Why We Sleep: Science of Sleep & Dreams | Matthew Walker | Talks at Google

and thank you all for coming out to this great crowd to welcome dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuro

science

and psychology at the University of California Berkeley and he is the founder and director of the Center for the Science of Human Sleep and he's here today to talk about his new book Why We Sleep, So It's Goodbye, Thank You Very Much . Thank you very much Josh, it is a pleasure and a privilege to be here and I would like to start with the testicles. Men who

sleep

five hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who

sleep

eight hours or more.

In addition, men who usually sleep five to five. six hours a night will have a testosterone level that is that of someone ten years older than him, so lack of sleep ages a decade in terms of that critical aspect of well-being and virility and we see equivalent deficiencies in female reproductive health . caused by lack of sleep this is the best news I have for you today from now on it will only get worse instead of telling you about the wonderfully good things that happen when you sleep. the alarmingly bad things that happen when you don't get enough for both the brain and the body and let me start with the brain and the learning and memory functions, what we have discovered in the last 10 years is that you need sleep after learning , essentially to hit the save button on those new memories so you don't forget them, so sleeping essentially tests those facts in the brain for the future, but we've recently discovered that not only do you need to sleep after learning, you also need to do it.

Sleep before you learn, but now, to prepare your brain, I'm almost like a dry sponge ready to initially absorb new information, and without sleep, the brain's memory circuits effectively become waterlogged, so to speak, and you can't absorb new information. , so here. In the study we decided to test the hypothesis that staying up all night was a good idea. How do you do that? We took a group of healthy adults and assigned them to one of two experimental conditions: a sleep group and a sleep deprivation group. In the sleep group they're going to get a full eight hours of sleep, but in the deprivation group we're going to keep them awake in the lab under full supervision, no naps, no caffeine, it's miserable for everyone included too and then.

The next day we will place those participants inside an MRI scanner and ask them to try to learn a whole list of new data while we take snapshots of brain activity and then test them. to see how effective that learning has been and that's what you're seeing here on the vertical axis, the amount of learning, so the higher up you are, the more you learn and when you compare those two groups, what you get What we found It's a pretty significant 40 percent deficit in the brain's ability to create new memories without sleep and I think this should be scary considering what we know is happening with sleep in our educational populations right now. difference between passing an exam and failing it miserably and we have discovered what goes wrong in the brain to produce these types of learning problems.

There's a structure on the left and right side of the brain called the hippocampus and you can see it here in these kind of yellow-orange colors. Think of the hippocampus as your brain's information inbox. It is very good at receiving new memory files and retaining them, and when we observed this structure in those people who had had a complete experience. night of sleep here in green we saw a lot of healthy activity related to learning, however, in those people who were sleep deprived we couldn't actually find any significant signals, it's almost as if the lack of sleep had closed the inbox of memory and any new incoming files that were just being bounced around, you couldn't memorize new experiences effectively and parenthetically I should point out if you want to know what life is like without a functioning hippocampus and just watch the movie memory.

I suspect many of you have seen this, but this. The knight suffers brain damage and from that moment on he can no longer create new memories. It is what we call densely amnesiac. The part of his brain that was damaged was the hippocampus and it is the same structure that lack of sleep will attack and block his brains. kapow thirty four new learning so that's the bad thing that happens when you lose sleep let me go back to that control group for a second remember those people who slept a full eight hours, well we can ask a very different question here, that?

Is it the physiological quality of sleep when you get it that really improves and restores your ability to learn and remember every day? By recording sleep with electrodes placed all over the head, we have discovered that there are large, powerful brain waves that happen during the deepest stages of sleep that have these spectacular bursts of electrical activity called sleep spindles and it is the combined quality of these brain waves from deep sleep during the night which acts as a file transfer mechanism, taking memories from a short period of time. vulnerable long-term reservoir and moves them to a more permanent long-term storage site within the brain called the cortex, this large, massive, wrinkled tissue that sits at the top of your brain and means that when you wake up the next morning , first there are two benefits.

Having transferred yesterday's memories to that safe long-term storage haven in the brain, they are protected so that you remember rather than forget. However, the second benefit is that having transferred those files from that short-term repository is almost like moving files from a USB. stick, you've cleared all that memory encoding capacity so that when you wake up the next day you can start acquiring new files again, you can start learning and new, so it's this beautiful, elegant symbiotic memory system that happens all and each of the night and it's important that we understand what is transmitted during sleep with these memory benefits because there are real medical and social implications and let me talk to you about two areas that we have moved this work into.

