Why do we sleep and dream? (featuring Dr. Gina Poe)

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Gina Poe about sleep and dreams - including whether mushrooms sleep, what Daniel's dog is doing in the middle of the night, and what rats dream about. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Daniel Whiteson?

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• 1:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Sleep. We spend around a third of our entire lives doing it, completely oblivious to the world around us. Some animals, like cheetahs, toads, and squirrels, spend at least half of their lives asleep. It's kind of baffling when you think about it. Time spent sleeping is time that can't be spent doing things like searching for food. And if you're a wild animal, time spent sleeping is time when you're less able to detect a predator in the area. So why do we sleep? It turns out, this activity that swallows up so much of our short time on this planet is really hard to study. But scientists have made some headway on this question of why do we sleep? And today, we're going to talk to Dr.

• 2:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Gina Poe about why we sleep and chat with her about other fascinating questions like, do mushrooms sleep? Does an octopus dream? And does all of our brains sleep at the same time? Or do some parts fall asleep before the others? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Sleepy Universe.

• 3:04Daniel Whiteson?

  Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and I don't sleep particularly well.

• 3:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hi, I'm Kelly Wiener-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm not going to blame it on the parasites, but I don't sleep very well either. But I love sleep. Like, when 8:30 comes around every night, it is like the only thing on my mind. Zach is like, it's only 8:30. Are you going to pull an all-niner and stay up past nine? And I'm like, not. I'm going to do everything I can to be in bed by the time nine o'clock rolls around.

• 3:30Daniel Whiteson?

  Young people don't appreciate how nice it is to be home in the evening and have no plans.

• 3:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  I know, and have a comfy bed. Oh, the blessing that is a comfy bed. It's one of my favorite things.

• 3:41Daniel Whiteson?

  It is, yes. When sleep goes well, it is definitely one of the best things in the world. But when it's fraught, man, I've had nights that lasted 1,000 years.

• 3:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, my gosh, yeah. No, me too. We went camping once and it was a little bit rainy. And we, so we weren't really camping. My daughter and I were sleeping on the trampoline. And it started to rain, and then it got really cold. And then my back hurt, but I didn't want to ruin the night for her. And so I tried to make it work. And then at like 5:00 AM, I was like, Ada, we're moving inside. I need a nap. This is miserable.

• 4:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, it's amazing to me that sleep is something we just cannot do. With that, that we have to accomplish every single day. And also that it's something you can't really try to do. It's like something you have to try to not do. You know, like the harder you work at sleeping, the more you get worked up about it. And the harder it is to sleep. It's incredible. It seems so fragile. It's incredible that it ever works. I don't know.

• 4:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yes, I think you and I are making clear that we don't have a very good relationship with sleep at all. But I wake up a million times in the middle of the night and it's, it's a thing.

• 4:40Daniel Whiteson?

  And it makes me wonder like, why we evolved this way? Why such an important part of our life cycle? If it's yet so fraught and so fragile, right? It seems like kind of a bad idea.

• 4:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  I mean, I think it's possible that you and I are just broken in a particular way. And that this problem with sleep is not present for everyone. I mean, my kids conk out and they are out and it's fine for them.

• 5:01Daniel Whiteson?

  But that's also an age dependent thing, right? A lot of kids have no problem with sleep, sleep all night, sleep anywhere, all the time. But then as you get older, sometimes it gets harder to make it work.

• 5:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  I agree, but so today's episode, we're talking to a sleep expert. And we forgot to ask her about tips for how to solve our sleeping problems. She didn't solve our sleep problems.

• 5:19Daniel Whiteson?

  Yes.

• 5:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  But a guest wanted to know about dreams, why we dream, interpretations of dreams, et cetera. So what is the weirdest dream you've ever had, Daniel? And let's keep it short because I think notoriously, people don't want to hear about dreams that other people have had. So real quick, weirdest dream you've had?

• 5:36Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, as you know, I think a lot about aliens. And so lots of my weird dreams have aliens in them and they're pretty weird. And sometimes they eat me or my children and sometimes it's my fault.

• 5:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, no.

• 5:48Daniel Whiteson?

  And so, yeah, those are pretty weird dreams.

• 5:50Kelly Weinersmith?

  There are so many insights about you wrapped up in that, in that story. For me, it was my mom and I teamed up with the Berenstein Bears. We were a crime fighting organization and a murderer was on the loose and the murderer killed me. Cause my mom, you know, went off down a hallway and we split up, which classically you should never do. And the Berenstein Bears had gone another way. And anyway, big mistake.

• 6:11Daniel Whiteson?

  Yeah.

• 6:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  But all right, so I don't know that there's much you can extract about me out of that dream in particular. But we are going to talk to an expert on sleep and dreams, Dr. Gina Poe. And she's going to answer all of our questions about sleep and dreams.

• 6:27Daniel Whiteson?

  And she's going to blow your mind about what it means to sleep across the animal world.

• 6:31Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so let's start by listening to the question from our listener that got this whole interview started.

• 6:37Speaker 04

  Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Carrie from the Pacific Northwest, and I was wondering if you can do a show on dreams, why we dream, what part of our brain is being used when we dream, and just everything about dreams. Thank you.

• 6:53Daniel Whiteson?

  Thank you, Carrie, for that wonderful question. And all of you out there listening, if you haven't already fallen asleep to this podcast, you are welcome to send us your questions about the universe. We will try to answer them, and we will sometimes rope in a world-class expert to give you answers.

• 7:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  And let's bring that world-class expert on now. On today's show, we have Dr. Gina Poe. She's the Eleanor Leslie Professor of Innovative Brain Research at UCLA. In addition to research, she directs three university programs aimed at supporting undergraduates who are underrepresented in STEM fields. She's done so many incredible things. I'm just going to cherry pick a few. Gina and her colleagues sent four rats to space as part of NASA's NeuroLab mission to study how brains map the 3D world in weightlessness, where you don't really know what side is up. And she's well-known for her discovery that sleep is important, not just for remembering things, but also for forgetting things. Her lab at UCLA focuses on sleep and memory, which are the topics we're going to be chatting

• 7:51Kelly Weinersmith?

  about today. Welcome to the show, Dr. Poe.

• 7:54Speaker 05

  Thank you so much. It's great to be here.

• 7:56Kelly Weinersmith?

  We're super excited.

• 7:57Daniel Whiteson?

  Gina, I have a first question, which is sort of goofy, which is, what do you call a rat you send into space? Is it a rattranaut?

• 8:04Speaker 05

  Yes, actually.

• 8:05Kelly Weinersmith?

  Great.

• 8:07Daniel Whiteson?

  And do they have to undergo like a rigorous selection process? You know, where they like run on treadmills for hours?

• 8:12Speaker 05

  Actually, yes. Yes. We started with 40 rats and ended up with four, so.

