#654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More

Brought to you by Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim sleeping solution for dynamic cooling and heating, Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim delicious low-carb cereal, and LinkedIn Marketing Solutions http://linkedin.com/tfs marketing platform with 800M+ users. Matthew Walker, PhD (@sleepdiplomat https://twitter.com/sleepdiplomat), is professor of neuroscience at the University of California Berkeley and founder and director of the school’s Center for Human Sleep Science http://www.humansleepscience.com/. Dr. Walker is the author of the New York Times and international bestseller Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams-ebook/dp/B06ZZ1YGJ5/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20, which was recently listed by Bill Gates as one of his top five books of the year. His TED Talk, “Sleep is Your Superpower https://www.ted.com/talks/matt_walker_sleep_is_your_superpower,” has garnered more than 17 million views. He has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and is a Kavli Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2020, Dr. Walker was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Achievements. Dr. Walker’s research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets including 60 Minutes, Nat Geo TV, NOVA Science, NPR, and the BBC. Dr. Walker is also scientific advisor to Oura https://ouraring.com/, a sleep-tracking ring. Dr. Walker hosts the 5-star-rated podcast The Matt Walker Podcast https://www.sleepdiplomat.com/podcast, which is all about sleep, the brain, and the body. And one last thing. UC Berkeley has given the rare approval for Matt’s newly opened Sleep Center at the University to be named by an individual donor, or a named company, in perpetuity. If you are interested, please reach out to Matt and note that this opportunity is in the 7-figure range. Please enjoy! * This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions https://linkedin.com/TFS, the go-to tool for B2B marketers and advertisers https://linkedin.com/TFS who want to drive brand awareness, generate leads, or build long-term relationships that result in real business impact. With a community of more than 800 million professionals, LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/TFS is gigantic, but it can be hyper-specific. You have access to a diverse group of people all searching for things they need to grow professionally. LinkedIn https://linkedin.com/TFS has the marketing tools to help you target your customers with precision, right down to job title, company name, industry, etc. To redeem your free $100 LinkedIn ad credit and launch your first campaign, go to LinkedIn.com/TFS https://linkedin.com/TFS! * This episode is also brought to you by Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim cereal! Magic Spoon https://magicspoon.com/tim is a low-carb, high-protein, and zero sugar cereal that tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal. Each serving has 13–14g of protein, 4g of net carbs, and 0g of sugar. It’s also gluten free, grain free, soy free, and keto friendly. And it’s delicious! It comes in your favorite, traditional cereal flavors like Cocoa, Frosted, Peanut Butter, and Blueberry. Magic Spoon https://magicspoon.com/tim cereal has received a lot of attention since their launch. Time magazine included it in their list of Best Inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it “the future of cereal.” My listeners—that’s you—get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you visit MagicSpoon.com/Tim https://magicspoon.com/tim and use code TIM. And some great news for Canadian listeners: Magic Spoon http://magicspoon.com/tim now also ships to Canada! * This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep http://eightsleep.com/Tim! Eight Sleep’s Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim is the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature. It pairs dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced (and user-friendly) solution on the market. Simply add the Pod Cover http://eightsleep.com/Tim to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55°F or as hot as 110°F. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. Go to EightSleep.com/Tim http://eightsleep.com/Tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. Eight Sleep currently ships within the USA, Canada, the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. * [05:43] Sleep and sex. [23:45] Melatonin misgivings. [32:47] The suprachiasmatic nucleus. [36:08] Shrinking balls phenomenon. [41:47] Minimizing the time it takes you to sleep. [49:40] The bizarre basics of dreaming. [55:56] Taking a leap into lucid dreaming. [1:19:57] Optimizing sleep for learning. [1:43:14] Can sleep during an illness boost memory retention? [1:49:08] Massed versus spaced practice. [1:53:00] Using brain stimulation technology to enhance learning. [1:56:50] Optimizing memory replay. [2:02:47] Sleep and time dilation. [2:11:25] Today's "charlatan" science that may someday be vindicated. [2:17:44] Exercise and memory. [2:25:37] Staying hydrated without having to urinate all night. [2:29:13] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors http://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees.

• 0:41Tim Ferriss?

  I think generally in my experience, my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada and the UK, select countries in the EU and Australia.

• 1:22Tim Ferriss?

  Again, that's eightsleep.com/tim to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.

• 1:31Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low-carb, high-protein and zero-sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. And it's so easy to prepare, it's instantaneous practically, and you get a lot of goodness. You get a lot of bang for the buck. Time Magazine included Magic Spoon in their list of best inventions of 2019, and Forbes called it "the future of cereal." It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood, remember those? But it's actually good for you. Each serving has 13 to 14 grams of protein, 4 grams of net carbs and 0 grams of sugar. It's also gluten-free, grain-free. Soy free and keto friendly. It's delicious. And I don't say that lightly because most healthy

• 2:14Tim Ferriss?

  versions of unhealthy foods are not delicious, but these guys really nailed it. And I know they did a ton of testing because I know the founders. Magic Spoon comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted, and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at magic spoon.com slash Tim. I'm going to order some more cocoa today, in fact, because I need more. And another fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with Magic Spoon. One of this podcast's most popular guests, Dr. Peter Attia routinely crushes six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot, by the way, with practically no glycemic response. That's blood sugar response. And he's checked this with a glucometer. He likes it so much that he invested and two other friends, very fine gentlemen, also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan

• 2:58Tim Ferriss?

  Holiday also invested. So check them out. Go to magic spoon.com slash Tim and grab a variety pack or my favorite cocoa or anything else. My friends love this stuff. Their kids love this cereal. So whatever strikes your fancy, but you should check it out. My listeners, that's you, get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you use code TIM, T I M, at checkout. So if you don't love it, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. One more time, that's magic spoon.com slash Tim.

• 3:27Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I answer your personal question?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Now would be an inappropriate time.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 3:50Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show. I'll keep my preamble short. My guest today is a fan favorite, Matthew Walker, PhD.

• 4:03Tim Ferriss?

  Dr. Walker is Professor of Neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley and founder and director of the school's Center for Human Sleep Science. Walker is the author of The New York Times and international bestseller, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which I highly recommend. This is a book that has greatly impacted me. It was recently listed by Bill Gates as one of his top five books of the year. His TED Talk, Sleep Is Your Superpower, has garnered more than 17 million views. He has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health and is a Cavali Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. In 2020, he was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Achievements.

• 4:47Tim Ferriss?

  His research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. Walker has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOAA Science, NPR, the BBC, and The Tim Ferriss Show. He is also the host of the five-star rated podcast, The Matt Walker Podcast, which is all about sleep, the brain, and the body. And one last thing, very important, this might apply to you. UC Berkeley has given the rare approval for Matt's newly opened sleep center at the university to be named by an individual donor or a named company in perpetuity. If you are interested, please reach out to Matt and note that this opportunity is in the seven-figure range.

• 5:30Tim Ferriss?

  Now, without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with the man, the myth, the legend, Matt Walker, PhD.

• 5:43Tim Ferriss?

  Sleep and sex. Let's dive into this wide and exciting topic. Where should we begin in a discussion of sleep and sex?

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Maybe we could start with how sleep impacts sex and begin with actually the literal idea of separating those bedfellows and to the question of should you have a sleep divorce as a couple to prevent a real one? And a sleep divorce is sleeping separately? That's right, that's right, yeah. So a sleep divorce is where you will sleep either in separate locations or at least in separate beds. The diluted version of the sleep divorce, rather than sleeping in separate rooms and separate beds, is called the Scandinavian method, which you think is sounds so much more salacious than it actually is, which is essentially you've just got two separate beds that you put side by side and that's

• 6:36Speaker 03

  the diet version of a sleep divorce. But I do think that sleep divorce idea is important because it is a taboo and it also can markedly improve things for people. So when we've looked at survey data, both in the US and also in the UK with the National Sleep Council, what you find is that about one out of every four couples who are surveyed will tell you that they have had a sleep divorce, that they will sleep in separate beds. And we think that that may be in part an underestimate because of the stigma associated with it. And if you survey people anonymously, you get to a number of almost one out of every

• 7:15Speaker 03

  three people will admit to waking up at least in different locations. And there is pretty good evidence from the science as to why that number may make sense, why 25% of all couples suggest that. When we study couples who are sleeping together objectively on almost every measure that we can quantify about sleep, sleep is worse when you're sleeping as a couple relative to when you're sleeping separately. The twist in the tale there, though, is that when you ask people about their satisfaction of sleep, there is definitely some group of individuals that say, look, I feel more satisfied with my sleep when I'm sleeping with my partner than when I'm sleeping separately, despite the fact that

• 7:59Speaker 03

  objectively their sleep is worse. So I'm not suggesting it's a one size fits all, but I think the taboo comes from the idea that, well, if you're not sleeping together, then you're not sleeping together.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  And the exact opposite is true. That's British for having intercourse. Thank you very much. Yeah. Can we just get over this? It's my desperately unfortunate Hugh Grant genes that has me sort of trying to navigate around the topic rather than just like saying it straight. So thank you, Tim. Yes. If you're not sleeping together, then you're not having sex. You're not having intercourse. Yes. The, oh, come on, Matthew. Hold it together. But it turns out that the opposite is true, that when you get a couple who are sleeping well, their sex life actually improves. And it's probably for three reasons that we've uncovered.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  The first is hormones. The second is sensitivity. And the third is libido. And I'll try to park my Hugh Grant and get right into it. In terms of the hormones. Take off the gloves, Matt. Take off the gloves. It's time. I'm wondering what you're, what you mean by saying, take off the glove in terms of this conversation, but let me just skip it. You see, you opened the door, Tim, and I walked right through. Here we go. Or put on the gloves if you prefer. Yeah, I think probably best. But we know each other quite well now. So maybe, anyway, I think so. In terms of the, the hormones, firstly, we know that testosterone, gosh, it takes a pretty sharp nosedive in males and in females when you're not sleeping well. Males

• 9:37Speaker 03

  who, if we put them on a diet of maybe four or five hours of sleep, they drop their levels of testosterone somewhere by about 10 years of aging. So a lack of sleep will age a man by a decade in terms of virility. It's also true of estrogen in women. And so when those two sex hormones are not in play, you get a reduction in the quality of the sex life. The second component, and this is data that we've only really got in females, less so in males, but the sensitivity of female genitalia increases when sleep is in high volume versus when people are not getting sufficient sleep. And we think that's due

• 10:19Speaker 03

  to the estrogen, that when estrogen is in normative amounts, because you're sleeping well, there is greater vaginal lubrication, which therefore leads to greater sensitivity and greater pleasure by way of sex.

• 10:33Speaker 03

  And then the final aspect is libido. We've also found that when a woman obtains an extra one hour of sleep, there is a 14% increase in her desirability to be intimate, to have sex with her partner. And I find that interesting because if you put it in context, the FDA approved drugs for increased libido in women, things like, I think it's called Vilese is one of them I know, that will increase libido in women by about 24%. But here is the simple addition of one hour of extra sleep. You can get more than 50% of that benefit drug free.

• 11:12Tim Ferriss?

  Question for you, Matt. How are these drug companies measuring increases in libido? Is it a self-reported one to 10 scale? Or something like that, which can be very fungible.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  It is, it's self-reported. So many of those scales are subject, you know, it's very much like pain that it's, when it comes to libido, it's somewhat difficult to quantify. And of course, it's not just about innate biological libido. The conditions have to be right. You have to have the relationship with your partner, which actually also reminds me, by the way, when couples are not sleeping well, this is a study from UC Berkeley, not from my lab, but what they found is that they have more fights. They don't resolve conflict nearly as well between them when they're having a fight. And the reason is because you lose empathy. When you're not sleeping well, your ability to empathize with other individuals, and we now have demonstrated why in terms of the brain networks, you decrease that capacity for understanding the other.

• 12:08Speaker 03

  And no wonder you're fighting and you're fighting in a pretty poor way.

• 12:13Tim Ferriss?

  What's the playbook? What's the best practices?

• 12:17Speaker 03

  I'm not suggesting that a sleep divorce is for everyone by any means whatsoever. There are some people for whom they adore sleeping with their partner for lots of reasons, safety, security, intimacy. But I think if you are interested in it, take a graded approach. And I would suggest firstly, just having an open, gentle conversation and don't be defensive about it. The second is.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  Don't suggest that it's permanent. Offer the idea that, look, could we do this? You know, darling, could we do this for the next week or the next two weeks? And I'm not suggesting it's forever. Let's just see and let's just try it on for size. Then I think what people misunderstand about sleeping together in the same bed is what they miss. They don't really miss the majority of time because for the majority of time you're asleep and you're non-conscious. What you really miss are the bookends of sleep. That sort of getting into bed, having a cuddle, saying a good night. And in the morning, waking up and doing the same thing. So if you have a sleep divorce, what you can also do is build that in. So, you know, whoever goes to bed first, the other person comes in.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  You have your time, you sort of cuddle, do whatever you need to do. And then you leave and then you repeat the same process in the morning. You don't have to do that every day, of course. It's not going to be practical. But in that way, you sort of get the benefits of sleeping together whilst still having a sleep divorce, if that makes some sense. So I would just say, you know, be honest with yourself.

• 13:47Tim Ferriss?

  I feel like sleep divorce needs a rebrand. Maybe furniture polyamory, since you'd be on separate pieces of furniture. Sounds really risque, taboo, kind of sexy.

• 13:58Speaker 03

  I am so stealing that because yeah, when you bring that up at, you know, a dinner conversation and you finally admit it to your friends, they all think, oh no, they're on the rocks, you know? But furniture polyamory, all sorts of swings from the ceiling and.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, sounds very exciting.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Candlework's on the nipples, let's go.

• 14:16Tim Ferriss?

  They're killing it.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. Honey, we've got to, we've got to switch things up if they're doing that.

• 14:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a question that has always been unanswered for me. I have some theories, but why is it? And this is my assumption, just based on broad strokes, having had conversations with many people about this and observed this also online. Seems that men tend to run hot. And women tend to run cooler in the sense that men will often want the temperature in the room to be lower, the sheets or the bedding to be thinner. I mean, this is part of the reason why I use devices like Eight Sleeps, not the only thing out there. They do sponsor the podcast, but I use them before that so that you can have zones of temperature. Is that, and I don't know if this is something you've looked into, but

• 15:01Tim Ferriss?

  is that mostly attributable to muscle mass and thermogenesis? Is it hormonal? How do you explain that?

• 15:09Speaker 03

  Muscle mass thermogenesis, it's also regarding, and thermogenesis really comes on to metabolic rate. And then it's also hormonal based on testosterone, which is in part a thermogenic hormone in and of itself. That temperature difference, we can measure and we can see it. Actually, studies were done before we were looking at this, not related to sleep, but just related to core body temperature. And they demonstrated that. There are some age dependencies to it, though, that once you get past about 50 or 60, the differences between men and women start to collapse and they start to become much more similar to each other than they are different. Why is that? It could

• 15:50Speaker 03

  be in part because of the reduction in testosterone that happens, also because of the muscle mass degradation that occurs in males as well. But that evidence of males in general running hot is well demonstrated and it does bleed over into the night and cause those often sleep problems. That's some of the reason that some people will get fussy about sleeping together. A lot of it is about movement. It's about also snoring is a big concern with desiring a sleep divorce, or it's a motivating factor, I should say.

• 16:23Tim Ferriss?

  So we've talked about one direction. We've talked about how sleep affects sex. What about the other direction? Is sex helpful, deleterious to sleep quality? What are the factors? If someone's trying to give themselves the optimal dose of sex to improve sleep, if there is such a thing?

