10:49 Serotonin is the neuromodulator
10:51 that's released intense to amplify the
10:54 circuits in the brain and body
10:55 that are associated with bliss
10:57 and the desire to remain still.
10:59 And dopamine is the neuromodulator
11:01 that's released and is associated with
11:04 amplification of the neural circuits in the brain and body
11:07 associated with pursuing goals and pleasure and reward.
11:11 Okay. So in slow wave sleep
11:14 something really interesting happens.
11:17 There is essentially no acetylcholine.
11:19 Acetylcholine production and release and action
11:22 from the two major sites, which are in the brainstem,
11:26 which from a nucleus if it's a parabigerminal nucleus,
11:29 if you really wanna know, or from the forebrain,
11:32 which is nucleus basalis.
11:34 And you don't need to know these names
11:35 but if you like, that's why I put them out there.
11:38 Acetylcholine production plummets.
11:40 It's just almost to zero.
11:42 And acetylcholine as I just mentioned,
11:44 is associated with focus.
11:46 So you can think of slow wave sleep
11:48 as these big sweeping waves of activity through the brain
11:51 and a kind of distortion of space and time,
11:53 so that we're not really focusing on any one thing.
11:56 Now the other molecules that are very active at that time
12:01 are norepinephrine.
12:02 Which is a little bit surprising 'cause
12:04 normally in waking states norepinephrine
12:06 is gonna be associated with
12:07 a lot of alertness and the desire to move.
12:10 But there's not a ton of norepinephrine
12:13 around in slow wave sleep, but it is around.
12:15 So there's something associated with the movement circuitry
12:18 going on in slow wave sleep.
12:20 And remember, this is happening mostly
12:21 at the beginning of the night,
12:22 your sleep is dominated by slow wave sleep.
12:25 So no acetylcholine, very little norepinephrine,
12:29 although there is some and a lot of serotonin.
12:31 And serotonin again is associated with this desire,
12:34 this sensation of kind of bliss or wellbeing,
12:37 but not a lot of movement.
12:38 And during sleep you tend not to move.
12:41 Now in slow wave sleep you can move, you're not paralyzed.
12:44 So you can roll over.
12:45 If people are going to sleep walk,
12:47 typically it's going to be during slow wave sleep.
12:50 And what studies have shown through some
12:54 kind of sadistic experiments
12:56 where people are deprived specifically of slow wave sleep,
12:59 and that can be done by waking them up
13:02 as soon as the electrode recording show
13:04 that they're in slow wave sleep
13:05 or by chemically altering their sleep
13:08 so that it biases them away from slow wave sleep.
13:11 What studies have shown is that motor learning
13:14 is generally occurring in slow wave sleep.
13:18 So let's say the day before you go to sleep
13:20 you were learning some new dance move,
13:23 or you were learning some specific motor skill,
13:26 either a fine motor skill or a course motor skill.
13:29 So let's say, it's a new form of exercise
13:32 or some new coordinated movements.
13:34 This could be coordinate movement
13:36 at the level of the fingers,
13:37 or it could be coordinated movement the level of whole body
13:39 and large limb movements.
13:41 It could involve other people,
13:42 or it could be a solo activity.
13:44 Learning of those skills
13:47 is happening primarily during slow wave sleep
13:50 in the early part of the night.
13:52 In addition, slow wave sleep
13:54 has been shown to be important
13:56 for the learning of detailed information.
13:59 Now this isn't always cognitive information.
14:01 We're gonna talk about cognitive information,
14:02 but the studies that have been done
14:04 along these lines involve having people
14:07 learn very detailed information
14:09 about very specific rules
14:11 and the way that certain words are spelled,
14:13 they tend to be challenging words.
14:15 So if people are tested and in terms of their performance
14:20 on these types of exams
14:21 and they're deprived of slow wave sleep,
14:24 they tend to perform very poorly.
14:26 So we can think of slow wave sleep
14:28 as important for motor learning,
14:30 motor skill learning
14:31 and for the learning of specific details
14:34 about specific events.
14:36 And this turns out to be fundamentally important
14:39 because now we know that
14:41 slow wave sleep is primarily in the early part of the night,
14:45 and motor learning is occurring primarily
14:47 early in the night, and detailed learning is
14:50 occurring early in the night.
14:51 Now for those of you that are waking up
14:53 after only three, four hours of sleep,
14:55 this might be informative.
14:56 This might tell you a little something about
14:58 what you are able to learn and not able to learn
15:01 if that were to be the only sleep that you get.
15:03 Although, hopefully that's not the only sleep that you get.
15:06 But we're going to dive deep into
15:08 how it is that one can maximize motor learning
15:11 in order to extract say,
15:14 more detail information about coordinated movements
15:18 and how to make them faster or slower.
15:20 So that might be important for certain sports.
15:22 It might be almost certainly important for certain sports.
15:26 It's gonna be important for
15:28 any kind of coordinated movement,
15:30 like say learning to play the piano,
15:32 or for instance, how to
15:34 learn synchronized movements with somebody else.
15:38 So maybe I mentioned the example of dance earlier.
15:42 Like me a few years ago,
15:43 I set out to learn tango because I have some Argentine
15:47 relatives and I was a Bismal.
15:49 I need to return to that at some point.
15:52 I was just a Bismal.
15:54 And one of the worst things
15:55 about being a bismal at learning dance is that,
15:56 that somebody else has to suffer the consequences also.
15:59 So I don't know maybe in the month on neuroplasticity,
16:02 I'll explore that again as a self experimentation.
16:06 But, the key things to know are
16:07 slow wave sleep is involved in motor learning
16:10 and detailed learning.
16:11 There's no acetylcholine around at that time,
16:14 has these big amplitude activity
16:16 sweeping throughout the brain and that there's
16:19 the release of these neuromodulators,
16:20 norepinephrine and serotonin.
16:23 And again, that's all happening early in the night.
16:25 So athletes, people that are concerned about performance,
16:29 if you happen to wake up after just a couple hours of,
16:33 you know, three, four hours of sleep
16:35 because you're excited about a competition the next day,
16:38 presumably if you've already trained
16:41 the skills that you need for the event
16:43 you should be fine to engage in that particular activity.
16:47 Now it's always going to be better
16:49 to get a full night's sleep.
16:51 And that, you know, a full night's sleep
16:52 for you is six hours then it's always gonna be better
16:55 to get more sleep than it is to get less.
16:57 However, I think some people
16:59 get a little bit overly concerned
17:02 that if they didn't get their full night's sleep
17:04 before some sort of physical event
17:06 that their performance is going to plummet.
17:07 Presumably, if you've already learned what you need to do,
17:11 and it's stored in your neural circuits
17:13 and you know how to make those coordinated movements,
17:15 what the literature on slow wave sleep suggest is that
17:18 you would be replenished.
17:19 That the motor learning and the recovery from exercise
17:21 is going to happen early in the night. Okay.
17:24 So we'll just pause there,
17:26 and kind of shelve that for a moment
17:27 and then we're gonna come back to it.
17:28 But I wanna talk about REM sleep,
17:30 or rapid eye movement sleep.
17:32 REM sleep and rapid eye movement sleep,
17:35 as I mentioned before, occurs throughout the night,
17:38 but you're gonna have more of it.
17:39 A larger percentage of these 90 minute sleep cycles
17:42 is going to be comprised of REM sleep
17:44 as you get toward morning.
17:46 REM sleep is fascinating.
17:48 It was discovered in '50s when
17:50 a sleep laboratory in Chicago,
17:52 the researchers observed
17:54 that people's eyes were moving under their eyelids.
17:56 Now, something very important that we're going to address
18:00 when we talk about trauma later is that,
18:03 the eye movements are not just side to side
18:05 they're very erratic in all different directions.
18:08 One thing that I don't think
18:09 I've never heard anyone really talk about publicly is,
18:12 why eye movements during sleep, right? Eyes are closed.
18:15 And sometimes people's eyelids will be a little bit open
18:17 and their eyes are darting around,
18:18 especially in little kids.
18:20 I don't suggest you do this. I'm not even sure it's ethical.
18:22 But, it has been done where you, you know,
18:24 pull back the eyelids of a kid while they're sleeping
18:26 and their eyes are kind of darting all over the place.
18:28 I think people do this to their passed out friends
18:30 at parties and things like that.
18:31 So again, I don't suggest you do it,
18:33 but I'm telling you it because it's been done before
18:36 and therefore you don't have to do it again.
18:38 But rapid eye movement sleep is fascinating
18:41 and occurs because there are connections
18:44 between the brainstem, an area called the pons,
18:47 and areas of the thalamus and the top of the brain stem
18:52 that are involved in generating movements
18:55 in different directions, sometimes called saccades.