• 8:18Daniel Whiteson?

  And those were the four that had the rat stuff?

• 8:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, the rat stuff.

• 8:23Kelly Weinersmith?

  Amazing. Great. Okay, so let's start big with why do we think we sleep? And how well do we understand the answer to this question?

• 8:33Speaker 05

  There are lots of answers to that question. I think that there probably is one essential reason why we sleep, but we don't know the answer to that question. But we do know a lot of essential things that happen during sleep with which we can't do without. For example, energy metabolism goes way up when we're asleep. What I mean by that is not actually metabolism. I mean restoring energy stores to our entire body. Our mitochondria wake up when we go to sleep, and they are doing their job much, much faster and restoring ATP to all of our cells. So that's just one essential function of probably 20 that we know of.

• 9:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Why do we have to be asleep for mitochondria to do that? Why can't they just do it while we're doing our thing?

• 9:24Speaker 05

  I don't know. That's a good question. That's actually a fairly new discovery.

• 9:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  And is that happening in all of our cells or just our brain cells?

• 9:34Speaker 05

  It's been discovered in fruit flies, brain cells.

• 9:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay.

• 9:38Speaker 05

  So that's a good question. I imagine it's going on everywhere, but we know that the longer we're awake, the more free adenosine builds up in our brain, and that free adenosine is a signal for sleepiness. And as soon as we go to sleep, within 30 minutes, that free adenosine has been re-packaged by mitochondria into ATP. So the free adenosine levels go way down when we're asleep in the first 20 minutes, which is probably why power naps are called the power naps.

• 10:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  I do love me a power nap.

• 10:13Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 10:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  And now I feel way more justified in that.

• 10:16Daniel Whiteson?

  You said there are like 20 different things that happen when we sleep. One of them is we're restoring energy stores. What are some of the other ones?

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Okay, so well, we know that we consolidate memories when we're asleep. That's my field of research. And that without sleep, we don't put them away long term in our memory stores. Of course, memory is really important for adaptation to our environment, finding where our home is, et cetera. And so that would, you could imagine that would. Be important for life itself. It doesn't seem like all animals should have to learn things. But in fact, every time we've tried to teach any animal something, they've been able to learn it. Even mushrooms can learn it. And there's some interesting study by Vlad Vaisovski that shows that even mushrooms need sleep.

• 11:03Kelly Weinersmith?

  Well, what does sleep look like in a mushroom? Like, what are they missing?

• 11:06Speaker 05

  Exactly. I don't know. You'll have to ask Vlad, but he came up with a very convincing argument that mushrooms do sleep.

• 11:14Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, wow. Okay, so then that I'm gonna jump ahead then to another question that I had. Before we go back to purposes of sleep. Okay, so I would not have guessed you were going to tell us that mushrooms sleep. That's an amazing surprise. I'm gonna try sneaking up on some of the mushrooms in my yard now.

• 11:29Daniel Whiteson?

  Kelly, they're busy consolidating their memories of the day. You're gonna ruin it for them.

• 11:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'm sorry. I know all the tricks they were trying to learn. So what organisms sleep? Or like, maybe it sounds like the better question is what organisms don't sleep? Given that even mushrooms sleep, like, do bacteria sleep?

• 11:47Speaker 05

  That is a good question. They definitely have a circadian rhythm. So they have a time when they're not actively pulsing or whatever, and times when they are. So, um, yeah, it's a good question. I don't know the answer to that one. And it would be difficult probably to tell in bacteria, except for that sort of change in activity. I guess it would be the only way you could tell. Certainly, our gut bacteria are doing different things at night versus the day. And their rhythm gets messed up when we have jet lag, for example.

• 12:20Daniel Whiteson?

  And in all these creatures that sleep, is it all linked to the same day-night cycle?

• 12:25Speaker 05

  Yes, except that, for example, there are rats and mice who sleep during the day. So there are some things that are flipped, the switch is flipped. But even for rats and mice, melatonin, which is the hormone of darkness, is higher during the night when they're awake and actively exploring.

• 12:43Daniel Whiteson?

  So I have a question based on a tiny amount of anecdotal data. When I go to sleep, my dog is in one place. And if I ever wake up in the middle of the night, he's sleeping in another place. And in the morning, he's in a third place, because he has like 19 different places he likes to sleep in our house. So my question to you is, what is my dog doing all night? Does he just take naps and then move around? Is he like, you know, up, learning how to make soufflés in the middle of the night? Like, why don't dogs sleep all the way through the night? What's going on in my house? Gina, tell me.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Dogs and cats, predators actually sleep a lot more than prey species do. They sleep about sixteen hours a day in a nice home environment. So yes, your dog is waking up more than you do probably at night and maybe going to get some water or just checking out the house and finding a cooler place to sleep. But if you were to put a camera on your dog, your dog isn't roaming around and hunting like a cat. A cat is more crepuscular, so they have a lot of activity in the morning and in the evening. But they sleep a lot during the day and they sleep a lot during the night as well.

• 13:54Speaker 05

  But dogs are a lot more dire and like we are. So yeah, your dog is pretty much rest assured sleeping all night, just getting up once in a while when they're uncomfortable or they're done with the sleep cycle.

• 14:05Daniel Whiteson?

  I was kind of hoping he was writing like the great American novel in the middle of the night or something.

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 14:11Kelly Weinersmith?

  So my brain is a little bit stuck on the mushroom thing and it's making me wonder, how do we define sleep? Because I, you know, I thought maybe we would define it by like brainwaves or things that you wouldn't be measuring in a mushroom. So, so let's, let's step back even farther then. How do we define sleep?

• 14:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. So there are animals we can't define sleep via brainwaves because their brain isn't organized the same way ours is. In order to be able to see those brainwaves, we have to have an alignment of neurons because each neuron has, you know, a tiny little electrical signal. And when they're all aligned in the same orientation, you can see that electrical signal sums and we can see it from a place as distant as the surface of your scalp. There are three layers of skin, four layers of skin actually, between your actual brain cells and the electrode plus bone and water. So you can imagine that that signal would be reduced the further distance you are away from your brain.

• 15:12Daniel Whiteson?

  So that's what brainwaves are? Sorry to interrupt. I just, I've always wondered, brainwaves are measurement of the electrical field caused by firing neurons?

• 15:20Speaker 05

  Yes, exactly. They actually don't even have to fire. The membrane potential just has to depolarize or hyperpolarize. So become more positive or negative.

• 15:31Daniel Whiteson?

  It's amazing there's any signal in there at all.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 15:34Daniel Whiteson?

  Why are the neurons oriented physically in the same way? So that they can constructively build a signal? That's incredible.