• 16:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And one should never state that that's the reason, you know, you say, you know, darling, is it? We just venture into the bedroom. Of course, well, it's because I've had really rough sleep the past couple of nights. And could you just like, please knock me out? Oh, yeah, that's a crowd place. Yeah, isn't it? Isn't it just there's a real divorce rather than a sleep one. But I think the evidence is actually favorable that when we survey couples, what we find is that sleep, although there's a caveat here, sex, as long as it's associated with orgasm, and I'm not pointing to any one of the two sexes, maybe males, but please keep, keep this in mind, that sex, as long as it accomplishes orgasm, is associated with about 70% increase in reported sleep quality

• 17:28Speaker 03

  that following night, and people do fall asleep faster as a consequence. And we're learning about the mechanisms, but I would say that it's probably quite depressing to hear that news. If you're, let's say you're single or you don't have a partner or your partner is away for a while, you don't have to worry too much because it turns out that masturbation is a reasonable stand in. And what we've also discovered is that masturbation, again, as long as it's associated with orgasm, produces a 47% increase in your sleep quality. Actually, it will decrease the speed with which you fall asleep by about 50%. And you'll hear this a lot. Some people will say they use it as a method when they're struggling with sleep.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  They will actually masturbate to try to, to help their sleep. So masturbation is not as impactful as intercourse based on the data, but it's a sizable benefit that rests in your hands, I guess, but it's a non trivial benefit. And, you know, I think you can, it's a playful topic, of course, and we joke, but I do find it interesting regarding the biology. And we've tried to scratch the surface here and dig down. Firstly, what we found is that the benefit of sex with orgasm on sleep is hormonally related. But now it seems to be that when. Women engage in intercourse that results in orgasm. There is an increase in a hormone called oxytocin,

• 18:57Speaker 03

  which I'm sure many people have heard of. Now, to a lesser degree, that there is also an increase in men. But firstly, we know that oxytocin is a sleep inducing molecule, and you can inject this into the brains of different animals. We don't do animal work, we do human work. But you can see that sleep induction benefit. The benefit in men seems to actually be about a different chemical called vasopressin. And although that story is just starting to emerge, it seems to be those two hormones, oxytocin more so for females, vasopressin for males.

• 19:28Tim Ferriss?

  So vasopressin, that's interesting to me because vasopressin is, as I understand, an antidiuretic hormone, sometimes given to adolescent bed wetters. Also, well, when it's prescribed as desmopressin, I suppose, this is maybe a topic for another time, but seems to have an impact on short term memory, which is quite interesting to me. But how does vasopressin help sleep? Maybe it just keeps you asleep longer because you're not inclined to get up and go to the bathroom. I don't know. I mean, that's one of the reasons why it's prescribed as desmopressin as well.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  It's possible, but it seems to have a sleep inducing mechanism. And we don't truly understand why, but we think that it's perhaps working at two different levels of the brain. One is directly at the level of the brain stem itself, where you're starting to shut down the wake promoting regions. And I think we discussed that in the previous episode, things like histamine, noradrenaline, serotonin.

• 20:23Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  So one component is working at the level of the brain stem. The second is working at a much smaller structure, but more in the middle of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is actually where we have what's called the sleep wake switch. And it's literally like a flip flop device. And there is some signaling direction of vasopressin on that sleep switch within the hypothalamus itself too. But right now, I think it's pretty unclear as to exactly how those mechanisms unfold. But I do find them interesting because if we're looking for novel sleep aids, you know, all joking aside, then should we be thinking about combinations of oxytocin and vasopressin as novel sleep inducing capacity? I think the second part of those two.

• 21:10Speaker 03

  Chemicals, however, is also the other side of the coin, which is the nervous system itself, that when you are engaged in the act of sex, you're the fight or flight branch of the nervous system, what's called the sympathetic nervous system, which is not that at all. It's very agitating and aggravating. It actually should be called the three Fs branch. Now I think about it, which is the fight, the flight and the fornication branch of the nervous system.

• 21:38Tim Ferriss?

  You're honoring the degree, it's not been revoked.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  I was trying to come in there, but what's interesting is that you cannot fall asleep when your sympathetic nervous system is switched on. And I'm sure you've had the experience, I've had this too. You know that you're tired. You know that you are so sleepy and fatigued, but maybe it's because, you know, you've just done a big event on stage and you're just so wired. And it's called the wired but tied phenomenon, where you are desperately wanting sleep, but you can't. The reason is because your sympathetic branch is still switched on. But post-coyly, what happens is that you go back to the opposite side, which is the parasympathetic, which is this quiescent calming branch of the nervous system. And that is the royal road to better sleep. So it's almost as though the orgasm

• 22:26Speaker 03

  removes the block of the fight or flight branch of the nervous system and pushes you into that relaxed autonomic state. And so I think that's, you know, how do we work that with new sleep novel medications, sleep inducing novel medications too?

• 22:41Tim Ferriss?

  So a few things come to mind for me. Number one is, guys, this doesn't mean you have free license to open your extremely bright, blue light emitting laptop and watch a bunch of porn right before bed, because that may, that may stem some of the benefits. So you're going to have to use that imagination instead of God knows what arms race you're watching on Pornhub. Second. Is guys buy a Hitachi Magic Wand, get the wireless edition. You'll thank me later. That's for if you are in a heteronormative relationship. That's for your lady friend and she will thank you as well.

• 23:15Speaker 03

  I'm so wet behind the ears. I'm now, can we please link to in the show notes so that I at least can click on the.

• 23:22Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just gonna edit that so that you just say, I'm so wet and I take out behind the ears and see what people come back with. They'll be like, wow, that Matt Walker is really, he's really taken a side road we didn't expect.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, I knew that, you know, maybe he and Tim were friends, but that's the next level.

• 23:39Tim Ferriss?

  I'm taking this down.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  Where's that position in Austin for me at the university, quick to jump from UC Buckley? Anyway, sorry.

• 23:45Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about another, let's say aid outside of the Hitachi Magic Wand and Speedwank before bed, which I know I'm violating the roadmap that you and I discussed a bit. So I'm hopping ahead a little bit, but let's talk about it because it's on the mind. Melatonin, how would you suggest people think about melatonin?

• 24:07Speaker 03

  If you look out there in terms of the silverback 500 pound gorilla of the sleep supplement world, it is melatonin. It commands a multi-billion dollar segment of the market, which is utterly stunning to me. Melatonin is not really going to be your sleep friend. And for a number of reasons, I think people don't understand what melatonin does. Melatonin is a hormone. By the way, it's sometimes called the hormone of darkness or the vampire hormone, just because it comes out at night. It doesn't mean that you start like biting into people's necks, but it's simply that it signals nighttime to the brain. And what that does is it regulates the timing of your sleep, but it doesn't participate in the generation

• 24:52Speaker 03

  of sleep itself. And so you could think of melatonin like the starting official at 100 meter Olympic race, that melatonin brings all of the races to the line and begins the race, but it doesn't participate in the race itself. That's a whole different set of chemicals. So melatonin is potentially useful when you're traveling between different time zones. But once you're stable in a time zone, that evidence is very clear when we look across all of the studies and we gather them together in the same statistical bucket and it's called a meta-analysis approach. What you find is that melatonin will only increase the speed with which you fall asleep

• 25:34Speaker 03

  by 3.9 minutes, which is really not that different to placebo. And it only increases your sleep efficiency by just 2.2%, which is really not fantastic as a sleep aid. But it's understandable when you then go back to what we were just describing as the mechanism. Why would it improve the quality of your sleep if it's there to help the timing rather than the generation of sleep itself? Does that make some sense, Tim?

• 26:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it does. It does. And I think this is also a good place to talk about not just the minimal upside, because I would say there are people out there, and I've experienced this when, say, traveling internationally. It does, if you take a walloping dose, it can help put you down. So I would imagine the efficiency and the effect on reducing onset time is dose dependent on some level. So you can brute force it, and I have found it very helpful, say, going from one side of the planet to the other.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I will use it too in those circumstances. That's the only time.

• 26:38Tim Ferriss?

  But there are taxes that you may pay. And it makes me think about, I don't want to steal the mic here, but a conversation I had with someone, actually a very smart researcher, probably 10 years ago, and he mentioned in passing that he took eight milligrams or 10 milligrams of melatonin every night. And I remember talking to him and saying, I'm no scientist, but my guess is that if you take something that is produced in the body

• 27:10Tim Ferriss?

  or something that is very similar, so you could have luteinizing hormone and HCG, right, very comparable. And if you start exogenously, meaning from the outside in,

• 27:23Tim Ferriss?

  Providing your body with X, it is going to have a negative feedback loop and things are going to start to happen. So it doesn't strike me, just again, starting from those principles, that taking melatonin continuously eight milligrams a night would, over the long term, be a good idea. But that was sort of my stance. And I'd love to know, what are the downside possibilities?

• 27:46Speaker 03

  So you're absolutely right in your thinking. The body has a huge number of feedback loops. And when you start exogenously, meaning taking it from the outside and in, you can play with those feedback loops where you start to shut things down. And the concern with melatonin, even at five milligrams or even three, and certainly at 10, what we would classify that is as a supra-physiological dose, meaning that it's a dose of a concentration that is maybe 10 times anything that your body would naturally release. So it is a whopping dose in that regard. By the way, you've got no idea whether it's 10 milligrams or not. There was a study that looked at 30 different brands. And what they found is that based on what

• 28:31Speaker 03

  it said on the bottle versus what was actually inside of the capsules, it ranged from, I think it was about 83% less to 478% more than what was stated on the bottle. Because, at least in the US, it's not FDA approved. And just recently, maybe it was, gosh, three, four weeks ago, there was a report demonstrating that melatonin overdoses that have been reported to the US Poison Control Center, they've risen by 530% over the last 10 years. And what's especially concerning is were that bump is happening, it seems to be particularly in pediatric populations too. So, you know, we need to, yeah, exactly, keep that in mind.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  So just, but coming back to your question, that is far too high of a dose. And the concern is about shutting down the brain's feedback. That's one of the taxes that you could pay. Some people have pushed back on social media and the internet to suggest Firstly, and I think they're right, that melatonin overall in terms of its mortality risk profile is quite low. It seems to be a somewhat safe molecule in the sense of absolute death. But that's obviously a very extreme threshold for you to use. People then also cite a study where they said, if you dose for a high concentration for a long period of time, there was no change in the individual's generation of melatonin itself.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  But if you look at that study, it's actually a case study in a blind individual, and they were dosed with melatonin at high concentrations for, I think it was about five, I think it was about, no, it was 37 days, so yeah, about five weeks. And sure enough, by the end of that, when they withdrew the melatonin supplementation, the individual went back to producing the same amount of melatonin that they'd produced before. So you could argue from that perspective, no harm, no foul. The problem is, that's not how people use melatonin. That people are using it for six months, 12 months, five years. And therefore, I don't think we've got any scientific data to meaningfully tell the

• 30:40Speaker 03

  public that they should not have these concerns, in my humble opinion too. And the reason I say that, you know, you can think about something like testosterone supplementation in males. You can use supplementation, and after, you know, three or four months, if you stop, testosterone production from the testes themselves will start again. But there is a concern that has to be had between the physician and the male who wants that prescription, that if you continue to take it long term, it may ultimately shut down the production of testosterone. And when you stop after a long-term use, six months, 12 months, you don't go back to producing your own testosterone. Is that true of melatonin? We don't know.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  But the reason I also would caution people around melatonin, and I don't mean to scare Monger, but firstly, there's some really fascinating data.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  In juvenile male rats, where when you give high levels of melatonin, you get testicular atrophy, you get testicular shrinkage. So that is certainly a concern, especially now we're seeing melatonin doses in pediatric populations. It's a real big concern. We also know that high doses of melatonin will block the ability of your hippocampus to form new synapses. Hippocampus is a memory-related center, and therefore it makes it more difficult to learn new information because you can't form brain connections as well. So please keep that in mind. I do think, though, that there is, you know, I said that melatonin is the sleep-timing hormone. There is one study that I looked at where I think you could argue

• 32:17Speaker 03

  that melatonin has a sleep-generating benefit above and beyond simply the timing of your sleep, which is that when you give it in somewhat higher doses in rats, it's thermoregulatory and it causes hypothermia. So not hypothermia to the degree of life concern, but basically it reduces core body temperature. And we know that you've got to drop your core body temperature to get to sleep. So I think melatonin, if it does have a sleep benefit, could be acting through this route of temperature. And I think that's fascinating for me at least.

• 32:47Tim Ferriss?

  A few follow-up questions. So the study you mentioned, the case study of the blind person, where I thought that was going. And keep in mind that I know just enough to be dangerous and throw around words that I probably shouldn't. But if melatonin is in sighted people, triggered in part by light signals or light cues, if you have a blind person, and again, I don't know what role, I immediately think of the suprachiasmatic nucleus, I think.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Suprachiasmatic nucleus, that's your right.

• 33:21Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I always fuck that up.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  You were so close.

• 33:24Tim Ferriss?

  I shouldn't. Nothing ventured, nothing gains. How do you say it properly? I always screw that up.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Suprachiasmatic nucleus, and it refers to the chiasm, which is a Latin derivative term meaning crossing. And it's where your two optic nerves from your left and right eye meet and then cross over and Reverse to the back of the brain, it's right at that fulcrum of the cross and it's just above it. Hence supra meaning above, chiasm meaning the crossing and the nucleus, obviously. So supra chiasmatic nucleus.

• 33:55Tim Ferriss?

  Supra also as in supra physiological, so I was, I'll just call it the SCN. So my thinking was, well, it's really not apples to apples if you're comparing a blind person to a sighted person. And it may be that their production of melatonin is less affected or maybe already handicapped to begin with in such a way that their processing of and recovery from melatonin administration is just completely different from a sighted person. I mean, that wouldn't be shocking to me.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  No, it's.

• 34:28Tim Ferriss?

  At all.

• 34:29Speaker 03

  It's wonderful acumen. That's exactly why we often will work with melatonin with these patients. Now, it depends on the form of the nature of blindness. For example, if it's blindness because let's say that you had damage to your, the back of the head and you damaged your visual cortex. And the, the eye itself, the retina is intact, the optic nerves are intact, but it's the back of the brain where you've got that blindness disruption. That can happen there. That's not necessarily a concern because the light signals are still at least coming down the optic nerves and hitting the supra chiasmatic nucleus this 24 hour. And the supra chiasmatic nucleus, by the way, is where your circadian rhythm sits. It's the master clock, the master 24 hour clock within the brain. You've got clocks all over the body, but that's the one, it's kind of one ring to rule them all.

• 35:14Speaker 03

  It's like the Lord of the Rings. It's one clock to rule them all. That's the SCN. And that still gets light in people who have intact retina and intact optic nerves. If you don't, however, you don't get the light signal to your supra chiasmatic nucleus. Your brain gets confused about, is it nighttime outside or is it daytime? And therefore sleep is very disrupted. They have actually what's called a free running sleep system where they just run around the clock in terms of the circadian rhythm. It's not regulated and set to the light dark cycle, hence we use melatonin. But how normative is that case study? Firstly, it's one person. Secondly. It's in someone who has a deficit that already alters melatonin regulation.

• 35:57Speaker 03

  Again, I think it's a fascinating study, but I'm not sure I put too much weight in it right now.

• 36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Too much weight into a single case.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. I'm trying to be kind, but so I would say.

