Dr. Matt Walker: The Science of Dreams, Nightmares & Lucid Dreaming

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest Series,

00:00:02.460 | where I and an expert guest discuss science

00:00:05.140 | and science-based tools for everyday life.

00:00:07.280 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology

00:00:11.580 | and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:14.780 | Today marks the sixth episode in our six episode series

00:00:17.860 | all about sleep with expert guest, Dr. Matthew Walker.

00:00:21.860 | Today's episode focuses on sleep and dreaming

00:00:24.660 | as well as lucid dreaming.

00:00:26.400 | We talk about what's happening in your brain when you dream,

00:00:28.980 | both mundane dreams as well as

00:00:31.060 | heavily emotionally laden dreams,

00:00:32.860 | and we discuss how to think about

00:00:34.300 | and perhaps even interpret the content of your dreams.

00:00:37.480 | And we talk about lucid dreaming,

00:00:38.780 | which are dreams that occur while in sleep, of course,

00:00:41.400 | in which you are aware that you are dreaming.

00:00:43.860 | And because unfortunately they are relatively common,

00:00:46.460 | we also talk about nightmares

00:00:48.300 | and both what to do about nightmares

00:00:50.220 | as well as how to think about nightmares.

00:00:52.540 | This being the final episode

00:00:53.700 | in the six episode series all about sleep,

00:00:55.920 | I put the call out on my social media handles

00:00:58.420 | for any and all questions about sleep

00:01:00.740 | that I could direct to Dr. Matthew Walker.

00:01:02.740 | So as today's episode closes, I ask him those questions,

00:01:06.260 | focusing specifically on the questions

00:01:08.140 | that were most frequently asked by you, the audience,

00:01:10.980 | and he answers them in rapid succession.

00:01:13.620 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:01:16.260 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:01:18.960 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:01:21.060 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:01:23.700 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:01:26.400 | In keeping with that theme,

00:01:27.620 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:01:30.220 | Our first sponsor is BetterHelp.

00:01:32.420 | BetterHelp offers professional therapy

00:01:34.100 | with a licensed therapist carried out online.

00:01:36.660 | I've been doing therapy for well over 30 years.

00:01:39.260 | Initially, I had to do therapy against my will,

00:01:41.340 | but of course, I continued to do it voluntarily over time

00:01:44.460 | because I really believe that doing regular therapy

00:01:46.940 | with a quality therapist is one of the best things

00:01:49.360 | that we can do for our mental health.

00:01:51.060 | Indeed, for many people, it's as beneficial

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00:05:02.360 | And now for my conversation with Dr. Matthew Walker.

00:05:05.860 | Dr. Walker.

00:05:07.420 | - My dear good fellow, Dr. Huberman.

00:05:09.380 | - Today is the sixth and final episode

00:05:13.480 | in the six-episode series

00:05:15.400 | that we've been recording on sleep.

00:05:17.760 | During episode one, you told us about the biology of sleep

00:05:20.280 | and some actionable items to get the basics of sleep

00:05:23.720 | well worked out for each of us.

00:05:25.600 | And it's highly particular to our individual needs.

00:05:28.900 | And you explained how to define those needs.

00:05:31.840 | Then you beautifully described in-depth protocols

00:05:35.220 | for let's call it optimizing one's sleep.

00:05:38.580 | And then a third episode focused on caffeine,

00:05:42.000 | napping, and also food intake and its impact on sleep.

00:05:46.080 | We talked about the relationship between sleep

00:05:48.560 | and learning and memory and creativity.

00:05:51.880 | And then of course, in the fifth episode,

00:05:53.520 | just prior to this one,

00:05:55.080 | you beautifully described the literature

00:05:56.760 | and actionable tools for connecting sleep

00:05:59.940 | to emotional health and mental health,

00:06:02.240 | as well as the relationship between lack of sleep

00:06:04.680 | and certain mental health challenges or conditions.

00:06:08.000 | Today, we are going to dive into a truly exciting

00:06:13.080 | and fascinating topic, which is dreaming.

00:06:17.280 | I can think of fewer topics more intriguing than dreams.

00:06:21.000 | I know there's a lot of interest in lucid dreaming.

00:06:23.360 | That is one dreaming while being aware that one is dreaming.

00:06:27.800 | You'll tell us more about that.

00:06:29.420 | But I think dreams just intrigue and fascinate us

00:06:31.880 | for so many reasons, but not the least of which is that

00:06:35.360 | at some point we all seem to have them

00:06:37.480 | and they seem to have a relevance for our lives.

00:06:41.180 | They're not just epiphenomena, as we say.

00:06:44.040 | So today, I know you're going to explain

00:06:45.560 | what they do and do not provide for us.

00:06:47.900 | And I'm really excited to dive into this topic

00:06:49.680 | 'cause it's something that I've been fascinated by.

00:06:51.560 | And I know many people are fascinated by.

00:06:53.640 | So just to kick things off, how do we define dreaming?

00:06:57.640 | What is a dream?

00:06:59.240 | What is a dream state?

00:07:00.420 | - You would think it's fairly simple

00:07:03.480 | because when people say,

00:07:05.220 | oh, I had the strangest dream last night,

00:07:08.280 | everyone seems to know what's a dream.

00:07:10.200 | And by the way, dreaming is, we take it for granted.

00:07:14.060 | We say, oh, I had a strange dream last night.

00:07:16.580 | Just think about it though.

00:07:18.260 | Last night, both you and I and everyone listening,

00:07:21.340 | as long as they slept, we all became flagrantly psychotic.

00:07:26.340 | Now, before you reject my diagnosis

00:07:31.540 | of your nightly psychosis, I'll give you five good reasons.

00:07:36.100 | First, when we start to dream,

00:07:38.240 | we see things which are not there.

00:07:40.260 | So we hallucinate.

00:07:42.020 | Second, we believe things that could not possibly be true.

00:07:45.980 | So we're delusional.

00:07:47.580 | Third, we get confused about time, place, and person.

00:07:52.200 | So we're suffering from disorientation.

00:07:55.100 | Fourth, we have these wildly fluctuating emotions,

00:07:58.820 | something that psychiatrists call being affectively labile.

00:08:02.680 | And then how wonderful, you woke up this morning

00:08:07.780 | and you forgot most, if not all of that dream experience.

00:08:10.740 | So you are suffering from amnesia.

00:08:12.740 | If you were to experience any one of those five symptoms

00:08:16.140 | while you're awake, we'd probably be seeking

00:08:19.140 | psychological or psychiatric treatment.

00:08:22.040 | But for reasons that we still don't fully understand,

00:08:25.220 | that seems to be a normal biological and psychological,

00:08:28.860 | and in fact, and I'll describe the data,

00:08:31.560 | absolutely necessary life support,

00:08:34.140 | perhaps necessary set of experiences to go through.

00:08:38.600 | So that's the peculiarity of dreaming,

00:08:43.260 | but how do we define it?

00:08:45.660 | One of the loose definitions

00:08:47.100 | that we often use in sleep science

00:08:49.340 | is that a dream is any report

00:08:52.060 | of mental activity upon awakening.

00:08:54.940 | So I'll come into the laboratory and I'll wake you up

00:08:57.380 | and I'll say, what was going through your mind?

00:09:00.060 | And if you just say, nothing really,

00:09:02.420 | then we note that down as no dream report.

00:09:06.740 | But if you were to say, well, you know what?

00:09:10.220 | I was actually just thinking about the next time

00:09:13.380 | you're going to come in and wake me up,

00:09:15.340 | then we would report that as a dream.

00:09:19.380 | But that's not really what most people mean

00:09:22.220 | when they say I had this strange dream.

00:09:26.440 | What they're referring to is dreaming that takes place

00:09:30.240 | during the stage of sleep called rapid eye movement sleep

00:09:32.740 | or REM sleep.

00:09:33.580 | And during REM sleep,

00:09:35.980 | there we have these bizarre hallucinogenic,

00:09:40.140 | these vivid, these narrative,

00:09:42.420 | these emotion filled story experiences.

00:09:46.660 | Those are the types of reports

00:09:49.120 | that we get principally from REM sleep.

00:09:52.300 | So if I were to go back to episode one and say,

00:09:55.140 | think about those different stages of sleep,

00:09:57.180 | light non-REM sleep, deep non-REM sleep,

00:10:00.140 | and REM sleep, when does dreaming occur?

00:10:03.460 | Well, if I wake you up during stage two non-REM sleep,

00:10:08.460 | that's one of the lighter forms of non-REM,

00:10:11.500 | early in the night, but especially later in the night,

00:10:14.100 | you typically will report a dream,

00:10:16.860 | maybe about 50% probability.

00:10:19.260 | 50% of the time I wake you up out of that stage,

00:10:21.500 | no report, the other half, yes.

00:10:25.100 | If I wake you up to deep non-REM sleep,

00:10:27.620 | stages three and four, we're down to a zero to 20% chance

00:10:31.820 | that you'll report a dream.

00:10:33.540 | So very, very unlikely.

00:10:35.860 | If I wake you up out of REM sleep,

00:10:38.680 | somewhere between 80 to 90% probability

00:10:42.340 | that you were going to report a dream.

00:10:45.300 | There's nuance in that REM sleep story, by the way.

00:10:48.240 | Rapid eye movement sleep

00:10:51.580 | is defined by those rapid eye movements.

00:10:54.280 | But when you're in that stage of sleep,

00:10:55.820 | you're not always having the eye movements.

00:10:57.980 | They come in these strange phases.

00:11:00.820 | So you will be in REM sleep,

00:11:02.740 | and we can define that with lots of different sensors

00:11:06.380 | on your brain and your body.

00:11:08.120 | But then there will be times

00:11:09.180 | when your eyes are darting back and forth,

00:11:11.220 | and times when your eyes are not.

00:11:13.620 | And when those eyes are moving during REM sleep,

00:11:16.160 | we call that phasic REM sleep.

00:11:18.460 | And when they're not, we call it tonic REM sleep.

00:11:21.580 | Don't worry about the terminology.

00:11:24.340 | When I wake you up out of tonic REM sleep

00:11:27.300 | when the eyes aren't moving,

00:11:29.420 | I'm around that 80% probability.

00:11:32.100 | If I wake you up out of REM sleep

00:11:33.940 | when your eyes are darting back and forth,

00:11:36.580 | there is 95 to 100% probability

00:11:40.300 | that you're going to report a dream.

00:11:42.900 | Some people, theories in the past have said,

00:11:45.840 | well, if that's the case,

00:11:46.980 | then presumably those eye movements

00:11:49.500 | are tracking something in the dream.

00:11:52.740 | If you do careful analyses,

00:11:54.660 | that just does not seem to hold up.

00:11:56.700 | There is some evidence that that may be the case,

00:11:59.940 | but your eyes are moving back and forth.

00:12:02.700 | It seems that these are impulses

00:12:05.260 | that are going to your eyes

00:12:06.300 | that don't have a strong correlation

00:12:08.180 | with what it is that you're dreaming visually in the scene.

00:12:11.620 | That's not the case.

00:12:13.820 | But that's a little bit of a definition of what dreaming is

00:12:17.580 | and also when dreaming occurs.

00:12:21.460 | I should probably note by the way that we human beings,

00:12:25.580 | we seem to be special in our REM sleep dreaming amounts.

00:12:30.500 | Now, I've just done a little bit of a sleight of hand.

00:12:33.460 | When I say REM sleep,

00:12:34.580 | I'm going to infer that it's a dreaming.

00:12:37.560 | But Charles Nunn, wonderful scientist,

00:12:42.560 | has looked at the proportion of REM sleep

00:12:46.540 | across different mammals.

00:12:49.940 | And what he found was that we human beings

00:12:53.100 | are a complete anomaly

00:12:55.300 | when it comes to our relative amounts of REM sleep.

00:12:58.220 | In other words, our dream sleep.

00:13:00.220 | He found that across most other primates,

00:13:05.100 | REM sleep was usually averaging

00:13:07.260 | about 9% of the sleep period.

00:13:11.860 | However, we human beings on average,

00:13:15.380 | including when we're young,

00:13:16.800 | we'll have a REM sleep proportion of about 20%.

00:13:20.280 | So if you plot the amount of REM sleep of primates

00:13:24.920 | in a graph, they're all sort of clustered around this mean.

00:13:27.880 | And then all of a sudden on the far right-hand side,

00:13:30.680 | you've got this one single data point that sticks out.

00:13:33.360 | That's us, human beings.

00:13:35.880 | And we don't fully understand why it is

00:13:38.880 | that we have such exceptional amounts of REM sleep.

00:13:41.800 | Now, I've done a lot of hand-waving

00:13:43.720 | and written some theories about why that is,

00:13:45.760 | but it's still very unclear.

00:13:48.300 | The other thing, and that's a very,

00:13:51.400 | I can go very philosophical about the functions

00:13:54.520 | of REM sleep and how it changed

00:13:57.100 | as we made the transition as a species from tree to ground.

00:14:00.720 | Because don't forget,

00:14:01.600 | as we mentioned in one of our episodes,

00:14:03.560 | when you're hanging like a bird on a tree

00:14:07.280 | or you're resting on a branch as a primate up in the trees

00:14:13.100 | and you go into REM sleep, you lose muscle tone.

00:14:15.820 | So it's quite a fragile state

00:14:17.460 | when you're 30 foot up in the air

00:14:19.220 | and you've got gravity desperately wanting

00:14:22.700 | to bring you and your limbs down to the ground.

00:14:26.160 | But when we made the transition down from tree to ground,

00:14:30.220 | we no longer had to worry about that.

00:14:32.700 | Did that open up the opportunity

00:14:34.800 | for more REM sleep to occur?

00:14:36.020 | And that explains why we human beings have that.

00:14:39.340 | We don't know.