• 15:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, why is a great question. I don't know the answer to that. But they are the biggest neurons in our brain are these things in our cortex called pyramidal cells, which are shaped like pyramids, which is why they're called pyramidal cells. And they are just oriented on the folds of our brain facing outward. And there are tufts of antenna at every pole of the pyramid. And the ones at the base are called basilar dendrites. And the ones at the top are called apical dendrites. And the apical dendrites are the ones that reach all the way to the very surface of our brain. And they are the ones that get communication from other areas of our cortex.

• 16:23Speaker 05

  So when we're thinking thoughts, that's all coming in are apical dendrites. When we're feeling feelings that are coming from the outside, like our sensations, they come in at the basilar drites and the ones that are closest to the apical dendrites, not the distant ones. So they're just all aligned like that. And our striations of our cortex are, as you've probably seen them, they're folded. So it's only at the top of those striations that you can get the electrodes and see that what's going on. So we can, with our electrical EEG electrodes, you can only see a small percentage of what's going on in our brains and only what's at the surface.

• 17:05Speaker 05

  Because as the distance increases, the signal decreases exponentially. Yeah.

• 17:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  And so we use that information to define sleep in organisms where that works?

• 17:14Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 17:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  Is that, and then otherwise, what kinds of things would we be looking for in organisms that have a more like distributed nervous system where it's harder to do that kind of stuff?

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, so organisms like the octopus.

• 17:28Speaker 05

  Okay. It has more ganglia like it doesn't have a cortex like we have. And so the neurons are there. Of course, they're there. They are all over their legs and central brain area. But they're organized in a very kind of more random fashion. So even though they're just as electrically active as ours are, the electricity, you know, is going in different directions. And so it doesn't summit, so we can't really see them with electrodes. So instead, we need behavioral measures. And so animals usually have a typical sleeping position or positions. Even the sea elegans worm has this typical sleeping position.

• 18:11Speaker 05

  They sleep like a, it's called a shepherd's hook. It looks kind of like a question mark. Huh. That's their sleeping position. It's kind of cute. Yeah, it's really cute. And then there, all these animals are less sensitive to what's coming in from the outside. So I wouldn't suggest this, but you can tap on your fish tank at night and the fish won't respond the same way that they respond during the day. During the day, they'll respond right away and swim around. But at night, they'll just sit there and maybe a few seconds later, they'll sort of arouse and respond. So they're less responsive to the outside world. But it is a reversible state to determine and distinguish it from coma.

• 18:52Speaker 05

  It's homeostatically regulated, which means that all animals that you deprive of sleep will try and get more sleep the next opportunity they have. So there is a great study of jellyfish, which don't have a central nervous system either, at Caltech, that showed that these Cassiopeia, which are these upside down jellyfish, sleep at night like we would expect. And what they do is they find the bottom of the tank or whatever. They find something to rest on to sleep. And then they just start pulsing more slowly. And then if you wake them up a bunch of times at night by giving them a jet of water or something to disturb them from their sleeping position, they will wake up, pulse faster, try and find the bottom again and go right back to sleep.

• 19:38Speaker 05

  And if you do that all night long, the next day they'll nap a lot more. Whoa. I know.

• 19:44Daniel Whiteson?

  Do you need some sort of ethics review to torture these jellyfish this way all night long?

• 19:48Speaker 05

  You know?

• 19:49Daniel Whiteson?

  Is that, is that a yes or no? I wasn't sure.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  No, but thankfully not many people are doing this, so.

• 19:55Kelly Weinersmith?

  If they had vertebrae, you would have to, but yeah.

• 19:58Speaker 05

  Right, exactly, exactly.

• 20:00Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh, I see. So rats have ethical protection, but jellyfish, you can torture as much as you like all day long?

• 20:06Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 20:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 20:07Kelly Weinersmith?

  We would not call it torture, I think, Daniel, the physicist.

• 20:11Daniel Whiteson?

  I'm trying to speak here on behalf of the jellyfish. This sounds like torture to me. You come in my room and wake me up 10 times in the middle of the night, I'm not going to be very pleasant the next day. I'm going to do more than just nap, I'll tell you that much.

• 20:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, you can't get their, their consent with people, you know? You get people volunteering for these kinds of studies all the time. And yeah, it's not great, but they, you know, they like contributing to our knowledge of what sleep is about and seeing what their own sleep is like. We can't give the same feedback to jellyfish, but we do allow them to sleep the next day. Nap as much as you want. You can also give them caffeine. It works the same way. It keeps them up and makes them more active. Interestingly, in that study of jellyfish sleep, they found that they pulse more slowly at night. If you wake them up, they pulse faster. But in a, I think it was figure two of that paper, they don't even describe there are

• 21:04Speaker 05

  periods of time when they're not pulsing at all, which is, you know, like not breathing essentially for 20 or 30 seconds at a time. And that could mirror the second stage of sleep, which I'm sure we're going to get into later, which is our dream stage of sleep. And in order to not act out our active dreams, we actively inhibit all of our muscles, not our breathing muscles, thankfully, not our heart muscles, thankfully, but all of our, our anti-gravity muscles so that we aren't acting out our dreams. And it seems like jellyfish have the same kind of, called atonia, no muscle tone, that we have, and they do it periodically throughout the night.

• 21:46Speaker 05

  The authors of that paper didn't describe a second state of sleep for jellyfish because I guess they just wanted to avoid contact.

• 21:52Speaker 05

  Or maybe they had it in the original draft and reviewers just said, ah, you need more evidence. But but also spiders and octopus, they all have this second stage of sleep. And when spiders have atonia, what do you imagine that they look like?

• 22:09Kelly Weinersmith?

  Do they look like the dead dried up?

• 22:11Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 22:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Really?

• 22:12Speaker 05

  They do.

• 22:13Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wait, so like if I find a black widow in my garage and it's all dried up, it it might just be sleeping and not dead?

• 22:18Speaker 05

  It might just be sleeping.

• 22:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Oh, interesting. That's a little scary. Okay.

• 22:23Speaker 05

  It might be in that REM sleep. Now, we call it REM sleep in humans because we have rapid eye movements and that corresponds with our dreaming. Actually, spiders also have rapid eye movements during that state.

• 22:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  And do all of their eyes move?

• 22:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, their eyes move. You can only see it in very young spiders where they don't have the dark carapace yet coloring. So you can see through their carapace and see their eyes moving. And also coolly, when we're in REM sleep, our eyes don't always move conjointly, like if they do when we're awake. So we could have one eye moving this way and it's it's just not, for some reason, maybe our brainstem areas that are helping our our eyes track the world are not coordinated when we're in REM sleep. And that's true spiders as well. So during wakefulness, their eyes move together in that REM sleep state, which we can call REM sleep in spiders because their eyes are also rapidly moving. Their eyes don't move conjointly. In cockroaches, they have rapid antennal movement sleep.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  So their antenna will, you know, jiggle.

• 23:27Daniel Whiteson?

  That almost sounds cute. Wow.