I'll start clinically and specifically context. of aging and dementia because I think many of us have the feeling or even know that as we age our learning and memory abilities begin to fade, begin to decrease, but what we also know for many decades is that a physiological characteristic of aging is that your sleep gets worse and not just any kind of sleep, especially that quality of deep sleep that I just described and just last year we finally published evidence that these two factors do not simply coexist, but are significantly interrelated and it suggests that La Disruption of deep sleep is perhaps an underestimated factor that contributes to what we call cognitive decline or memory decline in aging and which more recently we have also discovered in Alzheimer's disease.

Now I know this is remarkably depressing news. I understand it's in the mail. comes at you, but there is a possible silver lining here because, unlike many of the other factors that we know are associated with aging and dementia and, for example, changes in the physical structure of the brain or even changes in the vasculature of the brain, those are devilishly difficult to treat right now and we don't have good comprehensive approaches in medicine, but that sleep is a missing piece in the puzzle explaining aging and Alzheimer's is exciting because we may be able to do something about it and One way to What we are addressing at my sleep center is not by using sleeping pills, as they are blunt instruments that do not produce naturalistic sleep and have been associated with an increased risk of death and cancer, and I am happy to talk about that evidence. during the Q&A and also discussed in the book, what we're actually doing is developing a method based on this technology called direct current brain stimulation.

It sounds like

science

fiction stuff. Actually, it is a scientific fact. You apply electric pads to your head and you insert a small amount of voltage into the brain, so small that you tend not to feel it, but now it has a measurable impact on physiology if you apply this stimulation during sleep in healthy young adults, as if If you were singing along to those deep sleep brain waves you can not only amplify the size of those deep sleep brain waves, but in doing so you can almost double the amount of memory benefit you get from sleep.

The question now is whether we can translate the same affordable and potentially wearable technology in older adults and those with dementia can we restore some healthy quality of deep sleep and in doing so can salvage aspects of learning and memory function, that is my real hope now that It's one of our moonshots, so to speak, I should point out by the way. Since I always get asked this question, people will tell me: where can I buy one of those devices? I want one yesterday and I want five more tomorrow and they are not yet FDA approved for use while you sleep.

You can buy them on the Internet. I strongly advise against it. that I just read some horror stories, people have misaligned voltage, skin burns, lost sight for several days and they are holding on, we are desperately trying to make this come true as soon as possible, so that's dream and memory in a clinical context, but let me talk about sleep and memory in society and specifically here within education because if sleep is really that important for learning in memory, improving sleep in a context where possibly more importantly it should be transformative and it has been because there are several counties throughout the United States.

States that have begun to delay school start times and then measure the academic consequences now one of the first examples of test cases occurred in Edina in Minnesota, a municipality located on the outskirts of Minneapolis, and they changed their school schedule start of school from 7:25 in the morning to 8:30 in the morning, by the way, what are we doing trying to educate our next generation at 7:25 in the morning to give you a sense of this? Buses for a 7:25 start time will often start leaving at 5:30 in the morning that means some kids have to get up at 5:15 5 o'clock maybe even earlier this is crazy but in a döner was the beginning of a movement and the metric they used to evaluate academic performance The consequence was these SAT scores and they focused their analysis on the top 10% of students, possibly those who have the least to gain in terms of of any further improvement through sleep now in the year before they made the schedule change that the top 10% of students had an average score of 1288, which is a very respectable score the following year, when students now They went to school at 8:30, plus the average SAT score was 1500, that is, an increase of 212 points, which is not trivial and that will change.

What level of college those children end up going to and perhaps as a consequence of their later life trajectories. Now some people have questioned aspects of Adina's study, and I think perhaps for good reason, but in all subsequent carefully controlled studies the data are unequivocal. I think academic grades increase behavioral problems decrease truancy rates decrease and psychological and psychiatric problems decrease as well, but something else actually happened in this story of later school start times and it was something we didn't anticipate: the life expectancy of students actually increased and you think. I don't understand how that works.