00:14:41.220 | REM sleep, however, does seem to be quite fundamental

00:14:45.820 | and fundamental from a life necessary perspective.

00:14:50.220 | There were some studies done back in the 1980s

00:14:53.940 | and there are studies that have not really been replicated.

00:14:56.420 | And I think I agree as to why,

00:14:58.660 | because ethically, you don't,

00:15:01.100 | they're right in that gray zone.

00:15:02.940 | In fact, for me, I find them quite uncomfortable

00:15:05.260 | when I speak about them or even teach them in class.

00:15:08.140 | They took rats and they deprive them of sleep totally.

00:15:12.260 | And what they found was that rats on average

00:15:15.060 | will die somewhere between about 13 to 17 days

00:15:20.060 | after total sleep deprivation.

00:15:22.400 | In other words, rats will die almost as quickly

00:15:26.380 | from sleep deprivation as they will from food deprivation.

00:15:29.340 | It's that essential.

00:15:30.620 | - Brutal.

00:15:31.540 | - But then they did something different.

00:15:33.440 | They said, well, what about the different stages of sleep?

00:15:36.140 | So they selectively deprive them

00:15:37.820 | of either non-REM sleep and REM sleep.

00:15:40.660 | The hypothesis was perhaps that non-REM sleep

00:15:45.980 | is from an evolutionary perspective,

00:15:48.540 | a much older form of sleep.

00:15:50.500 | The first stage of sleep that came into being

00:15:53.700 | was non-REM sleep.

00:15:54.740 | And the way we answer that is we look across phylogeny

00:15:58.140 | and these sort of different branches.

00:15:59.660 | And what we find is that in insects and in reptiles,

00:16:03.460 | amphibians and fish, they all seem to have non-REM sleep.

00:16:08.460 | But for the most part, with a few exceptions,

00:16:11.380 | they don't seem to have REM sleep.

00:16:13.300 | But if you look at birds and mammals,

00:16:15.620 | they do have REM sleep.

00:16:17.500 | And in fact, it seems as though REM sleep

00:16:19.340 | evolved twice independently, once in birds,

00:16:22.460 | once in mammals, which tells us probably

00:16:25.420 | that it's essential if it's being forced

00:16:27.660 | through the evolutionary pipe twice independently.

00:16:31.140 | So you would argue, well, if I selectively deprived you

00:16:33.980 | of non-REM, the older stage of sleep,

00:16:37.220 | presumably that's more life support necessary,

00:16:40.140 | and REM sleep, REM sleep is the new kid on the block,

00:16:43.540 | evolutionarily, they found the opposite.

00:16:46.300 | They found that if they selectively deprive rats

00:16:48.300 | just of non-REM sleep, they did die,

00:16:51.980 | but it took them longer.

00:16:52.860 | They died after about 60 days.

00:16:55.060 | If you deprive them of REM sleep, dream sleep,

00:16:59.300 | they died after 40 days versus 60 days.

00:17:02.940 | The words, this new type of sleep, REM sleep,

00:17:06.180 | seems to be on that basis, maybe even more important

00:17:09.700 | to supporting life than non-REM sleep.

00:17:13.340 | - It's super interesting.

00:17:14.300 | And as I recall from graduate school,

00:17:16.980 | there are certain patterns of brain activity

00:17:18.940 | that occur during a rapid eye movement sleep.

00:17:22.700 | Maybe we could go a little bit deeper

00:17:24.020 | into those patterns of activity.

00:17:25.540 | I know you touched on some of these patterns

00:17:28.200 | in the first episode.

00:17:30.060 | The thing that comes to mind here is PGO waves,

00:17:32.780 | pons, geniculate, occipital,

00:17:35.020 | pons being an area of the brainstem

00:17:37.540 | that is chock-a-block full of different neurons

00:17:40.420 | involved in basic functions, rhythmic breathing,

00:17:43.820 | eye movements, and basic reflexive functions

00:17:47.980 | that preserve the well-being and life of the animal.

00:17:51.540 | And that the neurons there then do indeed connect

00:17:55.580 | to the thalamus, this is like a shape structure

00:17:59.540 | in the middle of the brain

00:18:00.380 | where you have something called the geniculate,

00:18:01.600 | which is a, there's an auditory geniculate

00:18:04.960 | and a visual geniculate,

00:18:06.920 | but that projects to this relay station

00:18:09.480 | for vision mainly and hearing.

00:18:11.600 | And then it goes up to the occipital lobe,

00:18:13.840 | the area in the back of our brain that incited people

00:18:16.360 | as responsible for conscious perception of images.

00:18:19.160 | And I was taught, and I don't know if this is still true,

00:18:24.320 | that based on the work of people like Merce Steriad

00:18:28.260 | and folks like that,

00:18:29.460 | that these pons, geniculate, occipital waves of activity

00:18:33.420 | that were ongoing during sleep, I think during REM sleep,

00:18:37.140 | were essential for resetting something essential

00:18:40.780 | about brain function and wakefulness

00:18:42.260 | so that you needed these PGO waves.

00:18:44.100 | And that maybe even the activation of the visual pathway

00:18:48.620 | was part of the reasons why we often experience

00:18:51.940 | such robust visual hallucinations during dreams.

00:18:55.000 | What is thought about PGO waves?

00:18:59.200 | Are they related to rapid eye movement sleep?

00:19:01.440 | And are they somehow the reset that we need,

00:19:06.440 | and indeed is essential for life?

00:19:08.380 | Because as you pointed out,

00:19:10.200 | in the absence of rapid eye movement sleep, we die.

00:19:12.860 | - It's a great demonstration of the uniqueness

00:19:18.300 | of your brain.

00:19:19.640 | I mean, essentially what we're asking is,

00:19:21.880 | this is your brain on dreams, explain.

00:19:25.960 | And REM sleep has many different brain features to it.

00:19:30.960 | The first of which is, as we spoke in the first episode,

00:19:34.600 | your electrical brainwave activity at the top of the brain,

00:19:37.360 | the cortex, looks almost identical to that

00:19:40.480 | which you have when you're awake, which is stunning,

00:19:43.560 | because you're not conscious.

00:19:45.800 | You're lying completely still,

00:19:47.480 | no presence of muscle tone whatsoever,

00:19:49.960 | yet your brain seems to be just as on fire

00:19:53.080 | with electrical activity as it is when you're awake.

00:19:55.980 | Coming down a step though,

00:19:58.800 | there are these unique pulses of electrical,

00:20:02.480 | almost like lightning bursts

00:20:04.400 | that come up from the brainstem

00:20:06.160 | up to this sensory relay center in your brain

00:20:10.120 | called the thalamus.

00:20:11.240 | And then they were initially recorded

00:20:13.320 | out in the back of the brain in the visual cortex.

00:20:15.960 | Hence this PGO waves describes the three sites

00:20:19.740 | that I've just mentioned,

00:20:20.920 | goes from the brainstem, the pons up to the thalamus,

00:20:24.000 | a part of it called the geniculate,

00:20:26.480 | and then out to the back of the brain

00:20:28.000 | called the occipital cortex, PGO.

00:20:30.280 | What they found was that those bursts of PGO wave activity

00:20:36.220 | were very much linked to these rapid eye movements.

00:20:39.680 | So once you got this burst of a PGO wave,

00:20:43.360 | this sort of brainstem up into the brain burst,

00:20:46.820 | then you got one of these rapid eye movements.

00:20:49.820 | So it was linking something there with the eye movements.

00:20:53.240 | And I told you that when you're having these eye movements,

00:20:55.400 | that's a state where there's a high probability of dreaming.

00:20:59.120 | And is it a surprise then that the final destination

00:21:01.800 | of that lightning bolt where it sort of strikes

00:21:04.380 | is at the back of the brain in the visual cortex?

00:21:06.920 | Probably not.

00:21:08.800 | There's also been some links

00:21:10.320 | with those PGO waves and learning.

00:21:13.440 | Not so much that those PGO waves

00:21:15.920 | seem to consolidate memories.

00:21:18.000 | In other words, they may not be critical

00:21:20.520 | for sleep after learning,

00:21:23.200 | but they seem to be related almost to sleep

00:21:26.600 | and initial learning.

00:21:28.520 | And the more that animals learn,

00:21:31.020 | the greater the amount of PGO wave activity they have

00:21:34.640 | when they go to sleep.

00:21:35.860 | So PGO waves are unique.

00:21:40.520 | PGO waves don't simply just hit the back of your brain

00:21:43.400 | that we've now measured them

00:21:44.480 | in all sorts of different cortical areas.

00:21:46.880 | And they seem to light up the lightning splits as it were,

00:21:50.920 | and it strikes all sorts of cortical areas.

00:21:54.520 | So then the question was, well, let's take humans

00:21:58.000 | and let's put them inside of brain scanners.

00:22:00.600 | Let's allow them to fall into REM sleep,

00:22:03.400 | and then we'll start scanning the brain.

00:22:05.400 | What did we find?

00:22:07.960 | It was very interesting.

00:22:10.120 | When you look at the brain during REM sleep

00:22:12.300 | compared to, let's say, non-REM sleep,

00:22:14.680 | you see motor regions of the brain lighting up.

00:22:18.480 | You see visual regions of the brain lighting up,

00:22:21.120 | just as we described.

00:22:22.380 | You see memory-related structures lighting up,

00:22:25.320 | like the hippocampus,

00:22:26.680 | and you see emotional-related structures,

00:22:29.420 | like the amygdala and something called the anterior cortex,

00:22:34.080 | the anterior cingulate cortex, I should say.

00:22:36.480 | So if I were to just show you an expert,

00:22:40.360 | a brain imaging map with memory centers related

00:22:45.360 | in terms of their activity,

00:22:46.600 | emotion centers, visual centers, motoric centers,

00:22:51.440 | and I were to say to you,

00:22:52.280 | "Andrew, this is a scan that we got from an individual.

00:22:55.360 | "Just describe the type of experience

00:22:57.860 | "that you think this person was having in the scanner."

00:23:01.320 | You would probably look at it and say,

00:23:02.440 | "Well, they were probably recollecting things

00:23:05.160 | "from their past, memory structures.

00:23:07.360 | "They seemed to be having a visual experience,

00:23:10.000 | "but there was also probably movement involved

00:23:12.860 | "in that brain scanning experiment,

00:23:15.300 | "and also there seems to be

00:23:17.200 | "some degree of emotionality to it."

00:23:19.460 | That sounds strikingly similar

00:23:23.600 | to what we know dreams are like,

00:23:26.560 | with one exception, though.

00:23:28.400 | Another part of the brain bucked the trend

00:23:31.220 | of increased activation during REM sleep.

00:23:33.880 | That part of the brain

00:23:35.120 | were the far left and right sides of your frontal lobe,

00:23:38.500 | something that we call the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex,

00:23:42.300 | terrible mouthful word salad.

00:23:44.680 | Essentially, it just means the far left and right sides

00:23:46.480 | of your prefrontal cortex.

00:23:48.060 | Those are very important for logical,

00:23:51.080 | rational thinking and decision-making.

00:23:54.040 | Those parts of the brain went down in their activity,

00:23:58.920 | almost as though they were suppressed

00:24:00.800 | during REM sleep dreaming.

00:24:03.400 | So now let's go back to our map.

00:24:05.680 | You're having a visual experience.

00:24:07.280 | It's filled with movement and memories and emotions,

00:24:11.880 | but it's utterly bizarre,

00:24:13.760 | completely illogical, and totally irrational.

00:24:17.360 | If that's not a perfect neural definition

00:24:22.380 | of this thing called dreaming, I don't know what is.

00:24:26.600 | - It's so interesting.

00:24:27.440 | We think of dreams, or at least I think of dreams

00:24:30.160 | as a fragmented representation of real-world experiences

00:24:35.160 | from our recent past, maybe even the previous day,

00:24:37.940 | sort of meshed with our distant past experience.

00:24:43.760 | And then, of course,

00:24:46.320 | our brain is also a very good anticipatory machine,

00:24:49.280 | and somehow puts that into a movie that,

00:24:52.880 | for all purposes, when we're in it,

00:24:55.780 | we feel as if it's happening in real time.

00:24:58.240 | And then, of course, we try and untangle

00:25:00.240 | what the meaning of all that is.

00:25:01.840 | I think people are really intrigued by dreams

00:25:04.320 | because they just feel so real to us,

00:25:07.280 | and yet we know they're not of the same real

00:25:10.800 | that is our waking experience.

00:25:12.760 | And, you know, throughout history,

00:25:15.120 | people have alluded to the idea

00:25:18.600 | or have been convinced of the idea

00:25:20.720 | that dreams are meaningful

00:25:22.160 | and something we're going to get into.

00:25:23.840 | - And I should mention, by the way,

00:25:26.000 | that your dreams based on those brain scans

00:25:29.120 | still remained your own.

00:25:31.600 | You were the only person privy

00:25:34.280 | to the experience of the dream itself.

00:25:37.360 | I could stick you in a scanner and I could say,

00:25:39.520 | you know, were you having a visual dream?

00:25:41.080 | And was it, you know, filled with motor activity

00:25:43.760 | and emotions and memories?

00:25:45.520 | That tells me how you're dreaming.

00:25:47.840 | It doesn't tell me what you're dreaming.

00:25:51.540 | So at that point, you still had this degree

00:25:55.100 | of security and privacy.

00:25:57.520 | No longer, it seems.

00:26:00.780 | There was a great study done by a Japanese group

00:26:04.240 | using very advanced brain imaging technology

00:26:07.140 | and techniques such as multi-voxel pattern analysis,

00:26:10.980 | again, word salad, but it's a very clever technique.

00:26:15.260 | And they were able to start to understand

00:26:18.780 | exactly what you, Andrew Huberman, were dreaming.

