The Paradox of Sleep with Matthew Walker & Neil deGrasse Tyson

Coming up on the special edition of Star Talk is all about

sleep

and we learned what it is, why we need it, how it affects our perception of time and how we actually go crazy when our head hits the pillow as we fall a

sleep

. up on Star Talk, this is Star Talk Neil degrass Tyson, your personal astrophysicist here, I've got Chuck Nice, my co-host, Chuck, hey, what's up? Neil, okay, Gary O'Reilly, hello, Neil, okay, and this is a special edition of Star Talk, all about sleep, sleep. Gary, what have you prepared today? Well sleep Neil, we all do it, some better than others, but why and why haven't humans evolved to do without it?

I've been wondering my whole life that we're going to get somewhere now, right? It is Cadian rhythms and chronotypes that really define a good night's sleep. What will it be like to sleep in space? There's a lot to understand so let's find an expert Neil if you'd like to introduce our guest and just because sleeping at night doesn't make you an expert okay we need a real expert we need a real expert we've got Dr .Matt Walker. Matt welcome to start talking. Oh, it's a pleasure and a privilege, and I have to say I'm a bit. intimidated by the intellectual power on display in you three, but I am, um, it's a privilege, you mean me, well, let me be agnos profess the University of California Berkeley, yes, I'm applying it, um, oh no, do not do it. let yourself be fooled by that whole accent um yeah my um I think someone last week suggested that if I was stupider you'd have to water me twice a week so keep in mind love that's a lot of fun so teacher of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California Berkeley, that presumably means you have an official appointment in two departments, it's that correct, in fact, and you are the founder and director of the center for the science of human sleep at UC Berkeley, with Center written c n t, is that correct in my notes here that is very correct how evil of you clearly clearly someone someone is not getting enough sleep to spell correctly oh there will be so many instances of my faas that you will be able to point to and say this guy must be on for three hours of sleep idiocy, so uh incoming and author of the bestseller why we sleep unlocking the powers of sleep plus dreams and you're the Ted Talker, why wouldn't you be after all that and you're the host of the Titled Matt Walker's podcast boring, what's up with that?

I know you know the team around me. We had one of these three or four day retreats discussing titles and I think the innovation there was impressive. The M Walker podcast, um, you can see that We are a creative group in this domain so deeply that in the end we will agree that they need to sleep more, okay, that's what's going to happen here, so what I want to know It's why we need sleep. I see it as a deficiency of the human brain if aliens came and just watched us, we just lay down and beat the Semians for a third of the Earth's rotation, you would wonder what's wrong with these people, isn't that amazing?

And when you think about it from an evolutionary perspective, it doesn't make sense because first we didn't find food, we didn't find a mate, we didn't reproduce, we didn't take care of our young and we were still vulnerable to predation, so on any of those five reasons, but especially in all of them. A collective sleep should have been strongly selected in the course of evolution, but the fact that in every species that we have carefully studied, even in the ancient evolutionary species, every species seems to sleep or have something like sleep, what that means is that sleep evolved with life itself on this planet and then has heroically worked its way through every step along the evolutionary path, which must mean that sleep is absolutely vital and in fact, it was once told to Neil that if sleep does not meet a critical set of needs function is the biggest mistake The evolutionary process has ever made a way I'm going I'm going I'm going with the ladder sorry man after my own heart drowns no no no let's just get the honesty on the table get it up there in front, please, please, but now we have a great collection of science that suggests that, why didn't Mother Nature make a false spectacular power by creating this thing called sleep, worms also sleep when You say animals, you're not just talking about vertebrates or mammals.

I mean all animals, yes, all of them, yes, even earthworms, which are so old from an evolutionary perspective, have states of activity and inactivity, and if I showed you on a video, it would be quite revealing that they seem to have it. , it may not be a dream. We call it torpor in these species it's the kind of fancy way that earthworms have of saying you look like you're asleep we can't ask you the question, yes, you know, but yes, it could be, it could be them. You're just lazy, you know, it's true, they're lazy at very predictable times during the 24 hour period, right, huh, but despite that, you know when they put their feet up, who knows what they're seeing, maybe it's an earthworm, Netflix, no.