Does anyone know what the leading cause of death in late adolescence is in most developed countries? Actually, suicide comes second, it's car accidents and sleep is very important here. Lee, another example comes from Teton County in Wyoming, they changed. their school starts from seven thirty in the morning until eight fifty-five in the morning and then they measured the reduction in car accidents in this narrow age of just 16 to 18 years old, the only thing perhaps more notable than the extra hour of dream that those students What was reported was the drop in car accidents, there was a 70% reduction just in the type of frame that, in the context of the advent of ABS technology, what we call anti-lock braking systems that prevent We still safely maneuver a vehicle that reduced accident rates by twenty to twenty-five percent and some considered it a revolution, but here is a biological factor of sleep that will reduce the accident ratesup to 70%.

I think it's time we reconsider the importance. of sleep in education when sleep is plentiful Minds flourish and if our goal as educators truly is to educate and not risk lives in the process then I fear we realize we may be failing our children significantly with this incessant early education model. school start times so that's sleeping to learn memory aging Alzheimer's what else is sleep good for let me tell you that sleep is essential to help stabilize your emotional and mental health and without sleep the emotional circuits of your brain become hyperactive and irrational let me demonstrate with a sleep deprived subject because it turns out that we do video diaries with our participants throughout the night of deprivation and you are going to meet one under the pseudonym Jeff it's 11:30 at night jeff has been awake for about 16 hours and I'm actually going to plug the audio in here to see if I can play some audio.

Jeff just entered the studio and has been awake for a normal 16 hours, maybe we'll hear from Jeff what his hopes and aspirations are for the deprivation period I've been here about and I think about an hour No, yeah, about an hour , so it's the first time I'm reading my article right now. 30-page document, I hope I can finish something before I can say it. That's Jeff, an affable and perfectly nice guy hoping to complete his 30-page report in one sleep-deprived night, classic college delusional thinking. I must say that I see it all the time in my students, so now let's turn the clock forward, it is now at At 5:30 the next morning, Jeff has been awake for 22 hours straight and you will instantly notice one of the distinguishing characteristics of lack of sleep, which is you actually slide down in your chair and you can look around the room right now.

In fact, and you see that Jeff has lost about 6 or 7 inches, that's about an inch for every hour you've been awake beyond standard 16 according to our highly sophisticated machine learning algorithms, so in all seriousness, look at how emotionally Jeff has become different to some people. I think maybe I cruelly described him as a little emotionally unhinged, so let's hear how that 30-page report went and I apologize in advance for the profanity. I'm really angry right now because I didn't understand. more, but I curse this and you know they really have crazy directions and a very weak erection, did you notice how Jeff went from being noticeably upset and annoyed that he hadn't completed any of his 30 page report, and then finding it almost funny?

I almost felt dizzy from lack of sleep and then returned to baseline, which is a remarkably abnormal emotional distance to travel in such a short period of time and I think it emphasizes the kind of destabilizing influence that lack of sleep has. in our emotional integrity and we have since discovered what really changes inside your brain to produce this type of pendular emotional irrationality. There is a structure very deep within his brain called the amygdala and you can see it here in these red colors again. They have one. on the left side and one on the right and the amygdala is one of the central regions for the generation of strong emotional reactions, including negative reactions, and when we looked at this structure in those people who had slept a full night here in green We saw a degree modest level of pleasant and controlled reactivity, but in those sleep-deprived people we saw this degree of reactivity amplified and almost aggravated.

The amygdala was actually 60% more responsive under sleep-deprived conditions and it's almost as if without sleep we have become a kind of emotional accelerator and very little disruption of regulatory control, but what is perhaps more worrying is that this It represents a neurological signature that is no different from numerous psychiatric conditions and we are now finding significant links between sleep disruption and conditions such as depression, anxiety, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia and, tragically, suicide, and of In fact, we cannot find a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal. I believe sleep has a deep story to tell in our understanding of our treatment and may even contribute to our ultimate goal. prevention of serious mental illness, so that's sleep for the brain, but sleep is equally essential for the body and here I could have gone into any of the model systems and talked about it in detail.

We've already talked a little about sleep loss. and the reproductive system. I could talk to you about sleep loss and the metabolic system. After a week of short sleep, your blood sugar levels are altered so significantly that your doctor would classify you as prediabetic or might tell you about sleep loss and cardiovascular system, all you need is an hour because there are a global experiment that takes place on 1.6 billion people in 70 countries twice a year and is called daylight saving time. Now, in the spring, when we lose an hour of sleep, we see the next. 24 percent increase in heart attacks in the fall, when we get an hour of sleep, we see a 21 percent decrease in heart attacks, that's how fragile your body is to even the smallest sleep disturbances.