• 23:29Speaker 05

  And bees as well. Bees will have rapid antennal movement sleep.

• 23:32Kelly Weinersmith?

  And do we have evidence for these animals that they're also consolidating memories while they're sleeping? Or do we think they're doing something different?

• 23:40Speaker 05

  I don't think they're doing something different. For example, in the octopus, so they don't, actually, I don't know if anybody's looked at the eye movements of octopuses. I think probably they have and they probably do move, as I recall. But in any case, what they do, one of the ways you can tell they're in REM sleep is that they flash their colors. So their camouflage gets flashy.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  Like, for example, a dog twitching its paws.

• 24:06Daniel Whiteson?

  That sounds like science fiction. That's crazy.

• 24:08Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah.

• 24:08Speaker 05

  I know, it is crazy. So they have a sleeping position too. They don't like to sleep, except if they're safe, like crawled into a hole in a rock or something like that, because they also are prey for other sea animals. So they try and get to a safe place. And a place where when they're flashing, they can't be seen.

• 24:28Kelly Weinersmith?

  Yeah, I'd want to hide that color party.

• 24:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 24:30Kelly Weinersmith?

  For sure, from predators.

• 24:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, exactly.

• 24:32Daniel Whiteson?

  So this has been a fascinating tour of sleep across the animal kingdom and the fungal kingdom and all sorts of crazy stuff. But it sounds to me like the fundamental answer is that we don't really know what sleep is. We have this thing in humans we call sleep. And we can find correlated activities in other creatures that are not the same, because they have different brains and different bodies. But we still call them sleep. What is the thing we can say unifies sleep across all of these folks? How do we know we're not just projecting our human experience onto mushrooms and black widows?

• 25:03Speaker 05

  Right. Well, I think the less responsive to the environment. You're not reproducing, you're not ingesting food. Actually, in ungulates, let's go back to ungulates for a second. Uh, I think that was studied in, I think it was camels, uh, ruminants, not ungulates, ruminants. So they were thought to sleep a lot less because they're actively chewing a lot. But in fact, they can chew while they're asleep. So it's a really good question.

• 25:33Kelly Weinersmith?

  Whoa, I'm lucky I can't chew while I'm asleep.

• 25:36Speaker 05

  I know.

• 25:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  I'd get myself in trouble.

• 25:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  I do love food.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, it's kind of like teeth grinding, I guess, in humans, but you know, they have something to chew on, their cud. So that's a really good question, and I think that it's still controversial, Daniel, because if you define it behaviorally, you would say someone who's sleepwalking isn't sleeping because they're walking. But in fact, we know because we can measure EEG that they are asleep while they're sleepwalking. So it's, it is tricky, but we do also know that the brain at least is doing something wildly different. Wildly different than when we're awake. We are not processing the outside world in the slow wave state of sleep, which is one of the two states. Our, uh, brain activity electrically is.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Periodically active and inactive. And the frequency is about one hertz. So we have this blip of activity and then a lot of silence. And this silence is something you never see during wakefulness. And then a little blip of activity and then a lot of silence. And so consciousness is probably completely severed during those periods of time when the brain is completely inactive. And those little blips of activity, a hundred milliseconds long or so, are probably too short to be called consciousness and certainly too short to write memories into any long-term stores. So that's probably why we are, consider ourselves unconscious. During REM sleep, it's an entirely different state.

• 27:10Speaker 05

  The brain is super active, but that activity is all internally focused. So I'm not focused on what the outside world is, but this inside reality. And that's probably the case of octopuses when they're flashing their camouflage.

• 27:26Daniel Whiteson?

  All right. So that's been a fascinating discussion of meditative mushrooms and napping black widows. When we get back, let's talk more about what's happening while we sleep and what it means to dream.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. What still makes you just sit down at the piano?

• 28:09Speaker 06

  If you sat down at nine AM and then at noon, you had a full song that you recorded and put in your voice recorder or you recorded at your studio. You just created something brand new that didn't exist when you woke up. What a beautiful feeling it is. I'm always excited to write something new. I've been writing for Broadway, which has been a new challenge with new collaborators and these amazing performers who are triple threads, who can sing and dance and act and do all these amazing things. And I want to keep feeling that. And so that means not resting on my laurels, going out there and continuing to create something new.

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:54Speaker 07

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex card, you can be a little savvier. Finding the right gift feels good, and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases. So while you're checking names off your holiday list,

• 29:39Speaker 07

  those gifts can be a treat for you, too. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JPMorgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 30:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, so I remember hearing that something like dolphins and birds sleep with half of their brain at a time, which sounds great because then you can be awake. But anyway, so my question is, is that actually happening? And what does that look like? And what are the bonuses or drawbacks of that technique?

• 30:35Speaker 05

  Right, well, if you're a dolphin, the bonus is that you can continue to breathe all night long while you're sleeping.

• 30:41Kelly Weinersmith?

  Solid.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  So the half of your brain that's awake keeps the dolphin swimming at the surface and able to breathe all night long. They switch sides. So one half of the brain is sleeping for a while, and then the other half of the brain sleeps for the rest of the time and just switch back forth. Interestingly, the one neurochemical that seems to be changing when the consciousness Changes is acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter that goes all over the brain from one area of the brainstem. And it's considered to be the searchlight of consciousness. So when you're thinking about walking upstairs, acetylcholine goes to the motor areas that are

• 31:24Speaker 05

  responsible for your feet walking upstairs. And when you're thinking about doing math, acetylcholine goes to the math areas of your brain and away from the walking upstairs. If you're doing walking upstairs and doing math at the same time, of course, the acetylcholine is in both places.

• 31:39Kelly Weinersmith?

  And you're probably gonna fall.

• 31:40Speaker 05

  And you're probably gonna fall. Anyway, so for dolphins, fur seals that are out, you know, hunting for long periods of time and not accessing land for several weeks, they can also sleep unihemispherically whales sleep unihemispherically. And it's true, the side that's asleep that doesn't have the acetylcholine has the big slow waves of unconsciousness. And the side that's awake looks like, you know, awake and the eye is open on that side and all of that. So actually, so we control our brains. This is a little confusing. Our left side of our brain controls the right side of our bodies. So if the left side of the brain is awake, the right eye is open and watching the world

• 32:22Speaker 05

  around them and vice versa. But so REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, the one that I talked about where you have atonia, seems to occur only very briefly in these animals that are unihemispherically sleeping. So there is something different about REM sleep that really requires atonia. And maybe that's why it's only 15 seconds long in the dolphin. And we haven't recorded the EEG, the electroencephalogram from dolphins or whales. It's a little more difficult. There's a lot of fat between, you know, to help them float between their skin and their brain. And no one has attempted it. But we do have another

• 33:04Speaker 05

  state of sleep in whales, at least. And I don't know if it's been observed in dolphins. It would be interesting to see, but where they're not just floating at the surface and breathing and sleeping one hemisphere at a time, but they're actually below the surface in instead of a horizontal position and a vertical position, either head down or head up. And usually what they do is they start with head down. And then as the waves and tides, you know, move their atonic bodies, they eventually sort of go to the head up position. It's just they have a lot of fat in the head. That's the one that the more neutral position. And they will do that for 20 minutes at a time. And that's where their body is completely also atonic.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  And then they swim to the surface and breathe and, you know, wake up and breathe again.