00:26:22.860 | And they would know what you were dreaming

00:26:25.220 | even before you woke up and told us what you were dreaming.

00:26:29.460 | And they did a two-part experiment.

00:26:31.140 | First, they showed you lots of very specific images,

00:26:35.660 | images of cars, of women, of houses,

00:26:40.660 | of men, of dogs, of cats,

00:26:43.540 | of just a whole category of different visual elements.

00:26:47.740 | And your brain was being scanned

00:26:49.580 | as you were awake watching each of these.

00:26:52.020 | And then using this clever analysis,

00:26:53.940 | they were able to build up this very specific pattern,

00:26:57.180 | this very specific template of activity

00:27:00.260 | that for you, Andrew Huberman,

00:27:02.100 | said he is now looking specifically at a set of keys,

00:27:07.100 | or he was looking at a car,

00:27:09.820 | or he was looking at a woman, or a man, or a house.

00:27:14.820 | And we knew ground truth

00:27:17.300 | in terms of what your brain looks like

00:27:19.740 | when it is seeing these different categories.

00:27:22.940 | And then they did something clever.

00:27:25.140 | Then they let those individuals sleep and go into REM sleep.

00:27:28.940 | And then they started waking them up

00:27:30.500 | and getting dream reports.

00:27:32.620 | But once they got the dream reports,

00:27:34.860 | the analysis sort of team remained blind to those reports.

00:27:39.780 | What they did was almost like a forensic team

00:27:42.460 | that goes hunting for DNA at a crime scene.

00:27:45.100 | They had the DNA and they started going around

00:27:47.780 | and searching to see if they could find a DNA match.

00:27:50.860 | But here, they weren't using the DNA.

00:27:53.100 | They were using these templates of a woman's face,

00:27:56.700 | or a car, or a house.

00:27:58.740 | And they would search through this electrical,

00:28:01.340 | this brain activity,

00:28:02.980 | sort of static of your dreams at night,

00:28:05.940 | and find these matches.

00:28:07.860 | And then we could wake you up, get the dream report,

00:28:11.340 | and see how well did our brain performing

00:28:15.060 | a sort of algorithm match

00:28:17.660 | with your actual subjective report when you came out.

00:28:20.700 | And it was stunning how close.

00:28:23.820 | So I could tell you were dreaming,

00:28:26.540 | but you were also dreaming about a house and a car.

00:28:31.540 | You're dreaming about a woman, it turns out.

00:28:34.980 | And we started to, once your dreams, as I said,

00:28:39.980 | were your own, but now no longer,

00:28:43.820 | because science can start to reveal those.

00:28:46.420 | What we can't yet do is understand which specific woman

00:28:51.420 | in which specific house.

00:28:53.060 | So what you would probably see in my brain

00:28:55.580 | based on my own proclivities lighting up

00:28:58.900 | is it would just be full of cars, probably, sports cars,

00:29:02.620 | and then maybe another special individual woman.

00:29:06.260 | Those two things would be dominant,

00:29:08.460 | but you wouldn't know that I'm dreaming

00:29:10.740 | about the new Porsche 911 GT2 RS.

00:29:15.740 | You can't tell it.

00:29:16.820 | You can just simply tell me he was dreaming about a car.

00:29:19.700 | So there is still some distance to go.

00:29:22.700 | - I can't help but ask, based on what you just described,

00:29:26.340 | when people say things in their dreams,

00:29:28.380 | when they sleep talk,

00:29:30.340 | how faithfully does that report what's in the dream?

00:29:32.900 | - It doesn't at all.

00:29:33.980 | And the reason is because when you're sleep talking

00:29:37.220 | or sleep walking, or even sleep eating,

00:29:40.380 | you're not dreaming because you're not in dream sleep.

00:29:43.780 | This is one of the fallacies

00:29:45.660 | that sleep walking or sleep talking,

00:29:47.900 | you're, you know, stop dreaming, wake up, you're dreaming.

00:29:51.620 | You're waking someone out of the very depths

00:29:54.620 | of deep non-REM sleep.

00:29:56.460 | And these different things, sleep walking, sleep talking,

00:29:59.100 | sleep eating, sleep,

00:30:01.180 | there's sleep associated sex behavior.

00:30:05.140 | All of these things are what we call parasomnias.

00:30:09.860 | Para meaning sort of around, somnia, obviously sleep.

00:30:14.540 | So these are things that happen around sleep,

00:30:16.860 | but they're not quite in sleep.

00:30:18.900 | Because when you have those,

00:30:21.060 | you are launched from deep non-REM sleep up to wakefulness,

00:30:24.940 | but you don't make it all the way to wakefulness.

00:30:28.220 | And so you act out these very rote,

00:30:30.540 | routine, reflexive behaviors.

00:30:32.340 | You just repeat certain words,

00:30:34.100 | you lift a cup to your mouth, go up to the refrigerator.

00:30:37.580 | So they are not faithful to the dream,

00:30:41.820 | because if I were to gently wake you

00:30:44.340 | as you're sleep talking and say

00:30:45.620 | what was going through your head,

00:30:47.420 | you'll say nothing at all.

00:30:49.300 | And you don't report a dream.

00:30:51.180 | - I'd like to take a brief break

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00:31:29.380 | to eat fruits and vegetables.

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00:31:34.580 | In addition, the adaptogens and other micronutrients

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00:32:00.420 | Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman.

00:32:04.860 | Earlier in the series, you described beautiful experiments

00:32:07.940 | by Matt Wilson and others at MIT

00:32:10.980 | who explored neural activity within the brain,

00:32:15.260 | within the hippocampus in particular,

00:32:16.860 | an area associated with memory formation,

00:32:19.100 | in which the neurons in the hippocampus fire

00:32:24.220 | in the same sequence as they did

00:32:26.020 | during a particular daytime activity

00:32:27.920 | that preceded that night's sleep.

00:32:29.620 | But they do so at a much more rapid rate.

00:32:31.700 | Sometimes they play in reverse, et cetera.

00:32:34.540 | This raises the question of, first of all,

00:32:38.700 | is that sort of neural replay of events from the prior day,

00:32:42.900 | is that also associated with dreaming

00:32:44.740 | or more specifically, is that dreaming or is dreaming that?

00:32:49.020 | And that's really to raise the larger question,

00:32:51.340 | which is what is dreaming for?

00:32:53.500 | What is the function of dreaming?

00:32:55.540 | - So what we know is that Matt Wilson's data

00:32:59.180 | during non-rapid eye movement sleep,

00:33:01.700 | the brain was replaying those memories

00:33:04.100 | 10 to 20 times faster.

00:33:06.740 | So (imitates rapid eye movement)

00:33:08.540 | But when you go into REM sleep, it's down to 0.5 times.

00:33:12.100 | So listening to this podcast now

00:33:13.540 | and you hit that speed button and you drop it down to 0.5,

00:33:16.700 | that seems to be the replay speed during REM sleep.

00:33:21.040 | We've not yet been able to confirm that in human beings,

00:33:24.460 | but if we did, does that mean we can explain

00:33:27.400 | the time differences that seem to happen in the dream state,

00:33:30.980 | that time is longer in the dream world

00:33:34.220 | than it is in the waking world?

00:33:35.700 | I think that's fascinating.

00:33:37.220 | But you're right, it does point us more

00:33:40.580 | towards the question though,

00:33:41.780 | of what are the functions of this state called dreaming?

00:33:46.700 | And we can get onto whether or not dreaming

00:33:49.060 | is a very faithful recapitulation of our waking experiences.

00:33:55.880 | And I'll give you a spoiler now, no,

00:33:58.640 | but I'll give you the data in a second.

00:34:02.220 | But the functions of dreaming come back

00:34:05.540 | to some of the functions of REM sleep

00:34:07.640 | that we described in an earlier episode.

00:34:10.500 | Those two related functions

00:34:12.940 | in the episode on learning and memory

00:34:15.180 | was that one function of REM sleep seems to be creativity,

00:34:20.060 | associating memories together

00:34:21.940 | so that you can come up with these

00:34:23.640 | wonderfully divine solutions

00:34:26.480 | to problems you couldn't answer when you're awake.

00:34:29.160 | The second came in our last episode

00:34:31.040 | about emotional and mental wellness.

00:34:33.680 | And we spoke about this theory that we put forward

00:34:36.440 | that REM sleep is a form of overnight therapy.

00:34:39.580 | And we described the evidence supporting that therapy.

00:34:42.280 | So I would say that those are the two leading theories

00:34:46.360 | of REM sleep and associated dreaming.

00:34:50.760 | But I perhaps didn't give you the full story there.

00:34:54.620 | There is a twist in both of those stories.

00:34:57.820 | I told you that when you are in REM sleep

00:35:01.620 | and you're dreaming, the next day you are better able

00:35:04.380 | to assimilate and associate memories

00:35:06.220 | and come up with these creative insight solutions.

00:35:09.060 | It turns out that sleep is necessary for that.

00:35:13.260 | And not just sleep, but dream-related sleep,

00:35:16.340 | REM sleep is necessary for that, but it's not sufficient.

00:35:20.920 | You not only have to be asleep

00:35:22.720 | and dreaming to get those benefits,

00:35:24.480 | you also have to be dreaming of the very things

00:35:28.120 | that you are trying to solve the next day.

00:35:31.020 | There's a great study by a scientist

00:35:32.840 | called Robert Stickgold at Harvard.

00:35:35.040 | And he had a whole group of individuals

00:35:37.880 | learn a virtual maze.

00:35:40.680 | And they were dropped down in different locations

00:35:42.720 | of the maze, and they had to try to get out of the maze.

00:35:45.280 | And gradually, when you're dropped down

00:35:47.020 | in different locations, you do that enough times,

00:35:49.580 | you start to build up this mental map of the maze.

00:35:53.660 | And then he let one half of those participants

00:35:56.380 | take a 90-minute nap, and the other half remained awake.

00:36:00.300 | And then some hours later, they tested them on the maze,

00:36:03.700 | and they measured how quickly were you able

00:36:06.040 | to navigate and get out of the maze.

00:36:08.580 | That was the outcome measure.

00:36:10.260 | And sure enough, just as we described,

00:36:12.380 | those people who slept versus those who didn't,

00:36:15.360 | they were better able to navigate the maze

00:36:19.640 | after they had slept versus those who remained awake.

00:36:23.160 | But then they went back and they separated

00:36:26.280 | those individuals who were napping into two classes,

00:36:30.900 | because as they were napping,

00:36:32.680 | they were waking them up intermittently

00:36:35.120 | and getting dream reports from them.

00:36:37.960 | And what they found was that those people who slept

00:36:41.480 | and still had dream reports,

00:36:43.820 | but those dreams were not related to the maze,

00:36:46.680 | they didn't show an improvement.

00:36:49.220 | But those individuals who slept and who dreamt,

00:36:52.980 | but also dreamt of the specific maze elements themselves,

00:36:57.140 | they were the only subset of people,

00:37:00.580 | of participants, who showed the benefit.

00:37:03.620 | And that's a beautiful demonstration that,

00:37:06.400 | yes, you need to sleep to get creative benefits,

00:37:08.900 | and in fact, seemingly have dream sleep,

00:37:12.040 | but you also need to be dreaming about specific things.

00:37:15.540 | Is that rule true for the second function

00:37:19.640 | of REM sleep dreaming, this overnight therapy benefit?

00:37:23.080 | Yes, it does seem to be true.

00:37:25.000 | There were some great studies by a scientist

00:37:27.280 | who has sadly passed away now, Rosalind Cartwright.

00:37:30.480 | And she was looking at different patient populations

00:37:34.480 | who had undergone really painful,

00:37:37.520 | difficult emotional experiences.

00:37:39.560 | For example, a very bitter, painful divorce.

00:37:43.160 | And she would, at the time that those individuals

00:37:46.760 | were going through this difficult challenge,

00:37:49.400 | she would be recording their sleep,

00:37:50.920 | looking at their different stages of sleep,

00:37:53.080 | and she was collecting dream reports from them.

00:37:55.680 | And then she would track them

00:37:57.560 | and their progression clinically over the next year.

00:38:01.680 | And what she found was that some of those participants,

00:38:06.400 | about 50% of them, ended up getting clinical remission

00:38:10.840 | from their depression that was instigated

00:38:14.440 | by the painful experience they'd gone through.

00:38:17.240 | The other half did not get clinical remission

00:38:20.280 | from their depression, they remained depressed.

00:38:22.720 | And then she used those two classes to go back

00:38:26.200 | and have a look at the sleep and the dream reports.

00:38:29.200 | And what she found was some differences in REM sleep,

00:38:32.000 | but more interestingly, were the differences in their dreams.

00:38:35.640 | Both of those sets of individuals were dreaming

00:38:39.200 | at the time of going through

00:38:40.680 | those difficult emotional experiences.

00:38:43.160 | Some of them, however, were dreaming

00:38:45.080 | of that challenging experience, others were not.

00:38:48.920 | Those who dreamt, but also dreamt

00:38:51.720 | of the problematic experience,

00:38:54.280 | were the ones who went on to get clinical resolution

00:38:57.280 | from their depression.

00:38:58.400 | Those who dreamt, but did not dream of those events,

00:39:02.200 | seem to be the ones who did not get clinical remission

00:39:05.720 | from their depression.

00:39:06.920 | In other words, here, once again, is this new rule,

00:39:09.840 | that when it comes to dreaming, it's not just about sleep,

00:39:13.320 | and it's not just about dreaming,

00:39:14.920 | it's about dreaming of the specific things

00:39:18.560 | that you're trying to get the functional benefit from,

00:39:21.400 | whether that's creativity and insight,

00:39:24.560 | or whether it's emotional resolution and overnight therapy,

00:39:28.480 | both of them seem to depend very much

00:39:32.040 | on the expression of dreaming of specific things itself.