I think many of us don't think about accessories. nothing about losing an hour of sleep, but as a deep dive, I actually want to focus on this immune system thing and here I will introduce these lovely blue elements in the image, they are called natural killer cells, think of natural killer cells like The Secret. Your immune system's service agents are very good at identifying dangerous foreign elements and eliminating them; in fact, what they are doing here in this picture is embedding themselves in a malignant, cancerous tumor mass, and destroying it, and many of you may not know it, but today, your body produces cancer cells and it is always doing this , what stops those cancer cells from developing into the disease we call cancer, are in part these natural killer cells, so what you want is a veeraiah set of these immune killers at all times and, unfortunately, that's exactly it. which you don't have if you don't get enough sleep, so here in this study by my wonderful colleague Mike Erwin they're not going to deprive you of sleep for an entire night, they're just going to limit your sleep to four hours for a single night and then we'll see what the percentage reduction in immune cell activity that you suffer from and it's not small, it's not ten percent, it's not thirty percent, there was a 70 percent drop in natural killer cell activity.

That's a pretty concerning state of immune deficiency and it happens quickly, essentially after just one bad night. Imagine the state of your immune system after weeks, if not months, of insufficient sleep. Perhaps we should not be surprised to learn that we now have important links between lack of sleep and numerous forms of cancer - currently that list includes bowel cancer, prostate cancer and breast cancer - in fact, the link between lack of sleep and Cancer is now so bad that the World Health Organization recently decided to classify any form of night shift work as a probable carcinogen, in other words, jobs that can induce cancer due to a disruption of sleep-wake rhythms, for example.

So you may have heard of that old maxim that you know you can sleep when you're dead. To be dead serious, it is deadly reckless advice because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the data that you will now live a shorter life and the quality of that shorter life will be significantly worse. Epidemiological studies teach that this short sleep predicts a shorter life. all-cause mortality and the bad news, sorry, it just keeps coming because if you're fighting a battle against cancer and you don't get enough sleep, that cancer can grow more quickly and aggressively, so here I want to present work not of my own sleep center, but by a scientist named David who works at the University of Chicago and examines the relationship between sleep loss and cancer in mice.

Now I know this isn't for everyone, so I'll tell you when to look away if you'd rather not look. This, but in one of the studies he did, he inoculated some mice with cancer cells on the back and then he gave that cancer a period of one month to grow and at the end of that month he resected the skin and measured the size of that mass tumor, half of the mice were allowed to sleep normally during that one month period, the other half had their sleep interrupted, not total deprivation, they were just played with a little more during the day and night to restrict your sleep. in a second I'm going to play a video with David illustrating the results and now would be the time to look away if you prefer to do so and here you can see him pointing a mouse at a monitor with the skin resected and you can clearly see that the master tumor is in one of the mice that were allowed to sleep normally during that month.

I'll play the video and he'll reveal behind him another mouse, that mouse was in the sleep restriction group and you'll see it. See the difference in tumor mass. This is the difference. There was a 200% increase in the speed and size of that cancerous growth related to lack of sleep. The cancer in those sleep-deprived mice had still metastasized. That is just a medical description, meaning that it had broken through the original origin and had started to invade other areas, bones, other organs and the brain, when cancer becomes metastatic, that is when we see mortality rates increase, for What if you are fighting a battle against cancer and you don't get enough sleep, it can be the equivalent of putting gasoline on an already aggressive fire.

Sleep loss is an accelerant and we now know that it produces a harmful biological fertilizer for faster growth and rampant cancer, if not for increasing the risk of developing Alzheimer's or cancer through lack of sleep. Disturbingly enough, we have since discovered that lack of sleep even erodes the very fabric of biological life: your DNA genetic code, so here in this study, they took a group of healthy adults and limited them to six hours of sleep for a week and then they measured the chain and changed the gene activity profile compared to when those same individuals slept eight hours for a week and there were two critical results here: first, 711 sizable and significant genes were distorted in terms of your activity caused by six hours of sleep and that's relevant because of the way we know that nearly one in two American adults is trying to survive on six hours of sleep or less during the week.

The second result was that approximately half of those genes were actually increased in activity. The other half actually decreased in activity. Those genes that decreased due to lack of sleep were genes related to numerous aspects of the immune system, which fits. Very well with the evidence that I just mentioned about cancer, those genes that actually increased in their activity or what we call regulated in their expression were genes related to tumor promotion, genes related to chronic inflammation within the body and also genes related to stress and, as a consequence, cardiovascular diseases, I now believe that many individuals in society.