18:57 Although, sometimes during rapid eye movement sleep
18:59 it's not just rapid, it's kind of a jittery
19:01 side to side thing and then the eyeballs kind of role.
19:03 It's really pretty creepy to look at if you see.
19:06 So what's happening there is
19:08 the circuitry that is involved in conscious eye movements
19:11 is kind of going haywire, but it's not haywire.
19:13 It's these waves of activity from the brainstem
19:17 up to the so-called thalamus, which is an area that
19:20 filter sensory information and then up to the cortex.
19:23 And the cortex of course,
19:24 is involved in conscious perceptions.
19:27 So in rapid eye movement sleep
19:29 there are a couple of things are happening
19:31 besides rapid eye movements.
19:33 The main ones are that they're, I should say,
19:36 in contrast to slow wave sleep.
19:39 In REM sleep serotonin is essentially absent. Okay?
19:44 So this molecule, this neuromodulator
19:46 that tends to create the feeling of bliss and wellbeing
19:49 and just calm placidity is absent.
19:54 All right. So that's interesting.
19:56 In addition to that, norepinephrine this molecule
20:00 that's involved in movement and alertness
20:02 is absolutely absent.
20:04 It's probably one of the few times
20:06 in our life that epinephrin is essentially
20:10 at zero activity within our system.
20:14 And that has a number of very important implications
20:17 for the sorts of dreaming that occur
20:18 during REM sleep and the sorts of learning that can occur
20:23 in REM sleep and unlearning.
20:24 First of all in REM sleep, we are paralyzed.
20:27 We are experiencing what's called atonia,
20:30 which just means that
20:31 we're completely laid out and paralyzed.
20:34 We also tend to experience
20:36 whatever it is that we're dreaming about
20:38 as a kind of hallucination,
20:40 or a hallucinatory activity.
20:43 Long ago I looked into hallucinations and dreaming
20:47 I was just fascinated by this in high school.
20:49 And there's some great books on this
20:51 if you're interested in
20:52 exploring the relationship between
20:54 hallucinations and dreaming.
20:56 The most famous of which are from a guy,
20:58 a researcher at Harvard, Alan Hobson,
21:02 you know, wrote a book called, Dream Drug Store.
21:05 And talked all about the similarities between
21:07 drugs that induce hallucinations and dreaming in REM.
21:10 So you can explore that if you like.
21:12 So in REM our eyes are moving,
21:14 but the rest of our body is paralyzed
21:16 and we are hallucinating.
21:18 There's no epinephrin around.
21:21 Epinephrin doesn't just create
21:23 a desire to move and alertness.
21:25 It is also the chemical signature of fear and anxiety.
21:31 It's what's released from our adrenal glands
21:34 when we experience something that's fearful or alerting.
21:38 So if a car suddenly screeches in front of us,
21:40 or we get a troubling text message,
21:42 adrenaline is deployed into our system.
21:44 Adrenaline is epinephrin, those are equivalent molecules.
21:48 And epinephrin isn't just released from our adrenals
21:51 it's also released within our brain.
21:53 So there's this weird stage of our life
21:56 that happens more toward morning, that we call REM sleep,
22:00 where we're hallucinating
22:02 and having these outrageous experiences in our mind,
22:05 but the chemical that's associated with fear and panic
22:09 and anxiety is not available to us.
22:13 And that turns out to be very important.
22:16 And you can imagine why that's important.
22:18 It's important because it allows us to experience things,
22:22 both replay of things that did occur as well as
22:27 elaborate contortions of things that didn't occur.
22:31 And it allows us to experience those
22:33 in the absence of fear and anxiety,
22:36 and that it turns out is very important
22:39 for adjusting our emotional relationship
22:42 to challenging things that happened to us
22:45 while we were awake.
22:46 Those challenging things can sometimes be in the form of
22:50 social anxiety, or just having been working very hard
22:54 or concern about an upcoming event,
22:56 or sometimes people report for instance,
22:59 dreams where they find themselves late to an exam,
23:02 or naked in public, or in some sort of situation
23:07 that would be very troubling to them.
23:10 And that almost certainly occurs during REM sleep.
23:14 So we have this incredible period of sleep
23:17 in which our experience of emotionally laid in events
23:22 is dissociated. It's chemically blocked
23:25 from us having the actual emotion.
23:28 Now probably immediately some of you are thinking,
23:31 "Well, what about nightmares?
23:32 I have nightmares and those carry a lot of emotion,
23:34 or sometimes I'll wake up in a panic."
23:36 Let's consider each of those two things separately
23:38 because they are important in understanding REM sleep.
23:42 There's a good chance that nightmares
23:44 are occurring slow wave sleep.
23:47 There are actually some drugs
23:49 that I don't suggest people take.
23:51 In fact so much so I'm not gonna mention them
23:53 that give people very
23:55 kind of scary or eerie dreams and this kind of
23:59 feeling that things are pursuing them,
24:02 or that they can't move when they are being chased.
24:06 That's actually a common dream that I've had.
24:08 I guess, it's more or less a nightmare.
24:10 The feeling that one is paralyzed
24:12 and can't move and is being chased.
24:13 A lot of people have said, "Oh, that must be in REM sleep."
24:16 Because you're paralyzed and so
24:17 you're dreaming about being paralyzed and you can't move.
24:20 I think that's probably false.
24:22 The research says that because no epinephrine
24:24 is absent during REM sleep,
24:26 it's very unlikely that you can have these
24:28 intense, fearful memories.
24:29 So those are probably occurring in slow wave sleep.
24:32 Although, there might be instances
24:33 where people have nightmares in REM sleep.
24:36 The other thing is some people experience,
24:39 certainly I've had this experience,
24:41 of waking up and feeling very stressed
24:44 about whatever it was that I happen to be thinking about,
24:46 or dreaming about in the moments before.
24:49 And that's an interesting case of an invasion
24:53 of the dream state into the waking state
24:55 and the moment you wake up epinephrine is available.
24:58 So the research on this isn't fully crystallized,
25:02 but most of it points in the direction of
25:05 the experience of waking up and feeling very panicked.
25:09 Maybe, I wanna highlight may,
25:11 but maybe that you were experiencing something
25:14 that was troubling in the daytime,
25:17 you're repeating that experience in your sleep,
25:20 epinephrine is not available,
25:21 and therefore the brain circuits associated
25:24 with fear and anxiety are shut off.
25:27 And so you're able to process those events
25:29 and then suddenly you wake up
25:31 and there's a surge of adrenaline of epinephrin
25:34 that's now coupled to that experience.
25:36 So nightmares very likely in slow wave sleep
25:39 and that kind of panic on waking from something
25:41 very likely to be an invasion of the thoughts and ideas,
25:45 however distorted in REM sleep invading the waking state.
25:49 In fact, that brings to mind something
25:52 that I've mentioned once before, but I wanna mention again,
25:54 this atonia, this paralysis that we experience during sleep
25:58 can invade the waking state.
26:01 Many people report the experience of waking up
26:03 and being paralyzed.
26:05 They're legitimately waking up, it's not a dream.
26:07 Waking up and being paralyzed, and it is terrifying.
26:11 I've had this happen before.
26:13 It is I can tell you terrifying to be wide awake,
26:16 and as far as I could tell fully conscious,
26:19 but unable to move.
26:21 And then generally you can jolt yourself out of it
26:23 in a few seconds, but it is quite frightening.
26:26 Now some people actually experience waking up,
26:30 being fully paralyzed and hallucinating.
26:34 And there is a theory in the
26:37 academic and scientific community at least,
26:39 that what people report as alien abductions
26:42 have a certain number of core characteristics that map
26:45 quite closely, yearly similarly to these experiences.
26:50 A lot of reports of alien abduction involve
26:53 people being unable to move, seeing particular faces,
26:57 hallucinating, extensively feeling
26:59 like their body is floating, or they were transported.
27:03 This is very similar to the experience of invasion
27:06 of atonia into the waking state,
27:08 waking up and still being paralyzed.
27:10 As well as the hallucinations that
27:12 are characteristic of dreaming and REM sleep.
27:15 Now I'm not saying that people's
27:17 alien abductions were not legitimate alien abductions,
27:20 how could I, I wasn't there.
27:22 And if I was there I wouldn't tell you
27:24 'cause that would make me an alien,
27:26 and I wouldn't want you to know.
27:28 But it is quite possible
27:31 that people are experiencing these things
27:33 and they are an invasion of the sleep state
27:36 into the waking state
27:37 and they can last several minutes or longer.
27:39 And because in dreams, space and time are distorted,
27:42 our perception of these events
27:44 could be that they lasted many hours
27:46 and we can really feel as if they lasted many hours,
27:48 when in fact they took only moments.
27:51 And we're gonna return to distortion of space and time
27:53 in a little bit.
27:54 So to just recap we've gone so far.