00:39:37.040 | And we'll come on to why that's maybe relevant

00:39:39.800 | when we speak about lucidity, too.

00:39:42.120 | - What you just said is very reassuring, at least to me,

00:39:44.520 | because when I'm going through a challenging phase,

00:39:47.600 | which somehow seems to happen periodically in my life

00:39:50.360 | at a frequency that, let's just say,

00:39:52.400 | keeps me dreaming about things.

00:39:55.680 | - You're not alone, by the way.

00:39:57.000 | - Oh, and I'm sure I'm not,

00:39:58.320 | which is why- - No, no, I didn't mean that.

00:39:59.600 | I just mean that there are lots of people

00:40:01.600 | who can resonate with that.

00:40:02.840 | So thank you for being vulnerable and sharing.

00:40:04.560 | - Yeah, yeah, it's one of these things

00:40:06.520 | where I put my head down on the pillow, fall asleep,

00:40:10.160 | and assuming I can get good sleep

00:40:13.840 | amidst those real-life events,

00:40:15.600 | which is something that sometimes is the case,

00:40:18.400 | sometimes it's not.

00:40:19.520 | I always dream about things related to those events

00:40:23.480 | or those events in particular,

00:40:24.960 | and I'm a long-time practitioner of writing down my dreams

00:40:29.760 | when I wake up from them,

00:40:31.280 | or as we discussed in an earlier episode,

00:40:33.400 | my phone is on airplane mode at night.

00:40:36.240 | Typically, I'll grab my phone

00:40:38.200 | and I'll hit the voice memo button, or function, rather,

00:40:42.440 | and I'll just, in my groggy state, with my eyes closed

00:40:46.720 | so I'm not getting any light in my eyes,

00:40:48.160 | I'll say, I'll describe what I can recall of the dream.

00:40:51.320 | Then I'll sometimes go back

00:40:52.160 | and listen to those recordings,

00:40:55.040 | and they've provided me insight,

00:40:56.920 | and in some cases, a path to solutions.

00:41:00.560 | So I'm 100% on board the fact that our dreams

00:41:05.400 | can help us resolve challenges in our waking day.

00:41:08.240 | What's always fascinating to me, though,

00:41:09.920 | is how the dreams are not a one-for-one representation

00:41:12.440 | of what happened during the day.

00:41:14.000 | I think symbolism is a hallmark feature of dreams,

00:41:20.000 | and that's something I know we're going to talk about

00:41:22.760 | in terms of dream interpretation,

00:41:24.240 | and much has been made of this throughout history.

00:41:27.600 | So it seems that when we're asking

00:41:30.400 | what are the functions of dreaming,

00:41:31.680 | one of them is to resolve challenges

00:41:35.000 | from our daytime experience.

00:41:36.620 | - Yeah, it's emotional first aid.

00:41:39.120 | - Yeah, that's beautifully put.

00:41:40.700 | And in an earlier episode on learning memory and creativity,

00:41:45.200 | you described how specific sleep stages

00:41:49.560 | and perhaps dreams themselves

00:41:51.560 | are involved in the consolidation

00:41:54.120 | of memories from daytime experiences

00:41:56.500 | or things that we're trying to learn

00:41:57.640 | from daytime experiences.

00:41:59.240 | And then in the episode on sleep and emotions,

00:42:01.680 | it was made very clear that rapid eye movement sleep

00:42:04.960 | is a time in which we get a sort of therapy

00:42:08.540 | that is a disentangling of the emotional load

00:42:10.980 | of a given experience from the experience.

00:42:14.160 | So to me, it just seems so clear,

00:42:16.120 | like dreams are critical, sleep is critical.

00:42:20.140 | But I think one question that still remains unresolved,

00:42:22.760 | at least for me, is are dreams really there

00:42:26.200 | to just be a replay of our waking lives

00:42:28.180 | with some distortion?

00:42:29.320 | Because when the conscious mind is asleep,

00:42:32.160 | the unconscious mind can kind of throw things up

00:42:34.900 | to the surface in ways that don't seem so obvious,

00:42:38.360 | like symbolism, analogy.

00:42:40.100 | Some of us are more visual than others.

00:42:43.640 | Are there any rules about the way

00:42:46.120 | that dreams convert our waking experiences

00:42:49.800 | into dream content?

00:42:51.800 | - There are.

00:42:52.960 | And the short answer to your question,

00:42:56.640 | do we simply go into sleep, start dreaming,

00:43:00.960 | and then rewind the videotape and replay

00:43:05.360 | in a faithful recapitulation the waking day

00:43:09.760 | in our dreaming night?

00:43:11.840 | And the answer is no.

00:43:13.680 | And here again, the scientist I mentioned before,

00:43:16.120 | Robert Stickgold, with Roar Fosse,

00:43:19.320 | they looked at this question.

00:43:21.600 | And it was a very difficult study to do.

00:43:23.960 | They did what we call experience sampling during the day.

00:43:27.720 | And they would give you sort of like a little beeper,

00:43:30.520 | and they would set it to go off multiple times

00:43:33.800 | throughout the day.

00:43:34.640 | And then you would write down what it is

00:43:36.120 | that you were experiencing right in that moment.

00:43:38.760 | And again, they were trying to build up

00:43:40.160 | this sort of time-lapse photography, as it were,

00:43:43.680 | of your waking day experience.

00:43:45.960 | And then they would bring people in,

00:43:47.600 | and they would start to record their dreams at night.

00:43:51.640 | And then they would match those two

00:43:53.760 | and ask what is the degree of overlap?

00:43:57.080 | What is the Venn diagram proportional percentage

00:44:01.080 | of those two things aligning?

00:44:03.920 | And what they found was that there was really only

00:44:06.600 | about 2% of your dreaming life

00:44:10.440 | that was a very faithful replay

00:44:13.640 | and reiteration of your waking life.

00:44:17.440 | However, what they did find

00:44:20.240 | was something even more interesting to me,

00:44:22.160 | which comes back to this idea of overnight therapy.

00:44:25.600 | They found that there is something that runs through

00:44:28.480 | like a red thread narrative from your waking life

00:44:31.880 | into your dreaming life.

00:44:33.760 | That is emotional concerns and people of significance.

00:44:38.760 | If there is anything in terms of an algorithm

00:44:42.240 | that seems to overlap and predict

00:44:44.680 | where those two Venn diagrams sort of collide,

00:44:47.840 | it really is in the emotional personal significance space,

00:44:52.840 | once again, pointing us to perhaps a reaffirmation

00:44:58.280 | that a key function of dreaming

00:45:01.320 | is about dealing with our waking experiences

00:45:04.560 | and particularly the things that are salient to us.

00:45:08.320 | - Okay, so clearly there's a functionality to dreaming,

00:45:11.960 | but what should we make of the specific content

00:45:15.200 | of our dreams really?

00:45:17.360 | Meaning, should we interpret our dreams

00:45:20.200 | or should we allow anyone else to interpret our dreams?

00:45:23.560 | There are scores of books out there, websites, programs.

00:45:27.040 | There's a long history of this in classic psychoanalysis.

00:45:30.540 | What about this dream interpretation business?

00:45:33.260 | - I mean, it really started,

00:45:35.760 | you have to give credit in some ways to Freud.

00:45:38.760 | Although if you look back at very ancient cultures,

00:45:42.760 | so much of their artwork,

00:45:44.700 | so much of the sort of left imprint on the world

00:45:49.040 | suggests that they were fascinated by dreams

00:45:51.880 | and used dreams and gods of dreams.

00:45:54.120 | So we've always been thinking about

00:45:57.320 | what are these things called dreams

00:45:58.760 | and can we interpret them?

00:46:01.520 | But it was really Freud who put his seminal works together

00:46:05.080 | in 1899 and then published it in 1901

00:46:09.920 | called "The Interpretation of Dreams."

00:46:12.960 | And it's probably one of his, if not his most famous text.

00:46:17.440 | And you can unfairly sum it up as,

00:46:21.840 | you know, if it's not one thing, it's your mother

00:46:24.140 | when it comes to Freud.

00:46:26.080 | But in some ways, Freud with his interpretation attempt,

00:46:31.080 | in my mind was 50% right and 100% wrong.

00:46:36.040 | Because until the moment that Freud came along,

00:46:41.720 | we left the interpretation and the instigation

00:46:46.720 | of our dreams to things outside of us.

00:46:50.620 | Maybe it was, there were comments

00:46:52.380 | that it was due to our soul,

00:46:53.800 | or it was from the gods on high

00:46:55.960 | that they would descend down these dream manifestos to us.

00:47:00.920 | But Freud, full credit, was the first person

00:47:04.480 | to put dreams front and center

00:47:07.160 | into this thing called the brain, the mind.

00:47:10.200 | So in some ways, Freud shifted dream science

00:47:14.520 | from really more of a sort of spiritual philosophical

00:47:18.840 | condition to very much a neuro science.

00:47:23.680 | It was of the mind and therefore of the brain.

00:47:27.040 | And earlier, he had tried to describe the neural patterns,

00:47:31.360 | and he had these beautiful drawings of neuronal circuits

00:47:35.200 | that could try to explain what was going on.

00:47:37.520 | But neuroscience was so anemic at the time

00:47:40.360 | in terms of its knowledge,

00:47:41.520 | he had no chance to do what we can do now.

00:47:44.480 | So in some ways, it's very unfair of me to criticize him

00:47:47.680 | as his theory being non-scientific.

00:47:51.040 | It is also non-scientific

00:47:53.880 | in the very strict sense of the word.

00:47:56.120 | When we create a scientific theory,

00:47:58.840 | just as though he created his interpretation

00:48:02.060 | of dreams theory,

00:48:03.260 | we allow that theory to be testable,

00:48:09.080 | which is to say that a scientific theory

00:48:11.380 | is only a scientific theory

00:48:13.000 | if it can be falsified or supported.

00:48:16.880 | But Freud's theory was not a scientific theory.

00:48:21.640 | It was not something that you could test

00:48:23.720 | and therefore it was not able to be falsified or affirmed.

00:48:28.720 | And in some ways it was Freud's simultaneous downfall

00:48:35.280 | and his utter genius.

00:48:37.000 | It's the reason that Freud remains to this day,

00:48:40.480 | because we can't put him in a way in a box and say,

00:48:45.000 | we've disproven him,

00:48:46.640 | but we equally will never be able to prove him.

00:48:49.280 | And therefore he's been in some ways,

00:48:51.320 | let go in hard science as being representative.

00:48:55.560 | His theory, which we don't need to get into,

00:48:59.500 | which was called disguised censorship,

00:49:02.320 | was really a very interesting proposition,

00:49:07.840 | which was that there was something about our dreams

00:49:11.120 | that was veiled and masked.

00:49:13.360 | And Freud believed that he understood

00:49:16.080 | the decryption code to our dreams.

00:49:20.320 | And if you tell him your dream,

00:49:22.280 | he has the special filter

00:49:23.880 | that he can pull that dream through the filter

00:49:26.920 | and magically out on the other side

00:49:28.960 | is the true meaning of that dream.

00:49:31.460 | There are several problems with that theory,

00:49:36.800 | not least of which I think,

00:49:38.040 | at the time, if you look at his writings,

00:49:40.120 | it seemed that Freud was probably doing enough cocaine

00:49:42.640 | to kill a small horse at the time,

00:49:44.000 | but we'll put that aside for a second.

00:49:45.880 | The issue there is that it's not very replicable

00:49:50.680 | as an analysis method.

00:49:52.440 | And there's a fascinating study that was,

00:49:55.560 | I remember from a conference,

00:49:56.880 | I should check to see if it's been fully published.

00:49:59.440 | And they did something clever.

00:50:01.000 | They took the Freudian method

00:50:03.320 | and they took a single dream from one individual.

00:50:07.480 | And they had three Freudian psychoanalysts

00:50:12.000 | analyze that dream.

00:50:13.720 | So it was the same dream, but three different analysts.

00:50:16.640 | Now in a scientific protocol,

00:50:18.400 | if it's a scientifically rigorous assessment tool,

00:50:22.320 | you would get back the very same answer

00:50:25.440 | from that measurement technique all three times

00:50:28.640 | or very similar.

00:50:29.520 | So for example, a carbon dating machine,

00:50:32.440 | if I were to take a fossil

00:50:34.120 | and put it in a carbon dating machine

00:50:36.440 | and then another one and another one,

00:50:38.800 | for the most part,

00:50:39.800 | they're probably going to return something

00:50:41.400 | that's much more similar than different

00:50:43.200 | in terms of the carbon date of that fossil.

00:50:46.840 | Why?

00:50:47.680 | Because it's been very well-validated and replicated.

00:50:50.800 | That's what you want from a scientific method and tool.

00:50:54.040 | But when they gave the single dream,

00:50:56.320 | the fossil as it were,

00:50:57.800 | to these three different interpreters,

00:50:59.640 | the three different carbon dating machines as who are,

00:51:02.640 | they all came up with completely different interpretations.

00:51:06.360 | And so that's not necessarily a reliable, valid method.

00:51:10.920 | So in that sense,

00:51:12.120 | we've abandoned and let go of Freud

00:51:15.240 | as being relevant or meaningful.

00:51:17.480 | However, I personally,

00:51:20.200 | and I think if you look at the data,

00:51:22.000 | I don't mean that to suggest

00:51:25.080 | that you should not try to think about

00:51:28.280 | and quote unquote, interpret your dreams.

00:51:32.360 | And the term interpret when it comes to dreams is so loaded.

00:51:35.560 | So I tend to, I would just simply say,

00:51:37.960 | see if you can really deconstruct some of your dreams.