We are uncomfortable with the idea of ​​a genetically modified embryo or even a genetically modified food, but by choosing to get enough sleep we may be forced to accept that we are performing a similar genetic modification experiment on ourselves and if we do not let our children sleep enough. need so desperately then we may also be inflicting a similar genetic engineering experiment on them there is simply no aspect of their physiology that seems capable of recoiling at the cue of lack of sleep and coming out unscathed is almost like a broken fountain pipe in Your home sleep loss will seep into every corner of your biology, even altering the very DNA nucleic alphabet that explains your daily health narrative, so where does this leave us?

What is the piece of mental furniture I would like? To give you as we finish the talk, it would be that this dream is not an optional lifestyle. Luxury leave is a non-negotiable biological necessity, it is a life support system, and it is Mother Nature's best effort yet to counteract death and sleep annihilation. Across industrialized nations it is having a catastrophic impact on our health or well-being and on the safety and education of our children, it is a silent epidemic of sleep loss and is rapidly becoming one of the biggest public health challenges we now face. in the XXI century.

Now is the time to claim our right to one nightfull of sleep and without shame and without that terrible stigma of laziness and in doing so we can finally remember what it feels like to be awake during the day and with that box of soap. rant I'll just say good night, good luck and most of all I hope you sleep well thank you very much, in fact I think we have plenty of occasions to ask questions. I think thank you very much for the objective, it was actually very informative. Two questions for you, number one, I have a five year old and then there's me, how much sleep should we get?

And number two, are there any downsides to sleeping too much? So let's say if I sleep 10 or 15 hours a day, yes. Those are great questions, so first, sleep recommendations can be found on the National Sleep Foundation website for all ages for the average adult. The World Health Organization's recommendation of eight hours ranges between seven and nine, once humans, the average human being is below seven hours. of sleep we can measure objective empowerment, so people who say I can survive on six hours of sleep have a problem with that, which is this: your subjective sense of how well you think you're doing without getting enough sleep is a miserable predictor of how objectively you don't get enough sleep, so it's probably a bit like a drunk driver in a bar, you know, they've been shot seven times, they pick up the car keys and say I can drive and your response is now I know. that you think you are fine to drive, but believe me objectively, you are not the same, it is true for lack of sleep, your second question is fascinating, can I sleep too well?

There are anecdotes of some so-called sleep hangovers where you said If you fall asleep and then feel worse, almost when you fall asleep, it usually means that you are trying to pay off a debt that you have incurred, so if you could sleep after the alarm went off, then you slept little because it is physiologically impossible to sleep too much if you are healthy now there is evidence to suggest something called hypersomnia, excessive sleep that is mainly expressed in depression, but if you look at that data, it is actually It's really hard to say whether people are just reporting staying in bed longer rather than sleeping more, so I think it's unclear at this point, but let me take it to a theoretical level.

Could there be such a thing as sleeping too much? I think so, but don't forget that the same thing happens with the other three essential factors of life: oxygen, food and water, you can eat too much, you can over-hydrate, you can increase blood pressure, cause strokes and heart attacks due to excessive consumption of water happened in the 1990s with the ecstasy craze where people were dehydrated governments said they drink too much they drank too much cardiac events can you really become hyperoxygenated, so you get free radical species dangerous to cells? Yes you can. Is there such a thing as sleeping too much?

We haven't figured it out yet, but I suspect that's probably the case. Bell-shaped curve is a U-shaped function in terms of benefit, it is not linear, but it is for most people who are at risk of sleeping too much. Oh on the contrary, thanks for the great talk. Do you also have any information on how quickly people recover after switching from sort of short periods of sleep to more normal periods of sleep because we just mentioned that one of those was the d'Este switch or when we slept one or more types of things were improving in terms of cardiac province, yes.

Is it quick to recover and as fast as? Yeah, it's a great question, so different aspects of your brain in your body seemed to come back online to a state of health with recovery sleep and those temporal profiles are different depending on even within the immune system, for example, some components take longer to come back online than others. What I would point out, however, is that you will never be able to recover everything you have lost. This is another one of those myths about sleep, so sleep is not like banking. You can't rack up debt and then pay it off at a later time, which is what the majority of modern society does, chronically undersleep during the week and then binge eat on the weekend, it's what I call bulimia. of sleep, is what is now known as social jetlag.