27:58 Slow wave sleep early in the night.
28:00 It's been shown to be important for motor learning
28:03 and for detailed learning.
28:05 REM sleep has a certain dream component
28:08 when which there's no epinephrin,
28:10 therefore we can't experience anxiety,
28:12 we are paralyzed.
28:13 Those dreams tend to be really vivid
28:16 and have a lot of detail to them.
28:18 And yet in REM sleep what's very clear
28:21 is that the sorts of learning that happened in REM sleep
28:24 are not motor events.
28:25 It's more about unlearning of emotional events.
28:29 And now we know why,
28:30 because the chemicals available for
28:32 really feeling those emotions are not present.
28:36 Now that has very important implications.
28:40 So let's address those implications from two sides.
28:43 First of all we should ask,
28:44 what happens if we don't get enough REM sleep?
28:47 And a scenario that happens a lot
28:49 where people don't get enough REM sleep is the following.
28:52 I'll just explain the one that I'm familiar with
28:55 'cause it happens to me a lot,
28:56 although I figured out ways to adjust.
29:00 I go to sleep around 10:30, 11:00,
29:02 I fall asleep very easily
29:04 and then I wake up around 3:00 or 4:00 AM.
29:08 I now know to use a NSDR, a non sleep deep rest protocol
29:12 and that allows me to fall back asleep.
29:15 Even though it's called non sleep depressed
29:16 it's really allows me to relax my body and brain,
29:19 and I tend to fall back asleep and sleep till about 7:00 AM.
29:22 During which time I get a lot of REM sleep.
29:26 And I know this because I've measured it,
29:28 and I know this because my dreams tend to be very intense
29:32 of the sort that we know is typical of REM sleep.
29:36 In this scenario,
29:38 I've gotten my slow wave sleep early in the night
29:40 and I've got my REM sleep toward morning.
29:44 However, there are times when I don't go back to sleep,
29:46 maybe I have a flight to catch, that's happened.
29:48 Sometimes I've got a lot on my mind
29:49 and I don't go back to sleep.
29:52 I can tell you, and you've probably experienced that
29:54 the lack of REM sleep tends to make people
29:56 emotionally irritable.
29:58 It tends to make us feel as if the little things
30:01 are the big things.
30:02 So it's very clear from laboratory studies
30:05 where people have been deprived selectively of REM sleep,
30:09 that our emotionality tends to get a little bit unhinged
30:12 and we tend to catastrophize small things.
30:16 We tend to feel like the world is really daunting,
30:19 we're never gonna move forward in the ways that we want.
30:22 We can't unlearn the emotional components
30:24 of whatever it is that has been happening,
30:26 even if it's not traumatic.
30:28 The other thing that happens in REM sleep
30:30 is a replay of certain types of spatial information
30:34 about where we were and why we were in those places.
30:37 And this maps to some beautiful data
30:39 and studies that were initiated
30:41 by a guy named Matt Wilson at MIT years ago.
30:44 Showing that in rodents and it turns out
30:47 in other non-human primates and in humans
30:49 there's a replay of spacial information during REM sleep,
30:53 that almost precisely maps to the
30:55 activity that we experienced during the day
30:57 as we move from one place to another.
30:59 So here's a common world scenario, you go to a new place,
31:02 you navigate through that city or that environment,
31:05 this place doesn't have to be,
31:06 you know, at the scale of a city.
31:08 It can be a new building.
31:09 It could be finding particular rooms,
31:11 new social interaction.
31:13 You experience that and if it's important enough,
31:16 that becomes solidified a few days later
31:19 and you won't forget it.
31:20 If it's unimportant, you'll probably forget it.
31:23 During REM sleep there's a literal replay
31:26 of the exact firing of the neurons
31:28 that occurred while you were navigating
31:30 that same city you're building earlier.
31:32 So REM sleep seems to be involved in
31:34 the generation of this detailed spatial information.
31:38 But, what is it that's actually happening in REM sleep?
31:42 So there's this uncoupling of emotion,
31:44 but most of all what's happening in REM sleep is that
31:48 we're forming a relationship with
31:50 particular rules or algorithms.
31:52 We're starting to figure out
31:54 based on all the experience that we had during the day,
31:57 whether or not it's important that we avoid certain people
32:00 or that we approach certain people,
32:01 whether or not it's important that,
32:04 you know, when we enter a building
32:06 that we go into the elevator
32:08 and turn left where the bathroom is, for instance.
32:11 These general themes of things and locations
32:13 and how they fit together and that has a word
32:16 it's called meaning.
32:18 During our day we're experiencing all sorts of things.
32:20 Meaning is how we each individually piece together
32:25 the relevance of one thing to the next, right?
32:28 So if I suddenly told you that, you know,
32:31 this pen was downloading all the information to my brain
32:34 that was important to deliver this information,
32:36 you'd probably think I was a pretty strange character.
32:39 Because typically we don't think of pens
32:40 as downloading information into brains.
32:43 But if I told you that I was getting information
32:44 from my computer that was allowing me to
32:47 say things to you, you'd say,
32:49 "Well, that's perfectly reasonable."
32:51 And that's because we have a clear
32:52 and agreed upon association with computers
32:54 and information and memory,
32:56 and we don't have that same association with pens.
33:00 You might say, "Well, duh." But something in our brain
33:04 needs to solidify those relationships
33:07 and make sure that the certain relationships don't exist.
33:10 And it appears that REM sleep is important for that,
33:12 because when you deprive yourself or people of REM
33:16 they start seeing odd associations,
33:18 they tend to lump or batch things.
33:21 I know this from my own experience
33:22 of I've ever been sleep deprived,
33:24 which unfortunately happens too often because
33:26 I'm terrible with deadlines, pull an all-nighter,
33:29 the word the starts to look like it's spelled incorrectly.
33:33 And the is a very simple word to spell,
33:36 but things start to look a little distorted.
33:39 And we know that if people are deprived of REM sleep
33:42 for very long periods of time, they start hallucinating.
33:44 They literally start seeing relationships
33:47 and movement of objects that isn't happening.
33:50 And so REM sleep is really where we establish
33:53 the emotional load, but where we also,
33:55 start discarding of all the meanings that are irrelevant.
33:59 And if you think about emotionality,
34:01 a lot of over emotionality or catastrophizing
34:05 is about seeing problems everywhere.
34:07 And you could imagine why that might occur if you start
34:10 linking the web of your experience too extensively.
34:14 It's very important in order to have
34:16 healthy, emotional, and cognitive functioning
34:18 that we have fairly narrow channels
34:20 between individual things.
34:21 If we see something on the news that's very troubling,
34:24 well, then it makes sense to be very troubled.
34:26 But if we're troubled by everything
34:28 and we start just saying, you know,
34:29 "Everything is bothering me
34:30 and I'm feeling highly irritable
34:32 and everything is just distorting and troubling me."
34:34 Chances are we are not
34:36 actively removing the meaning, the connectivity
34:41 between life experiences as well as we could
34:43 and that almost always maps back to a deficit in REM sleep.
34:48 So REM sleep is powerful and has this amazing capacity
34:52 to eliminate the meanings that don't matter.
34:56 It's not that it exacerbates the meanings that do matter,
34:59 but it eliminates the meanings that don't matter.
35:01 And that bears a striking resemblance
35:04 to what happens early in development.
35:06 This isn't a discussion about early in development,
35:09 but early in development the reason a baby
35:11 can't generate coordinated movements,
35:13 and the reason why children
35:15 can get very emotional about what seems like trivial events,
35:19 or what adults know to be trivial events.
35:20 Like, "Oh, the ice cream shop is closed."
35:23 And then the kid just dissolves into,
35:25 you know, a puddle of tears and the parents say,
35:28 "Okay, well, it'll be open again in another time."
35:31 The children one of the reasons that they can't
35:34 generate coordinated movement,
35:36 or place that of the ice cream shop being closed
35:38 into a larger context,
35:40 is because they have too much connectivity.
35:43 And much of the maturation of the brain and nervous system
35:45 that brings us to the point of being
35:47 emotionally stable, reasonable, rational human beings
35:50 is about elimination of connections between things.
35:54 So REM sleep seems to be where we uncouple
35:56 the potential for emotionality between various experiences.
36:02 And that brings us to
36:03 the absolutely fundamental relationship
36:06 and similarity of REM sleep
36:10 to some of the clinical practices
36:12 that have been designed to eliminate emotionality
36:15 and help people move through trauma
36:17 and other troubling experiences,
36:19 whether or not those troubling experiences are
36:21 a death in the family of a close loved one,
36:24 something terrible that happened to you or somebody else,
36:26 or, you know, an entire childhood or some event
36:30 that in your mind and body is felt as and experienced as,
36:34 bad, terrible, or concerning.