• 36:08Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, look, I mean, case studies are important, which is not to denigrate it in any way, but it's easy to over interpret or over apply something like that question then related to the not to get too scientific, but the shrinking balls phenomenon observed in these juvenile rats. I'm thinking of another thing you mentioned, which is say anabolic use or anabolic androgenic steroid use might be getting the AAS use, exogenous use, right? So it could be in the form of testosterone replacement cream, it could be injectable testosterone, sipionate, or whatever it might be. And if used for an extended period of time, and it doesn't actually need to be that long.

• 36:49Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, there are certainly anecdotal reports and case studies of people who even after what someone might consider a reasonably moderate cycle of say, you know, eight to 12 weeks, depending on the dosage. I know one person personally who had severely impaired testosterone production and libido for about nine months after a very short cycle of what I would consider moderate dosing of some of these androgens. And the reason I bring that up is you have the testes axis, which is the hypothalamic pituitary gonadal axis.

• 37:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Right, which is simply, and I'm fumbling around here, but you'll see where I'm going at this. So if you interfere upstream or directly, you inhibit, as I understand, the Leydig cells from producing any number of things, and then you have the shrinking testicle phenomenon. What is the plausible mechanism for that happening? Is it disrupting sleep architecture in a similar way that would be observed from too little sleep? And therefore you see a decrease in testosterone. What is causing? That testicle shrinkage.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  No, the study or the studies really showed that the effects were directly there in the testes themselves. And it was

• 38:04Tim Ferriss?

  nasty.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, that it was directly altering the androgenic benefits that would normally happen during development, during adolescent development. And it was inhibiting that androgenic and andro, obviously being these sex hormones and genic being the promotion, the genesis. So it was inhibiting the normal development of the testes and therefore leading to a failure to promote them in terms of the size and development. I think they even have now done studies where they were showing that the seminal tubes themselves, the tubes for semen were also impaired as a consequence of high doses of melatonin as well. I could have that wrong, but it's my recollection.

• 38:45Tim Ferriss?

  In high doses, if we're looking at, you know, since rats aren't always little humans, but when we say high dose, are the sort of miggs per kegs, like milligrams per kilogram comparable to what a human would be consuming if they are taking, let's assume the dosing is accurate on the bottle, just for the sake of simplicity.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:05Tim Ferriss?

  Eight milligrams, 10 milligrams, or would it be a human equivalent of someone who's say, been 160 pounds, taking 160 milligrams of melatonin? Do you have any idea what the comparable would be?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  It's difficult to look at those ratios if you try to match the paper in part because of the way

• 39:24Tim Ferriss?

  Administration.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  The administration, because it's direct administration rather than going through sort of hepatic clearance and the stomach and all of that stuff. So it's going to be tricky, I think, to do the one to one transformation. Certainly what we found with studies, if you are looking for a melatonin sleep benefit, there was one paper that demonstrated probably the optimal doses somewhere between about point three to point five milligrams of melatonin. Now, if you go onto the internet, it's going to be very difficult for you to get something even as low as one milligram. And here we're talking about, you know, maybe half of that dose of concentration. Most, you're lucky if you can find three milligrams.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Most will be five milligrams or 10 milligrams. That's the whopping dose that we're talking about here.

• 40:15Tim Ferriss?

  What a mess. Humans, humans, man, we make such a mess. It's just like, I remember when they're like, carrots are good for this. Let's isolate beta carotene and mega dose that. Oops. Sorry about that. It's just like over and over again.

• 40:31Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Time and place are everything with so many things, and especially this is true in marketing. But in today's age of a million messages per minute, I've seen my phone, have you? And seemingly not enough hours in the day, how do you really catch your target audience's attention? Fortunately, there's a simple way. LinkedIn can help you speak to the right people at the right time. With LinkedIn becoming number one in B2B display advertising in the US, you've got a great advantage right in front of you. You can stand out against your competitors while nurturing customer relationships and growing your brand. LinkedIn delivers you both quantity and quality. Its targeting tools allow you to reach your precise audience down to their job title,

• 41:15Tim Ferriss?

  company name, location, and more, which means your ads can be seen by those who matter. Scale your marketing and grow your business with LinkedIn Advertising. Companies of all sizes and sectors are using it, and now yours can too. It's easy to try. LinkedIn is now offering a $100 credit on your next campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com/TFS to claim your credit. That's like a Tim Ferriss Show. So, check it out. LinkedIn.com/TFS.

• 41:47Tim Ferriss?

  If we could keep on the unconventional, let's just say, tips slash perspective side of things, if you don't mind, I would love to talk about, and this is something that I haven't discussed with you at any length, the art of minimizing sleep time. And this may tie into CBTI, which I really don't know that much about. But I, like a lot of people, I think, have Made the error, although it doesn't feel like an error, of getting into bed, and even if my sleep onset takes an hour, hour and a half, because maybe I have that tired and wired feeling, which a lot of people do, a lot of veterans, people with PTSD, you know, suffer from this overly activated sympathetic nervous system, which I do a lot, and I'll just stay in bed, even if it takes me three hours to get to sleep.

• 42:32Tim Ferriss?

  I will often just kind of sit there and try to meditate my way into oblivion. It doesn't always work very well. So what's the counter approach?

• 42:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think one of the, the sort of the conventional tips for sleep, you can find all over the internet and, you know, idiots like me, you can hear speaking about the five tips of better sleep hygiene. And, you know, there's very good evidence for why those are sensible things to put in place. But what about the unconventional? And one of the unconventional components is to limit your sleep time, as you said. There is the principle treatment for insomnia should not be the first line defense of sleeping pills that we discussed in the last episode. The current recommendation is something called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia or CBTI. And as you can tell by the term, it works on two things, cognitive things, in other words, your thoughts and your beliefs

• 43:23Speaker 03

  about sleep, and then your behaviors. What are you not doing that you should do to help your sleep? And what are you doing that you shouldn't be doing and you should stop doing to help your sleep? And that's the CBTI component. If you look across the studies, and CBTI has a number of different features in this treatment, this therapy approach. But one of the most potent tools in the box of the CBTI therapist is sleep restriction therapy, which sounds paradoxical. You know, you come to me and let's say I'm your sleep clinician, you say, I am not sleeping well. I'm in bed for about eight hours, but I think I only maybe sleep for four, four and a half hours. I'm just not getting enough sleep. Can you help me? And my response to you is, excellent, I've got a great treatment for

• 44:05Speaker 03

  you. It's called sleep restriction therapy. And you hear the kind of the record scratch and you say, hang on a second. I just told you I'm not getting enough sleep and you're telling me we're going to restrict my sleep. It's actually a poorly termed phrase. It should really be called bedtime restriction therapy. And it works in the Following way that right now, if you take that example, you're in bed for eight hours and you're sleeping for four hours. You have a miserable sleep efficiency. So you have a sleep efficiency of fifty percent. Half of the amount of time that you're in bed, you're awake, half the time you're asleep. We want to see that around about eighty five or greater in terms of your sleep efficiency. That's what we think is healthy. And so rather than actually having you stay in bed for any longer, we do the opposite.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  And we use the biology of your brain and something called sleep pressure. So from the moment that both you and I woke up, we've been building up a chemical that we've sort of discussed with regarding caffeine, which was adenosine. And the more adenosine builds up, the sleepier and sleepier you feel. And the longer that you're awake, the heavier that weight of sleepiness will be weighing you down. So just take the extreme of, let's say, you pull an all nighter or you're awake for thirty six hours. Imagine how tired you are at that point when you get into bed that following night. It's almost as though nothing's going to stop you, earthquakes, wildfires. You're just going to get into bed and you're going to be knocked out. Why? Because you've just got so much sleepiness built up, so much adenosine that hasn't been removed.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  So we do a diluted version of that in CBTI with sleep restriction therapy. Where we say, okay, you're going to bed, just for argument's sake, at midnight and you're waking up at eight. Now what I want you to do is actually compress that window of time. And I want you to go to bed not at midnight, but now push it. Go to two AM or two thirty AM or let's say three AM. But you still wake up at the same time. So where we restrict your sleep is not by having you wake up any earlier, which is kind of miserable and most people like. Most people feel it's easier to go to bed later than wake up any earlier. So we start there.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  We limit the amount of time that you're in bed and we restrict it down to maybe six hours or five hours. And the next day you're going to feel miserable. You know, you've only been in bed for five hours. But what happens is that as long as you commit to it and it has to be committed and you have to work with someone who's going to motivate you and it is hard, but it works. And after the second night of being in bed for five hours, you've been awake for longer. So now you've been awake for 19 hours during the day and you're only in bed, assuming for five hours. And that increase in your adenosine, because you're awake now for 19 hours straight, for one day, for a second day, for a third day, it all starts to accumulate.

• 47:01Speaker 03

  And then at one point, maybe, and it depends on the patient, let's say about four or five days after that, they get into bed at 2:30 AM or 3:00 AM. And then the next thing that they remember is their alarm going off at 8:00 AM. And for the first time ever, they have slept all the way through from front to back. Now, in that example, I've restricted their bedtime by three hours. And they're now sleeping a solid five hours. But remember, that's better than where they were. They were in bed for eight hours and they were only sleeping for four hours. So I've added an extra hour and they're in bed for less time. And then gradually, what we do is we start to back that up.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Once you're stable and your sleep efficiency is 85, 90%, then we'll say, okay, now go to bed at 2:00 AM. And then now let's go to bed at 1:30 AM. And now let's try 1:00 AM. And gradually, we back it off. And essentially, it's like hitting the reset button on your Wi-Fi router. You are retraining the sleep system. And in doing so, you can start to get people's confidence renewed, because that's a big problem with insomnia.

• 48:07Tim Ferriss?

  I was gonna say, it sounds like more than anything, well, I shouldn't say that, who the hell am I? But it seems like principle among the reasons that would work is that you are resetting sleep-related anxiety.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Hundred percent. Because when you are suffering from insomnia, and I've had my bouts too, and I know that, you know, you've spoken publicly about struggles before. You go into the bedroom and the bed just looks like the enemy. And you have lost all confidence in your ability to sleep. And at that point, your sleep controls you. But by way of CBTI and sleep restriction therapy, you turn the tables. Now you control your sleep, not your sleep controlling you. And you regain confidence. That is a huge win. I can't tell you how big that is for people with insomnia. It's a terrible fear when they go into the bedroom. They just convince themselves it's not going to be my night. So does that sort of help? I know it's a long explanation.

• 49:03Tim Ferriss?

  It does help.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  It's a little bit like working out. You know, if I go to the gym for an hour. And for the most part, you know, I'm probably only working out for maybe 40 or 30 minutes. Cause I'm looking at my phone and chatting to people, checking social media, whatever it is. And so you're only really working out for 40 of those minutes. It's not an efficient workout. But now my gym says, I'm sorry, we're limiting it to 30 minutes every day. You've got no more time than that. After a couple of days, I don't have the choice. I'm thinking, I'm not getting my workouts in. So I put my phone on silent, turn it off. And I just go in there and I hit the gym hard and I work out for 30 minutes straight. My efficiency has improved.

• 49:41Tim Ferriss?

  So let's segue and I'll let you choose how you want to bridge things to lucid dreaming. And we can do it in a few steps if necessary. In part because when I reflect on the periods of best sleep, let's just say past adolescence or early adolescence, some of my best periods of sleep, and I could unpack what I mean by best, but easiest, lowest stress periods have been when I have focused on inducing lucidity. Because instead of dreading sleep, I end up looking forward to sleep. And it turned everything on its head. Now, the downside is we might get to this.

• 50:23Tim Ferriss?

  There's quite a bit of training required and things need to be a bit regimented in my experience. But how would you like to move to lucid dreaming, including a definition of lucid dreaming?

• 50:33Speaker 03

  I think perhaps what we could do is start with what basic dreaming is and what it is perhaps psychologically, neurologically, from the level of the brain, because neurological is important when we try to understand what lucid dreaming is and how it's different to standard dreaming. And we can also touch on the functional benefits of dreaming, but maybe we could leave that aside. I think we spoke a little bit about that before in the first episode. But from a psychological level, dreaming, I mean, it's pretty ridiculous when you think about it, because last night, you and I, when we went to sleep and we started dreaming, we became completely psychotic. And before you reject that sort of diagnosis

• 51:16Speaker 03

  of my nighttime psychosis, I'll give you five good reasons. When we dream, we start to see things which are not there. So you're hallucinating. You also believe things that couldn't possibly be true. So you're delusional. You get very confused about time and place, and sometimes also person as well. So you're suffering from disorientation. You often have these wildly pendulum-like, almost fluctuations in your emotions. And it's what psychiatrists will call being affectively labile or emotionally labile. And then how great, you and I both woke up this morning, and we forgot most, if not all, of that dream experience. So we're suffering from amnesia. You know, if you had to experience any one

• 51:58Speaker 03

  of those five things while you're awake, you probably would be seeking some form of psychiatric intervention. But for reasons that we're now only starting to understand when it comes to the functions of dreaming, it's a perfectly normal biological and psychological process. The biological process is utterly interesting. We and others have done studies where we've been putting people inside of brain scanners, and we let them go through the different stages of sleep, and we let them go into REM sleep. Now, dreaming, if you use a loose definition, which is the report of any mental activity upon awakening, if you use that loose definition, you dream in almost every stage of sleep. But what most people think of when you say dreaming are REM sleep.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Those are the emotional, the narrative, the bizarre, the strange. That's really the state from which you dream. And when we look at that sleep stage inside of the MRI scanner, firstly, vast swaths of the visual cortex start lighting up in your brain. The motor regions of the brain erupt in activity. Emotional centers of the brain become active as well as memory centers of the brain. And in fact, some parts of your brain are up to thirty percent more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake. Which is stunning to me because we often think of sleep as just this passive, non-conscious state. Metabolically, from the brain perspective, it's wild.

• 53:26Speaker 03

  But the freakish part is what happens to another region of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. And particularly the left and the right side, which sits just above your eyes. And it's particularly a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left and right side of the frontal lobe. That part of the brain normally, when it's active, acts like the CEO of the brain, that it makes high-level sort of executive, top-down control decisions. And it allows you to have not just rational decisions, but volitional decisions. In other words, you're choosing to make that choice and you're choosing to do that action. That's part of the prefrontal cortex job. That part of the brain goes offline when we go into REM sleep.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Your dorsolateral prefrontal cortex doesn't erupt with activity like many of these other regions. It is suppressed in its activity. And that, I think, is our current explanation as to why your dreams are so visual, so motoric, filled with past memories, also just highly emotional. But they're utterly bizarre, utterly erratic, and you have no volitional control. The prison guards have left the building and the prisoners are running amok. Your prefrontal cortex is down. And so that's one of the fascinating parts of dream sleep neurologically, as well as the body, by the way. I think we probably didn't discuss this before, but when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body.

• 54:55Speaker 03

  You are completely limp. So if I were to come into the bedroom and just pick you up during REM sleep, you would be like a rag doll. All of your skeletal muscles are inhibited.

• 55:07Speaker 03

  And people don't need to worry, by the way, your involuntary skeletal muscles that control your respiration and your heart, they're not affected, but all of your voluntary muscles are because your brainstem, which is where the REM and non-REM mechanisms play out, not only does it beam an activating signal up into the dreaming brain, it sends one down the spinal cord and it paralyzes what's called the alpha motor neurons of the spinal cord that control your voluntary skeletal muscles. So you are locked into a physical incarceration during REM sleep, during dream sleep, which by the way, explains something called REM sleep paralysis upon awakening and adequately explains most alien abductions, but we don't need to go there. We can, we can always move on to what's different

• 55:49Speaker 03

  about dreaming when it comes to lucidity and, or just pause there and go into anything that comes to mind.