If I took you and deprived you of sleep for a single night, eight hours of lost sleep and then I gave you all the sleep you want for as many nights as you wanted and we kept recording you, your brain would never get back all those eight lost hours, it would try to get some of it back, it would never get back. everything why is it like this? We may wonder why your brain doesn't have a credit system for sleep because there is precedent for this in biology: it has one for energy. It's called a fat cell, you can actually store caloric credit and spend it when you go into famine.

Now most of us are already in that danger, but during evolution we faced that challenge, so we came up with a solution called fat cell, where is the fat cell? fat asleep why is it not there the reason is that humans are the only species that deliberately deprived themselves of sleep for no apparent reason what that means is that Mother Nature has never had to face the challenge through evolution of finding a safety net due to lack of sleep so there is no safety mechanism, there is no credit system, have you done any research on supplements that can help you sleep well without the device?

Therefore, there are no medications or supplements that we have currently chemically produced naturalistic sleep. It's incredibly complex work now I don't want to fire people at drug companies I'm not against medications I'm not against all medications because medications work I'm all for them, it's just that all the sleeping medications that we have now they don't work They don't produce naturalistic sleep, most of them are a class of drugs that we call sedative hypnotics, sedation is not sleep, all you are doing is removing the cortex, you are not producing naturalistic sleep and as I said , I mentioned it in the book.

They are also linked to an increased risk of death and a significantly increased risk, as well as cancer. What happens to melatonin? Well, melatonin turns out not to be an effective sleep aid and it shouldn't be surprising based on how melatonin works. Melatonin helps time the onset of sleep, but it does not help in creating sleep itself, so the analogy would be that melatonin is like the starting official in the hundred meter race at the Olympic Games, melatonin brings together all the runners at the starting line and the race begins, but that official does not do so. participating in the great sleep race itself, which is a completely different set of brain and chemical mechanisms, which is why melatonin is not effective once you are stable in a new time zone.

However, I will say this if you are taking melatonin and feel it is beneficial. keep taking it because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all of pharmacology and by this I mean it tells you something, by the way, something profound, there is something called mind over matter and now there is a wonderful science of The placebo effect is very real and we dismissed it for a long time. I hope that answers your question. Aren't you sure you like the period of time between the time you wake up and the time you start using your brain to learn or whatever? difference, like if a person slept a full 8 hours but didn't go to school until evening, when he has night school, he learns worse than if he had been able to go to morning school, so it's a very interesting question.

You know, when it appears on the clock face, learning is, shall we say, more beneficial. Once you wake up at a reasonable time, there appears to be some degree of stability in learning throughout the day, however, it appears to be a gradual deterioration. and we've done some of these studies to basically map the time cost of the Great Depression type of learning that you know throughout the day and we've inserted naps and we can actually restore learning, but I'd like to move on to taking a nap. Someone should ask me about that because the danger is a double-edged sword, but what we do know from those school studies was that they delayed the start time of school where you get the biggest grade gains is not in all classes during the day , but it's especially in those first morning classes, but I think it's less that your brain learns better in the morning than that when you started so early, it was so detrimental to try to learn, that you sort of lowered the floor instead to do it.

Raise the ceiling so yeah, but it makes sense to me that learning would be somewhat stable over 16 hours because if you designed a memory system that could only learn in the last two hours of being awake, why are we awake for the other 14? ? and we seem to have a memory system that gives us a capacity of about 16 hours of recording in humans before sleep is required. A quick question. There you are doing a study on all their brain activities, how to encode it well. not coding, but you know more advanced, should I try not to schedule morning meetings because everyone is asleep but no one is making decisions?

Yes, we have done a lot of studies on all aspects of brain cognition that we have done in decision making, decision making. We've done creativity, emotional regulation, we've done aspects of visual attention, we've done motor skill learning and it follows the same profile which is essentially when sleep is high volume, all of those things are compatible with different operations within the brain that depend on different stages. of sleep at different times of the night, however, it is not just one stage of sleep that does everything for all the mechanisms and characteristics of the brain apparatus and that is why there is no single stage of sleep that is important , people will say, oh, how can I?