36:37 Many of you perhaps have heard of
36:39 trauma treatment such as EMDR,
36:42 eye movement desensitization reprocessing,
36:46 or ketamine treatment for trauma.
36:49 Something that recently became legal
36:51 and is in fairly widespread clinical use.
36:56 Interestingly enough, EMDR and ketamine
36:59 at kind of a core level,
37:01 bear very similar features to REM sleep.
37:07 So let's talk about EMDR first.
37:10 EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing
37:12 is something that was developed by a psychologist,
37:15 Francine Shapiro.
37:17 She actually was in Palo Alto.
37:19 And the story goes that she was walking,
37:23 not so incidentally,
37:26 in the trees and forest behind Stanford,
37:29 and she was recalling a troubling event in her own mind.
37:32 So this would be from her own life.
37:34 And she realized that as she was walking,
37:36 the emotional load of that experience
37:38 was not as intense or severe.
37:43 She extrapolated from that experience of walking
37:47 and not feeling as stressed about the stressful event
37:51 to a practice that she put into work in
37:53 with her clients, with her patients,
37:56 and that now has become fairly widespread.
37:58 It's actually one of the few behavior treatments
38:02 that are approved by the American Psychological Association
38:04 for the treatment of trauma.
38:07 what she had her clients and patients do
38:10 was move their eyes from side to side
38:13 while recounting some traumatic or troubling event.
38:17 Now this was of course in the clinic.
38:18 And I'm guessing that she removed the walking component
38:21 and just took the eye movement component
38:23 to the clinic because
38:24 while it would be nice to go on therapy sessions
38:28 with your therapist and take walks there are certain
38:31 boundaries to that such as, confidentiality.
38:34 You know, if there are a lot of people around
38:35 a person might not feel as open to discussing things,
38:38 or weather barriers and things like that,
38:41 you know, if it's raining or hailing outside,
38:42 it gets tough to do.
38:44 Why eye movements?
38:46 Well, she never really said why eye movements.
38:49 But, soon I'll tell you why the decision to
38:52 select these lateralized eye movements
38:55 for the work in the clinic was the right one.
38:58 So these eye movements, they look silly.
39:01 I'll do them because that's why I'm here.
39:04 They look silly, but they basically involve
39:07 sitting in a chair and moving one's eyes from side to side,
39:10 not while talking. But, you know, for it's...
39:15 And then recounting the events.
39:17 So it's sometimes talking while moving the eyes,
39:19 but usually it was moving the eyes from side to side for
39:21 30, 60 seconds, then describing this challenging procedure.
39:26 Now as a vision scientist who also works on stress
39:31 when I first heard this, I thought it was crazy, frankly.
39:36 People would ask me about EMDR
39:38 and I just thought, "That's crazy."
39:40 I went and looked up some of the theories
39:42 about why EMDR might work
39:43 and there were a bunch of theories.
39:46 "Oh, it mimics the eye movements during REM sleep."
39:49 That was one.
39:50 It turns out that's not true and I'll explain why.
39:53 The other one was, "Oh, it synchronizes the activity
39:55 on the two sides of the brain."
39:57 Well, sort of, I mean, when you look
39:59 into both sides of the binocular visual field
40:01 you activate the visual cortex.
40:03 But, this whole idea of synchrony
40:05 between the two sides of the brain
40:06 is something that I think modern neuroscience
40:08 is starting to, let's just say,
40:11 gently or not so gently move away from.
40:15 This whole right brain, left brain business.
40:18 It turns out however, that eye movements
40:21 are the sort that I just did
40:22 and that Francine Shapiro took from this walk experience
40:25 and brought to her clients in the clinic,
40:29 are the sorts of eye movements that you generate
40:31 whenever you're moving through space,
40:33 when you are self-generating that movement.
40:35 So not so much when you're driving a car,
40:37 but certainly if you were riding a bicycle,
40:39 or you were walking or you were running,
40:41 you don't realize it
40:42 but you have these reflexive subconscious eye movements
40:44 that go from side to side,
40:46 and they are associated with the motor system.
40:49 So when you move forward your eyes go like this.
40:52 There've been a number of studies
40:53 showing that these lateralized eye movements helped people
40:56 move through or dissociate
40:59 the emotional experience of particular traumas
41:02 with those experiences, such that they could
41:04 recall those experiences after the treatment
41:07 and not feel stressed about them,
41:09 or they didn't report them as traumatic any longer.
41:12 Now the success rate wasn't 100%,
41:13 but they were statistically significant
41:15 in a number of studies.
41:17 And yet there are still some critics of EMDR.
41:19 And frankly, for a long time I still thought,
41:22 "Well, I don't know. This just seems like kind of a hack."
41:25 It just seems like kind of
41:27 something that for which we don't know the mechanism,
41:28 and we can't explain,
41:30 But in the last five years,
41:33 there have been no fewer than
41:35 five and there's a sixth on the way,
41:38 high quality peer reviewed manuscripts
41:40 published in Journal of Neuroscience, Neuron,
41:43 Cell Press Journal, Excellent Journal,
41:45 Nature Excellent Journal.
41:48 These are very stringent journals and papers
41:51 showing that lateralized eye movements
41:53 of the sort that I just did,
41:55 and if you're just listening to this
41:56 it's just moving the eyes from side to side with eyes open.
41:59 That those eye movements but not vertical eye movements
42:03 suppress the activity of the amygdala,
42:06 which is this brain region
42:08 that is involved in threat detection,
42:11 stress, anxiety, and fear.
42:14 There are some forms of fear
42:15 that are not amygdala dependent,
42:16 but the amygdala it's not a fear center,
42:19 but it is critical for the fear response
42:23 and for the experience of anxiety.
42:25 So that's interesting.
42:26 We've got a clinical tool now
42:29 that indeed shows a lot of success
42:32 in a good number of people,
42:33 where eye movements from side to side
42:36 are suppressing the amygdala.
42:37 And the general theme is to
42:39 use those eye movements to suppress the fear response,
42:42 and then to recount or repeat the experience
42:46 and over time uncouple the heavy emotional load,
42:50 the sadness, the depression, the anxiety, the fear
42:52 from whatever it was that happened that was traumatic.
42:56 This is important to understand because,
42:58 you know, I'd love to be able to tell somebody
43:01 who had a traumatic experience
43:02 that they would forget that experience,
43:04 but the truth is you never forget the traumatic experience.
43:07 What you do is you remove the emotional load.
43:10 Eventually it really does lose its potency.
43:13 The emotional potency is alleviated.
43:16 Now EMDR I should just mention,
43:18 tends to be most successful for single event
43:21 or very specific kinds of trauma
43:23 that happened over and over,
43:25 as opposed to say an entire childhood or an entire divorce.
43:29 It tends to be most effective for
43:32 single event kinds of things, car crashes, et cetera,
43:35 where people can really recall the events
43:37 in quite a lot of detail.
43:39 So it's not for everybody and it should be done...
43:42 If it's going to be done for trauma
43:44 it should be done in a clinical setting
43:46 with somebody who's certified to do this.
43:49 But that bears a lot of resemblance to REM sleep, right?
43:52 This experience in our sleep where
43:53 our eyes are moving, excuse me, although in a different way,
43:57 but we don't have the chemical epinephrine
44:00 in order to generate the fear response,
44:02 and yet we're remembering
44:04 the event from the previous day or days.
44:06 Sometimes in REM sleep we think about things happened
44:08 a long time ago. So that's interesting.
44:12 And then now there's this new treatment,
44:14 this chemical treatment with the drug ketamine,
44:17 which also bears a lot of resemblance to
44:20 the sorts of things that happen in REM sleep.
44:23 Ketamine is getting a lot of attention now.
44:25 And I think a lot of people just
44:28 don't realize what ketamine is.
44:29 Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic.
44:33 It is remarkably similar to the drug called PCP,
44:38 which is certainly a hazardous drug
44:42 for people to use.
44:43 Ketamine and PCP both function
44:48 to disrupt the activity of a particular receptor
44:51 in the brain called the NMDA receptor,
44:54 N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor.
44:56 This is a receptor that's in the surface of neurons
45:00 or on the surface of neurons for which
45:02 most of the time it's not active,
45:05 but when something very extreme happens
45:08 and there's a lot of activity in the neural pathway
45:11 that impinges on that receptor,
45:13 it opens and it allows the entry of molecules,
45:17 ions that trigger a cellular process
45:22 that we call long-term potentiation.
45:24 And long-term potentiation translates to
45:27 a change in connectivity so that later
45:30 you don't need that intense event
45:32 for the neuron to become active again.
45:34 Let me clarify a little bit of this.
45:36 The NMDA receptor is gated by intense experience.
45:40 One way you could think about this is,
45:42 typically I walk in my home,
45:43 I might make some food and sit down at my kitchen table,
45:46 and I don't think anything about explosions.