I know, but they do it in a very stable predictive way. I hate using this term, but you'll know exactly what I mean. Higher level animals require more sleep than lower level animals. It is a very interesting question: can we understand the functions of sleep? through philology through different species and it has been Fishlyn, we have cats that can do that, that bat has nothing that my cat, sorry, all animals ending in can do at least 19 hours a day, yeah , it seems so, but but then if you look at elephants, for example, they sleep maybe only two or three hours and you think, well, is there a correlation between size?

So absolutely no, there is no correlation, it's about brain size, it has nothing to do with the brain size is about prey versus predator and your status in that hierarchy at all. Wow, it's a little bit about the complexity of your nervous system, but not much. An omnivore, a herbivore, a carnivore, that protects, no, no, um, if you are regulated by temperature Thermoregulators or are not so warm-blooded or cold-blooded, yes, warm-blooded, cold-blooded, but we are starting to understand that it's actually a complex set of all these different things, metabolic rate seems to be predictive, um and so if you have a higher metabolic rate, your idea would be good, then you need more sleep to restore, which is The opposite of a higher metabolic rate, you need to stay awake longer in order to eat enough calories to keep your metabolic rate higher. metabolic rate and therefore it is a very complex question, but from your point of view, no, there is no simple correlation that explains the great variation in sleep between species, so we have heard things about sleep rhythms and maybe leading the pack are circadian rhythms, could you just ditch? some light on that, I think Chuck had a question about that too, yeah, well, no, I was just wondering if, like earthworms, they had a circadian rhythm because that's one of the defining attributes of sleep, it's the fact that you really do it in kind. of the same time in the cycle of the day, you are absolutely right, so that is one of the ways, so let me start with what Cadian rhythms are and break down the term um Circ roughly and Rhythm, we all know what that term is so C which is the same Latin word when Circa 18 yeah, something's good, cool exactly and then you have um Dian from the Latin derivative of d so in other words, it's a pace of about or about a day, why?

Not exactly one day, well, when we did studies where we took human beings, there's a famous study with a professor Nathaniel um cman and um and they went to Mammoth Cave. I remember the study in America without them just living the day they wanted the right thing and they just lived and wanted to see what happens to their weak sleep rhythms, they just abandoned all the times and the answer was no, no, they stuck to a very close, but it was close to 24 hours, but it wasn't. precisely 24 hours when they isolated themselves from the outside world, specifically the most predictable thing on this planet, which is that since the beginning of time, unless you want to correct me, the sun has always risen and the sun has always set and sets that The nature of the 24 hour rhythm MC and when they decoupled from that rhythmic signal the body still maintained its 24 hour rhythm, it was almost a little bit behind and it ran for about 24 hours and about 30 minutes and now we discovered all of this in large studies . and it's about 24 hours and 12 minutes that we are a little late if we are disconnected from the outside world, that's why I always want to sleep 30 more minutes after the alarm clock, that's why please do that, please do that, um or Better yet, remove the alarm clock and add an extra half hour exactly, yes, but if it were to disconnect you like they did with the Mammoth cap, you just move forward in time and keep adding about 50 minutes, so that's why Define it as about 24 hours, but beautifully when we live in the real world we have signals from that 24-hour period like light, but we also feed at certain times those signals which are what we call zeit gers from the German term time Giver act. like little fingers to take out the dial of your wristwatch and reset it to 25, 24 hours each day so you don't go off track.

But back to Chuck's question, that's one of the ways we define sleep in species where it's difficult to place it. electrodes or place electrodes on their heads so that we can look at whether they do that state of activity and inactivity in a predictable 24-hour rhythm. Yes, another one is also reversible because that is what differentiates it, it is one of the things that differentiates sleep. of death, which is that when an organism goes into this state of inactivity, yes, I was going to say it's not the only one, don't worry, but if you push the worms then they seem to come back to life as if they were absent.