00:51:42.960 | I think dreaming, just as we've spoken about,

00:51:46.640 | is a very solid window into the things

00:51:50.480 | that you should be concerned about from your waking life.

00:51:54.520 | It's very obvious that whatever it is

00:51:57.200 | that we typically dream are the things

00:51:59.560 | that our brain is telling us, the human being,

00:52:03.480 | this is the stuff that's essential.

00:52:06.200 | This is the stuff you need to work through.

00:52:07.920 | This is please pay attention to me.

00:52:11.520 | And any amount of journaling or deliberation,

00:52:15.560 | digestion, cogitation of that specific dream

00:52:19.960 | is going to be beneficial to you.

00:52:22.360 | Because in my mind,

00:52:23.960 | a life unexamined is not a life well-lived.

00:52:27.880 | And that isn't just applicable to your waking life.

00:52:31.080 | It's especially applicable to your dreaming life.

00:52:34.200 | Now, does that mean I'm suggesting

00:52:36.280 | that everyone should race out

00:52:37.640 | and start cataloging and interpreting their dreams?

00:52:42.240 | Not necessarily.

00:52:43.600 | But I am saying that if you wish to do that,

00:52:46.800 | I, as a scientist, based on the data,

00:52:48.440 | I'm not telling you that that's hooey and non-scientific.

00:52:52.080 | I think it's very valid.

00:52:53.560 | It's just that some of the Freudian principles,

00:52:55.520 | I think, we've been able to dislocate ourselves from.

00:52:59.200 | - I wholeheartedly agree with what you just said.

00:53:03.360 | And I've spoken about dreams

00:53:04.520 | and their possible relevance to clinician psychiatrists,

00:53:07.760 | such as Paul Conti and others,

00:53:09.640 | some who have more of a psychoanalytic training than others.

00:53:12.120 | But certainly folks like Paul know a ton of neuroscience.

00:53:17.120 | They understand pharmacology.

00:53:18.960 | They understand family systems models,

00:53:21.520 | dialectical therapy, and so many other-

00:53:24.480 | - That man is, he's extraordinary.

00:53:26.760 | He's not extraordinary, he's extraordinary.

00:53:28.600 | - He is extraordinary.

00:53:29.840 | And in part, because he can synthesize

00:53:33.080 | across all these different domains of psychiatry,

00:53:34.920 | psychology, neuroscience, et cetera,

00:53:37.600 | as opposed to just existing in one silo,

00:53:40.760 | like psychoanalysis or psychopharmacology.

00:53:44.120 | So, and there are others,

00:53:45.600 | although few as extraordinary as Paul,

00:53:49.600 | which is why we hosted him on the series here.

00:53:51.700 | And one of the things that has come up

00:53:53.280 | in the discussions with Paul and others

00:53:55.440 | with similar training about dreams

00:53:59.340 | is that dreams seem to present us

00:54:03.460 | with emotional states and scenarios

00:54:06.520 | for which there's a lot of swapping in and out of identity.

00:54:11.120 | So for instance, the notion of symbols within dreams

00:54:13.860 | is a longstanding conversation.

00:54:15.700 | And I think one of the mistakes, as I understand it,

00:54:17.900 | is to assume that every time there's an animal in your dream

00:54:20.860 | that it represents children,

00:54:22.040 | or that every time it's a particular kind of animal,

00:54:24.260 | it represents your boss or something.

00:54:28.220 | - Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

00:54:29.980 | - Right, right.

00:54:31.460 | On the other hand, it's very clear that within our dreams,

00:54:35.260 | there's rarely a completely linear one-for-one relationship

00:54:39.980 | with what happened in the daytime of real experience.

00:54:43.700 | So there seems to be a swapping in and out.

00:54:46.100 | And there, I just sort of zoom out,

00:54:47.640 | and forgive me for going long here,

00:54:48.780 | but I think this would be a good fodder

00:54:50.940 | for exploring this a little bit more deeply.

00:54:53.740 | You know, one of the best descriptions of brain function

00:54:56.500 | that I've ever heard is from the Nobel Prize-winning

00:54:58.540 | neuroscientist Richard Axel at Columbia,

00:55:01.500 | who often talks about the brain creating abstractions

00:55:05.060 | of the outside world.

00:55:05.940 | So if I were to take a photo of your face, for instance,

00:55:07.900 | and then show you that photograph, you'd say,

00:55:09.260 | "Yeah, that's me."

00:55:10.420 | But if I were a painter, I might, you know,

00:55:13.060 | swap some of the positions of components of your face

00:55:16.980 | and show it to you.

00:55:17.820 | And you might say, "Well, that doesn't look like me."

00:55:19.180 | And I'd say, "But that's my abstraction of your face."

00:55:21.500 | So to me, it makes sense because I understand the rules

00:55:23.460 | by which I made those swaps and moves.

00:55:25.460 | There are some algorithms or rules that are known to me.

00:55:28.260 | So there's a preservation of real world to the abstraction.

00:55:32.380 | And that's really what our brain does all the time.

00:55:34.180 | It attempts to faithfully represent the world around us,

00:55:37.780 | but it is indeed an abstraction.

00:55:40.100 | And when it comes to the colors of things

00:55:42.060 | or the position of objects,

00:55:43.180 | it's as one-for-one as our brain is capable of.

00:55:47.700 | But when it comes to ideas, to feelings,

00:55:50.860 | to our relationships to other people,

00:55:53.260 | the brain abstracts those in its own little neural symphony

00:55:57.300 | of this is the relationship to my dog.

00:55:59.500 | This is the relationship to my friend

00:56:00.860 | and colleague, Matt Walker.

00:56:02.540 | So it makes sense that in dreams,

00:56:04.180 | those algorithms could be different.

00:56:05.900 | They could be faster or slower,

00:56:08.020 | but they could also be entirely different.

00:56:09.420 | I don't think we yet know what the algorithms

00:56:12.900 | of transformation of real world experience

00:56:15.460 | to dream experience are.

00:56:18.620 | And once we do, and I think someday we will understand those

00:56:22.060 | through electrical recordings and MRI type experiments.

00:56:26.740 | And some of the experiments you talked about earlier

00:56:28.340 | point to this.

00:56:29.260 | And so I think it's entirely reasonable to assume

00:56:31.620 | that we each have our own unique abstraction algorithms

00:56:36.500 | so that indeed we can have consistent representation

00:56:39.700 | of real world experiences in symbols,

00:56:41.700 | but that it's not going to be the same for everybody.

00:56:44.220 | - Correct.

00:56:45.060 | - Your way of abstracting your real life to your dream life

00:56:48.780 | could be entirely unique to you.

00:56:51.220 | And mine could be entirely unique to me,

00:56:52.580 | making it very difficult for a third party to come in

00:56:54.780 | and say, okay, Matt, here's what your dream means.

00:56:57.140 | But you can know what your dream means

00:56:58.900 | if you explore your dreams over time,

00:57:01.260 | not just that one dream.

00:57:02.420 | Does that make sense?

00:57:03.260 | - It makes total sense because in some ways,

00:57:05.780 | there is no one who knows your own autobiography

00:57:09.500 | by definition than you, than yourself.

00:57:13.140 | Now, I'm not suggesting that having that interpretation

00:57:16.700 | guided by someone who also understands

00:57:19.740 | the emotional problems that you're having

00:57:21.660 | and also sees your blind spots,

00:57:23.700 | which is what a really good therapist can do,

00:57:26.380 | can then help with that interpretation.

00:57:29.020 | But you're right because my representation

00:57:31.900 | of information in the brain is going to be very biased

00:57:35.620 | by also what I've experienced in the past

00:57:38.860 | and how that past experience augments and modulates

00:57:42.740 | the current representation of that information

00:57:45.300 | and thus the meaning of it for me, the unique individual.

00:57:50.140 | And you're also right to say that it's somehow,

00:57:54.820 | it's almost as though you're squinting your eyes

00:57:57.180 | when you're in dream sleep

00:57:59.780 | in terms of the true vision of things.

00:58:01.940 | Things get a little bit wacky

00:58:04.300 | and distorted, this bizarre nature.

00:58:06.060 | There is some very interesting data

00:58:09.380 | and it comes back to what we described earlier,

00:58:12.220 | the neurochemistry of the REM sleep state.

00:58:15.180 | I told you that during REM sleep,

00:58:17.260 | levels of noradrenaline are at floor levels.

00:58:20.620 | Noradrenaline is shut off.

00:58:22.300 | One of the things if you sort of drop noradrenaline

00:58:24.660 | onto neural circuits, it will very much increase

00:58:28.460 | what we call the signal to noise.

00:58:31.460 | And this is why noradrenaline, when it's released

00:58:34.380 | or if you administer it to an animal,

00:58:36.180 | you can become almost more directed.

00:58:40.900 | You're much more divergent.

00:58:43.460 | You're focused in attending and it's really there.

00:58:47.100 | You're very blinkered.

00:58:48.220 | You're very focused.

00:58:49.900 | But when that goes away, the neural circuits

00:58:52.660 | become a little bit more loosey goosey.

00:58:55.020 | And I also told you that the other chemical,

00:58:57.220 | if there is a neurochemical that defines REM sleep dreaming,

00:59:00.660 | it's this thing called acetylcholine.

00:59:02.980 | And acetylcholine seems to do the opposite.

00:59:05.620 | It seems to inject a little bit more noise

00:59:08.940 | relative to the signal.

00:59:10.580 | So in other words, your brain circuits

00:59:14.380 | are neurochemically modulated when you dream

00:59:18.740 | to inject almost what we would think of as fuzzy logic.

00:59:22.780 | And this is why I think the analogy that we spoke about

00:59:25.220 | in a previous episode holds that when you are awake

00:59:28.940 | and you're given some information,

00:59:31.140 | you produce the most obvious links and obvious associations

00:59:34.380 | because you're very much blinkered

00:59:36.980 | and you have noradrenaline on board.

00:59:38.940 | But when you go into dream sleep,

00:59:42.460 | it's almost like the Google search.

00:59:44.060 | When you're awake, go straight to page one

00:59:46.020 | and it's very related.

00:59:47.980 | But do that same search when you're in the dream state

00:59:51.700 | and you go straight to page 35 and it's an utterly bizarre

00:59:58.460 | page.

00:59:59.060 | And you think, hang on a second.

01:00:00.380 | This has got nothing to do with the search term.

01:00:02.340 | When you read it, you think, well, if I squint my eyes,

01:00:05.820 | it kind of does.

01:00:06.500 | It's very distant, very non-obvious.

01:00:08.620 | But that's a very smart connection

01:00:10.860 | that as a waking brain, I never would have put together.

01:00:15.460 | So I think neurochemically, we can start to understand it.

01:00:18.900 | But I think this is a very good important point where

01:00:21.660 | you could almost say the very best person

01:00:23.620 | to interpret your dreams is probably you.

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01:01:37.420 | - Some dreams we'd rather not have.

01:01:39.460 | Here I'm specifically referring to nightmares.

01:01:45.020 | I've had one nightmare countless times throughout my life.

01:01:50.020 | I won't share what it is.

01:01:54.340 | It's not a real world experience,

01:01:57.380 | or at least it's not a one-for-one of real world experience,

01:01:59.620 | but I've had this nightmare since I was a kid.

01:02:01.700 | I have it seldom these days,

01:02:03.140 | but every time it starts again, I'm like, "Oh no."

01:02:05.900 | And there's a bit of a lucidity to it,

01:02:07.980 | where I'm like, "I hear him again."

01:02:09.500 | Been working on this one a while, as you can imagine.

01:02:12.660 | But given what we understand about the relationship

01:02:16.280 | between real world experiences and dreams,

01:02:18.900 | what should we make of the fact that we have nightmares?

01:02:22.060 | So let's just start there.

01:02:22.940 | The phenomenon of nightmares,

01:02:24.860 | does it represent something that troubled us in the daytime

01:02:28.700 | and that we're trying to work out in our sleep?

01:02:31.460 | And then maybe we can get into some of the specifics

01:02:33.500 | around why, regardless of whether or not the answer

01:02:37.940 | to that question is yes or no,

01:02:39.880 | that we would have this thing called nightmares,

01:02:42.060 | especially given that there's all this machinery

01:02:43.700 | to make sure that we don't move

01:02:44.900 | and the noradrenaline is low in the brain

01:02:47.080 | while we're dreaming.

01:02:48.820 | Seems like there's all sorts of mechanisms

01:02:50.940 | to try and ensure that our dreams are very pleasant

01:02:53.300 | or at least neutral, but nightmares suck.

01:02:57.100 | But, so I'd love to know-

01:02:58.500 | - Get me that T-shirt, please.

01:02:59.860 | - So I'd love to know that they serve some utility.

01:03:03.140 | - So nightmares, how do we define a nightmare

01:03:06.740 | in sort of science clinically?

01:03:08.940 | It's a little bit tricky,

01:03:10.020 | but usually the way we define it is

01:03:12.500 | it's a strongly unpleasant dream

01:03:14.860 | that causes some time of daytime displeasure.

01:03:19.860 | So in other words,

01:03:21.460 | some type of daytime dysfunction or distress.

01:03:25.320 | So everyone can have a bad dream,

01:03:27.500 | but when you go up into your waking life

01:03:29.780 | and about your waking day,

01:03:31.540 | it doesn't seem to bother you too much.

01:03:33.580 | And maybe we'll just say that's a bad dream.

01:03:36.420 | When it really becomes a nightmare

01:03:38.220 | is when I almost think of it as though you wake up

01:03:42.460 | and that blanket of strong nightmare emotion

01:03:46.380 | is still wrapped around you and you can feel it.

01:03:49.740 | You can just know there's,

01:03:51.580 | my emotional state is still heavy

01:03:53.980 | and I know exactly where it came from.

01:03:56.860 | And it was from that nightmare.