45:50 But were I to come home one night,
45:52 sit down to a bowl of chicken soup
45:54 and there was a massive explosion
45:56 the neurons are associated with
45:59 chicken soup in my kitchen table
46:00 would be active in a way
46:02 that was different than they were previously,
46:05 and will be coupled to this experience of explosions
46:08 such that the next time,
46:10 and perhaps every other time
46:12 that I go to sit down at the kitchen table,
46:13 no matter how rational I am
46:15 about the origins of that explosion,
46:17 maybe it was a gas truck that was down the road
46:20 and there's no reason to think it's there today,
46:21 but I would have the same experience.
46:23 Those neurons will become active
46:24 and I'd get an increase in heart rate.
46:26 I'd get an increase in sweating, et cetera.
46:29 Ketamine blocks this NMDA receptor and prevents
46:33 that crossover and the addition of meaning
46:36 to the kitchen table, kitchen soup,
46:38 excuse me, chicken soup explosion experience.
46:41 So how is ketamine being used?
46:43 Ketamine is being used to prevent learning
46:46 of emotions very soon after trauma.
46:49 So ketamine is being stocked
46:51 in a number of different emergency rooms,
46:53 where if people are brought in quickly
46:55 and, you know, these are hard to describe even
46:57 but, you know, a horrible experience of
47:00 somebody seeing a loved one next to them
47:01 killed in a car accident and they were driving that car.
47:05 This isn't for everybody,
47:06 certainly and you need to talk to your physician,
47:08 but ketamine is being used
47:10 so they might infuse somebody with ketamine
47:12 so that their emotion it can still occur,
47:16 but that the plasticity,
47:18 the change in the wiring of their brain
47:20 won't allow that intense emotion
47:23 to be attached to the experience.
47:25 Now immediately you can imagine
47:26 the sort of ethical implications of this, right?
47:29 Because certain emotions need to be coupled to experiences.
47:32 I'm not saying that people should be using ketamine,
47:34 or shouldn't be using ketamine,
47:35 certainly not recreationally it's quite dangerous.
47:38 It can be lethal and like PCP it can cause
47:42 pretty dramatic changes in perception and behavior.
47:45 But in the clinical setting
47:47 the basis of ketamine assisted therapies
47:49 is really to remove emotion.
47:52 And I think the way I've been
47:54 hearing about it talked about in the general public
47:56 is a lot of people think it's a little bit more like
47:58 the kind of psilocybin trials or the NMDA trials,
48:02 where it's about becoming more emotional
48:04 or getting in touch with a certain experience.
48:06 Ketamine is about becoming dissociative
48:09 or removed from the emotional component of experience.
48:12 So now we have ketamine, which chemically blocks plasticity
48:16 and prevents the connection between
48:18 an emotion and an experience.
48:20 That's a pharmacologic intervention.
48:22 We have EMDR, which is this eye movement thing
48:25 that is designed to suppress the amygdala,
48:27 and it's designed to remove emotionality
48:29 while somebody recounts an experience.
48:31 And we have REM sleep, where the chemical epinephrin that
48:35 allows for signaling of intense emotion
48:39 and the experience of a tense emotion in the brain and body
48:43 is not allowed.
48:44 So we're starting to see a organizational logic,
48:47 which is that a certain component of our sleeping life
48:50 is acting like therapy.
48:52 And that's really what REM sleep is about.
48:55 So we should really think about REM sleep
48:58 and slow wave sleep as both critical.
49:01 Slow wave sleep for motor learning and detailed learning.
49:03 REM sleep for attaching of emotions
49:05 to particular experiences.
49:07 And then for making sure that the emotions
49:11 are not attached to the wrong experiences
49:13 and for unlearning emotional responses
49:16 if they're too intense or severe.
49:18 And this all speaks to the great importance of
49:21 mastering one sleep,
49:23 something that we talked about in episode
49:25 two of the podcast.
49:26 And making sure that if life has disruptive events,
49:30 either due to travel or stress,
49:33 or changes in school hours or food schedule,
49:37 something that we talked about in episodes three and four,
49:39 that one can still grab a hold and manage one sleep life.
49:44 Because fundamentally the unlearning of emotions
49:48 that are troubling to us
49:50 is what allows us to move forward in life.
49:52 And indeed the REM deprivation studies
49:54 show that people become hyperemotional.
49:57 They start to catastrophize.
49:58 And it's no surprise therefore,
50:00 that sleep disturbances correlate
50:03 with so many emotional and psychological disturbances.
50:08 By now it should just be obvious why that will be the case.
50:12 In fact, the other day I was in a discussion
50:14 with a colleague of mine
50:15 who's down in Australia, Dr. Sarah McKay.
50:18 I've known her for two decades now
50:20 from the time she was at Oxford.
50:23 And Sarah studies among other things menopause in the brain.
50:27 And she was saying that a lot of the emotional
50:30 effects of menopause,
50:32 actually are not directly related to the hormones.
50:35 There've been some really nice studies showing that
50:37 the disruptions in temperature regulation in menopause
50:41 mapped to changes in sleep regulation
50:43 that then impact emotionality and an inability to
50:48 correctly adjust the circuits related to emotionality.
50:52 And I encourage you to look at her work.
50:54 We'll probably have her as a guest on the podcast
50:55 at some point in the future,
50:56 'cause she's so knowledgeable about those sorts of issues,
50:59 as well as issues related to testosterone and
51:02 in people with all sorts of different
51:03 chromosomal backgrounds.
51:05 So sleep deprivation isn't just deprivation of energy.
51:11 It's not just deprivation of immune function.
51:13 It is deprivation of self-induced therapy
51:17 every time we go to sleep.
51:19 Okay. So things like EMDR and ketamine therapies
51:23 are in-clinic therapies,
51:25 but REM sleep is the one that you're giving yourself
51:27 every night when you go to sleep.
51:29 Which raises, I think,
51:31 the other important question which is,
51:33 how to get and how to know if you're getting
51:35 the appropriate amount of REM sleep and slow wave sleep.
51:38 So that's what we'll talk about next.
51:39 So how should one go about getting the appropriate amount
51:43 of slow-wave sleep and REM sleep
51:46 and knowing that you're getting the right amount.
51:49 Well, short of hooking yourself up to an EEG,
51:52 it's gonna be tough to get exact measurements
51:55 of brain states from night to night.
51:58 Some people nowadays are using things like,
52:00 the Oura Ring or a WHOOP band, or some other device
52:03 to measure the quality and depth and duration
52:05 of their sleep.
52:06 And for many people those devices can be quite useful.
52:10 Some people are only gauging their sleep by way of
52:14 whether or not they feel rested,
52:15 whether or not they feel like they're learning
52:17 and they're getting better or not.
52:20 There are some things that one can really do.
52:22 And the first one might surprise you
52:25 in light of everything I've said,
52:26 and probably everything you've heard about sleep.
52:29 There was a study done by a Harvard undergraduate,
52:34 Emily Hoagland, who was in Robert Stickgold's lab
52:38 at the time.
52:39 And that's the study explored how
52:43 variations in total sleep time related to learning,
52:48 as compared to total sleep time itself.
52:53 And to summarize the study, what they found was that
52:58 it was more important to have
53:01 a regular amount of sleep each night
53:04 as opposed to the total duration.
53:08 In other words, and what they showed was that
53:11 improvements in learning
53:14 or deficits in learning were more related to whether or not
53:17 you got six hours, six hours, five hours, six hours,
53:20 that was better than if somebody got for instance,
53:25 six hours, 10 hours, seven hours, four or five hours.
53:30 See you might say, "Well, that's crazy because I thought
53:32 we were just all supposed to get more sleep
53:34 and there's more REM towards morning."
53:35 It turns out that forsake of learning new information
53:39 and performance on exams in particular,
53:42 that's what was measured,
53:45 limiting the variation in the amount of your sleep
53:48 is at least as important and perhaps more important
53:53 than just getting more sleep overall.
53:55 And I think this will bring people great relief,
53:58 many people great relief
53:59 who are struggling to "get enough sleep."
54:02 Remember, a few episodes ago
54:05 I talked about the difference between
54:07 fatigue and insomnia.
54:10 You know, fatigue tends to be when we are tired.
54:13 Insomnia tends to lead to a
54:14 sleepiness during the day when we're falling asleep.
54:17 And you don't want that,
54:18 you don't want either of those things really.
54:21 But, I found it striking that
54:24 the data from this study really point to the fact that
54:27 consistently getting about the same amount of sleep
54:30 is better than just getting more sleep.
54:33 And I think nowadays
54:34 so many people are just aiming for more sleep,
54:36 and they're rather troubled about the fact that
54:38 they're only getting five hours,
54:40 or they're only getting six hours in some cases.