• 55:57Tim Ferriss?

  No, let's jump into lucid dreaming. I'm ready.

• 55:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:00Tim Ferriss?

  And I do want to talk about, about tracking of time or perception of time.

• 56:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:06Tim Ferriss?

  At some point, but I think we can do that vis a vis lucid dreaming because I have some.

• 56:10Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 56:11Tim Ferriss?

  Questions.

• 56:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:12Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll, I'll get there, but let's, let's jump into lucid dreaming.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, lucid dreaming, it used to be a complete charlatan science, you know, back in the sixties and the seventies, to suggest that you could gain control over a normally non-volitional process only added insult to the idiotic nature of this thing called sleep and dreaming by itself. And now you're telling me, okay, we've got these things called dreams and also you claim to be able to control them and do whatever you like in them. Really? Show me some good science. But now we have some exquisite science and it's not even debated anymore. It's not a charlatan science. And the first experiments, actually come back to our first topic, which was sleep and sex. The first experiments used orgasm and ejaculation as the test.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  So with a lucid dreamer, when they are asleep, just like you and I when we're not lucid dreaming, they are paralyzed. So they've got no good way to tell you, okay, I'm now lucid. And they have no way to tell you what I'm dreaming about and what's happening, except that they do, which is their eyes. Because one of the two muscle groups that is spurred from the voluntary skeletal paralysis of your muscles are the extra ocular muscles that move your eyes up and down and left and right. And that's why, by the way, you still have rapid eye movements during REM sleep, because those muscles are not inhibited. So we can now generate essentially a language between me, the experimenter, and you, the lucid dreamer, which is like an ocular Morse code.

• 57:47Speaker 03

  And you can be telling me, using predefined eye movement instructions, what's going on. So at the moment you become lucid, you've gone into dream sleep, and I can see that in the next door sleep control center. And then all of a sudden, I see, based on your eye movement traces that I'm measuring, you do three deliberate flicks to the left. And that's your signal to me, that me, the participant, I'm now lucid. Okay, great. Now then you're going to do two big circular movements to the right. And that's you saying in my dream, I'm now clenching my right hand, and then moving your eyes circular to the left. That's me moving my left hand. And so you can be telling me every time that you're doing something in your dream,

• 58:30Speaker 03

  what it is that you're doing, which is, I mean, could you imagine who?

• 58:36Tim Ferriss?

  And then if you're like, if you like that trick, now watch me ejaculate.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Well, that was exactly what they did. So then they said, okay, you claim to be able to, because when you control lucid dreaming, by the way, the definition is just that you are aware that you're dreaming as you are dreaming. That's our basic scientific definition. But what most people in the lay public think of as lucid dreaming is not just that you know that you're dreaming, you take control of your dreams. And of course, if you can control your dreams, one of the things that people enjoy doing is, you know, having sex and having an orgasm.

• 59:08Tim Ferriss?

  That's all they're gonna do. That's all they're gonna do in the beginning.

• 59:11Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 59:12Tim Ferriss?

  Orgy all over.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  It was the original dreamscape pornography, you know, forget Pornhub, you just had to lucid dream.

• 59:20Tim Ferriss?

  So to have your lip.

• 59:22Speaker 03

  It is, but you know, I could argue it's well worth it. And so the. So we've got these experiments now, and by the way, we've done imaging studies that are less messy for the experimenter to prove by, but I should come, I should explain that, by the way, people would then say, okay, I'm now starting to have sex and I'm now just about to have an orgasm. And then they would say, I've just had my orgasm and you can go into the room. And sure enough, with males especially, you've got proof positive data that what they said was real. And hence, you've just scientifically proven lucid dreaming is correct. We've got much more sophisticated MRI scanning methods now, and I won't bore you with the studies, but it's very clear that we know that lucid dreaming is real.

• 1:00:04Speaker 03

  The next question then was, how do people lucid dream? What is the underlying neural mechanism? And this comes back to the prefrontal cortex and those dorsolateral prefrontal parts of the brain, which are the volitional control centers which go offline. What we found is that activity, both the electrical activity and also when you put people in scanners, the imaging activity in those regions starts to ramp back up again, as if when you become lucid, you regain your rational, logical control over the dream state. And so the prefrontal cortex gives you that capacity to take back what you lost, which is volition.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  There was a study recently, however, that I think did a pretty good job to say, that may not be the case, that some of those results are confounded by the method of the analysis and the method of the recording. So I think it's, the jury is still a little bit out. But even in that study, they demonstrated that there's something about their brainwaves that is radically different at that fulcrum point where they shift from going from non- lucid dreaming to lucid dreaming. It's not a question of if, it's just how.

• 1:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  What is the jury still out on? I'm sorry, I missed that.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  So the jury is still out on this idea that the electrical bursting brainwave activity comes back online over the prefrontal cortex. And what they were finding is that it's potentially an artifact of the eye movements that start to happen. So the eye movements, when you're moving those muscles, those extra ocular muscles, you move muscles. Using electrical impulses and those electrical impulses that are coming from the eye will also bleed up into the brain. And when you get all of this frenetic eye movement, it starts to masquerade as if it's the prefrontal cortex, which sits directly above them as getting re-engaged. And hence, when you control for that, you don't see as powerful an argument for the

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  re-engagement of the prefrontal cortex.

• 1:02:06Tim Ferriss?

  What is your personal experience, if any, with lucid dreaming?

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, I am not a common lucid dreamer. It's happened probably about two or three times in my life. And when it's happened, it's immensely pleasurable. Have I tried to curate it, develop it and use different techniques? And we can speak about the current techniques that are out there in the science. I have not chosen to do that. And it's not necessarily because I see in the science anything to be worried about. I can steel man both sides of that argument. We know that only about 10 to 20% of the population is our natural lucid dreamers. And you could argue from an evolutionary standpoint that if lucid dreaming is so

• 1:02:53Speaker 03

  adaptive, so beneficial to us homo sapiens, then the reverse would be true, that Mother Nature would have heavily selected it. And 80 to 90% of the population would be lucid dreamers. But I can push back on my own argument because there's a desperate flaw in that logic. That argument assumes that we've stopped evolving and we haven't. So maybe that 10 to 20% of natural lucid dreamers are the forefront of hominid evolution. And we don't need to be worried about AI. We need to be worried about the lucid dreamers becoming the next super race of humanity. So I wrestle between those two. If it's that volume, though, that 80 to 90% of people don't naturally do it at this

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  stage of after 3.6 million years of evolution of hominid development, my sense is that

• 1:03:45Speaker 03

  Do I think that I understand better than Mother Nature's blueprint exactly what I should be serving up in my dreams at night to get all of the benefits of dreams? And by the way, we know that dreaming above and beyond REM sleep itself serves a number of key different functions like emotional therapy and emotional first aid. It supports creativity. I've worried myself, is it hubris for me to think that I should then take the reins and get into the the driver's cockpit and start steering the vehicle rather than just allowing whatever Mother Nature thinks should happen for me? I don't know. The only other strike against lucid dreaming, and I don't think it's a big one, and I don't think it's anything to be worried

• 1:04:29Speaker 03

  about. When you survey people and when we've examined people who claim to be lucid dreamers, on a night after lucid dreaming, they typically report that their sleep is less restorative and less refreshing. They find it to be perhaps more mentally fatiguing. The second night, the subsequent night of sleep. No, sorry. The next morning when they wake up after the night when they have had lucid dreaming, they find that it was more fatiguing, perhaps because it's more effortful, because you're engaging the prefrontal cortex. That's one argument, but I don't think that's a particularly good argument to say that if you are a lucid dreamer, you need to be worried, or if you want to lucid dream, you should not engage in some of the different methods that we've developed to improve it.

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm curious what the state of the art is from a scientific perspective, because people may hear the term lucid dreaming and think that it is a relatively new construct slash exercise of the human mind, but that's not true at all. At least, I mean, for thousands of years in Tibetan practices and elsewhere.

• 1:05:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  There have been elaborate descriptions of training and philosophical and cosmological implications of this type of sleep engineering, let's call it. So what are the predominant methods of or for inducing lucidity in these studies?

• 1:05:55Tim Ferriss?

  Or that just that you've seen covered in the literature. I'm very curious.

• 1:05:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, right now, in terms of the science, we probably have two methods that have been put out that that have some degree of validity to them. Although I would say that when you look at each one of the papers, the statistical robustness in terms of the reliability of these things, it's not especially high. I mean, some of these techniques do gain statistical significance, meaning that when you try them, it does significantly, from a statistical perspective, increase your likelihood of lucid dreaming. The first one is called, it's called the mild method for short, but it stands for the mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming, M I L D method. And essentially, it's pretty

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  simple that you create a conscious and very deliberate intention to remember that you're dreaming. And usually this is pre-bed, that you're lying there before you go to sleep, and you start repeating this intention. I'm going to deliberately remember that I am dreaming as I am dreaming. And you keep doing that night after night, over and over again. And it sounds hokey. It sounds really quite science L I T E light, but the evidence is suggesting it's in favor. I think the other one that's probably more popular is called the reality testing method. And it's, oh gosh, it was popularized in a, at least I think it was popularized in a

• 1:07:23Tim Ferriss?

  Steven LaBeurge?

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  No, it's actually, well, so Steven LaBeurge was a fascinating researcher who was working here in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 90s, who probably was really the pioneer of modern day lucid dreaming. And then at some point, he was doing academic, you know, really interesting scientific studies. And then he moved away and he developed his own lucidity institute and sort of was selling CDs to how to do that. And so I think it went off in a slightly strange direction. And I don't know what came of him. But the reality testing method actually came to fruition on many people's radars with a brilliant movie called Waking Life by Richard Linklater. Have you seen this? It is a if people and maybe we can link to it in the show notes. If people haven't watched it,

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  don't worry if you're not interested in lucid dreaming. Yes, the movie revolves around lucid dreaming, but the philosophy and the conversations will blow your mind. It is one of my favorite.

• 1:08:20Tim Ferriss?

  And the visual treatment of the movie.

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Oh, it's so clever.

• 1:08:23Tim Ferriss?

  It's perfect.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  So isn't it genius? And maybe we won't spoil it for people who haven't seen it. But the idea of the reality testing method is that during the waking day, you start to test reality in a way that you don't normally do. So let's say that I would walk over to the table that I'm sitting next to here and I press my hand down on the table and the table is resisting my hand, just like the waking laws of physics would predict. Or I go over to the wall and I switch on the light switch. Do the lights go on? And when I turn them off, do they go off? And hence, I understand that I'm probably in conscious waking reality. And you start doing this throughout your entire waking day to the point where it becomes a reflexive habit. And then the

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  hope is that that habit bleeds through into your dreaming life from your waking life. And you start to do the same reality testing in dreams. And then all of a sudden, I press my hand down on the table and it moves all the way through the table to the other side. And at that point, I think, oh, the jig is up. I'm not awake. I'm dreaming. And then you gain lucidity.

• 1:09:30Tim Ferriss?

  Actually, if you don't mind me just because I don't think I've discussed this at any real length in any podcast, but this was a very strong focus of mine for a part of like the last two years of high school. And then I revisited it a few years later in college. And one might ask, if you enjoy it so much, why the break? And the break is because there's training involved. And I do suggest, this is an oldie but goodie. I'm sure there are, actually, I know there are many, many, many books that have been published since, but Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming by Steven Le Berge, B E R G E. I'm probably mispronouncing the last name because I can't speak French. But that book lays out the mild technique that you mentioned and the reality testing. And I'd love to just give folks an idea.

• 1:10:16Tim Ferriss?

  Perhaps a few stories, and these are, yes, anecdotal and of one, so, but I hope them to be perhaps inspiring in a sense. So number one, I do not count myself among the people who are natural lucid dreamers at all. I think most people have had the experience of lucid dreaming. Oh, my God, I became conscious I was dreaming and then I immediately woke up or went back into non-lucid dreaming. Most people have had that experience and I'd had that experience, who knows, much like you, maybe two or three times scattered over a very long period of time. But then I read Stephen's book and step one is practicing dream recall and putting together a dream journal. And there are a number of reasons for this, but one of the reasons is to

• 1:11:01Tim Ferriss?

  identify good candidates, recurring patterns that you can use as cues for your reality testing and waking life. So for instance, if you identify and your dream recall improves dramatically when you begin to journal in this way immediately upon waking, you can't check your phone, you can't brush your teeth, you need to just roll over and immediately do this. And I do not think voice memo works nearly as well because you'll go back and reread this skeleton outline of fragments and that will prompt further recollection and you can fill in the blanks and that is a productive way of approaching it. You might identify that you walk through many doorways, for instance, or for whatever reason you end

• 1:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  up in areas where you see grass or perhaps you see, you look at your watch often in dreams, at which point you would identify those as candidates for this reality testing that you were referring to. Or you could simply have an alarm after you've started doing this dream recall and at random points in the day, you have to do a reality test. And I'll just give a couple of recommendations for folks. So the first is if the reality test is hard to precisely convincingly test, it may not translate to dream. So what I mean by that is a lot of folks, when they're starting this, they'll say, well, I will try to fly.

• 1:12:26Tim Ferriss?

  And yes, you can fly in dreams. And I wasn't kidding earlier when I said that people just go complete and infomaniac. Generally, when people first gain the ability to intermittently induce lucidity, they're just fucking everything and they're flying everywhere. Those are the two things that everybody does. And that's fine. But if during your waking life, it's like you have lunch and then the alarm goes off and you're like, let me reality test. How are you really going to attempt to fly in a convincing, compelling way? But there are other options, for instance, and yeah, who knows? I mean, science can be expensive and who knows if these studies will ever get done, but or how they would even be done. But what I think experienced lucid dreamers will probably corroborate is that if you look

• 1:13:09Tim Ferriss?

  at a pattern, let's just say you have long tiles that have one orientation in a restaurant, and you look away from them and look back at them. In reality, they stay the same. In a dream state, they very often almost always reorient because your mind is reconstructing that pattern, if that makes sense. And similarly, if you look at, say, a digital clock readout, something like that, the numbers will not be the same. The time will change. And just for the practical applications here, yeah, you can have fun doing stuff. But at the end of high school, I was going to be competing at a national level in wrestling. And so I would actually train with this coach from Oklahoma, John Smith, who I'd never met,

• 1:13:52Tim Ferriss?

  still haven't ever met. And I would actually do drilling in lucid dreams. And again, N of one, who knows? But I really seem to discern a translation of that added practice time to the in-world practice, so to speak. It's a fascinating experience. I encourage everybody to try it out, but it is a commitment. It's quite a commitment. It is. It's kind of like if you want to control your anger and you want to have a pattern interrupt and you need to develop that over time. And to take something that is subconscious and make it conscious does take some time.