Wakefulness, so when you have circadian rhythms and you're stuck in a 24 hour time cycle for an obviously clinical experiment, what happens if you're an early riser or a night L and you call those right Chron, they're morning people? and they're morning people and they're night people, so how are we doing? yeah, they're party people and then there's everyone else plus Gary, the term for your brain isn't software, it's neoprene clothing, we have different types of wetar, okay, it sounds like I'm scuba diving, but I'll stick with it, right? So? It's a weird thing and we're defined by our chronotype and our chronotype, by the way, whether you're the night type, the morning type or somewhere in between, it's about a third of the population, um, it's not your fault, it is.

It is largely genetically determined and there are at least 22 different genes that we now know will dictate the fate of your chronotype. They give it to you at birth. Unfortunately, you can't change it much, but how does this fit with that weird kind of circadian rhythm? I just told you that everyone has them, but these chronotypes, as I said, are essentially three types and they are genetically determined. The interesting thing about them is how they change what I just told you about the 24-hour clock, the Escadian rhythm. I told you I had an augmentation where a dinal species was active during the day and then slept at night active during the day, so how does chronotype fit into your innate Cadia rhythm?

The chronotype dictates whether that type of sine wave was that oscillation of upward activity and then the lull of sleep falls into the 24-hour format, so we all have a Sadrian rhythm, but if you're a morning type, your peak activity will come earlier in the clock format, whereas if I am neutral, which I am. I'm just going to sit somewhere in the middle and then, you know, the people at the party, uh um, say whatever, yeah, their peak activity won't start to happen or increase until the afternoon, everyone has a rhythm of 24 hours where that rhythm is found on the clock face. and your position is dictated by chronotype, does that make any sense?

So the chronotype is like a dial that establishes where you fall that way, yes exactly, hello Star Talk fans, you know there's been a lot of talk about comedians being made up. stories and then pass them off as real life experiences and that is why I invite you to get tickets to the taping of my comedy special on November 17 and 18 and check the facts, the special is titled Chuck Nice just smart enough and I hope I'm smart enough not to lie, but there's only one way to find out and that's to go to Chuck KNC comic.com and get tickets to Chuck Nice Smart Enough at the Midnight Theater in Manhattan on the 7th, 1st and 18th.

November. shows up every night and remember that facts don't lie, but maybe Matt, I get it, you can describe what you already see in us, but scientifically what I really want to know is what the hell is going on inside of us while we are. asleep and now we know it and we know it from a perspectivebroad in terms of Hope's brain activity and we also know it within a cell itself in terms of gene expression and everything else, I mean, we've got it cut out. and the diced dream in many ways, but I'll just give you a few highlights above in the brain, it's stunning, it's a spectacular display of electric symphonic ballet and believe me, if you saw it you would be amazed and in fact we have even We extracted these brain waves from the sleeping brain and converted them into sound files, and you could, it's incredible, what happens is when we're awake we have very fast frenetic activity, your brain wave pattern or patterns, sorry, I should say that They go up and down many, many times per second, maybe 50 60 times. per second, as you start to fall asleep, those brain waves start to slow down and when you enter the deeper stage of what we call non-rapid eye movement sleep, you have two main types of sleep: non-rem sleep and non-REM sleep. -fast. rapid eye movement sleep rapid eye movement sleep and non-rem sleep you can divide it into light non-rem deep non-rem when you enter deep non-rem something incredible suddenly begins hundreds of thousands of brain cells decide to synchronize in their firing in unison then they all start They fire together and then they all go silent together and they all fire together, it's almost like this mantra chanting and it produces huge, powerful, deep, rhythmic, slow brain waves that have on top of them these incredible bursts of electrical activity called brain spindles. dream. and then this is awesome and then you go into REM sleep and then the brain goes once again frantic, in fact, if all I had was your Neel brainwave activity during REM sleep and I was in the other room and you I couldn't tell in bed if you were awake or in REM sleep, in fact, some parts of your brain are up to 30% more active when you are in REM sleep and dreaming, which is impressive and then down in the body, my God.

As you go into deep sleep, it provides you with almost the best form of naturalistic blood pressure medication you could ever want, as your heart rate drops, your blood pressure drops, your immune system revs up, returning to your brain. , there is a cleaning. system that begins to pulse and eliminates all toxins, so it is literally an energetic cleanse for the brain at night. There are so many surprising things. These are just some of what I could give you. Well, listen, I have to go drink. a nap so my job here is done J you then sold me I'm ready to go given these things are happening Matt is the brain capable of improving mental health Does it have an effect on things like dementia?