54:44 It may be the case that they are sleep deprived
54:46 and they need more sleep,
54:48 but some people just have a lower sleep need.
54:50 And I find great relief, personally, in the fact that
54:53 consistently getting, for me, about six hours
54:56 or six and a half hours is going to be more beneficial
54:59 than constantly striving for eight or nine
55:01 and finding that some nights I'm getting five
55:03 and sometimes I'm getting nine
55:05 and varying around the mean.
55:06 As I recall, and I think I'm gonna get this precisely right,
55:09 but if not I know that I'm at least close.
55:12 For every hour variation in sleep
55:15 regardless of whether or not it was more sleep
55:18 than one typically got,
55:19 there was a 17% reduction in performance
55:22 on this particular exam type.
55:25 So this is powerful.
55:27 This means that we should strive for
55:29 a regular amount of sleep.
55:31 And for some of us that means falling asleep
55:33 and waking up and going back to sleep.
55:34 For some people means falling asleep and
55:36 waking up and not getting back to sleep.
55:39 Now ideally, you're getting
55:41 the full compliment of slow wave sleep early at night
55:44 and sleep toward morning, which is REM sleep.
55:46 Which brings us to, how to get more REM sleep.
55:49 Well, there are a couple of different ways but
55:52 here's how to not get more REM sleep. All right.
55:57 First of all, drink a lot of fluid
55:59 right before going to sleep.
56:00 One of the reasons why we wake up
56:02 in the middle of the night to use the bathroom
56:04 is because when our bladder is full
56:06 there is a neural connection,
56:08 literally a set of neurons and a nerve circuit
56:10 that goes to the brain stem that wakes us up.
56:14 Actually some people
56:16 that I know and won't be mentioned,
56:18 actually use this to try and adjust
56:20 for their jet lag when they're trying to stay awake.
56:22 Having to urinate is one of the most
56:25 anxiety evoking experiences anyone can have.
56:28 If you really have to go to the bathroom
56:30 it's very hard to fall asleep or stay asleep.
56:32 And bedwetting, which happens in kids
56:35 very early on is a failure of those circuits to mature
56:40 until, you know, I think we all assume that babies
56:44 are gonna pee in their sleep,
56:46 but adults aren't supposed to do that.
56:48 And the circuits take some time to develop
56:51 and in some kids they develop
56:52 a little bit later than others.
56:53 So having a full bladder is one way to disrupt your sleep.
56:57 You don't wanna go to bed dehydrated, but that's one way.
57:00 On the other hand there is evidence
57:03 that if you want to remember your dreams more,
57:06 or remember more of your dreams
57:08 there is a tool that you can use.
57:10 I don't necessarily recommend it,
57:12 which is to drink a bunch of water before you go to sleep.
57:14 And then what happens is
57:15 you tend to break in and out of REM sleep.
57:17 It tends to be fractured.
57:19 And with a sleep journal
57:21 and they've done these laboratory studies.
57:23 Believe it or not, people will recall more of their dreams
57:26 because they're in this kind of semi-conscious state
57:27 because they're constantly waking up throughout the night.
57:30 I suggest not having a full bladder before you go to sleep.
57:32 That one's kind of an obvious one, but nonetheless.
57:36 The other one is if you recall that during REM sleep
57:39 we have a shift in neurotransmitter such that
57:45 we have less
57:47 serotonin, right?
57:49 Just wanna make sure I got that right.
57:50 Excuse me, less serotonin.
57:53 There are a lot of supplements out there
57:55 geared toward improving sleep.
57:58 I've taken some of them and I've taken many of them,
58:00 if not all of them at this point.
58:03 So I could report back to you.
58:04 And I think I mentioned on a previous episode
58:06 that when I take tryptophan,
58:08 or anything that contains 5-HTP, which is
58:10 serotonin or a precursor to serotonin,
58:13 serotonin is made from tryptophan,
58:15 I tend to fall very deeply asleep
58:17 and then wake up a few hours later.
58:19 And that makes sense now based on the fact that,
58:22 you just don't want a lot of REM sleep early on.
58:24 What was probably happening
58:25 is that I was getting a lot of REM sleep early on,
58:27 because low levels of serotonin
58:28 are typically associated with slow wave sleep
58:31 and that comes early in the night.
58:33 So for some people those supplements might work,
58:35 but be aware serotonin supplements
58:38 could disrupt the timing of REM sleep and slow wave sleep.
58:42 And in my case led to waking up
58:44 very shortly after going to sleep
58:46 and not being able to get back to sleep.
58:48 Now if you want to increase your slow wave sleep.
58:52 That's interesting. There are ways to do that.
58:54 One of the most powerful ways to increase slow wave sleep,
58:58 the percentage of slow wave sleep,
59:00 apparently without any disruption
59:02 to the other components of sleep and learning
59:05 is to engage in resistance exercise.
59:08 It's pretty clear that resistance exercise
59:10 triggers a number of metabolic and endocrine pathways
59:13 that lend themselves to release of growth hormone,
59:16 which happens early in the night.
59:18 And resistance exercise therefore can induce
59:21 a greater percentage of slow wave sleep.
59:24 It doesn't have to be done very close to going to bed time.
59:27 In fact, for some people
59:28 the exercise could be disruptive,
59:30 for reasons I've talked about in previous episodes.
59:32 But resistance exercise, unlike aerobic exercise
59:35 does seem to increase the amount of slow wave sleep,
59:38 which as we know is involved in
59:40 motor learning and the acquisition of
59:42 fine detailed information not general rules,
59:45 or the emotional components of experiences.
59:49 For those of you that are interested in lucid dreaming
59:52 and would like to increase the amount of lucid dreaming
59:54 that you're experiencing,
59:56 I haven't been able to track down that device
59:58 with the red light that I described at the beginning,
1:00:01 but there are a number of just simple
1:00:04 zero technology tools that one could use in principle.
1:00:07 One is to set a queue.
1:00:09 The way this works is you come up with a simple statement
1:00:13 about something that you'd like to see,
1:00:17 or experience later in dreams.
1:00:20 You can, for instance, write down, you know,
1:00:24 something like, I want to remember the red apple.
1:00:29 I know it sounds silly and trivial,
1:00:31 and you look at that you would probably wanna write it down
1:00:34 on a piece of paper.
1:00:35 You might even want to draw a red apple,
1:00:36 and then before you go to sleep you would look at it
1:00:39 and then you would just go to sleep.
1:00:41 There are some reports that doing that
1:00:44 for several days in a row can lead to a situation in which
1:00:47 you are suddenly in your dream
1:00:49 and you remember the red apple,
1:00:51 and that gives you a sort of tether to reality
1:00:53 between the dream state and reality
1:00:55 that allows you to navigate and shape
1:00:57 and kind of adjust your dreams.
1:00:59 Lucid dreaming does not have to be,
1:01:00 or include the ability to alter features of the dream,
1:01:05 you know, to be able to control things in the dream.
1:01:07 Sometimes it's just the awareness that you are dreaming,
1:01:10 but nonetheless some people enjoy lucid dreaming.
1:01:13 And then for people that have a lot of lucid dreams
1:01:15 that feel kind of overwhelmed by those,
1:01:18 that's going to involve trying to
1:01:21 embrace protocols that can set the right duration of sleep.
1:01:27 There's a little bit of literature not a lot
1:01:29 that shows that keeping the
1:01:31 total amount of sleep per night
1:01:34 to say six hours such that you begin sleep and end
1:01:38 at the beginning and end of one of these ultradian cycles,
1:01:41 can be better than waking up
1:01:43 in the middle of one of these ultradian cycles.
1:01:46 So try and find the right amount of sleep that you need,
1:01:49 that's right for you,
1:01:50 and then try and get that consistently night to night.
1:01:52 If you're a lucid dreamer and you don't like it,
1:01:55 then you may want to start to
1:01:56 make sure that you're waking up
1:01:59 at the end of one of these ultradian cycles.
1:02:01 So in this case,
1:02:03 it would be better to wake up after six hours
1:02:05 than after seven and if you did
1:02:06 sleep longer than six hours, maybe you'd wanna get
1:02:08 to seven and a half hours.
1:02:09 'Cause that's gonna reflect
1:02:10 the end of one of these 90 minute cycles,
1:02:12 as opposed to waking up in the middle.
1:02:15 Alcohol. Alcohol and marijuana
1:02:18 are well known to induce states that are
1:02:20 pseudo sleep like.
1:02:21 Especially, when people fall asleep
1:02:24 after having consumed alcohol or THC,
1:02:27 one of the active components of marijuana.
1:02:31 Alcohol, THC
1:02:33 and most things like them,
1:02:37 meaning things that increase serotonin, or GABA
1:02:41 are going to disrupt the pattern of sleep.