• 1:14:25Speaker 03

  And I think that it's fascinating that last part that you said were when you were working with a coach that you truly actually never worked with, but you saw it translates to the mat in the waking real world. I think it fits very well with the idea of what one of the functions of dreaming, which is this notion of abstract creativity of problem solving. And we know that it's during the dreams that it's during deep non-REM sleep when we take individual memories that we've been learning and we cement them and we essentially hit the save button on them and we concretize them in the neural architecture of the brain. But it's during dream sleep that we take those newly freshly minted memories and we start to interconnect and associate them with this vast catalog of previous knowledge

• 1:15:10Speaker 03

  that we have so that you start to divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems. And the reason that happens is not because the dreaming brain is designed to build the obvious connections. It seems to do a Google search gone wrong where it takes the new information, it inserts it and it immediately puts you to page 20. So maybe I type in the Tim Ferriss show and it takes me immediately to some field hockey game in Utah. And I think, hang on a second, how on earth is that related? But if I look, there is a distant non-obvious connection. And this is what the dreaming brain and perhaps the lucid dreaming brain is particularly good at. It starts to fuse things together that shouldn't normally

• 1:15:54Speaker 03

  go together, but when they do cause marked advances in evolutionary fitness. And it's the biological basis of creativity. And so I think what's happening with that description that you mentioned is that you're waking up in terms of your skills and your motor skills, but it also happens with knowledge with a revised mind wide web of associations. It's almost like informational alchemy that happens at night.

• 1:16:21Speaker 03

  And that's why you can have these remarkable stories of people solving problems and coming up with incredible creative solutions and wonderful pieces of art and music and literature have all been inspired by way of dream creative insight. And I think that's perhaps in part why you're feeling good about that benefit is there are certain ways that you are performing skills and movements that you just couldn't see when you're awake. But when you go into the dream state and you force that to be on the menu of the dreaming digestion at night, then all of a sudden the dreaming brain was taking what you were learning and coming up with these novel new insights. So I think it fits very well with what we know about

• 1:17:06Speaker 03

  one of the functions of dreaming. And it's the reason that you've probably never been told to stay awake on a problem.

• 1:17:12Tim Ferriss?

  I have not experienced the subsequent fatigue, which I think would have been at least for me, very obvious because I was training every day. And so I think I would have subjectively noticed a decrease in performance. And I will just put a call out to the audience. If anyone out there is aware of someone who is the heir apparent, or maybe the the version two, version three, or not, but of Stephen La Bear's, but somebody who is really taking lucid dreaming seriously, the different techniques for induction, perhaps looking at the interplay of sleep, nutrition, other variables on inducing lucidity, please let me know on Twitter at

• 1:17:55Tim Ferriss?

  T Ferris, T F E R R I S S, because I am deeply interested in this. And I remember back in the day when I was at school, I mean, this was in the 90s, but some of Stephen's acolytes were experimenting with things like, actually, I was experimenting with Hooperzine A, but others were experimenting with things like Galan to me and all these various supplements in the hopes that they would increase the frequency of Inducing lucidity.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  There are some devices out there right now where people have sort of tried to have these ocular devices where they start to sort of flash light into the eyes. And the reason they use the ocular device is that the device itself can measure some parts of the brainwave activity. It can measure the eye movements. It senses when you go into dream sleep and then it begins sort of the flashing and the hope is that that flashing is an instigating trigger to make you build lucidity and make you aware that you're dreaming. You know, I've seen no data on how effective those are scientifically, but people are trying to take this to the next level. People have played around with compounds. They're now playing around with technology.

• 1:18:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. So I'm going to give some further unsolicited thoughts that will no doubt just be very bothersome because they're not based on any data to speak of other than my personal experience. And also having read a number of books and different reports and gone on all these crazy forums, but experientially, and this could be pure placebo effect, but for most folks, when they realize they're dreaming, it's like, oh my God, I'm dreaming. And then they snap right out of it. Either they wake up or they go right back into normal REM sleep, let's just say. For whatever reason, looking at your hands or spinning, attempting to spin, like to like to spin in place, much like you would physically, seems to help extend

• 1:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  the session of lucidity, so to speak. Again, no studies to cite, no hard data to point to. But for people who want to screw around with it, there you go. So it's free advice. It may be worth what you pay for.

• 1:19:57Tim Ferriss?

  So I would love to, if we go from here, perhaps to segue to learning and memory. And I know that you're very deeply familiar with research as it relates to sleep, different phases of sleep and various aspects of cognition, including memory. If one wanted to

• 1:20:20Tim Ferriss?

  Optimize for learning. Now, there are different types of learning, right? You could have procedural knowledge, like riding a bike, or skill acquisition, like in my case, the wrestling. You could have declarative knowledge, more data-driven. Memorizing Chinese characters is one that I've thought about a lot. How would you suggest people think about sleep? And are there ways to optimize for learning or skill acquisition, aside from ensuring that your sleep is just not broken in some fundamental way?

• 1:20:49Speaker 03

  I think what we've started to understand is that different stages of sleep do different things for different systems of memory at different times of night. Yes, the story is simple, that you need sleep for learning and memory. But there is evidence that we can pattern match what type of things that you're learning with a particular stage of sleep, if you wanted to try to dial it up. If we were so, you know, replete as scientists to have dials like a mixing deck, where we could instantly say, okay, tonight, you want more stage two non-REM sleep? Or you want more spindles? You want more deep sleep? I mean, we're getting there with brain stimulation, but it's not quite there yet.

• 1:21:31Tim Ferriss?

  The dead mouse DJ.

• 1:21:32Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah, yeah. I would like to, maybe I should grab that Twitter handle already. But certainly, what we know from a bigger perspective is that you firstly, you've got to get sleep before learning to prepare your brain for the initial act of imprinting and learning new information. And we've done some studies where we've deprived people of sleep. And that night of deprivation, you know, should you pull the all-nighter? Is it a wise idea? And the answer is no, because you're about 20 to 40% deficient in your learning ability when you have not been getting sufficient sleep, which I do think is interesting when you consider what's happening to sleep in our education populations right now, but I can put that aside.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  We also know why that's the case. We did a study where we were looking at the brain trying to learn information with and without sleep inside an MRI scanner. And there's a structure that we've spoken about before called the hippocampus, which sits on the left and the right side of your brain. And it's almost like the inbox for memory, the informational inbox that it grabs new memories. And when you don't have sleep, that hippocampal structure, it's almost like it becomes waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new information. Now, it's just, coming back to the inbox analogy, I suppose, it's almost like the inbox is full and you just start bouncing those incoming mails. You don't commit the experience to memory because what we discovered is that the hippocampus

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  is shut down. And so no wonder you can't imprint that new information. We also found that if you want to reverse that trend and say, how can I increase my learning capacity? We did a nap study during the day. And what we found is that it's not just sleep, but it's a particular bursting electrical brainwave called a sleep spindle. And the more of those sleep spindles that you are having, the greater the restoration of your learning ability. So the way we did the study, we took a group of people and we had them try and learn a whole set of information midday. And then we brought them back. And then at 6:00 PM, we had them learn an additional new set of information.

• 1:23:44Speaker 03

  And so we could simply compare what's your learning capacity at time point one versus time point two. But then half of the subjects had a nap in the middle of that six hour period. The others did not nap. They remained awake. And there was a deviation, there was a separation such that those people who napped, they actually had a restoration of their learning ability. Those people who didn't had a deterioration in their learning ability. And the greater the number of spindles during the nap, these sleep spindles that happen during what we call non-rapid eye movement sleep, the greater the refreshment and the recuperation of their learning ability. How long were the naps? So the naps there were 90 minutes in duration.

• 1:24:26Speaker 03

  Now, I wouldn't recommend that for most people, and I'll sort of come back to why. Is that like an ultradian rhythm? Oh, you are. Yeah. I mean, you're close with Supra Kaismati nucleus, you're bang on with the ultradian. So ultradian, yeah, simply means it's shorter than a day. And circadian, when we describe it, it means approximately or around a day's length. Ultradian, shorter than a day. And yes, you're in human beings, our sleep cycle going from non-REM to REM, which we repeat, is every 90 minutes. Now, that's in us, human beings. It's different across different species. Our sleep cycle is actually quite long relative

• 1:25:09Speaker 03

  to others. For example, birds may just have a non-REM to REM cycle of about two minutes, which is very, very short. They flip back and forth. Us, 90 minutes. And so usually, when we do these nap studies, we give the brain the opportunity to cycle through both non-REM and REM. So then we give the sleeping brain the chance to say, look, this is the stage of sleep where you're going to see the correlation with the benefit that you measure when you wake that individual up. So we want to give REM and non-REM an equal opportunity to show their prowess in transacting a functional benefit for the brain. That's why we usually do 90 minutes. But if you're trying to optimize napping, I should probably

• 1:25:53Speaker 03

  do a podcast on this myself, on the optimal version of napping. The short and longer of it is nap for about 15 to 20 minutes and no longer. Because when you nap for longer, what happens is that you start to go down into the deeper stages of non-REM. And then when you wake up after 30 or 40 minutes, you're coming out of the deeper stage of sleep and you have what's called sleep inertia, which feels like a sleep hangover. And it's even worse when you wake up than it was before you took the nap. But if you do 15 to 20 minutes, you don't get that heavy hit of sleep inertia, but you still get sleep benefits. Once you get to sort of down to about nine, eight or seven minutes, we really don't see

• 1:26:34Speaker 03

  brain or body benefits. Getting to 15 to 20, you get some nice cognitive benefits, but you lose the downside of the sleep inertia effect. But I'm digressing. So that's sort of the sleep before learning. You also need sleep after learning, however, to then take those new memories. And as we mentioned before, to sort of fixate them into the neural architecture of the brain. It's like hitting the save button, but the problem is it's not digital in your word document, which happens in milliseconds. The saving of memories in the brain is an organic process. It requires the building of new proteins between new synapses. So it takes hours, but it takes hours, not just during wake, but during sleep.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  And there, what we found is that it's during deep, non-REM sleep or deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep that the brain will cement those new memories. It's almost like that scene in Jurassic Park where the amber has fixated the fly, you know, in perpetuity. And sleep future proofs the information within your brain. And this perhaps comes on to both the mechanism, but also the idea of time that we discussed or that we should discuss perhaps.

• 1:27:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, could I pause before we get to time just to ask about the neuroanatomical or plausible mechanisms for ongoing need for sleep in order to have accurate recall later. Now, I may be misremembering this, but when I read your book, one of these studies that seemed to hop out to me, and maybe I was having a fever dream, so please correct me. But it was looking at different sleep deprivation at different points after initial acquisition of knowledge. So you had students who were studying, and this may have been alcohol related as well. So you'll have to clarify for me, but one might think sleep before learning important? Yes, of course.

• 1:28:35Tim Ferriss?

  Sleep, say, the night after learning important? Yes, but as I recall, it was something like three days later, if you interrupted the sleep, whether by deprivation or alcohol, that you subsequently saw lower recall scores, something like that. Am I inventing this?

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  Your memory is pinpoint accurate, so your sleep is not perhaps quite as bad as one would fear. You're right. So we've done these studies and there are perhaps two studies that speak to your point. One of the studies, you have people learn some information and then you deprive them of sleep the first night after learning. But then you don't test them. You give them all of the recovery sleep that they want on a second night and a third night, and then you test them. And what we find is that the memory recollection is still impaired out on day five. So in other words, if you don't sleep within the first 24 hours after learning,

• 1:29:40Speaker 03

  you lose the chance to consolidate those memories. So sleep for memory is an all and nothing phenomenon. And you know, if you're not snoozing that first night, you're you're losing. And no amount of recovery sleep on the second or the third night was going to salvage the process because it seems as though that there is a selective time window of opportunity for consolidation. And if you miss it, unfortunately, it's gone. So in that way, sleep isn't like the bank, that you can't accumulate that debt and then try to pay it off at a later point in time. That was the first study. Then there was another study done by Colyle Smith, a great memory researcher.

• 1:30:21Speaker 03

  We didn't do the study, but I I'm so jealous because it's such a brilliant study. He was looking at different forms of sort of creative learning, which we know is more dependent on REM sleep. Learning facts, textbook information and saving that stuff. That's about deep non REM sleep. And we can speak about the mechanisms. When it comes to integrating and associating the information as we spoke about, that's more about REM sleep. So he did a very clever study. He knew that one of the major consequences of alcohol's disruption on your sleep is not just that it sedates you, not just that it fragments your sleep, but it's very potent at blocking your dream sleep. And the reason is because of the aldehydes, the metabolic byproduct,

• 1:31:05Speaker 03

  and something called acetaldehyde is the main reason that your REM sleep is demolished by way of alcohol. And he was very interested in this idea because we knew at the time that REM sleep dreaming, REM sleep dreaming was associated with this type of creative memory. So he took a group of individuals and he separated them into about four or five different groups.

• 1:31:30Speaker 03

  And everyone learned this information on the first day, which required them to sort of create, it was actually very much like learning a novel language. It was an abstract analogical language, almost like learning a computer code that's completely foreign to you. And it's not just about learning the individual pieces, it's understanding the grammatical rules of this big picture structure, associative. So they learned it on day one, and then out on day seven, they tested those individuals. So they learned it without any alcohol in their system, and then they were tested seven days later without any alcohol in the system. But here was the clever twist. One group, across those subsequent

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  six nights, they slept normally with no alcohol. The second group, the first night after learning that information, they got them essentially just to the point of inebriation, to about the point of being blood alcohol illegal, you know, 0.08%. And it was body standardized dose across individuals. So you had one group, the control group, the second group, they got a little bit tipsy on night one, and then the subsequent nights, they were alcohol free. Then there was a third group of individuals, they learned on day one sober, then they had natural sleep the first night, no drinking, then they had natural sleep the second night, and no drinking. And then on the third night, that's when they dosed them with alcohol.

• 1:32:55Speaker 03

  And then again, everyone was tested on day seven. And what did they find? Firstly, relative to the group that got a full night of good sleep, every single night across the six nights, their memory was still there, it was present. But in the group that had alcohol dosed on the first night, there was a greater than a 50% loss of their memory out on day seven because of the impact of alcohol on night one on REM sleep. But the frightening part was the night three group. So the third group, they were very good. They said, okay, I've been, let's say it's a student.

• 1:33:33Speaker 03

  You know, I've been learning on Wednesday and I've got all of this information. I'm not going to go out with my friends drinking on Wednesday night because sleep is important for memory. And then I'm not going to go out on Thursday night because I've just learned all this information. But then on Friday, surely my memories are now safe. I'm going to go out. I'm going to have a few drinks. Oh, contraire, because even alcohol on night three caused almost the same. It was about a 40% deficit in memory. And what that tells us is not just something about alcohol. It tells us that the sleeping brain is still processing and consolidating and digesting information three days after the act of learning itself. So yeah, it was a great study and you've got a fantastic memory. Yeah.

• 1:34:19Tim Ferriss?

  That's the one that blew me away. And I was like, oh, my God.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  Tough, isn't it? It's like, please, come on.

• 1:34:24Tim Ferriss?

  I know. Why does biology have to steal all the fun? But it raises all these interesting questions that, again, for not to belabor the point, but having been very involved through the Science Foundation with funding various scientific initiatives, like science costs money. There is federal funding and you have NIH and so on, but some of these studies are probably unlikely to be done anytime soon, but I wonder what the sort of fragile plasticity range is for, say, associative slash creative work versus straight declarative memorize this list of 35 things. Right? And if those windows are different, I mean, I would imagine they probably are. It's hard to say, but

• 1:35:04Tim Ferriss?

  it highlights for me, I mean, yes, we know a lot of things, but how many exciting questions there are that we don't have as of yet, really clear answers to.

• 1:35:13Speaker 03

  I think that's a really interesting point when it comes to therapy, because therapy is not just about, you know, targeting any one individual memory. It's trying to put it together, both in the context of your back autobiography catalog of knowledge and experience. And it's also often in therapy, trying to recontextualize it with new information to

• 1:35:37Speaker 03

  Dissipate the negative affect. That is an incredibly complex thing for a memory system to achieve. In other words, what you're trying to do is break previous associations, form new associations, and change the, essentially, the emotional and the informational weighting of memories and the weighting of the different connections. Dissipate some, increase others. That's a process that I suspect does not happen across one night of sleep. It happens across multiple nights of sleep, and I think it has implications for therapy too.