It does so radically. It alters both what we call your cognitive functions, that is, learning memory and also your emotional and mental health processes, in terms of emotional and mental health, we have done a lot of work on my sleep center, first of all, on This thing about sleep and in particular, Dream Sleep seems to provide a form of almost nighttime therapy where it will take difficult painful experiences and essentially act almost like a nighttime calming balm and just take the sharp edges off of those painful experiences so it comes back to you. the next day and don't feel comfortable.

They don't feel as bad anymore, they don't feel as painful anymore, so it's not time that heals all wounds, but it's time during sleep and specifically sleep that offers that emotional convalescence, so to speak. , so that's one of the mental health benefits. Wow, by the way, there was a great quote Joseph um and Joseph Cosman, an American businessman, once said that the best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep and that's exactly what we've discovered in the lab. Your other question, Gary is. Very interesting about cognitive function and Alzheimer's disease, what we have discovered is that there are at least two toxic proteins underlying Alzheimer's disorder: one is the amalo protein, the beta amalo protein and the other is called a protein and yes, What we discovered is that during sleep, and particularly deep sleep at night, there is this pulsating sewer system called the glymphatic system.

You have one in your body, it's called the lymphatic system in the brain, it's called the glymphatic system and it only kicks into high gear during deep sleep. it sort of removes all the metabolic detritus from day two of the proteins, the toxic proteins that sleep will remove every night if you get enough are these two Alzheimer's proteins, amalo and Tow protein, and that's why we find such strong links between lack of sleep throughout life and the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease, so from that perspective it's a way to almost know how to get a good night's sleep, is there anything being worked on to figure out how you can induce Is that artificial or is it cleaning? of this amalo plaque in your brain is not important enough to be able to protect yourself from Alzheimer's, uh, completely, but the mechanism itself is something that we could replicate artificially to help that process or just do it.

Fantastic question and it's actually a question we've addressed, we started developing a technology based on something called transcranial direct current stimulation, it sounds like science fiction, more your stuff than mine, but I promise it's not like that, you apply electrodes on the head and insert them. a small amount of voltage in the brain and it's so small that you don't normally feel it, but it has a measurable impact and if you apply that stimulation during sleep during those big, powerful, deep, slow brain waves, when we get this clearing, you can amplify the size of those deep sleep brain waves and we can almost, for example, double the benefit that deep sleep brain waves give to your memory the next day and that would mean a little bit of sleep, you can hide a shorter sleep so that feel like you slept longer, well, we don't know, we don't know if improving the size of these brain waves reduces your overall need for sleep and if we could answer your point, Neil, I would suggest that I can almost buy compressing sleep by increasing the quality it's almost like I'm, you know, I'm kind of like a Zip file of sleep.

I just compress your need for sleep by improving the quality and it's a short period, I mean that would be spectacular, we haven't found evidence for that yet, but we have found the ability to manipulate this brain wave activity and we've since broken it down into a new company to develop the device. What intrigues me is the way you describe the different parts of the sleep cycle, the dream, the sleep session, um, I hadn't thought about this before now, if you sleep less than your full allotted time or are in some travel regime where there is a time zone change and everything you can get. a little sleep serves only some parts of that portfolio of needs and leaves out other parts of that same portfolio, so are there effects?

I mean, you mentioned Alzheimer's, but in general, why can't I sleep a little more afterwards? I have to stay up and shoot all night. or tonight is a very interesting question, can you essentially? You know, catching up on sleep when you missed it. Catch up and we say that all the time. uh I'm having a tough week this week, but on the weekend don't worry, I'm going to catch up, unfortunately a lot of the sleep processes not all of them really, but a lot of them don't work like the bank. you can't rack up a debt and then expect to pay it off at some later time sleeping in many ways and learning by rote is a good example, it's a pervasive phenomenon, meaning if you don't sleep within 24 hours Hours after learning those facts , you may miss the opportunity to consolidate and hit the save button on those memories, so you end up forgetting the information instead of remembering it.