1:02:43 They're going to disrupt the depth.
1:02:44 They're going to disrupt
1:02:46 the overall sequencing of more slow wave sleep
1:02:48 early in the night and more REM sleep later in the night.
1:02:50 That's just the reality.
1:02:52 There are some things that
1:02:55 at least, in a few studies that I could find
1:02:57 seem to suggest that you could
1:02:59 increase the amount of slow wave sleep
1:03:01 using things like arginine, the amino acid arginine.
1:03:04 Although, you really wanna check.
1:03:05 Arginine can have effects on heart, et cetera
1:03:07 has other effects.
1:03:09 But, alcohol, THC, not gonna be great for sleep
1:03:11 and depth of sleep.
1:03:13 You might feel like you can fall asleep faster,
1:03:15 but the sleep that you're accessing
1:03:17 really isn't the kind of deep restorative sleep
1:03:19 that you should be getting.
1:03:21 Now, of course, if that's what you need
1:03:24 in order to sleep and that's within your protocols,
1:03:26 I've said here before,
1:03:27 I'm not suggesting people take anything.
1:03:28 I'm not a medical doctor.
1:03:29 I'm not a cop.
1:03:30 So I'm not trying to irregulate anyone's behavior.
1:03:33 I'm just telling you what the literature says.
1:03:36 Some of you may want to explore your dreams
1:03:38 and meaning of dreams, et cetera.
1:03:40 You know, there's not a lot of hard data
1:03:43 about how to do this,
1:03:43 but a lot of people report keeping a sleep journal,
1:03:47 where a dream journal can be very useful.
1:03:49 So they mark when they think they fell asleep
1:03:51 the night before, when they woke up
1:03:53 and if they wake up in the middle of the night,
1:03:55 early in the morning they'll just write down
1:03:57 what they can recall of their dreams.
1:03:59 And even if they recall nothing,
1:04:01 many people have the experience of mid morning
1:04:04 or later afternoon that suddenly comes to them
1:04:07 that they had a dream about something and writing that down.
1:04:10 I kept a dream journal for a while.
1:04:11 It didn't really afford me much.
1:04:13 I didn't really learn anything
1:04:14 except that my dreams were very bizarre.
1:04:17 But, there are some things that happen in dreams
1:04:20 that are associated with REM sleep
1:04:22 as compared to slow wave sleep,
1:04:24 which can tell you whether or not
1:04:25 your dream likely happened in REM sleep or slow wave sleep.
1:04:28 And the distinguishing feature it turns out
1:04:30 is something called theory of mind.
1:04:33 Theory of mind is actually an idea
1:04:35 that was developed for the study and assessment of autism.
1:04:38 And it was initially that phrase, theory of mind,
1:04:42 was brought about by Simon Baron Cohen,
1:04:47 who is Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedians brother.
1:04:51 Simon Baron Cohen is a psychologist and
1:04:54 to some extent an neuroscientist at Oxford.
1:04:58 And theory of mind tests are done on children.
1:05:01 And the theory of mind test is some what like the following,
1:05:05 a child is brought into a laboratory
1:05:07 and watches a video of
1:05:08 a child playing with some sort of toy.
1:05:11 And then at the end of playing with that toy
1:05:14 they put the toy in a drawer and they go away,
1:05:17 and then another child comes in and is looking around
1:05:21 and then the experimenter asks the child
1:05:24 who's in the experiment, the real child and says,
1:05:27 "You know, what does the child think?
1:05:30 You know, what are they feeling?"
1:05:33 And most children have a particular age,
1:05:35 five or six or older will say, "Oh, you know,
1:05:37 he or she is confused, they don't know where the toy is."
1:05:40 Or, they'll say something that implies
1:05:42 what we call theory of mind, that they can put their
1:05:45 ideas and their mind into what the other child
1:05:49 is likely to be feeling or experiencing.
1:05:52 That's theory of mind.
1:05:53 And it turns out that this is used
1:05:57 as one of the assessments for autism,
1:05:59 because some children, not all, but some children
1:06:03 that have autism or that go on to develop autism
1:06:05 don't have this theory of mind.
1:06:07 They tend to fixate on the fact that
1:06:10 the first child put the toy in the drawer.
1:06:12 They'll say it's in the drawer
1:06:13 as opposed to answering the question
1:06:15 which is how does the second child feel about it,
1:06:18 or what are they experiencing?
1:06:20 So theory of mind is something that
1:06:22 emerges early in life as a part of the
1:06:25 maturation of the circuits in the brain
1:06:27 associated with emotional learning and social interactions.
1:06:31 And we experienced this in certain dreams.
1:06:35 So if you had a dream that you're puzzled about,
1:06:38 or that you're fixated on and you're thinking about,
1:06:40 you might ask, "In that dream
1:06:42 was I assessing somebody else's emotion and feeling,
1:06:46 or was I very much in my own first person experience?"
1:06:49 And that the tendency is that theory of mind
1:06:53 tends to show up most in these REM associated dreams.
1:06:58 Now this isn't a hard and fast rule,
1:07:00 but chances are if you were in a dream
1:07:02 and you were thinking about other people
1:07:04 who wanted to do something to you,
1:07:06 you were thinking about their desire
1:07:07 to chase you or help you,
1:07:10 or something that was related
1:07:12 to someone else's emotional experience.
1:07:14 It was probably a REM dream.
1:07:17 That dream occurred in rapid eye movement sleep
1:07:19 as opposed to slow wave sleep.
1:07:21 And that makes sense when you think about the role of REM
1:07:24 in emotional unlearning of associations
1:07:28 with particular life events.
1:07:30 That REM is rich with all sorts of exploration
1:07:33 of the emotional load of being chased,
1:07:37 or the emotional load of
1:07:39 having to take an exam the next day,
1:07:40 or being late for something.
1:07:42 But again, if you're fixated
1:07:45 or you can recall thinking a lot about,
1:07:48 or feeling a lot about
1:07:49 what somebody else's motivations were
1:07:51 then chances are it was in REM and if not
1:07:54 chances are it was in slow wave sleep.
1:07:56 Today we've been in a deep dive of sleep and dreaming,
1:08:01 learning and unlearning.
1:08:03 And I just want to recap a few of the highlights
1:08:06 and important points.
1:08:07 A lot more slow wave sleep and less REM early in the night,
1:08:11 more REM and less slow wave sleep later in the night.
1:08:14 REM sleep is associated with
1:08:16 intense experiences without this chemical epinephrine
1:08:20 that allows us the anxiety or fear.
1:08:23 And almost certainly has an important role
1:08:26 in uncoupling of emotion from experiences.
1:08:29 Kind of self-induced therapy that we go into each night.
1:08:33 That bears striking resemblance
1:08:35 to things like EMDR and ketamine therapies and so forth.
1:08:38 Slow wave sleep is critical, however,
1:08:41 it's critical mostly for motor learning
1:08:43 and the learning of specific details.
1:08:45 So REM is kind of emotions and general themes and meaning,
1:08:50 and slow wave sleep, motor learning and details.
1:08:53 I personally find it fascinating that consistency of sleep,
1:08:57 meaning getting six hours every night
1:09:01 is better than getting ten one night, eight the next,
1:09:04 five the next, four the next.
1:09:06 I find that fascinating and I think I also like it because
1:09:09 it's something I can control better
1:09:11 than just trying to sleep more,
1:09:12 which I think I'm not alone and agreeing that
1:09:14 that's just hard for a lot of people to do.
1:09:17 This episode also brings us to the conclusion of
1:09:21 a five episode streak where we've been focusing on sleep
1:09:24 and transitions in and out of sleep, non sleep depressed.
1:09:28 We've talked about a lot of tools, morning light,
1:09:30 evening light, avoiding lights, blue blockers, supplements,
1:09:34 tools for measuring sleep duration and quality.
1:09:37 We've been covering a lot of themes.
1:09:40 I like to think that by now
1:09:41 you're armed with a number of tools and information.
1:09:45 Things like knowing when your temperature minimum is,
1:09:48 knowing when you might wanna view light or not,
1:09:50 when you might wanna eat or take hot showers,
1:09:52 or God forbid a cold shower,
1:09:54 something that most people including me more or less loath,
1:09:56 but can have certain benefits.
1:09:58 And that will allow you to shape your sleep life
1:10:00 and get this consistent,
1:10:03 or more or less consistent amount of sleep
1:10:04 on a regular basis.
1:10:06 Nobody's perfect. In fact I have this little joke
1:10:08 that I sometimes tell, it's not funny.
1:10:10 Like, most of the jokes I tell I'm told are not funny,
1:10:13 but, you know, there's so much excitement now about
1:10:15 intermittent fasting.
1:10:17 Sometimes I think that someone should start
1:10:18 something on intermittent sleep deprivation,
1:10:20 although we're already doing that.