• 33:50Daniel Whiteson?

  But I'm not sure I follow the basic idea of why some animals do this and some don't. You said, you know, dolphins need to keep swimming and breathing, but we also need to keep breathing while we're asleep. Why don't we do this as well?

• 34:02Speaker 05

  Right, because well, we, we can breathe while we're asleep without having to swim. You know, we just, you know. So also dolphins and whales breathe voluntarily. So it actually requires a voluntary sort of waking brain to breathe. Whereas we breathe involuntarily. When we go unconscious, if we were holding our breath before we went unconscious, we will start breathing again.

• 34:30Daniel Whiteson?

  And whales and dolphins have ancestors that were land animals, right? Which probably slept more like us. How do you think that evolution happened? How do you evolve this kind of thing?

• 34:38Speaker 05

  Right, I don't know.

• 34:41Speaker 05

  It's incredible, you know, the differences between species. It's really a beautiful and amazing thing.

• 34:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  So you mentioned that seals, when they go off on long foraging trips, can do unihemispheric sleep. Do they alternate between unihemispheric sleep and then everything?

• 34:57Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 34:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Like the whole brain going, oh, wow, they can do both.

• 35:00Speaker 05

  Yeah, when they're on land, they do by, you know, whole brain sleep.

• 35:04Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Yeah. And there is an elephant seal that isn't found to do unihemispheric sleep, either on land or at sea. And so that was used to argue that maybe sleep isn't necessary because they would be out there foraging for a couple of weeks and they're not sleeping for those couple of weeks. And then they go back to land and they don't have homeostatic rebound, like they had been sleep deprived for a couple of weeks. So it was thought that maybe these are animals that don't need to sleep and maybe sleep isn't necessary, or at least not always homeostatically regulated. But a few years ago, someone at EC Santa Cruz outfitted these elephant seals with headcaps so they could record from their brains while they're out there swimming.

• 35:48Speaker 05

  And they found that in fact, these headcaps also had GPS. They found that they actually do sleep while they're out there foraging. And what they do is they take a deep breath, you know, lots of deep breaths. They swim down, down, down to a depth beneath where sharks and killer whales would predate them. And where if they fall asleep, and when they fall asleep, they start sinking instead of floating back up. And so what they do is they they go into slow wave sleep and they have these beautiful slow waves. And they're just kind of coasting down as they go into slow wave sleep. And then when they go into REM sleep with the atonia,

• 36:30Speaker 05

  whatever body position they're in, if it's less than perfectly straight, which always is going to be less than perfectly straight, they'll start spiraling. The, you know, the fin that's down will make them spiral. So they will spiral down and down and down until they hit the ocean floor or until about seven or eight minutes have passed. And they start, you know, the oxygen need starts giving, making them decide that they need to wake up. And so they wake up and start swimming up to the surface.

• 36:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow.

• 36:59Speaker 05

  And they, even while they're swimming to the surface, they can hold their breath for a long time. So even when they're swimming to the surface, they could have little naps and then swim some more. And yeah, it's, it's, it's super cool. So really, sleep has been found in every animal and in every animal who's looked closely enough seems to have these two stages of sleep, so both stages. And both stages are independently regulated, so both stages seem to be important.

• 37:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  So wait, when one hemisphere is asleep, I assume that they're less good at doing, like, they can't have social interactions or anything like that. They're just watching out for predators and trying to breathe. Is that right?

• 37:37Speaker 05

  Yes, I think so. Yeah, we don't see social behaviors, which would take the whole body. I, I suppose they could flap one fin waving.

• 37:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Hey guys, taking a nap.

• 37:49Speaker 05

  Okay. Right.

• 37:50Daniel Whiteson?

  And it makes sense to me that predators might sleep like they eat very calorie-rich food, they don't need to move around, they're conserving energy, but prey, it seems to me like a huge disadvantage to ever go to sleep.

• 38:00Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 38:01Daniel Whiteson?

  Um, does that mean that it must be fundamentally important that you can't escape it, there's no evolutionary path away from it?

• 38:07Speaker 05

  I think that's what it means, yes. So I would love to see sleep in the pond organism that can survive in space and radiation. Tardigrades? Tardigrades. I would love somebody to do a sleep in tardigrade study. Because, because they survive so well despite all of these different assaults on them. They can, they have amazing abilities to rebuild broken double-stranded breaks in their DNA, which seems to be also one of the functions for sleep is to rebuild that double-stranded breaks in our DNA.

• 38:48Speaker 05

  So another animal that seems to be really good at repairing their DNA is the naked mole rat, which are really ugly or cute, whatever you think.

• 39:01Daniel Whiteson?

  It's a personality test, actually, whether you like the naked mole rat.

• 39:03Speaker 05

  It is, it is. So there are some studies done in San Diego and then some more studies done in Russia that of sleep in the naked mole rat. And they seem to sleep so much more than the rest of us. And the naked mole rat, unlike other rats which live about two years, the naked mole rat can live 35 years. And when they die, it's usually from accidents or injuries or something like that. So why do they live so much longer? Well, they have this superior ability to repair their double-stranded breaks in DNA. And their REM sleep is about 50% of their sleep, which as for us, it's about 25% on a

• 39:47Speaker 05

  good day. For rats and mice, it's more like 12, 15%, but with naked mole rats, it's 50%. And that's as much REM sleep as we get as babies.

• 39:59Daniel Whiteson?

  Wow.

• 39:59Speaker 05

  So when we are, you know, learning so much from our environment and actually I want to give you another factoid, which is learning requires double stranded breaks in our DNA. So every time we learn, we're breaking our DNA in order to do that.

• 40:16Kelly Weinersmith?

  What?

• 40:17Speaker 05

  Yes, I know.

• 40:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  Why? I've never heard that before.

• 40:20Speaker 05

  Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why. But sleep helps repair, repair that. And so, so what are naked mole rats doing? They're, babies are learning, of course, a ton, right? And there's, they have about 50% REM when they're born. So why are naked mole rats having so much REM all through their lives? Are they learning a lot? You know, there doesn't seem to be any evidence that they're so much smarter than anybody else.

• 40:49Daniel Whiteson?

  They're writing the great American novel, of course.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  Maybe writing the great American novel, but the only they can read.

• 40:55Daniel Whiteson?