• 1:36:08Tim Ferriss?

  So have your therapy on Monday and not on Thursday.

• 1:36:11Speaker 03

  Exactly, before you go.

• 1:36:12Tim Ferriss?

  Drink on weekends. I mean, I'm not kidding, right?

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  I think it's very.

• 1:36:16Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like a flippant comment.

• 1:36:17Speaker 03

  No, I think it's, I don't think it is a flippant comment, especially, I think one may want to think about engineering. Look, life is to be lived. Have a drink, of course. I'm not being puritanical. But if you are, let's say, a student or you've been learning new information for a new job, or you've been learning a new skill for a new particular sport, and you know when you've been learning and you know when you probably want to have a night out, restructure those things to implement them in the smartest way possible for optimizing outcomes.

• 1:36:46Tim Ferriss?

  I will say, fortunately for me, in college, I have a, just a kind of a strange pseudo allergic reaction to most beers. So, given that I was a dirt pourer, along with most other students, that was the only thing really on offer. So I didn't drink very much. I did pull a lot of all-nighters. And what I would say, and this is not to encourage anyone to pull all-nighters, but if there's a 20 to 40% penalty, but you have not covered 80% of the material that might be on a test, you could still hypothetically net out positive, right? Which is not to say you should do it.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  No, that, I think that's very true, but one of the other interesting things that we did a study, and we never actually ended up publishing the data. We wanted to do some follow-up studies. But it comes on to this point. I think you're right in that logic, that if you've not learned 80 to 90%, even though your learning is going to be 20 to 40% deficient in its capacity, time on task in that break glass in case of emergency situation is still going to be in your favor, you could argue. Setting aside, of course, all of the deleterious consequences that come of that night of sleep, not to mention if you're driving to your exam the next day, your chances of getting in a fatal car accident are astronomically higher.

• 1:38:02Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, so bad.

• 1:38:02Speaker 03

  But let's just put that aside for now. Let's think about it from an educational context, because I wrote an op ed for when I was back as faculty at Harvard and I was asked to write a piece for the Harvard Crimson. We just published some work on sleep and memory, some of the first in that area. And I wrote the op ed and said, "The frequency of pulling all-nighters at the end of the semester for exams is so rife, and it is not the students' fault. The fault is us, the faculty. Why? Because we unload the semester with all of these inane, idiotic exams. And no wonder. What do you think is going to happen? You're putting students in a pressure cooker.

• 1:38:47Speaker 03

  Of course, they're all going to be pulling all-nighters, and it's counterfactual to the very idea of higher education. So it's not the students' fault. We are the people at fault, and we need to reorganize and restructure how we examine individuals." Now, of course, that was the last time I was ever asked to write an op ed piece for the Crimson, so I suppose that told me everything I needed to know. But it comes on to my point, which is this: what's the goal of education? The goal of education, in my mind, is twofold. The first is to brainwash you into thinking for yourself. The second is for you to gain long-term information. So we did a study where we suggested, "Okay, you haven't learned any of the information, and we tested your hypothesis."

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  And sure enough, yes, time on task returns some degree of a greater benefit if you pull the all-nighter. And they were better in terms of the testing relative to if you chose, you know, obviously not to engage in the material at all. At that point, there's no learning whatsoever. Of course, you're worse. What was interesting, however, is that in the people who had the same amount of learning opportunity but then got a full night of sleep afterwards, relative to the next day, yes, the people who got sleep were better than those people who were sleep deprived. But then we brought them back four weeks later. And then we tested them a second time. And the difference between those two groups now was magnified almost tenfold.

• 1:40:17Speaker 03

  In other words, the people who had been sleep deprived the first night, yes, they could still test to a degree, they were worse, but they still got some degree of the answers right. But the amount of catastrophic forgetting that happened across those following four weeks relative to the group that imprinted those memories and saved them the first night was far less, there was a lot less forgetting in the group that had it. And I put this in context simply because I don't want to simply educate human minds, which is what I do as a job, only for you to test well the next day, but then two years later, you've got none of that information in your brain. What's the point of higher education then? It should be long term.

• 1:40:59Speaker 03

  And so it's a very insightful suggestion that you make, and we tried to test it. I should publish some of that data.

• 1:41:05Tim Ferriss?

  Question on that study, were the groups randomly assigned or were the members of each cohort choosing which cohort they wanted to belong to?

• 1:41:15Speaker 03

  No, they were randomly assigned.

• 1:41:17Tim Ferriss?

  All right. No, I was just wondering, because I was thinking if somebody chose to be in the sleep deprivation group, their self-care might suck.

• 1:41:23Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:41:23Tim Ferriss?

  Over the subsequent four weeks.

• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  I would say that the study is partly flawed in terms of its selection bias because ahead of time, we tell them in the consent form, look, you could be in a group that is going to be sleep deprived or a group that is going to have your sleep sort of well rested and full. And so would you like to continue? So in some ways, they know that they're rolling the dice, they could or could not be sleep deprived. And so you could argue there's still a selection bias in that regard, but it's not the, we don't do selection assignment, we do random assignment.

• 1:41:54Tim Ferriss?

  Science is hard. People, I shouldn't say people, that's too broad, but a lot of folks don't realize just how hard it is.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  It is so, but it's so rewarding though. It's, you know, at the moment when we analyze the data and I'm sitting there with a student or I'm analyzing data and we finally run the statistics, at that moment in time, if I'm lucky, I know something. That has never been understood in the entirety of human civilization. And I cannot tell you how much of a thrill and a privilege that is. And so is science hard? It's brutally hard, but just that alone, the hedonic rush that you get from de novo knowledge, gosh, it's never left me and I don't think it ever will.

• 1:42:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Yeah, what a drug.

• 1:42:41Speaker 03

  It's quite the drug. Get a belt around my arm, the vein is up and I will go intravenous with that all day long.

• 1:42:48Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to ask you about sleep spindles because you mentioned that in the context of napping and how that seems to be a determining factor or a critical factor in later performance, cognitive performance. So I want to come back to see if there are any levers you can pull, even if you wouldn't recommend them for a long period of time, right? Like, are there levers you could pull to increase the frequency or amplitude of these sleep spindles? And I say that not really knowing sleep spindles well, but I'm planting that seed. I'm gonna let that germinate. But first, I want to tell you a personal experience and see how you might speak to it because I have pretty good out of the box memory. I think my hardware and genetics are reasonably good for it.

• 1:43:27Tim Ferriss?

  But I've had a few outlier experiences that are still to this day standout experiences. And one of them was while I was studying at a university in China and we were responsible at the advanced levels for being able to produce, so not just recognize, but also actively write many thousands of characters. And some of these characters have, you know, 15, 20 strokes. I mean, they're very intricate. And I had this experience of getting very sick. I can't remember exactly what caused it. Maybe I never learned what caused it, but I had a fever. And there was this big exam the next day and it was mostly characters, but in the context of essays.

• 1:44:11Tim Ferriss?

  So it was not just memorizing characters and being familiar with new terminology. Some of it all very abstract. So it's not like the cat. It's kind of like hyperinflation, that kind of stuff. And I was bedridden because I had a fever, but I knew this test was coming the next day and I had a very high fever. And the way that my studying proceeded was I would wake up for 30 minutes and study super intensely and then I would feel really sleepy and I would just kind of fall asleep right on the book on the bed. And then I would wake up and I would do another like 30 minute burst and then fall asleep. And when I went into the test the next day, I was feeling somewhat

• 1:44:54Tim Ferriss?

  better, but I'd slept a lot of the previous day and I'd studied a lot of the previous day. And it was intended to be, I want to say maybe a 90 minute or two hour exam. And I finished the exam in something like 25 minutes and I handed it in and they were like, what are you doing? And I was like, I think I'm done. And they're like, you can't be done. And I was done. Not only was I done, but I scored 95 plus percent on the test. And that blew me away. And I don't really have a great way to explain it. And maybe it was just a freak incident and I'm reading too far into it. But I've spent a lot of time around very, very, very smart people, including people who have very impressive memories. And for

• 1:45:38Tim Ferriss?

  me personally, in my life, I think I've done a good job of learning many different skills and memorizing many different things. But that particular test stands out as very unusual. Do you have any, any thoughts on that?

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  I do. And I think it comes back to the neural mechanisms of memory consolidation. So there are at least two different mechanisms, non mutually exclusive, that promote the cementing of that new information, but also the freeing up of your short term memory capacity. And what we've discovered, we and others have done this work. The first method is a file transfer mechanism that when you go into deep non-REM sleep, which by the way, is dialed up by way of infection. When you get sick, you have an increase in sleep drive, particularly for deep non-REM sleep. We know why. There are a number of immune factors, inflammatory

• 1:46:33Speaker 03

  factors that call up to play this thing called deep sleep. Those immune factors are things like cytokines, and they are very sleep inducing. That's why you typically want to curl up and get into bed. That's why you typically sleep more when you are sick. Because the human organism understands that the very best health insurance policy that it has, the very best Swiss Army knife of health, is this tool called sleep. And it brings all of the armament of sleep to the core. So part of the reason you were sleeping so much is because you were undergoing the infection. You had a supercharged amount of deep sleep, it turns out. What happens, the first mechanism of deep sleep, and it's not just the sleep spindles,

• 1:47:17Speaker 03

  and it's not just the big, powerful, slow waves of deep non-REM sleep, it's the combination of those two that we've discovered. So we've published some work where, as long as you get this perfect timing between a slow wave and then a sleep spindle, it's almost like making sure that the drummer is directly on the beat in this rhythmic sort of capacity. So you have a slow wave and then you have a sleep spindle riding on top of it, this electrical burst of activity. The slow waves, they go up and down maybe once or twice a second. The sleep spindles, they burst at about 14 or 15 times per second, 14 or 15 hertz. And it's the timing, the combined quality of these two deep sleep brainwaves that will

• 1:48:01Speaker 03

  shift memories from a short-term, vulnerable reservoir, the hippocampus, to a more permanent, long-term storage site within the brain and protecting them. And that long-term storage site is the cortex that sits on top of your brain. I mean, I don't want to do computer brain analogies, but I suppose the idea would be your hippocampus is a little bit like a USB stick, that it's very good at running around during the day and grabbing individual files from different locations, but it has a limited storage capacity. But then, at night, you shift those memories from that short-term reservoir of the hippocampus to the hard drive, the cortex, which gives you two benefits. The first is that that which you learned before sleep is now shifted over and protected and safe in the new location.

• 1:48:45Speaker 03

  But the second benefit is that because you've cleared out the USB stick of the hippocampus, when you wake up, you've got a refreshed learning ability, and so you can start acquiring new files all over again. symbiotic relationship that we've discovered. And I think that's one of the explanations for why you were able to just rip through the material, do it in a short burst. By the way, we know that that's optimal for learning. It's called masked versus spaced practice. If you try to learn in one long bout, not great. If you chunk it up into different sort of segments, your learning is much better. You still spend the same two hours of learning, but if you've spread it across four hours than two hours straight, much better. But sleep is a part of that. So that's the first of the two mechanisms.

• 1:49:31Tim Ferriss?

  That's fascinating. I have a number of follow up questions. The first is in these short burst study sessions, how do you explain the benefit of that versus longer duration? I mean, one thing that leaps to mind for me, which may or may not be true based on your read of the literature, but is that you have this primacy and recency effect in any given study session. So what that would mean is the first thing you study and the last thing you study, you're generally going to recall, say in a word list, better than things in the middle. Okay. Now, if that's true in a four hour session, you have, let's just say this almost Golden Gate Bridge, high tension wire type of dip in the middle. But if you have shorter sessions, the actual

• 1:50:14Tim Ferriss?

  drop of that high tension wire is going to be less. So your sort of average retention over each individual session will be higher. And maybe that's just me spouting nonsense, but that's kind of what jumps to mind. Does that mesh?

• 1:50:27Speaker 03

  It does mesh very well, which is that you're getting the primacy and the recency. So it's like this banana, this bow shaped where the information in the middle of the list, you don't remember very well, but the stuff at the front and the back end of it, you do remember well. Well, if you do only one learning session, you only get two stanchions, either end of the bridge of primacy and recency. But if you split it up into six chunks, then you're getting six hits of primacy and recency, which gives you a greater benefit. That's one of them. The other, we think actually relates to attention, which is that your ability to focus and attend and have a spotlight of attentional focus, you need attention to imprint information, at least consciously. There is non conscious learning too, but.

• 1:51:11Speaker 03

  When you are constantly time on task, that spotlight of attention starts to fade and your ability to focus on what you should learn decreases and therefore what you learn decreases. It's not really related to the fact of your memory fatiguing itself, but I think there's evidence for that, too. One of the things that I've always been fascinated by, and I want to do the study, but it's one of those bucket list studies. I don't think it's quite as simple as that. I at least have found in my own personal experience and heard from others that I could be learning information about organic chemistry for an hour and I just know that I'm just starting to fade. My learning is just getting miserable. It's just diminishing returns at this point.

• 1:51:56Speaker 03

  But then if I close the book and I start trying to learn French, I actually think my learning capacity is renewed and refreshed. And so I think there is something about the context of the information that the familiarity versus the novelty can also re-instantiate your learning ability. Does that make some sense?

• 1:52:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, totally makes sense.

• 1:52:16Speaker 03

  So I think this idea of fatigue, we don't really understand it.

• 1:52:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, there seem to be these compartmentalized capabilities. It's wild. It's so wild. I will say for folks also, you know, I use the example of word lists, but having attempted somewhat successfully in most cases to acquire different skills, motor skills, sports, et cetera, different capabilities, could even be something like poker, which is kind of a combination of all sorts of things, that the same type of short duration sessions and breaks helps. It's not limited to pure what we might consider book learning, at least in my experience. Let me ask two questions and I'll let you pick the first one. I'd love to hear you comment on both, though. So the first is if you wanted to put your sleep spindles

• 1:53:02Tim Ferriss?

  on hyperdrive for a short period of time. Who knows, final exam. I expect the slow wheels of institutionalized academia will probably not completely reform at the end of semester testing default that they have had for so long. So if someone were had sort of infinite resources and they wanted to put their sleep spindles on hyperdrive, how might they do that? The other one is, you mentioned a term earlier with respect to lucid dreaming. That was charlatan science. So it was considered charlatan science for a long time until it wasn't. And I would be super curious to know if there's anything that is currently, and this might make you uncomfortable,

• 1:53:43Tim Ferriss?

  but I'll do it. If there's anything that is currently considered along the lines of charlatan science that you think might similarly bear out as lucid dreaming?

• 1:53:55Speaker 03

  So in terms of the sleep spindles, and I wouldn't probably just focus on the sleep spindles. I would focus on the combination of deep slow brainwaves and the synchronisation of this. What we call is phase amplitude coupling is the technical term, which is the phase of the wave and the coupling of that, the peak of that.

• 1:54:13Tim Ferriss?

  Two people jumping on a trampoline at the same time.