01:03:58.540 | And throughout the day,

01:04:00.060 | you don't seem to be able to de-robe yourself

01:04:03.620 | from that cloaked affect of the nightmare,

01:04:07.540 | drenches you almost.

01:04:09.400 | That's where it really starts to become unpleasant.

01:04:12.460 | And we actually do have a clinical category.

01:04:14.540 | It's called nightmare disorder.

01:04:16.700 | And the way we typically define that

01:04:19.460 | is the same thing as I said,

01:04:21.340 | a very unpleasant dream

01:04:23.200 | that causes some type of daytime distress.

01:04:26.020 | And it's happening at least once a week.

01:04:30.180 | At that point, we start to move it

01:04:31.860 | into this category of nightmare disorder.

01:04:34.700 | What are nightmares doing, if anything at all?

01:04:41.460 | There are at least two theories.

01:04:42.860 | One is that it's simply the system failing,

01:04:46.900 | the system gone wrong.

01:04:48.620 | And we're not processing, we're not moving through things.

01:04:52.140 | And therefore nightmares are maladaptive.

01:04:55.940 | They're not warranted, they're not normative.

01:04:59.540 | The other is that no, they are adaptive

01:05:02.700 | and they are meaningful.

01:05:04.660 | And it's us really trying to go

01:05:06.620 | to a very specific pain point.

01:05:09.540 | And we continue to process it over and over,

01:05:12.860 | perhaps to the point where we get resolution.

01:05:15.860 | But sometimes we just don't.

01:05:17.780 | So it keeps cropping up.

01:05:19.140 | We don't have good data to disambiguate those two right now.

01:05:24.220 | So I think it still remains open.

01:05:25.860 | At least I don't know of any data that tells me,

01:05:29.300 | are they functional or are they maladaptive?

01:05:33.700 | Even when we get that answer,

01:05:38.060 | in some ways it doesn't change the fact

01:05:40.500 | that it still leaves a patient with nightmares,

01:05:44.180 | with recurring nightmares.

01:05:46.540 | So then what do you do about that?

01:05:48.940 | How do we, is there any treatment for people out there

01:05:51.940 | if they're under this distress, is there hope?

01:05:55.860 | And for a long time,

01:05:56.980 | there really wasn't very much hope at all.

01:05:58.980 | You just had to go through it.

01:06:01.460 | But recently there was a method that was developed

01:06:05.420 | and it's very effective.

01:06:07.380 | And it is called IRT,

01:06:10.140 | which stands for Image Rehearsal Therapy.

01:06:14.100 | And its basis comes back to something that in fact we,

01:06:17.940 | I think hopefully published the first evidence

01:06:19.660 | in humans of some years ago now

01:06:22.660 | called memory reconsolidation.

01:06:26.020 | So in our episode on learning and memory,

01:06:28.420 | we said that there is at least sort of

01:06:30.540 | two main steps of memory.

01:06:31.980 | First, you have to imprint and learn the memory,

01:06:34.460 | lay down that memory trace.

01:06:36.100 | But then that memory is very fragile

01:06:38.340 | and vulnerable to being overwritten

01:06:40.820 | by competing information knocked out of place.

01:06:43.900 | And for you to hold onto that memory,

01:06:45.780 | you have to go through a second step

01:06:47.420 | called memory consolidation, a very slow process.

01:06:50.700 | It's like a very slow pressing of the save button

01:06:53.420 | because it's biological.

01:06:54.620 | It requires protein synthesis and all of that good stuff.

01:06:57.540 | But that always struck me as a strange model

01:07:02.780 | because it's the equivalent of opening up a Word document,

01:07:06.180 | you type out all of the information into it,

01:07:09.300 | and then you hit the save button.

01:07:10.700 | So I've encoded, imprinted the information

01:07:13.260 | that I've hit save and saved it.

01:07:15.300 | And then I close that file.

01:07:17.340 | And then the next day I come back or some days later,

01:07:19.860 | and I double click on that file again

01:07:21.580 | because I want to edit it.

01:07:23.060 | I either want to add to it

01:07:24.740 | or I want to revise it and change it.

01:07:27.660 | But according to that model, it's been locked in place

01:07:30.740 | and you could never edit that Word document.

01:07:32.820 | That seems like a profoundly useless way

01:07:35.140 | to store information.

01:07:37.060 | And what we learned is that every time in subsequent days,

01:07:41.620 | when you reactivate, which is to say,

01:07:44.020 | when you recollect the memory that has been consolidated,

01:07:48.620 | it opens that memory file back up

01:07:51.860 | to once again, being plastic and malleable.

01:07:55.140 | So you can go in and update the information

01:07:58.660 | in that memory store.

01:08:00.220 | And then the next night, you consolidate it again.

01:08:03.660 | In other words, you re-consolidate it.

01:08:06.460 | So it's memory updating.

01:08:08.700 | And there is a very clear mechanism in the human brain

01:08:11.300 | that allows us to do this memory updating,

01:08:14.020 | iteratively, time and time again.

01:08:16.420 | This comes back to nightmare disorders.

01:08:21.420 | This therapy, Image Rehearsal Therapy or IRT,

01:08:25.180 | will have you sit down with a therapist.

01:08:27.420 | And at first you'll describe the nightmare

01:08:29.700 | that you're going through

01:08:30.740 | and you'll write that narrative down.

01:08:33.100 | And then working with a therapist,

01:08:35.020 | you will agree to think about a more neutral ending

01:08:40.580 | to that nightmare.

01:08:42.420 | So let's say that I was involved

01:08:44.460 | in a very, very difficult car crash.

01:08:48.420 | It was just horrific.

01:08:50.020 | And every night since, I'd say at least once a week,

01:08:54.100 | I just continue to have the nightmare of the car crash.

01:08:57.540 | I know that I'm traveling towards the junction.

01:09:00.380 | I apply the brakes, the brakes have failed.

01:09:03.340 | I am just looking around.

01:09:05.740 | I'm trying to maneuver,

01:09:06.940 | but nothing is going to change this.

01:09:09.620 | I go through the red light and someone sideswipes me

01:09:14.100 | and that's the end.

01:09:15.060 | And I relive that time and time again, and it's awful.

01:09:19.980 | So you with the therapist, or I with the therapist,

01:09:22.860 | would then start to say,

01:09:23.700 | "Well, what about the alternative scenario?"

01:09:26.100 | I depress the brake and the brakes don't work,

01:09:29.220 | but gradually I think,

01:09:30.060 | "Well, I'm just going to reach over to the handbrake

01:09:32.900 | "and I'm going to gradually apply the handbrake."

01:09:35.900 | And that slowly is going to bring the car

01:09:38.620 | to a nice safe stop.

01:09:40.940 | And then I'm going to call the emergency services.

01:09:44.820 | The car is going to get towed.

01:09:46.500 | I don't go through the junction.

01:09:48.100 | I survive, everything's fine.

01:09:50.620 | So you rehearse this alternate ending

01:09:54.540 | and you keep going through that, rehearsing that.

01:09:58.140 | And then you go to sleep the next night

01:10:01.580 | and you'll probably have a high chance

01:10:03.500 | of that nightmare again.

01:10:04.820 | But if you keep doing that,

01:10:06.860 | once you've got that alternative ending,

01:10:09.700 | essentially what you're trying to do

01:10:10.900 | is every time you reactivate the memory

01:10:13.500 | of the trauma car crash,

01:10:15.860 | and then you rehearse this alternate ending,

01:10:19.060 | it's like me going into the Word document

01:10:21.740 | and editing the section that was really horrific and bad

01:10:25.140 | and replacing it with something that's neutral

01:10:27.220 | or even positive.

01:10:29.140 | And over time, then I sleep and I will consolidate

01:10:33.180 | that memory.

01:10:34.020 | I'll come back the next day

01:10:35.460 | and I'll do some more editing and more updating.

01:10:39.300 | And time after time after time,

01:10:41.260 | gradually you dissipate the narrative

01:10:44.340 | that is fixed inside of the brain.

01:10:46.980 | And the nightmare frequency decreases in proportion.

01:10:51.180 | Now it's not effective for 100% of patients.

01:10:55.220 | If you look at the data on average,

01:10:56.900 | it's about two out of every three people.

01:10:59.460 | So about 66% of people will benefit,

01:11:02.300 | which if you look at some medical treatments,

01:11:03.980 | that's a great treatment.

01:11:05.660 | That's still very effective.

01:11:07.220 | There was a very recent study from Sophie Schwartz

01:11:13.460 | and her colleagues at the University of Geneva

01:11:16.060 | that did an even more ingenious study.

01:11:19.540 | And they were able to nudge the effectiveness

01:11:22.700 | of that treatment from 66% up to 92%.

01:11:27.700 | And they used an additional memory related research tool.

01:11:33.340 | We've come up with in sleep science

01:11:36.060 | and it's called TMR or targeted memory reactivation.

01:11:40.820 | And here's how it goes.

01:11:42.260 | I'm going to have you learn a set of associations.

01:11:45.980 | Have you ever played that card game?

01:11:47.460 | I think in America it's called memory,

01:11:49.420 | which is very apt where you get a deck of cards

01:11:53.220 | and it has two of the same item,

01:11:55.380 | two houses, two cars, two fire engines, two kettles,

01:11:58.980 | and you shuffle the cards

01:12:00.060 | and then you put them face down in a big square

01:12:03.100 | and a big matrix.

01:12:04.340 | And over time you have to turn over one card

01:12:06.700 | and it's a kettle.

01:12:07.860 | And then I'm just going to randomly pick another card

01:12:09.980 | and it's a fire engine.

01:12:11.660 | Okay.

01:12:12.500 | But gradually you start to learn

01:12:14.020 | where each one of the pairs are located.

01:12:18.260 | So what's clever about that is we would do that type

01:12:22.300 | of what's called a paired association memory test.

01:12:26.500 | You learn these paired associates

01:12:29.620 | and then we test you after a night of sleep

01:12:31.780 | and you're better.

01:12:32.860 | However, if for, as you're turning those items over,

01:12:37.820 | I play a congruent sound.

01:12:40.620 | So let's say you turn over the fire engine.

01:12:43.540 | And then when you turn over the other fire engine,

01:12:46.020 | I'm going to start playing a fire engine noise

01:12:49.060 | in the background.

01:12:50.020 | So I'm bonding the association of the memory card pairs

01:12:54.980 | with this tone, with this congruent sound.

01:12:57.940 | And then a kettle, I turn over a kettle,

01:12:59.940 | I turn over the other kettle and it's whistling.

01:13:03.020 | And then when you let people sleep at night,

01:13:06.140 | if you start replaying those same tones

01:13:10.140 | at a sub-awakening threshold,

01:13:12.700 | so you're not waking people up and you bring them back.

01:13:16.340 | And let's say that you only do those sound cue reactivations

01:13:20.820 | for half of the memories that you've done

01:13:23.300 | and the other half you leave untouched.

01:13:24.580 | So within an individual,

01:13:26.100 | you have a unique within individual control.

01:13:28.740 | You test them on the things that you didn't reactivate

01:13:31.460 | at night and those that you did.

01:13:33.500 | It's almost like creating a bespoke playlist at night

01:13:39.540 | where you say, look, I learned all of this information

01:13:41.780 | during the day, or wouldn't this be wonderful?

01:13:43.780 | And then here's the stuff that I really think,

01:13:46.060 | personally to me, I want to remember.

01:13:48.660 | Well, it turns out I'd been tagging that

01:13:50.580 | with particular music.

01:13:51.700 | And then at night I replayed that music.

01:13:53.540 | And the next day, it turns out

01:13:55.620 | that those things I reactivated

01:13:57.740 | are much more strongly consolidated by way of sleep

01:14:00.820 | than those things I didn't.

01:14:02.860 | So that's the basic method of what we call TMR,

01:14:05.820 | targeted memory reactivation.

01:14:08.620 | What they did was something very clever.

01:14:11.180 | They had them go through this process

01:14:12.820 | of the image rehearsal therapy.

01:14:14.580 | They were rehearsing the alternate ending,

01:14:17.020 | but about every 10 seconds,

01:14:18.740 | they were playing them this very pleasing piano chord

01:14:22.100 | in the background.

01:14:23.700 | And they were just bonding the association

01:14:26.660 | of the new outcome ending to the nightmare

01:14:30.500 | with this pleasant piano chord.

01:14:33.500 | And then sure enough, in the subsequent weeks afterwards,

01:14:37.140 | not only was that person day after day

01:14:39.340 | doing the diligent therapy practice of rehearsing the memory

01:14:43.420 | whilst the piano tone was playing,

01:14:45.660 | but then at night they would wait

01:14:47.820 | until they went into REM sleep,

01:14:50.060 | which is the state we think the emotional therapy begins,

01:14:53.940 | and they would start to replay

01:14:56.260 | that same piano chord over and over again.

01:15:00.500 | And sure enough,

01:15:01.540 | those people who had image rehearsal therapy standard,

01:15:04.820 | they improved by about 60%

01:15:06.580 | in their nightmare frequency reduction.

01:15:08.700 | Those people who did that,

01:15:10.220 | plus the memory reactivation at night,

01:15:13.300 | it drove it from 66% all the way up to 92%.

01:15:19.020 | So now modern day neuroscience with its techniques

01:15:22.740 | is starting to overlap with classical clinical psychology.

01:15:26.660 | And we're developing these next forefront of methods

01:15:30.820 | that really harness and fine tune the brain's ability

01:15:34.860 | to undergo effective therapy.

01:15:38.260 | - It's incredible.

01:15:39.100 | I mean, I think that we've known about classical conditioning

01:15:41.500 | for a long time.

01:15:42.480 | And the case of Pavlov's dogs is the most known of those.