Yes, I read the abstract of a study that talked about that and what they did was they measured the cognitive retention of people who slept immediately after learning something compared to those who didn't and interestingly, if you want to get good results in a exam, go to bed, study and go to bed, you're supposed to go to sleep. During class, does that help? Well, do you know what's in my C? I teach a large course here of about five or 600 students on campus, the science of sleep, and at the beginning of the semester I say based on what I know about the benefits. of sleep about learning in memory um, it's the greatest form of flattery for me to see that people like them can't resist the edge to strengthen what I'm telling them by falling asleep in class, so feel free to go ahead and flow.

Awareness throughout my course. I won't be offended at all Matt, is there a connection between dreams and time? We've had this question before in previous episodes, but without a sleep expert, we all watched the Christopher Noan movie, uh, Inception. right, what time frames embedded with inur and Matt may have had a part in that, did you have a part in that? I can't confirm or deny it, but what I'm going to tell you is very consistent with the movie. So time is so fascinating when it comes to sleep because it's a total

paradox

, on the one hand, you lose all sense of time, which means if you fall asleep on a plane, you know, let's say, on a transatlantic flight, when you wake up, which one is first?

What you usually do is look at your watch and say: you know how long I've been asleep, why couldn't you keep track of the time while you were sleeping? No, then, you have done it, you have lost your sense of time. during sleep on one level, but then the second level is that when we fall asleep and enter dream dream, something different happens over time and we have a neural explanation which I will come back to, but what is different in dream dreamlike? is that you can get what we call time dilation and this comes to the movie Inception where in the first level five minutes less in the real world is maybe 50 minutes in the first dream level and then maybe it's five years in the world . second level and then maybe it's 50 years in the third level now we don't really have these levels so to speak, we really just go into the dream state, but it's appropriate because when you go into dream, and here's a good example, Let's say you have a snooze button and your arm goes off and the snooze button lasts three minutes, so you press it and you go back to sleep and you go back to the dream you're having and then the alarm goes off again three minutes later, but definitely You could tell me no, that wasn't three minutes.

I was dreaming for what seemed like 15 minutes, so time stretches and dilates, which means yes, starting light, you have more time as you enter the dream, why would this be? If you watch rats running through a maze as they learn the maze, the memory centers in the maze encode the maze, so it's like you listen to the brain cells as they learn the signature of the Maze and then scientists have let those rats sleep. and then they listen to the activation of those brain cells and the amazing thing is that when you go into REM sleep, unlike non-rem sleep, where things speed up in REM sleep, it goes from BU to BU, it's about 0.5 times that like take this podcast and hit your podcast player, play it at 0.5 times for me, that's actually what the dream is like and maybe it provides an explanation for why we have time dilation and why you can create beautiful movies like Inception and now At what level is it going well?

The one that worries me the most is the one that goes away. I'm trying to adapt to CCT. Matt, how about premonitions? Because I got into this before about a premonition. I have, but do we have the ability to see the future while dreaming or are we literally just dreaming? No, the answer is no, no, no, we really want it to be true. Books are written about it, it is in, it is in religion. Text messages ask Oh Neil, I'm so glad you're in the world. Well, at first glance you're right, and then if you look at some of the data, you start to think, "Oh, he's right?" because there are some cases where people and this is what people will tell me: look, the FBI has a documented person who two days before called them and said, look, there will be, unfortunately, a plane crash, it will be, you know. , this specific line and it's going to crash in this state, um, it's going to crash here in the United States and they think you know it's just part crack and the FBI should arrest him because they just think this person is crazy and then, I've here, you know, two days. later and now that person looks like a culprit and they find out that's not the case, that seems deeply prophetic when that person tells you during the interview that I had this dream, it was a dream that told me this was going to happen, it felt so real and now I just saw it happen and I want to go back to my phone call and you think okay there has to be something to this, well this is where there are lies, damn lies and statistics, because if you think aboutFirst of all, we have about four to five REM cycles each night and let's say that for every REM cycle we only have one dream, that's probably not true, but let's be conservative in our calculation, so it's about four to five dreams per person. per night in the current six billion. human beings, so if you do eight eight eight billion correctly and let's assume that of those that you know, seven are at the stage of development where they are actually dreaming, so I become conservative again when it comes to mathematics, as we would say, If you calculate them, it means that It is very likely, just by statistical chance, that someone somewhere on the planet tonight will have a dream that turns out to have some degree of prediction of something that will happen in the world tomorrow.