• 1:54:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. Yeah. And you sort of want those to sort of just go just in this lovely rhythmic sync. We've been developing some brain stimulation technology to see if we can do this. We can certainly boost your deep sleep brainwaves with brain stimulation. We can also improve your sleep spindles. And here what we're doing is we're applying electricity through the brain where you don't feel it. It's so small, it's a small voltage, but we can stimulate at a slow frequency brainwave. And we can act like a choir to that flagging lead vocalist and boost those slow waves. But we can also stimulate at the frequency of the sleep spindles, which is a much faster frequency, somewhere between 12 to 15 hertz, 12 to 15 cycles per second.

• 1:55:00Speaker 03

  And we can also induce those sleep spindles. By the way, motor learning is another good example. We did some studies, gush, 10 years ago now at least, where we found that motor skill learning was also dependent on lighter stages of non-REM sleep, but once again on sleep spindles. And a recent group, this wasn't us, although we're doing these studies too. They applied stimulation at the sleep spindle frequency range and they were able to improve aspects of motor skill learning as well, which is kind of wild when you think about airline pilots, musicians and professional athletes. Can you actually adopt and learn some of these new skills and then supercharge them overnight with electrical brain stimulation?

• 1:55:44Speaker 03

  Is that going to be in 10 years' time, a band electrocuteical rather than a band pharmaceutical in sport?

• 1:55:52Tim Ferriss?

  Or will it be a required electrocuteical for, say, airline pilots?

• 1:55:56Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:55:56Tim Ferriss?

  And what ethical questions does that raise?

• 1:55:59Speaker 03

  Exactly. You know, and what are we trying to do? And always got to think about free lunches and if you ever get one. So I would say that that's probably one of the areas. I would also say that the sleeping brain often takes care of itself. What we've learned is that when you have people do intensive learning sessions and you measure their sleep that following night relative to when they've not been doing intensive learning sessions, lo and behold, the brain after the intensive learning session artificially for that night, it's not artificially, adaptively for that night, increases the amount of spindles that it gets. So your brain actually knows what it needs and it self medicates with greater numbers of spindle. So we may almost not need to worry about that. It's wild, isn't

• 1:56:43Speaker 03

  it? When we've sort of made that discovery.

• 1:56:45Tim Ferriss?

  Amazing piece of wetware we carry between our ears. What a thing.

• 1:56:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so the other aspect of memory that you could optimize, and people have been doing this, and I don't think it's mainstream yet, comes back to the second mechanism of why sleep is good for memory. It's not just about shifting memories from short term to long term. It's about memory replay. The story emerged back in the 1990s when a scientist called Bruce McNorton at the University of Arizona, he was measuring the memory cell activity in rats as they were running around a maze. And he was trying to learn how the hippocampus codes a maze and basically how it builds a memory circuit of the maze. And he was recording individual cells in the hippocampus. And he wasn't doing this, but you can just think of this as.

• 1:57:32Speaker 03

  Each cell has a tone to it. And as the rat would run around the maze, what he would hear is the signature of learning. That would sound a little bit like buh buh buh bum, buh buh buh bum, buh buh buh bum. As the rat was running around the maze, he was listening to the brain imprinting these memories. The brilliant part of his study was that he didn't stop recording when the session ended. He kept recording from that memory center as those rats went into sleep and went into deep non-REM sleep. And when they went into deep non-REM sleep, he kept listening. And when you eavesdrop on the sleeping brain, not only was the memory replayed, but it wasn't replayed at waking speed. It was replayed almost 10 times faster.

• 1:58:15Speaker 03

  So instead, what he was hearing, instead of buh buh buh bum, buh, it was, he was hearing rum, rum, rum, rum. As if these rats were just replaying the memory at high frequency speed. As if they're etching the memory into the glass surface of the brain and scoring the memory trace even more powerfully. So we know that memory replay is a critical component of that. Then studies, it probably restarted back with some French scientists in the early 2000s. And then there was a big paper in Nature by a German group. And they tried to hijack the system of memory replay. And it was brilliant. It was so clever. And now Ken Parler at Northwestern has been doing some of these studies.

• 1:58:59Speaker 03

  Here's what they did. They had people learn information, but they associated that information with some matter sensory stimuli. And what I mean by that is you're learning a list of words. And then during that list of words, I'm infusing a rose perfume up your nose with a mask. And what you're doing, the brain is bonding the scent, the odor of the rose with the learned information. So now you've got a bonded memory with the odor. Then what they would do is they would let those individuals fall asleep. And during deep non-REM sleep, when we believe the memories are being replayed, they started to reperfuse that rose odor up their nose.

• 1:59:42Speaker 03

  And as a consequence, the next day, there was about a forty to fifty percent improvement in their memory because they had brute forced the reactivation of the memory. It's almost as though they decided to take that memory and give it VIP access to the memory replay during non-REM sleep. And you start to cherry pick information. And then Ken Parler and others, they started to look at this and they did it even more cleverly. I think the way the game over here in America is actually called memory, where it's a set of cards all out on the table. And each card has its own pair. So you turn one card over and it's a house. And you turn another card over and somewhere in the rest of the deck, there is another house that's the match.

• 2:00:27Speaker 03

  And then there is one tea kettle and then there is one fire engine. And so they would do all of these things. But they did this on the computer and each time they were learning this sort of associative spatial layout of information, when they would turn over the tea kettle, they would hear a tea kettle sound. And when they turn over the fire engine, they would hear a fire engine sound. So once again, they were bonding a sound, a congruent semantic sound with that particular information visually. And then they let them sleep. And as they went into deep non-REM sleep, they would replay those sounds at what we call a sub awakening threshold, where it was loud enough to get into the brain. But yeah. Critical detail for people listening.

• 2:01:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, please, please, please don't do that. So what they were able to do is essentially an even more selective process of cherry picking. So now, whatever I want to serve up to the menu of this thing called sleep at night in terms of the different dishes of memory, I get to choose. I can say, no, no, no, I don't want that information. I want this particular information tonight and I'm going to develop this auditory playlist. And so the question then becomes, can you start using that method? Is the cheap version of that, that I'm going to study organic chemistry and I'm going to blaze up some green tea incense, which I personally really like.

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  And then, before I go to bed at night, am I going to put back on the green? Tea incense and start trying to stuff that back up my nose and either improve my memory or burn my house down and be a scientist no more and char grill the rest of my body because it's a desperate fire safety hazard and you'd never want to do it. But this is the idea that there's something that we're starting to understand about the sleeping brain that not just is understanding, but it gives us the ability to take control. And at that point, that becomes kind of scary because should we be taking control of a process that maybe is not really our purview to be in control of?

• 2:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds like the story of humankind in a nutshell right there.

• 2:02:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. You can almost see visions of the atomic bomb. By the way, I would say that it's a bit extreme, Matthew, but what happens during REM sleep is really quite different. It's during deep non REM sleep that those memories are replayed at, as I said, about 10 times faster. But when you go into dream sleep, and this is worked on by Matt Wilson, not me, Matt Wilson at MIT, he found that the rat brain does replay memories during REM sleep, but it doesn't replay them faster and it doesn't even replay them at waking speed. It replays them at about 0.5 times the speed. So it's like listening to this podcast and all of a sudden you hit that sort of button that says no go slow and everyone

• 2:03:23Speaker 03

  sort of slows down. And I think this has relationships to, you know, the component of time and our time perception, which is totally freaky, by the way, time and I kind of have written about this and have a few theories and we were really interested about how to do this. By the way, I haven't forgotten about your, your question as to what is charles in science and I will come back to that because I've vaguely still holding on to my memory despite being in the foothills of middle age. The time perception is interesting. When you and I, let's say, you know, we go on a long haul flight and you're lucky enough to actually fall asleep on the flight and it's dark and on the flight, when you wake up, what is one of the first things that you do? One of the first things that you

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  do is you check your watch, you check your phone because you're trying to look to the time. Because when you sleep, you lose all conscious perception of time. You've got no idea and that's the reason that you check. How long have I been asleep? Why don't you know? I don't know because I don't track time when I'm sleeping. However, when you dream, something different happens. Maybe you've had this experience, I certainly have, and many people have. Your alarm goes off and you have a snooze button and the snooze button is for five minutes. So the alarm wakes you up, you hit the snooze button and you were dreaming. And you go back to sleep and you go back to dreaming. Maybe it's the same dream, maybe it's a different dream. And then the alarm goes off again and it's been five minutes in the waking world.

• 2:04:51Speaker 03

  But you personally, you think that wasn't five minutes. I felt like I was dreaming for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, 40 minutes. As if time is different in the dreamscape. And what I've described this as is time dilation. That it's during dream sleep that we almost stretch time out. What would be the neurobiological basis of that? Well, I think it could be some of this rat work. That suggests that perhaps during dream sleep, the brain slows down the recapitulation of time. And you can have all sorts of fun with this idea. I, Christopher Nolan was wise enough to consult some sleep researchers and come up with this idea in inception

• 2:05:34Speaker 03

  where we'd have different dream levels where in the first level, five minutes in the waking world is now 50 minutes at the first level of the dream. And you go down a next level and now five minutes is now five hours. And then the next level, it's five years and the next level, it's 50 years. And you're constantly doing this sort of time dilation, as it were. It comes up with some fascinating ideas, but science just getting to that position now where we can understand time during sleep, because it is strange. It's a very strange thing, time with sleep.

• 2:06:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. If you sit with that for a minute, I mean, that is one of the. Strangest experiences is that it's very hard to fit in to our paradigms of thinking about things right now. The idea that you could have more than five minutes, you can have 40 minutes of experience, subjective experience, in five minutes of waking earth time. No matter the, if we take the fidelity of the firsthand experience to be high, in so much as it being a real experience, it raises a lot of very, very hard to answer questions.

• 2:06:50Speaker 03

  Well, I think it's fascinating too. And I have a, right now, I do have a neural hypothesis for this. And there's a part of the brain called the insular cortex that sort of is in the left and the right side, but it's buried deep inside. And it serves many different functions. But one of its functions is the mapping of your bodily state of your emotions and the updating it from one moment to the next to the next. So the insular cortex is consistently mapping the physiological state of your body from one moment to the next to the next. The reason I bring that up is because the physiological emotional state of your body contributes to time. How does it do that? I think you and I and everyone listening has also had that experience where they said, I just had

• 2:07:35Speaker 03

  this emotional experience and all of a sudden time slowed down. I remember when I was an avid cyclist and I've been knocked off my bike a few times. And I remember one time I was going through and a car came out of a junction and I could just see it and it hit me. I went through the windscreen of the car and came out. And that moment of time, which was obviously pretty traumatic, kind of pretty emotional event where you get knocked off your bike through a car windscreen, I, time just slowed down.

• 2:08:06Speaker 03

  The emotion was so intense that all of a sudden it was like, you know, when you see on a video camera, you go from a standard frame rate and all of a sudden, and you can now do it on your iPhone, you can slow it down and you can get really high resolution, slow tempo, slow motion activity. It was like that because my, the insular cortex was starting to map with, you know, much higher frame rates and therefore time slowed down. I realized I was going to be hit and I realized I'm clipped into my pedals on the bike. I'm going to clip out because I don't want to go under the car where my bike is going. I'd much prefer to go over the car, onto the

• 2:08:47Speaker 03

  windscreen and off. So I remember, and that happened obviously within milliseconds, but I remember clipping out, thinking all of this within time. And I think what's happening is that the insular cortex has some interesting changes. We see it changing in its activity during dream sleep. My prediction is that if I start to map your perception of time in dream sleep, I think it's going to be predicted by changes in activity within this part of the brain called the insular cortex, which is constantly mapping the affective visceral state of your experience consciously. So I've got a neural theory, it's hand waving, but

• 2:09:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the time machine.

• 2:09:27Speaker 03

  Time machine.

• 2:09:27Tim Ferriss?

  So if I try to then just restate that, so I ensure that I'm understanding it correctly, is it that your insular cortex?

• 2:09:35Speaker 03

  Yes, insular cortex. Yeah, insular.

• 2:09:37Tim Ferriss?

  Insular cortex, insular, yep. Insular cortex has the ability to effectively increase your frame rate in certain circumstances, which is ostensibly resource intensive and there's a cognitive load, therefore it doesn't do it all the time, right? Because, I mean, reality, perception of reality in a sense is a shorthand, a lot of the times of sorts. I mean, it seems that way at least, otherwise we would just be, you know, on psychedelics all the time experientially and that would be just unmanageable. So I suppose where I wanted to, that's, that's just a restatement. Is that a fair lay restatement of what you just said?

• 2:10:18Speaker 03

  It's a accurate statement in the sense that the insular cortex does do that mapping of time, but it does seem to do it all of the time and some of it probably non-consciously. But they have done these where, let's say that you ask people to Say, count time, count two minutes of time. And they'll just sit there and they'll just try and sense time, quantify time. And the accuracy from one individual to the next, in terms of mapping that subjective sense of two minutes, is predicted by the insular activity itself. The greater the insular activity, the greater your precision of mapped timing. So it really does seem to be one of the seats of mapped time.

• 2:10:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It makes me wonder if this is one of the unmeasured performance enhancing variables in, for instance, batters in Major League Baseball who claim to be able to see the stitching on the baseball as it travels towards them as a fastball, right? And how much of that is innate versus trained, right? If it's innate, it may be very interesting if that were a deciding factor in performance in certain sports. Let's hop to the charlatan science. So the question is not so much, what is charlatan science? Because I think that's somewhat evident in the term itself. I think most people kind of grok what that means. The question is like, what is currently being dismissed or cast aside, much as lucid dreaming

• 2:11:44Tim Ferriss?

  was for a long time, that may in fact become a credible area of inquiry in the foreseeable future?

• 2:11:55Speaker 03

  To me, and this is probably just because we've been talking about dreaming for so long, I do have a theory of dreaming that is currently not very well supported. Most science right now suggests, just as I did when it comes to dreaming, that we are amnesic, that we forget most, if not all, of our dreaming life, that it's just not imprinted into our brains. I think that there could be a day and a time in the future where we realize we have been desperately wrong about this, and that our dreaming lives are influencing our waking lives in a far more powerful way than we ever thought, I was going to say dreamed, than we ever thought possible.

• 2:12:40Speaker 03

  And here's the reason.

• 2:12:43Speaker 03

  We know that there is such a thing as non-conscious memory or implicit memory. And I think people have conflated an issue with memory that is about accessibility versus availability. And what I mean by that is you can learn some information and it can be available. It can be there in your brain, that memory is present. But you, for whatever reason, lose the IP address to the memory, so it is not accessible. And right now, we have conflated accessibility of dreams with availability of dreams, such that we say, "Well, you can't remember most of your dreams."

• 2:13:23Speaker 03

  So we assume that that memory is not available, that that memory is not present in your brain. I don't believe that's true. I think that memory could be present, available, but it's simply not accessible. And the evidence I have for this, and it's happened, you know, to me multiple times. I'll wake up in the morning and I know for a fact I was dreaming. And the harder I try, I just can't remember it and it just seems to evaporate, as if the memory is gone. And the availability of the memory, its presence in my brain, we all assume in science, is no longer there. That memory has evaporated. But then, two or three days later, I could be in the shower, washing my hair,

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  and I look at the shampoo bottle and there's something about the label that triggers the instant recollection of that dream from three days ago, and it all comes flooding back. In other words, it wasn't a problem of availability of the dream. It was a problem of accessibility of the dream memory. The memory is there, it's just that I don't have conscious access to it. Now, if that is true, and if I can prove that, and I've got some ideas. I mean, I've always got way too many experiments than I can do. But if I can prove that that's true, what that could unleash is the maybe scary fact that most of our dreams firstly are residing within us.