  So you have a lot of questions about sleep and all these creatures and in humans. Tell us a little bit about how we've learned these things. Like what experiments have you done? How do we know these things?

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 41:06Daniel Whiteson?

  Other than torturing jellyfish?

• 41:08Speaker 05

  Right. Watching, right? Watching, just anybody can be a scientist, as you know. You just need to, you need to observe the world around you, ask questions and try and answer them by perturbing that, that universe and seeing what happens. So we know home, sleep is homeostatically regulated, even in ourselves, because when we get less of it one night, we are sleepier the next day. Our drive to sleep is higher. But yes, there have been some key experiments throughout history. For example, the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep was probably not the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep, but rather the first report of rapid eye movement sleep that other

• 41:49Speaker 05

  People could read and that was an observation made by at the University of Chicago by a research scientist who was actually the trainee of another researcher who was studying sleep. Yes, had EEG electrodes on people's brains and this trainee said, hey, there seems to be this second state where eyes are moving and there's a bit of twitching and respiration changes and the principal investigator, the PI, didn't believe it. You know, like, yeah, it's just a little bit of wakefulness or something else. Sleep is just one thing and it's a we thought at that time it was a disconnect from the world and it was saving energy,

• 42:35Speaker 05

  which doesn't appear to be very true, actually. So this trainee hooked up the son of the PI and all night long and this was a young kid, I think 10 years old or younger, who has more REM sleep and is very thoroughly asleep. Kids, boy, it's hard to disturb them. It's hard to wake them up out of sleep. And, yeah, and so he showed the record to the PI, this is your son. Look at these states. And the PI said, wait a minute, and had his son sleep another night and watched him and, you know, tried to poke him awake during their REM sleep when he thought that must have been wakefulness.

• 43:18Speaker 05

  The son was quite, quite heavily asleep and, and realized, okay, there may be, you know, maybe there is something to this. Maybe there's a second state of sleep. So it's kind of, you know, observations like this, someone saying, hey, this is weird. This doesn't follow my hypothesis. This isn't what I thought would happen, you know, and then pursuing that thing that's weird

• 43:40Speaker 05

  to its end to see what the answers are.

• 43:42Daniel Whiteson?

  For humans, you're obviously limited in the experiments you can do. I want to ask you a weird question. Imagine that we're not limited.

• 43:49Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think that's the only kind of question you ask, Daniel.

• 43:52Daniel Whiteson?

  I know, but this one's gonna feel a little extra weird. Imagine you weren't limited by any ethical concerns and you only had scientific questions. What experiments would you do to learn more about sleep? You know, slicing brains open, torturing people, sticking things inside them? I don't know. What would you do just from a scientific point of view to learn about sleep? What experiments do you wish you could do?

• 44:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, if it weren't for the dangers involved, I would put electrodes in my own brain, a ton of them. I would put a thousand of them in my own brain. Because one of the things that we have discovered from people with electrodes in their brain, and they put electrodes in their brain because they want to find out where epilepsy is starting, so that they can go in and just take out that little section of brain, which is generating epilepsy all over the brain. So when we have looked at 12 of those people who had electrodes already implanted in their brain, and we find that in fact, sleep isn't a whole brain phenomenon. One third of the time, for example, your hippocampus, which is involved in recording

• 44:57Speaker 05

  memories in the first place, and then consolidating those memories to other parts of the brain, your hippocampus can be in an entirely different sleep state than the cortex is. And it's about a third of the night that it's in an entirely different state. So for example, your hippocampus can go into rapid eye movement sleep faster and better and longer than the cortex does. It can go to sleep, actually, the first place, sooner than the rest of the cortex does. So you could be in bed, reading a book, and about two minutes on average before you actually fall asleep and the book hits your face, or whatever it is, your hippocampus is already asleep. It's not going to remember that last

• 45:38Speaker 05

  page that you read. You can also tell when you're falling asleep, you have to reread the same patches again and again. What was that? I don't know, you know, ugh, what was that? And that's called sleep onset amnesia. And we found in people that your hippocampus can be asleep for 20 whole minutes before the rest of your brain is asleep. So don't have a critical conversation with your bed partner while they're trying to fall asleep, because it's possible they will not remember the conversation the next day at all.

• 46:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Oh my gosh, you have disinserted yourself in my marriage. I have a no important conversation after 10pm rule.

• 46:17Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 46:18Daniel Whiteson?

  Which is controversial in my marriage.

• 46:19Kelly Weinersmith?

  That seems reasonable. I'm almost always asleep by 10pm, so Zach would not make much progress anyway.

• 46:27Daniel Whiteson?

  But now I have a scientific foundation for winning this argument. So, thank you, Gina.

• 46:32Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 46:35Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right, let's, let's hope we helped some other marriages as well. And when we come back, we will talk about dreams.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by breakout singer-songwriter Alex Warren.

• 47:11Daniel Whiteson?

  To this day, Ordinary would not have done anything, and I would have not been able to put it out if Book Talk didn't back it up, and if my wife and her friend didn't back it up. So, pretty crazy how like, just one thing.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:22Daniel Whiteson?

  I mean, you, I bet you, we could point to nine different things in our careers where it's just one thing, all of a sudden, if that one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here.

• 47:29Speaker 01

  What you're talking about right now is what I've been talking about since the beginning of my career. There's these things outside of you that make everything happen. These other forces somehow came into contact with each other and helped propel you to this place.

• 47:47Daniel Whiteson?

  It's just insane.

• 47:48Speaker 01

  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeartRadio app, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 47:57Speaker 07

  This is Hoda Kotb from Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb. Have you started your holiday shopping yet? This time of year always feels like the list just keeps growing. Gifts for family, gifts for friends, stocking stuffers, plus all the everyday things you still have to buy, like groceries and gas. That's why being a little strategic about the spending on gifts and those everyday needs is key. With the Chase Freedom Flex car, you can be a little savvier. Finding the right gift feels good, and maximizing cash back feels even better. Freedom Flex offers plenty of ways to earn more. You get 5% cash back on popular rotating quarterly categories, 3% on dining and drugstores, and 1% on all other purchases.

• 48:40Speaker 07

  So while you're checking names off your holiday list, those gifts can be a treat for you. This holiday season, let Freedom Flex reward you. More ways to earn, more ways to get rewarded. So sign up for the Chase Freedom Flex card. Learn more at chase.com/getflex. This is a paid collaboration with Chase Freedom Flex. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Subject to credit approval. Offer subject to change. Terms apply.

• 49:20Kelly Weinersmith?

  Okay, we're back and we are finally going to answer our listeners' questions about dreams. So Gina, when do we dream and why do we dream? Tell us about dreams.