01:15:47.880 | Known of those.

01:15:49.080 | Am I right in recalling that this paired association way

01:15:54.960 | of bringing about certain memories

01:15:57.800 | or strengthening certain memories in sleep

01:15:59.360 | can also be accomplished with odors?

01:16:01.400 | That it's not just the playing of tones

01:16:03.980 | during specific experiences,

01:16:05.840 | but also for instance,

01:16:07.400 | if one were to pair a particular odor

01:16:10.680 | with a certain novel memory event in the daytime

01:16:14.640 | or attempt to learn something new,

01:16:16.680 | that if that odor is then infused

01:16:18.760 | into the room of the sleeping person later that night,

01:16:22.040 | that somehow the memories would be strengthened.

01:16:24.400 | Do I have that correct?

01:16:25.560 | - There's nothing, I've said it before,

01:16:27.180 | I'll say it again, nothing wrong with your memory.

01:16:29.400 | That was one of the seminal papers

01:16:31.120 | that started this whole movement.

01:16:32.800 | And what they did was they had them learn

01:16:34.440 | this kind of paired associate card test,

01:16:37.480 | but they were wearing this mask,

01:16:39.720 | almost looks like a fighter pilot mask.

01:16:42.160 | And they were either puffing up inert air

01:16:46.400 | that didn't smell at all,

01:16:48.640 | or they were perfusing this very pleasant rose scent.

01:16:53.040 | Because smell in particular

01:16:54.920 | has a very unique relationship with our memory,

01:16:57.640 | in part because we emerged from animals

01:17:01.600 | that would principally use smell as their navigational tool.

01:17:06.000 | I think everyone has had this experience

01:17:08.120 | where you bond a certain cologne or a certain perfume

01:17:11.920 | with a particular individual.

01:17:14.160 | So they were puffing the rose perfume

01:17:16.640 | up the nose of these participants.

01:17:18.640 | And then when they went into sleep,

01:17:21.080 | they started to re-perfuse that rose odor.

01:17:24.280 | Now, what was clever also about the experiment,

01:17:27.120 | you could say, well, look,

01:17:28.080 | just anytime you get something that smells

01:17:30.240 | puffed up your nose, your memory is going to be better.

01:17:33.080 | Now, the initial experiment had them learning

01:17:36.160 | the information when they're awake

01:17:37.640 | with the rose scent getting pushed up the nose.

01:17:40.560 | And then when they slept, they had the rose odor again.

01:17:43.560 | Another group had learning,

01:17:46.480 | but they had no rose smell pushed up their nose

01:17:49.840 | to bond with the information

01:17:52.040 | at the time of learning when they were awake.

01:17:54.480 | And then when they slept,

01:17:55.760 | they also had rose odor stuffed up their nose

01:17:58.760 | and they showed no additional benefit.

01:18:00.760 | So it's not just enough to have rose odor at night,

01:18:03.760 | you need to have made the initial bonded familiar connection

01:18:08.040 | with the novel information that you're learning

01:18:10.120 | to get the subsequent

01:18:11.760 | targeted memory reactivation benefit.

01:18:14.120 | And you could then think, well, practical tools,

01:18:16.200 | what should I do?

01:18:17.040 | Maybe when I'm learning for studying for a test,

01:18:21.120 | I should blaze up my most preferred incense.

01:18:25.560 | And I have a particular proclivity

01:18:28.120 | to green tea incense, it turns out.

01:18:30.840 | And maybe then before I go to bed at night,

01:18:34.600 | I get a couple of sticks and I blaze them back up,

01:18:37.880 | took my head on the pillow, turn the light out.

01:18:40.440 | However, do not do that

01:18:42.440 | because it's probably a desperate fire hazard.

01:18:45.560 | So do not listen to me,

01:18:46.840 | but you could think about doing something

01:18:49.120 | along those lines, perhaps.

01:18:50.720 | Anyway, so that's targeted memory reactivation.

01:18:53.480 | - Yeah, it's a perfect segue

01:18:55.480 | for what I wanted to talk about next,

01:18:58.080 | which is lucid dreaming.

01:18:59.480 | But before we move to lucid dreaming,

01:19:04.200 | I'm wondering whether or not there's an opportunity here

01:19:07.000 | to construct an experiment,

01:19:08.520 | maybe even a protocol of sorts,

01:19:10.840 | to uncouple the negative experience of nightmares

01:19:15.840 | to our daily experience.

01:19:18.240 | So for instance, we're talking about paired association

01:19:20.400 | based on odors or sounds replayed in sleep

01:19:22.880 | to sort of nudge or conjure particular daytime memories

01:19:27.880 | to the surface in the form of dream sleep.

01:19:30.420 | But we also know that one can uncouple associations.

01:19:36.700 | So for instance, if one experienced something negative,

01:19:41.700 | and maybe this is being attempted

01:19:43.480 | in the realm of trauma therapy,

01:19:45.900 | and that experience was paired with a particular odor,

01:19:52.080 | it'd be hard to do with visual cues in sleep, or sound,

01:19:55.180 | could one attempt to introduce a sort of a competing sound,

01:20:01.280 | you know, set up a sort of a collision

01:20:06.340 | stimulus so that in sleep,

01:20:09.020 | the dream would no longer contain the scary content,

01:20:13.580 | where it would be less scary?

01:20:15.100 | Or is this exactly the wrong approach?

01:20:18.260 | Because if we believe that the nightmares

01:20:20.040 | are serving some functional purpose,

01:20:21.620 | allowing us to work through-

01:20:23.240 | - What you really don't wanna do.

01:20:24.660 | - Right, okay, great.

01:20:25.640 | Then we answered the question.

01:20:26.620 | - Well, no, I think it's unclear right now,

01:20:30.500 | but you're on the right line

01:20:33.380 | because there is something that we have

01:20:35.800 | in learning and memory called fear extinction.

01:20:39.360 | And let's say that I were to

01:20:42.080 | sort of classic Pavlovian learning, Pavlov's dogs.

01:20:45.080 | Let's say I show you a specific image on the screen,

01:20:48.140 | and then you hear a specific tone,

01:20:50.660 | and then you get an electric shock.

01:20:52.960 | I show you the stimulus on the screen,

01:20:54.760 | you hear the specific tone,

01:20:56.320 | and then you get an electrical shock.

01:20:58.120 | Then I don't show you the stimulus on the screen,

01:21:01.560 | but you do still hear the tone.

01:21:04.440 | And then what happens is that you have a braced response

01:21:08.300 | to the electrical shock.

01:21:09.760 | And there's all sorts of combinations in between of that.

01:21:12.240 | But essentially, I condition you to learn

01:21:15.440 | that these things seem to be associated

01:21:18.280 | with a negative outcome.

01:21:19.640 | The inverse being the Pavlovian dog,

01:21:21.740 | which is that you ring a bell,

01:21:24.040 | you show the dog some food and it salivates.

01:21:26.100 | You ring the bell,

01:21:26.940 | you show the dog some food and it salivates.

01:21:28.880 | And then you ring the bell,

01:21:30.260 | you don't give it some food,

01:21:31.740 | and it still salivates because it knows

01:21:33.720 | that the bell precedes the meat being shown.

01:21:37.400 | And I actually mixed my order around there

01:21:40.680 | in my own experiment to begin with.

01:21:42.600 | But then there's something different that you can do.

01:21:46.420 | You can start to perhaps change the sound

01:21:49.880 | or the bonded connection,

01:21:51.880 | and then you don't start getting the shock anymore.

01:21:55.840 | So that same ringing of the bell

01:21:58.400 | now is no longer consistently associated with the food.

01:22:03.060 | And gradually you decondition the dog

01:22:05.860 | such that after some time it learns,

01:22:08.380 | oh, I started to learn that the bell predicted food,

01:22:11.440 | but now it no longer does.

01:22:12.980 | And it takes some time to remove that.

01:22:15.420 | And that's what we call extinction.

01:22:17.620 | You've induced an association

01:22:19.380 | and then you gradually extinguish it

01:22:22.140 | by way of that alternate training method.

01:22:25.260 | So the question then became,

01:22:26.740 | could we use that type of method, but during sleep,

01:22:30.640 | could we train you up on a fear memory

01:22:33.400 | and then just begin the early signs of extinguishing,

01:22:37.960 | of deconditioning you?

01:22:40.240 | But then we don't do that very much.

01:22:42.960 | We wait until sleep

01:22:44.560 | and we continue the deconditioning protocol.

01:22:48.120 | And sure enough, sleep seems to be as if not more effective

01:22:51.920 | at extinguishing those fear memories

01:22:54.840 | than when you enact the protocol during wakefulness.

01:22:58.860 | So here is a very good example

01:23:00.900 | of where you can use

01:23:02.100 | this sleep dependent memory processing tapestry,

01:23:06.620 | this opportunity to harness,

01:23:09.340 | not just to strengthen memories that you wish to keep,

01:23:13.100 | but start to extinguish memories you wish to remove.

01:23:17.380 | And so I think it's a very exciting,

01:23:19.020 | it's right on the cusp

01:23:20.300 | of what we're starting to do right now.

01:23:22.380 | - I love it because I think some people

01:23:23.740 | would like to experience certain dreams

01:23:25.640 | and other people would like to

01:23:27.400 | not experience certain nightmares,

01:23:29.140 | which reminds me of a tool that Rick Rubin taught me.

01:23:32.460 | I don't know of any experiments that support this directly,

01:23:36.520 | but I've tried this

01:23:37.360 | and it certainly has worked first time and every time,

01:23:39.920 | which is, Rick said, if you wake up from a dream

01:23:44.440 | and you want to remember your dream

01:23:46.160 | and/or you found it pleasant or interesting,

01:23:50.120 | lay there completely still with your eyes closed

01:23:53.520 | and it will come to you.

01:23:55.160 | Whereas if you wake up from a nightmare,

01:23:58.720 | which many people do,

01:24:00.200 | and in a state of anxiety

01:24:02.040 | and you have a hard time kind of shaking

01:24:03.440 | the disturbing affect associated with that nightmare

01:24:07.260 | to move your body,

01:24:08.840 | get up and move your body

01:24:10.040 | and maybe even flip some lights on,

01:24:11.800 | something that normally I don't suggest

01:24:13.200 | in the middle of the night,

01:24:14.040 | but waking up from a nightmare can be quite disturbing

01:24:18.160 | and it can be disturbing enough

01:24:20.560 | that it makes it difficult to fall back asleep.

01:24:22.960 | So, and by the way, he's right.

01:24:25.080 | I don't know if he's read the science

01:24:26.840 | or it's, he's just, knowing Rick,

01:24:29.160 | he's probably just because he's so Yoda-like,

01:24:31.960 | he's probably intuited.

01:24:33.600 | - He has supernatural levels of insight.

01:24:35.440 | - Tens of thousands of scientific articles,

01:24:37.600 | but he's absolutely right.

01:24:38.600 | One of the ways, if you really wish to remember your dreams

01:24:42.640 | is not just jump up out of bed

01:24:44.680 | and start trying to write them down.

01:24:46.760 | Don't.

01:24:48.080 | Lie in bed, keep your eyes closed

01:24:50.960 | and gradually rehearse that dream

01:24:53.720 | over and over in your mind,

01:24:55.400 | almost as though you're scoring it

01:24:57.560 | into the etched surface of your memory,

01:25:00.200 | trace more and more.

01:25:01.480 | And gradually when you've re sort of capitulated

01:25:05.240 | and pieced back the jigsaw puzzle,

01:25:07.800 | then gradually open your eyes,

01:25:10.160 | start to dictate, start to write down,

01:25:12.800 | but don't do it immediately

01:25:14.280 | because as soon as you start doing it,

01:25:16.480 | it begins to float away,

01:25:18.000 | it begins to dissolve in a way

01:25:19.560 | that you're running and you're trying

01:25:22.880 | to reach your hand out or grab them.

01:25:25.000 | - Exactly, yeah.

01:25:26.120 | This is why I use the voice memos.

01:25:28.080 | Last night I woke up in the middle of the night

01:25:29.520 | from a dream and I decided to turn on voice memos.

01:25:31.960 | And I remember thinking,

01:25:32.920 | I'll remember this in the morning.

01:25:34.040 | And I remember, you never remember this in the morning.

01:25:36.200 | I did it.

01:25:37.040 | That is a perfect segue for lucid dreaming,

01:25:40.440 | which is the awareness that we are dreaming

01:25:43.880 | while in a dream.

01:25:45.640 | Is lucid dreaming real?

01:25:47.360 | Can we train ourselves to lucid dream?

01:25:49.080 | And what is the value of lucid dreaming?

01:25:51.400 | Is it just a fun game we can play?

01:25:53.840 | Is there any reason we should attempt to lucid dream

01:25:58.200 | if we don't already or encourage more lucid dreaming?

01:26:01.040 | - Or even any reason we shouldn't, perhaps.

01:26:04.240 | Lucid dreaming, you beautifully gave the definition.

01:26:08.280 | Loosely defined lucid dreaming

01:26:10.040 | is that you simply know that you're dreaming

01:26:13.320 | whilst you are dreaming.

01:26:15.600 | So in other words, as the dream is unfolding,

01:26:18.960 | you gain awareness of, ah, this is a dream,

01:26:23.960 | but I'm still dreaming.

01:26:25.480 | At that moment, by science definition,

01:26:28.160 | you are in a state of lucidity.

01:26:31.000 | But most people don't really mean that

01:26:33.640 | when they say, oh, I'm a lucid dreamer.

01:26:36.440 | They mean, yes, I become aware that I'm dreaming

01:26:39.960 | as I am dreaming.

01:26:41.600 | And then I take over the reins of control.

01:26:44.760 | And then starting to decide exactly what it is you dream

01:26:49.040 | and how you dream.