1:10:22 We are all experiencing lack of sleep from time to time.
1:10:25 And I don't think we should catastrophize that too much.
1:10:28 I think that what we wanna do
1:10:29 rather than accumulate a sleep anxiety is to...
1:10:33 You know, if we get a bad night's sleep, we want to adjust,
1:10:37 we want to get back on track
1:10:38 and just get the consistent amount of sleep.
1:10:40 Use those non sleep deep rest protocols to help us relax
1:10:43 when we're feeling anxious,
1:10:44 we're having trouble waking up in the middle of the night.
1:10:46 There are a lot of tools out there,
1:10:48 and most of them are zero cost.
1:10:50 And so I hope you'll find those beneficial.
1:10:52 If you've been hearing Costello snoring
1:10:55 throughout this episode.
1:10:56 I apologize in his behalf.
1:10:59 As I said, in the welcome video to this podcast
1:11:01 he's an integral part of the podcast.
1:11:03 A few people have said, "Hey,
1:11:04 that noise in the background is really disruptive."
1:11:07 Hey, what can I say?
1:11:09 Costello is a ten-year-old bulldog mastiff.
1:11:12 The lifespan on those animals is about 10 years.
1:11:15 So I'm not trying to make you feel guilty,
1:11:17 but, you know, after he's gone there won't be any snoring,
1:11:20 although I'll probably get a different dog.
1:11:23 So sort of a, what were the kids say, sorry not sorry.
1:11:25 Sorry not sorry about the snoring
1:11:28 and I'm sorry if it's disruptive genuinely,
1:11:31 but he's here for the hall.
1:11:34 So that's what that's about.
1:11:37 As we close out the segment on sleep
1:11:40 we are moving into a new theme and topic
1:11:42 for the next four to five episodes.
1:11:44 We are going to discuss the science
1:11:46 and the tools related to neuroplasticity.
1:11:50 Neuroplasticity is a remarkable feature
1:11:52 of the nervous system.
1:11:54 In fact, it's the defining feature of the nervous system,
1:11:56 which is its ability to change itself
1:11:59 in response to experience.
1:12:01 That is unlike every other tissue
1:12:03 and collection of cells and organ in our body.
1:12:06 It's really what makes us us as a species
1:12:09 and it's what makes us us as individuals,
1:12:12 and it's really where our potential lies.
1:12:14 Everything that we know, everything we can do,
1:12:17 and our true potential
1:12:19 in terms of what we will ever be able to
1:12:21 know, do, say, in life is set by
1:12:23 the limits of neuroplasticity.
1:12:26 So we're going to explore learning and childhood,
1:12:29 learning and adulthood.
1:12:31 We're going to discuss detailed protocols
1:12:33 as they relate to sensory plasticity.
1:12:37 Learning new sensory information,
1:12:38 versus motor plasticity or sensory motor integration.
1:12:42 We're going to talk about language acquisition.
1:12:44 We're going to be talking about
1:12:45 emotional acquisition and breadth.
1:12:47 As well as, I think a topic a lot of people
1:12:50 are gonna find fascinating is,
1:12:51 the relationship between plasticity set
1:12:54 during childhood attachment to parent or other caregiver,
1:12:57 and how that maps onto adult relationships.
1:13:01 Many of you have probably heard about
1:13:03 secure attach or insecure attach.
1:13:05 The A, B and C, D babies as they're called
1:13:07 from the classic studies
1:13:09 of Bowlby and others.
1:13:11 But now there's actual neuroscience that can say
1:13:13 which circuits were active
1:13:15 during those early life attachment
1:13:17 and how those map to adult attachment styles,
1:13:21 challenges, and what makes us more likely
1:13:24 to select certain partners and styles of attachment,
1:13:26 as well as how to change those.
1:13:28 It's really fascinating and I think
1:13:30 neuroscience's time has come for neuroplasticity.
1:13:34 We're also gonna talk, of course, about
1:13:36 supplements and chemicals and machines and devices
1:13:39 that can assist in speeding up the plasticity process.
1:13:42 Or believe it or not, there are some cases
1:13:44 where you might want to delay plasticity
1:13:46 in order to get more depth of learning
1:13:48 and have that learning last longer.
1:13:51 Something that is just absolutely spectacular literature.
1:13:54 So I'm very excited to move on to that topic soon.
1:13:57 I hope that the tools that you've acquired so far
1:13:59 and the knowledge that you've acquired so far
1:14:00 is helping you with your self evaluation
1:14:03 and experimentation as you see fit,
1:14:04 and is allowing you to not just sleep better,
1:14:06 but feel better while you're awake.
1:14:08 And hopefully has set the stage for you to learn better
1:14:11 as we start to march into the month on neuroplasticity.
1:14:16 Many of you have asked how you can help support
1:14:18 the Huberman Lab Podcast and we
1:14:20 greatly appreciate the question.
1:14:22 You can help support the podcast
1:14:24 by subscribing to the YouTube channel,
1:14:26 if you haven't already
1:14:27 and leaving comments and questions in the comment section.
1:14:31 If you could subscribe on Apple and or Spotify,
1:14:34 that's helpful.
1:14:35 And there's a place on Apple Podcasts to leave a rating,
1:14:39 as well as comments about how you feel about the podcast.
1:14:43 If you could suggest the podcast to friends and coworkers
1:14:47 and anyone else that you think would benefit
1:14:48 from the information that also really helps us
1:14:51 get the word out.
1:14:52 And of course, check out our sponsors
1:14:54 because that's a very direct way
1:14:55 to help us continue to get this information
1:14:57 out to the general public.
1:14:58 Many of you have asked about supplements
1:15:00 and where I personally get my supplements.
1:15:02 I've partnered with Thorne
1:15:04 and I get my supplements from Thorne because,
1:15:07 by my view they have the highest level of stringency
1:15:09 and precision in terms of what's in the bottle.
1:15:13 And they also have very high quality standards.
1:15:16 They're partnered with the Mayo Clinic
1:15:17 and all the major sports organizations.
1:15:20 If you wanna try Thorne supplements
1:15:22 you can go to thorne.com.
1:15:24 So that's Thorne spelled thorne.com/u/huberman.
1:15:31 And if you do that you can see the formulations that I take.
1:15:34 And you'll also get 20% off,
1:15:36 not just those formulations, but anything that Thorne makes.
1:15:39 That's thorne.com/u/huberman
1:15:43 to get 20% off anything that they provide.
1:15:47 Last but not least, a few people wrote to me
1:15:50 with some questions/corrections about things that I said
1:15:55 in previous podcasts.
1:15:57 So in keeping with my goal of
1:15:59 making the information accurate and clear,
1:16:02 I just want to correct myself
1:16:04 about a few things that I said.
1:16:06 One of those and I'm guessing
1:16:08 it probably came from an endocrinologist
1:16:10 or somebody else that knows a lot about testicles said,
1:16:14 "Huberman, you mentioned that testosterone
1:16:17 is made by the sertoli cells of the testes, and it's not.
1:16:20 It's made by the leydig cells of the testes."
1:16:22 And indeed you are correct.
1:16:24 And so I want to make sure that I clarify that.
1:16:27 Testosterone is made by the leydig cells of the testes,
1:16:30 not by the sertoli cells.
1:16:31 The sertoli cells make 5 alpha-reductase and aromatase,
1:16:35 and some other enzymes involved
1:16:36 in conversion of testosterone into
1:16:39 things like DHT and estrogen.
1:16:40 So thank you for that correction.
1:16:42 I genuinely appreciate it. I misspoke.
1:16:44 The other thing I said, was at one point I said,
1:16:46 "Typical temperature is 96.8
1:16:48 when I actually meant to say 98.6."
1:16:52 So it was a dyslexic slip on my part and I apologize.
1:16:55 I don't know that I'm dyslexic.
1:16:57 I know I haven't been clinically diagnosed with dyslexia,
1:17:00 but I swapped them, which sometimes happens
1:17:03 when I'm going fast.
1:17:04 So I apologize. I'll use this a moment to just say
1:17:07 temperature varies a lot across the day and night,
1:17:10 that was a theme of previous podcasts.
1:17:13 So we can't really talk about average temperature anyway,
1:17:16 but I do want to be clear that
1:17:17 most people think about average temperature as 98.6.
1:17:21 I misspoke, my error and I apologize.
1:17:23 Thank you for joining me in this journey
1:17:27 of the nervous system in biology
1:17:29 and trying to understand the mechanisms
1:17:31 that make us who we are and how we function in sleep
1:17:34 and in wakefulness.
1:17:35 It's really an incredible landscape to consider
1:17:38 and I hope that you're getting a lot out of the information.
1:17:41 As always thank you for your interest in science.
1:17:44 [upbeat music]