• 2:14:53Speaker 03

  And vast amounts of our dreaming life are non-consciously implicitly unaware to us influencing our everyday choices and our behaviors. That right now sounds a lot like charlatan science. That sounds like hooey to me. That sounds like total BS.

• 2:15:11Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh, strong words, Matt Walker.

• 2:15:13Speaker 03

  Matt Walker used to do some like, you know, fairly hard-nosed, good neuroscience data. And then towards the end of his career, he kind of lost it. He was going on podcasts and they started dreaming of all these crazy theories. And that was the end of him. And next we know he's selling books door to door in some odd country. But I think that that's, to me, that could be a wild and plausible, currently charlatan, nonsensical idea. But if we can prove it, and I think it's a testable hypothesis, that's why I entertain it, because I'm a scientist and it has to be a testable hypothesis. What does that mean for us as a species in terms of what dreams do and influence to us as a species and as a society?

• 2:15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's also, if you can't get the funding for the study, you might be able to sell it to Hollywood. I'm just imagining a film premise where you have something like waking Matt and dreaming Matt. And those are certainly one in the same in some respects, but perhaps in the same way that you can consciously attempt to recall experiences, data, things you've memorized from your waking life, perhaps through lucidity, you can query your dream memory and be more active as a participant in that mindscape.

• 2:16:34Speaker 03

  In sculpting that that experience.

• 2:16:36Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, how amazing would it be if, and I'm getting way out there now, but if in the same way that you could try to recall, perhaps with the help of someone like a family member, what your fifth birthday was like, or what happened when you graduated from elementary school. And perhaps you could have a similar attempt, perhaps successful.

• 2:17:00Tim Ferriss?

  At sort of aided inquiry to identify what your dreams were like when you were three, four, five, eight, 11, right? It opens up all sorts of narrative possibilities, if not scientific.

• 2:17:13Speaker 03

  Let's write the screenplay. I'm represented by WME. I don't know if you're with the same agency, but we should definitely like, let's do the joint screenplay and let's sell it for probably about $20.

• 2:17:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. It's like, here's a great idea. It'll cost just a mere 20 to $100 million to, to try to do a test reel.

• 2:17:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:17:33Tim Ferriss?

  Good luck.

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  I'll email Christopher Nolan and see what he wants.

• 2:17:39Tim Ferriss?

  Well, yeah, if you can email Christopher Nolan, I'd love to have him on the podcast too, but that's a whole separate conversation. So if we're looking at a few different things here, I mean, we've covered a lot of ground. I would like to chat for a second about my fever induced hypernasia, my experience with that Chinese test. And I was listening to you describe the cytokines and inflammatory markers and so on, which would be associated with that fever. And it raised the question for me of how you might simulate that without going out and eating rotten beef or whatever gave me food poisoning, because I wouldn't

• 2:18:16Tim Ferriss?

  recommend that. And then I started to think about exercise and its relationship to, or how it might affect sleep and memory. And certainly you have a whole cascade of things that can happen with different types of exercise, including brain drive neurotrophic factor and all of these various things. But I was wondering, if you go through intense exercise, let's just say intense resistance exercise, you are going to trigger, I would think, many of the same type of inflammatory responses and compensatory mechanisms that you might, when you are experiencing an infection, in a sense, and they're not identical, I'm not

• 2:18:58Tim Ferriss?

  saying that. But where I'm going is I'm wondering if there's a role for intense exercise that is pro-inflammatory in the short term for enhancing memory.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  I think there is, and it's funny you should mention that. Literally this week on my podcast, I released the first of a three part series all about sleep and exercise. And it's exactly what you predict, that exercise hugely beneficial for sleep. The principal stage of sleep that it seems to induce is an increase in the amount of deep non-REM sleep and particularly the power of those powerful big slow brainwaves. One of the interesting things is though that there is no free lunch that you, when you exercise intensively, if you look across the studies, yes, you increase the amount of deep sleep, but it does seem to come at the cost of REM sleep, that you will have a reliable and statistical drop in the amount of REM sleep.

• 2:19:55Speaker 03

  Now, I don't think that's anything to be concerned about if you're exercising. I think it's simply that, once again, Mother Nature knows what the menu of sleep stage options should be and prescribes the right one for whatever conditions you've been doing that day, whether it's physical exercise, whether it's learning intensively material, that is figured out for you. But you're absolutely right, exercise will induce that. Part of that is because of the low grade inflammation, that it's a pro-inflammatory state by way of exercise. I think there are other factors too, that probably help with that. Some of them may be related to temperature, some of them may be related to the degree

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  of parasympathetic downshoot that you get after exercise. So you get very sympathetic and stressed in terms of the nervous system, of course. But then you typically have this drop that comes down and you dip below your typical level. That's what you see in heart rate, you see it in blood pressure. That's one of the benefits of exercise. So I think this nice downshoot, shifting from the fight or flight down to the parasympathetic in part is one of the reasons why you get better sleep by way of exercise. It benefits across all ages, by the way. It's not just that young people benefit from exercise, old people do as well. You can look at different forms of exercise and right now, I don't think there's enough data.

• 2:21:20Speaker 03

  There's some data that aerobic versus resistance training may lead to somewhat greater benefits on sleep, at least on deep non-rem sleep and the consistency of your sleep.

• 2:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  You're saying on the aerobic side?

• 2:21:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, so aerobic seems to potentially outdo, if you put them head to head in a sort of Coke Pepsi challenge, basically doing cardio seems to produce a greater benefit relative to resistance training, in other words, lifting weights. But lifting weights is still better by it than doing nothing at all. So don't feel worried about the fact that, oh my goodness, I'm principally someone who just goes into the gym and lifts weights. I'm not going to get a sleep benefit. You will, relative to being sedentary. That's definitely the worst situation. But aerobic seems to, and we call it aerobic exercise, but most of the time it's anaerobic. It's where you go without oxygen. That's where all of the good stuff can happen too. Although I'm a big fan of zone two as well. Peter, thank you.

• 2:22:19Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk about that for a second. So if we're talking about anaerobic, does that mean that you're talking about cardio in quotation marks that is above your lactic threshold or otherwise sort of pushing the boundaries of your aerobic capacity as opposed to lower intensity, steady state aerobics? Because it's the devil's in the details with this stuff, right? And that's true for resistance training because there's such a spectrum of different types of resistance training. I'll just say as a quick side note for folks, do both.

• 2:22:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 2:22:50Tim Ferriss?

  You really don't want to have sarcopenia and lose muscle mass year on year as you get older. That is just a recipe for disaster. So do your weight training or resistance training. But when you say anaerobic, in this case, what type of protocol are we talking about?

• 2:23:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so people have looked at sort of HIIT routines, H I I.

• 2:23:10Tim Ferriss?

  High intensity interval training.

• 2:23:13Speaker 03

  And they've also looked at steady state cardio. Right now, I don't think we have enough data to separate between those two. Simply that both of those will provide a nice sleep benefit and a boost both in the, it's not just that it boosts the amount of deep sleep. It also boosts the continuity of your sleep, meaning that you're going to wake up fewer times throughout the night and you'll have a nice, longer consolidated bout of total sleep as a consequence. That's one of the other benefits of exercise on sleep. But again, resistance training also provides those benefits too. They're just not quite as voluminous. But to your question, no one has done the systematic study where you try to,

• 2:23:55Speaker 03

  I mean, it's only now being worked out in the field of exercise itself, which is really understanding when you put all of these different flavors of HIIT versus zone two, exactly what are the nuanced neurobiological and biophysical changes within the body and the brain. Regarding sleep, we've got no idea. There are studies that have done these different flavors, but they've never done a randomized controlled trial where you assign people to each one of these two in the same protocol and then ask, you know, basically Coke, Pepsi, Dr. Pepper, Sprite, whatever you want to line up, challenge and put them all head to head to see which one wins out. We don't know right now.

• 2:24:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's really hard, from what I can tell, to implement studies in exercise science in a really clean, precise way. And I don't want to name names, but I at many points volunteered to be a subject in experiments all over the place and in some very fancy places. And I remember being in one study, it entailed circuit training. And so you'd go to different stations and you had to do bench press, pull up, et cetera. And there were a number of other subjects in this room and were rotating around these stations. And I would see one person doing bench press, very controlled. In a slower cadence, you know, like four seconds down, two seconds up, and then the next two people be bouncing the bar off their chests using momentum. And I just thought

• 2:25:22Tim Ferriss?

  to myself, like, the time under tension and the loading here is apples and oranges. Like, you're not actually getting a clean signal because it's not standardized well enough. So that's certainly a challenge, I think, with a lot of these studies. Let me ask you, I'm gonna do a hard left turn, just because you've inspired me and I actually want to try to get to the gym now. But let's talk about urination. So I love drinking beverages. I'm very well hydrated and there's a lot of upside to that. But one of the downsides is I almost always get up and pee in the middle of the night. That is not a new thing. I mean, I'm sure that the plumbing starts to wane.

• 2:26:05Speaker 03

  It does.

• 2:26:06Tim Ferriss?

  In its strength over time, unfortunately. But this has been pretty consistent for me. I drink a lot of liquids. So the question is, and I'll say a few more things, but the question is, what are some approaches for minimizing this as an issue, as a problem? Because it does interrupt that continuity of sleep. And I see a marked difference in my feelings of restfulness on subsequent mornings when I do or do not get up to go to the bathroom. So one is drink less. Okay, fine. I seem to be very bad at following that advice. Another is, hey, take something like a desmopressin, which is an antidiuretic hormone, which no one should do without medical supervision. I tested that. The problem

• 2:26:48Tim Ferriss?

  is, I ended up experiencing orthostatic hypertension, where I would stand up and get really dizzy.

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

  Dizzy and then, yeah, potentially pass out.

• 2:26:55Tim Ferriss?

  I'd get really dizzy and I thought, wow, that's dangerous. I don't want to screw around with it. Are there any other techniques or thoughts that you have on this particular issue? Because I know a lot of men in particular seem to contend with it as they get older.

• 2:27:08Speaker 03

  I've definitely experienced this as I'm getting older. I used to sleep throughout the night. Now I probably get up, you know, on average, at least once every second night to go to the restroom. We don't have a particularly good approach to this in terms of medication. There's nothing that there are a few medications out there to try to decrease the likelihood and the frequency of those. And I think those medications are more about trying to increase the expulsion of urine such that before bed, you expel more of that fluid. And so less is left as you are casting off into sleep to trigger the awakening. But there's nothing that I know that helps suppress that reflex and that desire during

• 2:27:53Speaker 03

  sleep. And it's really then at that point, unfortunately, down to how do I taper off my fluid intake throughout the late afternoon in the early evening? And is it worth it to me to get that continuity of sleep? Is it that I don't stop drinking the number of drinks that I have, but starting at 5:00 PM or 4:00 PM, I actually will just have half the size of the drink that I normally would. So I don't fool my brain into thinking you are in a famine of fluid. I still have the same number of drinks. So my habit is still satisfied with having three or four, whatever drinks I'm having.

• 2:28:38Speaker 03

  But the volume is halved and therefore the psychology is still easier to adopt, but the impact is reduced by 50%. That's one of the ways that you could try to, or at least I've tried to get around the effect. And when people speak to me, I advise them that that's what one method that you can try to fool your brain. Don't feel as though you're you're stopping yourself from doing what you normally like to do, but you still get half of the fluid intake. Other than that, it's very challenging.

• 2:29:07Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. All right. Well, I'll try the Dr. Walker half glass trick tonight and see how that goes. I'll report back. But this is up. It's so much fun. We've covered a lot of ground. Is there anything that you would like to mention? Anything you'd like to point people to? Certainly, I think we could refresh where people can find you online, just so they can track you down and see what you're up to. So please feel free to add your your closing comments.

• 2:29:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, people can find me. I'm on Twitter at Sleep Diplomat. I'm on Instagram at Dr. Matt Walker. That's D R M A T T W A L K E R. And I also have a podcast, if you're not sick and tired of my voice, and it's creatively called The Matt Walker Podcast, which can be found on all platforms. And that's probably about it.

• 2:29:59Tim Ferriss?

  All right. Well, thank you for taking the time.

• 2:30:02Speaker 03

  Not at all. Thank you for the privilege of being a repeat offender, a second repeat offender on the podcast for all of the sins that I've offered in terms of sleep advice. So thank you for having me.

• 2:30:13Tim Ferriss?

  I'm all about repeat offenders. And of course, thank you for putting on the gloves.

• 2:30:20Tim Ferriss?

  To everybody listening, we will have links to everything that we discussed in the show notes, as per usual, at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, try those half glasses of water out, see how that works.

• 2:30:35Speaker 03

  Add a little bit of

• 2:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  Let me know.

• 2:30:36Speaker 03

  A little bit of sex in between as well, and maybe you'll just not

• 2:30:39Tim Ferriss?

  Little bit of sex.

• 2:30:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, a little bit of sex sprinkled here and there. And if you don't have a fantastic partner, then maybe your right or left hand will do the trick.

• 2:30:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:30:49Tim Ferriss?

  For that 47%.

• 2:30:51Speaker 03

  Half glass full in left hand, keep your right hand free, and you're good to go for sleep.

• 2:30:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, be safe out there, folks. And as I mentioned, until next time, thanks for tuning in.

• 2:31:04Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 2:31:49Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Magic Spoon. Magic Spoon is a low carb, high protein, and zero sugar cereal that I eat all the time. I had a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago after a short workout. And it's so easy to prepare. It's instantaneous practically, and you get a lot of goodness. You get a lot of bang for the buck.

• 2:32:32Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:33:17Tim Ferriss?

  And another fun fact, my friends are also obsessed with Magic Spoon. One of this podcast's most popular guests, Dr. Peter Attia, routinely crushes 6 to 7 servings at a time, that's a lot, by the way, with practically no glycemic response, that's blood sugar response, and he's checked this with a glucometer. He likes it so much that he invested, and two other friends, very fine gentlemen, also past podcast guests, Kevin Rose and Ryan Holiday, also invested. So check them out. Go to magicspoon.com/tim and grab a variety pack, or my favorite cocoa, or anything else. My friends love this stuff, their kids love this cereal, so whatever strikes your fancy, but you should check it out. My listeners, that's you, get $5 off and a 100% happiness guarantee when you use code TIM at checkout.

• 2:34:00Tim Ferriss?

  So if you don't love it, they'll give you a full refund, no questions asked. One more time, that's magicspoon.com/tim.

• 2:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat is my personal nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning, throwing blankets off, pulling the back on, putting one leg on top, and repeating all of that ad nauseam. But now I am falling asleep in record time. Why? Because I'm using a device that was recommended to me by friends called the Pod Cover by Eight Sleep. The Pod Cover fits on any mattress and allows you to adjust the temperature of your sleeping environment, providing the optimal temperature that gets you the best night's sleep. With the Pod Cover's dual-zone temperature control, you and your partner can set your sides of the bed to as cool as 55 degrees or as hot as 110 degrees. I think generally in my experience,

• 2:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  my partners prefer the high side and I like to sleep very, very cool. So stop fighting, this helps. Based on your biometrics, environment, and sleep stages, the Pod Cover makes temperature adjustments throughout the night that limit wake-ups and increase your percentage of deep sleep. In addition to its best-in-class temperature regulation, the Pod Cover's sensors also track your health and sleep metrics without the need to use a wearable. So go to eightsleep.com/tim, all spelled out, eightsleep.com/tim, and save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover. That's eightsleep.com/tim. Eight Sleep currently ships within the US, Canada, and the UK, select countries in the EU, and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/tim to save $250 on the Eight Sleep Pod Cover.