I have more REM sleep and I would say why do you want more REM sleep? Well, how can I have deeper sleep? It took mother nature about 3.6 million years to figure that out, let her do a job, she'll see you right, quick question, basically. How do drugs of any type of drugs, medicine, alcohol, marijuana, what would it just be like on brain activity during the process? So how do they get high? Maybe some legal, some not legal, impact on sleep. I'm going to focus on marijuana and alcohol, since you mentioned them, alcohol. It is perhaps the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep people say you have a drink and I fall asleep better, false, alcohol is also a class of drugs that we call sedatives and, once again, that is not natural sleep, What you are doing is simply eliminating consciousness through alcohol, you are not putting yourself in a natural sleep, the more problems with alcohol, it will first fragment your sleep with awakenings throughout the night.

The problem is that they are so brief that you tend not to remember them. and keep them in memory. So you wake up the next morning feeling refreshed but you don't understand why it was the alcohol that fragmented your sleep. Finally, alcohol is very effective at blocking your REM sleep or blocking your dream sleep, so alcohol (misunderstood) and people who use marijuana should be avoided. to try to help them fall asleep or relax, the problem is that marijuana also seems to fragment sleep, it also seems to block rapid eye movements, probably the other chemical that deserves mention here is caffeine, the caffeine that most People know it's a warning drug, it's actually a class.

Of the drugs we call psychoactive stimulants, it is the only legal stimulant we give to our children. By the way, caffeine can obviously keep you awake at night, but some people will say that I am one of those who can have a cup of coffee and fall asleep fine, the problem is that even if you do fall asleep, the depth of deep sleep that you have is not as deep as if you had a dream without caffeine running around in your brain, so you wake up again. the next morning you don't feel refreshed, you don't remember waking up or having trouble falling asleep, so you don't think it's the caffeine, but now you need two cups of coffee instead of one, the next morning you accumulate this circle vicious and is probably the reason why caffeine is the second most traded product on the planet's surface after oil.

I don't think there's probably any other cystic than Burres discovers how sleep-deprived we are in industrialized nations. Quickly ask how much of this deep each night is basically enough, um, zero hours, maybe, once, like I said, once you get less than seven hours of sleep, that's when we can measure objective deficiencies, yeah, yeah, but that It's just that once we can measure objective deficiencies, it doesn't mean that if we had more sensitive tools, we would measure. You know, at 7 o'clockand 50 minutes I was wondering about blue light exposure, especially from devices, and a couple of years ago I bought blue light walking glasses and they actually seem to allow me to sleep better and I know what the researchers behind that, yes, that.

Actually, it turns out that it's not a placebo effect, so the studies are very clear at this point. We are like a bunch of industrialized nations, we are a dark, private society and we need darkness because the way darkness works is that it actually removes interruptions from life. The melatonin hormone I described needs to increase to help time the normal onset of healthy sleep, so if you're bathed in electric light at night, although it's not as powerful as daylight, it can keep the brake pedal on. melatonin. Now they did something. Fascinating studies were reading on an iPad for an hour versus just reading a regular dollar in dim light and, first of all, relative to that hour of regular book reading in dim light, the hour of reading on iPad first delayed that increase in melatonin in two or three hours.

So here, if we're reading the iPad in Seattle, we're almost all the way to Hawaii in terms of our biological melatonin rhythms, that's how displaced and behind we are. Secondly, the sleep was not so good. REM sleep was disrupted and people subjectively felt worse and less refreshed. the next morning and it was a few days before it went away after they stopped, so I think you know the recommendation right now is to try to limit screen time in the last hour. I know where I'm talking now, which is Google and what that means is that you can install software that helps desaturate the most harmful wavelength of light, which is blue light.

You can also put those glasses on. They seem to work too, but in general try to decrease the stimulation. Blackout curtains are also great at night. bed, you know, follow the blackout curtains, so one of the things that I found is that it's very difficult to get up in the morning if the room is completely blocked off to have that and because it's important, I wanted to know which one is worse to have any. of this light coming in during the night versus having to deal with an unnatural alarm clock that wakes you up in the morning, yes, if you have to, I mean, it sounds like what you're experiencing is a kind of grogginess, what we call inertia of the dream. which is when you wake up, usually means you're waking up at a time that slightly offsets your natural biological tendency, so you can use daylight to maybe try to help you.

Some people use eye masks in the first part. at night and at some point they'll take off their eye mask and then they'll help with daylight exposure because they've kept their curtains, you know, not opaque in that sense, but it's hard to balance, yeah, I know . There are a lot more questions, they'll come up at two o'clock, so let's cut them off, but dr. Walker will stay and sign books. We're selling some copies, so let's all give it to dr. Walker our hands thank you very much indeed thank you very much thank you very much