• 49:31Speaker 05

  That's a great question and we can only study dreams in people because we can only ask people about their dreams. It's a hard one because you can only ask people about their dreams when they're awake. So it's kind of a retrospective study rather than a live study. However, we do dream most when we're in rapid eye movement sleep, when our bodies are actively inhibited from acting out those dreams. So that's a good thing.

• 49:58Daniel Whiteson?

  But how do you know that if you can only ask people about their dreams later?

• 50:01Speaker 05

  Yeah, you just wake them up out of different stages of sleep. And when you wake them up out of REM sleep, they're most likely to report having had a dream and the dream is most likely to be the most bizarre and lengthy. So if you wake them up out of stage two sleep, which is not the deep slow wave unconscious state, but rather the first state you go into when you're asleep and then the state that you go into right before REM sleep. So it's called a transition to REM. There are more dreams, but they're usually very, very brief. Also bizarre, but they're not long stories usually. They're just short little snippets. So when we wake people up out of deep slow sleep, which is hard to do because there's a lot of sleep inertia

• 50:46Speaker 05

  and you ask someone what they were dreaming, they'll say, I have no idea. I wasn't dreaming anything. Let me go back to sleep. You know, grunt and turnover, right?

• 50:56Speaker 05

  It doesn't mean that definitively people aren't dreaming of slow asleep. It might just be that they're not remembering it when we wake them up.

• 51:03Daniel Whiteson?

  But do you have any way to know their reactions over their stories or their retelling of their dreams correlate at all to their real dreams?

• 51:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, so there is some evidence, but it's controversial or it has been controversial because there was this idea of activation synthesis. So that in fact, you just have little blips of randomness when you're in REM sleep. And then when you're awake, because we don't like little blips of randomness, we sew them into a story. And that dream isn't actually a story, but we've sewn them into a story. And there's some, a little bit of evidence for that. For example, if you have an alarm waking you up, you will have a dream that can incorporate that alarm. Not everybody does, but you can have a dream that incorporates that alarm that starts before the alarm started ringing.

• 51:53Speaker 05

  Like, for example, in your dream, your alarm is a ticking bomb and you have to defuse it. But in your dream, you're coming up upon the bomb and then you, then you start hearing the ticking. And so is it that you've retroactively dreamt about the silence before the alarm starts ringing? In order to make this a story? Or is it that, you know, we don't know the answer to that. But interestingly, because we can put electrodes in the brains of rats. Actually, I want to tell you that it doesn't hurt to have an electrode in your brain. With these people with electrodes in their brain for epilepsy will not report any, having any pain.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  We actually strangely don't have sensory structures in our brain to, to sense what's there. So rats with electrodes in the brain will not know that they've got electrodes in their brain and they will sleep wonderfully. They will sleep beautifully. And you can see, because you can control what happens to a rat during the days, you know, a rat's exploring a maze during the day and they're finding food in your maze. They will re-dream about that maze. They will reactivate the same neurons that are active in a particular order during the day will reactivate in that order during their dream state of rapid eye movement sleep.

• 53:15Speaker 05

  And you'd say, why would they dream about the same thing that they were doing during the day? Well, they have a pretty boring life, except for that exciting maze running time. And so they're much more likely to activate that particular dream. But there are a lot of times in REM sleep where they're not activating that maze. And so what are they dreaming about? We don't know. We'd have to record every minute of their lives in order to see what they're reactivating, what they're dreaming about. But we do know that they do reactivate the maze. And interestingly, they can reactivate the maze in the same order in which they ran it during the day. But they can also do bizarre things that they can't do during the day, like leap from one side to the other maze to the next, like we can in our dreams. We can change scenes, right?

• 53:58Speaker 05

  We can, you know, suddenly we're in a boat, you know, versus before we were in a house. So and rats can do the same thing. So we can't ask them about their dreams, but we can see their brain activity, reactivating this reality that they were in the day before. Also, we have this tiny little brainstem area that inhibits our muscles when we're dreaming, so that we don't act them out. When that tiny area of the brainstem degenerates, we act out our dreams. That's called REM behavior disorder. And people with that have to actually tie themselves down while they sleep. So they don't, you know, hurt themselves because you're completely insensitive to the world around you. You're totally in your dream world.

• 54:40Speaker 05

  And you could, you know, fall downstairs or walk through a plate glass window or beat your bed partner because you're dreaming about, you know, an alligator over the side of your canoe. So you can also lesion that tiny little area of the brainstem in a rat and see the rat act out their dreams as well. So they will be, you know, cowering as though they're dreaming they're being predated upon. There's somebody spraying on them. They can fight. They can walk around. They can, you know, phantom eat. If it's, I've seen the cats do it. They can, you know, swat at imaginary butterflies and and also pounce on imaginary prey. So.

• 55:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is some evidence that all animals seem to dream, including cephalopods, which have this flashing of their camouflage while they're in that state.

• 55:36Kelly Weinersmith?

  So we think that's a dream where their body is physically responding as opposed to that's just, okay, huh?

• 55:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. So what, what is the origin of dreams? We don't know. But there is another part of the brainstem that only is active during REM sleep, so during the dream state. And it's filled with big excitatory neurons that project all over the brain. And it starts firing when we are in that N2 stage of sleep, which is the state when if you wake someone up, they'll report little short dreams, but not long ones. And then it fires like crazy when we're in REM sleep. And it might be the origin of the internal origin of dreams. It's right beneath an area of the brain, uh, brainstem called the locus coeruleus, which gets all sensory information from the outside

• 56:29Speaker 05

  world. And that is actively inhibited when we are in REM sleep. But the just beneath that is this area that comes on and comes alive when we're in dream state. So it might be the way we feel things and hear things and start speaking and all of that, because this coeruleus area, it's called subcoeruleus, projects all over our cortex. And we don't know, because we haven't been able to control which areas are active and which are not active in the subcoeruleus to try and control and formulate a dream, like an inception of a dream. We can't do that yet, but, um, but maybe someday we will be able to do that.

• 57:10Kelly Weinersmith?

  Wow. So there are a lot of people who are interested in interpreting dreams and trying to decide like what, what they mean. Is there any hidden meanings in dreams? Or is it, what, what's, what's the science there?

• 57:23Speaker 05

  Again, that's really difficult, because again, you can only study it in waking people. But there is a reactivation of memories.