Unfortunately, it's just a statistical fluke, Neil. You are a gem, you are completely right again and we remember the successes and not the mistakes, right? Do you call the FBI every time you have some kind of premonition of a crime? Do you know what it is. I dreamed that someone killed my wife and it wasn't like that. happened what's happening what's happening why I can't escape so many problems with the good lady yeah so you've busted that myth with statistics and damn lies in my opinion Matt so when we go into a dream state and sleep, Is there a point we are entering? a psychotic state by definition, yes, because when you start dreaming you start seeing things that do not exist, then you are hallucinating, you believe things that could not be true, then you deceive yourself, you become confused like the monster that is chasing.

I that feels immensely real and you know, ask your heart rate and it will confirm that you know a lot, um and so on, and you lose sense of time, place and person, so you suffer from disorientation, you have wildly fluctuating emotions what we call being. affectively labile and then, how wonderful you wake up, you woke up this morning and you forgot most, if not all, of that dream experience, so you're suffering from amnesia, which means actively, I mean, unstable, almost like a pendulum, in an unpredictable way, where you are simply unstable. so it's a very labile state and that way you know through all those five hallucinatory things that you're delusional, you know you're amnesiac if you were to report any of those symptoms to me when you're awake you know you would be seeking serious psychological psychiatric treatment, but for reasons which we barely understand now, seems to be a perfectly normal biological and psychological reason, but you are essentially completely psychotic when you drink.

Good to know, good to see. that things don't change when I go to sleep welcome, you know, you invite a guest on the show and what they end up doing is accusing you of becoming psychotic. I have a question on zero gum, you know, I think about a nice cozy night. sleep is a fluffy pillow a nice cozy duvet blankets uh in zero gravity your body doesn't lean in any direction One Direction you just float there so do you think your brain knows we have? You can ask the astronauts this, of course, but I have NE.

I never thought about doing it, does your brain have to have some sense of gravity? Vector while you're asleep, do you think so, like your inner ear for proper sleep, fascinating, uh, ask and you know we've done some work. with NASA, um, with sleep, and it's a really important challenge for a number of reasons, but first of all, what we found is that that gravitational vector, as you described it, fortunately is not so influential that any particular stage of the dream or your whole dream becomes, um, ungenerated, like that's not the word, but um, it's not necessarily a problem there, however, there are some other problems.

The first is simply pragmatic: if you are floating and you are asleep, you are going to start. When you collide with things, you're always going to wake up, so first you have to fight this, yes, tie them exactly floating, you know the people who work the night shift, writing, who is that, oh, it's Gary floating . you know, and people who snore, you know there's additional propulsion, well, actually, that would be great because what you could do is, uh, you could, since there's no gravity, hopefully, that means you wouldn't be able to collapse the airways and snoring. be less, it's actually a really interesting hypothesis, one that I don't know.

I suspect that most astronauts are so fit that they probably don't snore. A great hypothesis. I love it. There is the first concession. But yes, then you have to take charge against this. A kind of big, cylindrical, metal cigar, that you're floating around and that's the first thing. The second strange thing is that when you're in sort of zero gravity, when you exhale if there wasn't enough circulation and you're strapped in and you're in the same position, what starts to happen is this cloud of carbon dioxide builds up around you. CO22 bubble and obviously it can lead to a very quick end that takes you off the pole just to make it clear that the space station is drafty. in it, it would circulate through the air and, in addition to the CO2 leaving at body temperature, which is presumably warmer than air temperature, it would rise on Earth and not on the space station, but that's what it is. drafts and so much so that if you let something go, if you let something go, it will eventually go to the right vent, which is why everything is closed with Velcro.