• 57:32Speaker 05

  And if you deprive someone, a person, of REM sleep, you will get a much more pedantic mindset. You can't deprive people of REM sleep for very long. That's, again, independently regulated. And if given any nap opportunity, normally REM sleep comes after about ninety minutes or eighty minutes of sleep. It's, it follows slow wave sleep because your brain needs to be in the perfect state, temperature-wise, et cetera, in order to go into this dream state of sleep. But if you deprive someone of particularly that dream state of sleep, they will go into REM sleep earlier and earlier because, and get more, they'll get more, more of it. And in fact, just at sleep onset, they can go into REM sleep. There does seem to be, you know, a lot of anecdotal evidence

• 58:16Speaker 05

  that, that dreams do relate to things that we're experiencing. And for some people, more than others. A lot of people don't remember their dreams at all. So they're not the ones to study for this. But those who can remember their dreams, sometimes it, it, in fact, dreams do seem to relate to the things that you've learned during the day or the week before, the month before. And the bizarreness of dreams seems to allow us to put things together. So we wake up with an aha moment. Not always, but sometimes with an aha moment where we've put things together that we couldn't, you know, our conscious brain just couldn't let us put together. So the study of dreams and creativity

• 59:00Speaker 05

  does show that people, for example, doing a, a task that requires a creative insight in order to do it quickly, about a third of the people doing this task get the creative insight while they're awake and doing the task in the first place. Two-thirds of people don't see the hidden rule that allows them to take this shortcut. And of those, half of them, through sleep, wake up and then can do the creative leap. And then a one-third seem to never get it. So unfortunately. And those that... Make that creative leap seem to have a lot more activity in this area of the brain that causes sleep spindles, which is related to these

• 59:44Speaker 05

  subceralis area, which causes these this activation, this random activation during dreams.

• 59:50Daniel Whiteson?

  Are you saying that people have this idea, solve a problem while they're asleep? And then they wake up and they have the solution?

• 59:55Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:56Daniel Whiteson?

  Or that the sleep is somehow prepare their brain to be able to solve this problem?

• 1:00:00Speaker 05

  It seems like they wake up with the solution. So that the first time that they're doing it, you know, they've, they've got it.

• 1:00:07Daniel Whiteson?

  So it is possible to dream up the great American novel?

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  Yes, I think so.

• 1:00:12Daniel Whiteson?

  All right.

• 1:00:12Speaker 05

  There is one famous songwriter who said that when he wakes up, if he doesn't write down the song that he was dreaming about, God will give it to Bob Dylan.

• 1:00:27Kelly Weinersmith?

  That's excellent.

• 1:00:28Daniel Whiteson?

  So what do we know about the cultural dependence of sleep and dreams? Do people sleep the same way around the world? Do they dream the same way? Do we have the same relationship with dreams around the world?

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  There are cultures that have strong beliefs that these insights that come through dreams come from ancestors that are you go to visit your ancestors in your dreams and they give you wisdom. Again, there's, you know, no scientific evidence, but there are, you know, cultural norms surrounding dreams that are different in different cultures. There's also cultural norms surrounding sleep in general that differ between different cultures. Some cultures don't value sleep at all. It's for the lazy, they believe. And there's nothing good happening, except just turning off your brain and resting. And if you're tough, you can do without it. Other cultures have a much more

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  an open or receptive view of sleep. And sleep is something they welcome each night. And, you know, with open arms, because that's a time when, you know, lots of things happen, like consulting with your ancestors or whatever it is.

• 1:01:40Speaker 05

  There's a really cool study in South America by a researcher who's actually at University of Washington in Seattle. He put sleep trackers on people in a village without any electricity in South America, in the Amazon, and another set of sleep trackers on people with bare minimum electricity, like a single light bulb in the ceiling, and then on people living in the city. And he found that all of these cultures, no matter where they were living, sleep less during the full moon or the new moon. So he was tracking them for a full month. And there's a statistical significant difference where people sleep less, either the full

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  moon or the new moon. And so you think it's not light because the new moon, there's no, you know, there's no moon, and the only light you see is the stars when you're out in the Amazon, if that at all. So it can't be light disturbance. And in fact, the people in the city also, these are college students, they typically spend very little time looking at the moon or thinking about the moon. So it's, it seems to be, the only explanation that they could come up with in this paper is that the gravitational pull is stronger on the Earth during both a new moon and a full moon. And so maybe there's something have to do with gravity and, and sleepiness.

• 1:03:08Daniel Whiteson?

  Maybe that explains why we sleep worse at high altitudes? I always thought that was the oxygen.

• 1:03:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, the oxygen definitely does disturb our sleep. Yeah. Yeah, I don't know.

• 1:03:18Daniel Whiteson?

  What about people who have different sensations of the world? Do dreams play a different role in folks who like have always been blind?

• 1:03:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:03:27Daniel Whiteson?

  Or always been deaf? Can people see in their dreams if they're blind?

• 1:03:29Speaker 05

  No, they do if they're not blind from birth. But if they're blind from birth, no, it's different sensations that are, that are activated in dreams.

• 1:03:38Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel, do you want to ask your alien question?

• 1:03:41Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 1:03:42Daniel Whiteson?

  Right, so we've asked you about whether sleep is something that's common across Earth creatures. How common do you think it is across the universe? When aliens come and visit, are they going to need to take naps in between our conversations? Or do you think this is something that happens only on Earth?

• 1:03:58Speaker 05

  Well, it does happen on Earth, but whether an alien's sleep is a good question. Depends on what, um, whether aliens need to repair double-stranded DNA. Do they have double-stranded DNA? It depends on whether they, their energy stores, uh, works the same way. That's a great question because there are people who would like to do away with sleep altogether. Um, they think, the few ones who think it's a waste of time or who would like sleepiness to not affect people's performance, for example. But we have not found anything on Earth, at least, that can replace sleep itself. And in fact, without sleep, eventually we die and that eventually is about as long as we take to die without any food. So it's as essential as food for us.

• 1:04:44Speaker 05

  So yeah, it's quite possible that there are aliens who don't need sleep, um, that have different, work differently.

• 1:04:52Daniel Whiteson?

  Well, when the aliens do arrive, I think I hope that they're invertebrates so that you can do all sorts of terrible experiments on them. Understand.

• 1:04:59Speaker 05

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 1:05:01Kelly Weinersmith?

  I think, I think they're coming up with new rules for working on like octopus, uh, as well because they think they're particularly intelligent. And, uh, yeah, it's a little more complicated.

• 1:05:11Speaker 05

  There are already rules for octopus. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:05:15Kelly Weinersmith?

  All right. Well, thank you so much for chatting with us about sleep and dreams. This has been fascinating and, uh, let's go ahead and hear if our listener had her questions answered.

• 1:05:24Speaker 04

  Thanks for doing your podcast on this. It was really interesting. Dr. Poe was really interesting. I've never knew that people believe they talk to their ancestors in their dreams. I found that fascinating. Thanks for everything you do and I look forward to hearing all your future podcasts. Bye-bye.

• 1:05:47Kelly Weinersmith?

  Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you.

• 1:05:52Daniel Whiteson?

  We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe.

• 1:05:58Kelly Weinersmith?

  We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you.

• 1:06:05Daniel Whiteson?

  We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at [email protected].

• 1:06:12Kelly Weinersmith?

  Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky. And on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe.

• 1:06:21Daniel Whiteson?

  Don't be shy. Write to us.

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