If you play something wrong, check the vent, yeah, Matt, you know, talking to the space station. How many sunsets and sunrises do you get in space in a 24 hour period for an astronaut or on a space station and how do you work with that? Here is the challenge, this is the main reason, not the loss of the gravitational vector, but the fact that your circadian rhythm that we talk about now is completely confused because let's say you are on the International Space Station as an example, you will see every 24 hours 16 sunrises and 16 sunsets, so your body is getting the signal that we all get in a nice, predictable way once during the day once Sunrise once Sunset is getting the signal of okay, it's time to be awake um oh no now it's Leep oh no and you're awake and no no no how connected Are we in the sun?

We live in a completely illuminated night. I live in New York City, you know, it doesn't get dark. I never take my eyes off my phone, so I mean, you know, we're farmers, not, you know, we. Not everyone is awake, it's time to go to sleep, the sun is time to wake up, so do we think it really matters in modern society? I'll still give you 24 hours, but do you really give a damn about the sun, you'd think B I'm not sure I've ever heard you say that, right, I don't give a damn about the sun, take that song, yeah, well, speaking of um, the way and der to, like you just described it, um, yes, yes, it matters. and in fact, it is part of one of the contributing reasons why there are so many sleep interruptions and sleep problems, such a sleep problem that we see in society right now, we have become dislocated from this natural edict of the rise and set of the Sun We are a darkness deprived society in this modern era and we need darkness at night in particular to help regulate the release of hormone called melatonin which increases human sleep and we can partly do this with natural light when we enter.

At night, it's no wonder where sleep is interrupted because our brain is completely confused. It is constantly at a low light level. Matt I. I might be a good subject for your sleep studies because I can sleep anytime, anywhere, in virtually any position, for almost any period of time. I'd say you know the power nap that people talk about, yes. I can take it or not if I have a couple of minutes. I say, let me sleep for 20 minutes and I'll get up and let me sleep for an hour and a half let me sleep for 45 and I'll do this and at night I can sleep eight hours or five hours depending on what I need to do that day and I can going to sleep within a few minutes of laying down, you know in some kind of comfortable position and I've met so many people who have a hard time sleeping.

I said, what do you mean you have to go to sleep well or stay up and do something productive? Don't lie in bed. Say I can't. go to sleep and then go do something, mow the lawn, I mean, yeah, yeah, at 11:30 at night, get out the lawnmower, your neighbors are going to love you, is it true that people sleep in anytime, anywhere and I don't drink coffee? I don't have a relationship with caffeine, so I don't depend on it to stay awake or asleep. I think it's unusual from the people I talk to, it's unusual and it's especially unusual the older you get.

I'm not suggesting you're old, but I'm an old fool. I'm an old grump right now, so trust me, I'm right there with you, in the foothills of middle age, at least right now. starter, what I would say is that, first of all, you might be one of those unique people who has an incredible appetite and hunger and seeks to sleep in such a way that the speed with which you get to sleep is surprising and you are in the 1 % higher, the other thing we would sometimes want to do is check the quality of your sleep because if you can consistently fall asleep anytime, anywhere and for any duration, which is what you just described to me at that time, it's You might be worrying a little bit that you have a persistent debt to sleep quality because there's something about your sleep that may not be enough, so with that debt you're constantly yearning for your brain to have this constant hunger because it's constantly in a state. fasting so to speak, when it comes to quality sleep, so it's no wonder that every time you give your brain a chance, it thinks it's time to feast because, gosh, I have some kind of sleep deficiency. macronutrients for sleep, right?

Or it could have been that she's just a closet narcoleptic. no, I'm serious, but also when I wake up I'm pretty cheerful when I wake up, I'm not one of the right ones, yeah, and unfortunately there's not necessarily a strong alignment between your subjective sense of how well you're doing. I slept last night, so I would say when it comes to that need for sleep, we just want to check the quality of your sleep to make sure you're sleeping. Okay, time to put on electrodes. Well, I'll bring you any time. We'll fly out, we'll come and apply them tonight, tell me where you live and once I know where you live, I'll be careful Matt, this has been a pleasure.

Neil degrass Tyson comes from a special edition of Star Talk about sleep. See you again as long as you continue looking d