01:26:50.360 | So now I'm on the ground and I'm walking through a park

01:26:54.280 | and I decide that I just want to take off

01:26:56.680 | and I want to fly over the river

01:26:58.720 | or I want to fly out over San Francisco Bay and take a tour.

01:27:02.160 | So I decide to start flying.

01:27:05.120 | That is what most people think of as lucid dreaming.

01:27:08.800 | If you were to think about it,

01:27:12.120 | this thing called dreaming, as we've described,

01:27:14.520 | is utterly absurd as a state

01:27:18.120 | based on its psychotic kind of nature and characteristics

01:27:22.600 | to then start to say,

01:27:24.520 | it's that idiotic and strange and bizarre,

01:27:29.120 | but P.S., I can also take control of it

01:27:31.960 | and decide what I want to do with it,

01:27:33.680 | injects a whole dose of disbelief

01:27:37.440 | into a process that's already unbelievable by itself.

01:27:41.600 | So science for a while just thought,

01:27:44.160 | this is charlatan type stuff

01:27:46.240 | that these people claim that they can control their dreams.

01:27:50.760 | How can you ever prove that?

01:27:53.560 | Because don't forget when you go into REM sleep

01:27:56.120 | and you dream, you are paralyzed.

01:27:59.000 | So I can't just wake up and say, I was lucid dreaming.

01:28:01.920 | That's not proof.

01:28:03.160 | I have to, in some ways, be able to demonstrate

01:28:05.560 | that I'm lucid dreaming as I begin to become lucid,

01:28:09.320 | but I can't because I can't communicate with you

01:28:11.960 | as the scientist.

01:28:14.040 | Well, it turns out that you can.

01:28:16.480 | One of the things we spoke about in the first episode

01:28:18.680 | is that yes, you get these rapid eye movements,

01:28:21.000 | but think about what that means.

01:28:22.920 | I told you that when you dream,

01:28:24.440 | your brain paralyzes all of your voluntary muscles

01:28:27.760 | so that you can dream and dream safely

01:28:30.200 | and you don't act out your dreams,

01:28:31.760 | with the exception that at least two muscle groups,

01:28:34.440 | your extraocular muscles that move your eyes

01:28:37.280 | and your inner ear muscles,

01:28:39.040 | for some reason they are spurred from the paralysis

01:28:41.800 | so you can still move.

01:28:42.920 | Otherwise you could never have rapid eye movements.

01:28:47.040 | So the eyes, all of a sudden,

01:28:48.840 | because we have electrodes up top and below

01:28:51.680 | and left and right sides,

01:28:54.000 | we can measure what you're doing with your eyes during sleep.

01:28:58.160 | In fact, we have to do this to determine,

01:29:00.240 | are you awake or are you in REM sleep?

01:29:02.480 | The brain activity by itself doesn't tell us that.

01:29:05.040 | We measure your muscle activity,

01:29:06.760 | and if you lose muscle activity

01:29:09.040 | and your brain is very active

01:29:10.640 | and the eye channels that we're recording

01:29:13.000 | start to show these darting back and forth signals,

01:29:16.200 | we know you're in REM sleep, that's how we define it.

01:29:19.320 | So that then suggested to us,

01:29:21.360 | we can use the eye movements

01:29:23.120 | to create a form of Morse code signaling

01:29:26.680 | from the participant to the experimenter.

01:29:30.160 | And so let's say that with this claimed lucid dreamer

01:29:34.000 | who comes to my sleep center,

01:29:35.680 | we'll create a very specific agreed upon code,

01:29:38.840 | which is that as you start dreaming, I can see that.

01:29:42.160 | And when you become lucid in that dream,

01:29:44.160 | firstly, give me three leftward flicks of your eyes.

01:29:47.960 | We never see that in dreaming.

01:29:49.960 | It's a very deliberative act.

01:29:52.200 | And then when you say,

01:29:54.520 | okay, I've started the lucid dreaming

01:29:57.360 | and you've agreed with the experimenter

01:29:59.520 | that you're then going to start moving your hands,

01:30:02.960 | you're going to start to move your right hand.

01:30:05.320 | Well, when you start to move your right hand,

01:30:07.440 | give me four flicks to the right.

01:30:11.000 | And when you're moving your left hand in the dream,

01:30:13.760 | give me four flicks to the left.

01:30:16.280 | And so there we create

01:30:18.200 | this very specific instigational code.

01:30:21.000 | But then how does that help us?

01:30:25.040 | Well, we can have you sleeping in a brain scanner.

01:30:28.920 | And before the brain scanning session, when you sleep,

01:30:31.920 | I have you just go into the brain scanner awake

01:30:34.320 | and I say, move your left hand

01:30:37.000 | and your right motor cortex is going to be lighting up.

01:30:40.120 | And then I'm going to say, move your right hand

01:30:42.720 | and your left motor cortex is going to be lighting up.

01:30:46.560 | And for you and me, I build up a very unique map

01:30:50.480 | of your left hand motor memory representation

01:30:53.120 | and your right hand motor memory representation.

01:30:55.800 | And if it's the left hand,

01:30:57.000 | as I said, it's the right side of the brain.

01:30:58.600 | If it's the right hand, it's the left side of the brain.

01:31:00.960 | So now I've got ground truth

01:31:03.040 | as to where your hand representation is

01:31:05.480 | on your motor cortex in my brain scanner.

01:31:08.440 | And then I'm going to put you back in the brain scanner,

01:31:10.600 | let you go into sleep, let you start dreaming.

01:31:13.480 | Then you give me three left flicks, good.

01:31:16.920 | This person has now become lucid.

01:31:19.280 | And now he's doing four rightward flicks,

01:31:23.640 | which means he's clasping his right hand

01:31:26.480 | over and over again.

01:31:28.200 | And then he gives me four leftward flicks,

01:31:31.040 | which means he switched over.

01:31:32.360 | He's now using his left hand in his dream.

01:31:35.160 | By the way, I'm looking at the participant

01:31:37.120 | inside of the brain scanner through the glass.

01:31:39.240 | And of course, they're not moving their hand.

01:31:41.080 | Why? Because they're paralyzed.

01:31:43.000 | But in the dream, they are claiming

01:31:45.680 | based on their eye movements

01:31:47.320 | that they are moving their hands.

01:31:49.840 | We bring them back out of the brain scanner

01:31:51.800 | and we analyze their brain scans during the period

01:31:54.320 | when they said, I'm moving my right hand,

01:31:56.200 | I'm moving my left hand.

01:31:57.880 | What did we see?

01:31:59.520 | Sure enough, we saw the same.

01:32:01.520 | And we being the Royal We,

01:32:03.040 | it's a great city by a German group.

01:32:05.040 | Sure enough, you see exactly the same pattern.

01:32:08.080 | It was scientific ground truth evidence

01:32:11.200 | that when a lucid dreamer claims

01:32:13.320 | they are doing something in their dream,

01:32:16.160 | the brain scans that we received confirmed

01:32:19.120 | that indeed that's exactly what was happening.

01:32:22.920 | - It's just that none of the signal is being sent out

01:32:24.920 | to the periphery, to the limbs,

01:32:26.360 | because there's that-

01:32:27.880 | - Cut off at the spinal cord.

01:32:29.120 | - Descending inhibition.

01:32:30.160 | - Yeah, at the level of the alpha motor neurons

01:32:32.000 | of your spinal cord.

01:32:33.000 | - Incredible.

01:32:33.840 | So here we are talking about lucid dreaming,

01:32:36.640 | which is a kind of mixed level of consciousness.

01:32:39.660 | Dreaming, of course, but also lucidity.

01:32:43.160 | That is an awareness that one is dreaming.

01:32:45.080 | Now, in just about every one of the five episodes

01:32:49.640 | leading up to this sixth episode in this series,

01:32:52.940 | you emphasize the key importance of deep sleep

01:32:55.580 | and rapid eye movement sleep.

01:32:57.360 | And in many ways, some of the problems that arise

01:33:01.400 | from waking up in the middle of the night too many times

01:33:04.760 | or being in shallow sleep, as opposed to deep sleep,

01:33:08.240 | lucid dreaming, it seems, is a kind of a case of light sleep

01:33:13.240 | because of one's awareness, or is it?

01:33:16.700 | So that's one, the first question.

01:33:18.240 | And then just very quickly, an anecdote.

01:33:19.940 | When I was a kid, I used to read these

01:33:21.320 | like "Boy's Life" magazines and those kinds of things.

01:33:23.560 | I forget what they're called,

01:33:24.720 | but in the back they would have these ads for products

01:33:28.840 | like x-ray glasses or sea monkeys,

01:33:32.640 | which turned out to be brine shrimp.

01:33:33.900 | What a disappointment that was.

01:33:35.440 | And I thought they were monkeys.

01:33:38.240 | On the package, they were little monkeys,

01:33:40.080 | but they were brine shrimp.

01:33:41.440 | There was a product advertised that I in fact purchased,

01:33:46.600 | which was an eye mask that had a little blinking red light

01:33:49.960 | in one corner.

01:33:51.400 | And it said, "Learn to lucid dream."

01:33:53.680 | And the idea was that you would put this thing on

01:33:55.900 | and look at the red light just prior to going to sleep.

01:33:58.400 | And then you'd go to sleep with this thing on.

01:33:59.760 | And then at some point in your sleep,

01:34:02.200 | you would see or think that you saw the red light flashing.

01:34:07.040 | And the idea was that because you were in the eye mask,

01:34:09.800 | you were in enough of a dream

01:34:11.400 | that you would be able to link the waking state

01:34:14.320 | recognition of the light, et cetera, et cetera.

01:34:15.960 | Okay, people get it.

01:34:16.920 | I purchased that product.

01:34:20.280 | I used it.

01:34:21.440 | I thought perhaps there was an effect, quote unquote,

01:34:24.880 | where I could lucid dream,

01:34:26.360 | but I wouldn't consider myself an avid lucid dreamer.

01:34:28.880 | Although sometimes I am aware that I'm dreaming

01:34:30.880 | and usually it's in pleasant dreams,

01:34:34.640 | in which case I'm usually like, yeah, let's keep this going.

01:34:37.620 | Things like flying and being particularly talented

01:34:40.840 | in a sport that in my waking life,

01:34:43.040 | I had to ask for minimal things like that.

01:34:45.480 | Okay, so is lucid dreaming a case of shallow sleep

01:34:48.920 | and therefore something to avoid?

01:34:50.560 | Or is lucid dreaming something quite different?

01:34:54.180 | And is there any advantage to learning to lucid dream

01:34:57.640 | or enhancing one's amount of lucid dreaming?

01:35:00.280 | And if so, how should one go about that?

01:35:02.820 | - So I'll take the question, should you be lucid dreaming?

01:35:06.940 | And I think I can argue it both sides right now,

01:35:10.120 | and we don't have a very clear answer yet.

01:35:13.000 | The first side is if you take a step back

01:35:15.520 | and ask from an evolutionary perspective,

01:35:18.560 | let's assume for want of a better word,

01:35:22.200 | that lucid dreaming is helpful, it's meaningful,

01:35:27.160 | and that we should engage in it.

01:35:29.200 | If that's the case,

01:35:30.120 | that it confers some type of evolutionary benefit,

01:35:34.180 | then you would expect that a lot of people

01:35:36.720 | would be doing it.

01:35:38.300 | But if you look at the statistics,

01:35:39.760 | somewhere between maybe just 10 to 20% of the population

01:35:44.760 | are natural lucid dreamers.

01:35:47.480 | And so from an evolutionary perspective,

01:35:49.480 | I could say, well, if it was so powerful,

01:35:51.960 | it was so meaningful 'cause we know everyone sleeps.

01:35:55.720 | And for the most part,

01:35:56.640 | we can say that almost everyone dreams.

01:35:59.980 | If that's the case, then those must clearly serve a purpose.

01:36:03.820 | But the fact that very few people are lucid dreamers,

01:36:07.360 | doesn't that tell us that it isn't necessarily beneficial?

01:36:11.520 | So from that perspective, I can play those numbers.

01:36:14.960 | There is an inherent flaw in my argument there, however,

01:36:20.540 | because that assumes based on the argument

01:36:23.540 | I've just given you, that we have stopped evolving.

01:36:27.200 | And of course we have not.

01:36:29.100 | And so perhaps that 10 to 10 to 20% of the population

01:36:33.300 | who are natural lucid dreamers

01:36:35.180 | are at the forefront of hominid evolution.

01:36:39.340 | And they're the next super rate,

01:36:43.060 | we shouldn't be worried about AI,

01:36:44.380 | we should be worried about the lucid dreams

01:36:46.220 | 'cause they're gonna come and take over the world.

01:36:48.380 | So I can argue it from that perspective,

01:36:51.120 | which is just a philosophical argument.

01:36:53.940 | It doesn't have weighted data to it,

01:36:56.340 | but there is some data.

01:36:58.740 | Some individuals have asked the question,

01:37:01.280 | is there any changes to your sleep

01:37:05.140 | or even the benefits of sleep

01:37:07.380 | when you are a lucid dreamer versus not?

01:37:09.980 | And what's interesting is that for some papers

01:37:13.040 | that have been published,

01:37:15.000 | after nights when people report lucid dreaming,

01:37:17.540 | they wake up and they don't feel as restored.

01:37:19.940 | They don't feel as refreshed by their sleep in the morning,

01:37:23.100 | suggesting just as you sort of hinted at there,

01:37:26.460 | that the lucid dreaming state is associated

01:37:29.520 | with perhaps a less deep or more shallow form of REM sleep

01:37:34.520 | or a more active state of REM sleep, perhaps too active,

01:37:39.420 | so that it's fatiguing and depleting.

01:37:42.180 | And upon awakening, you don't get that memory

01:37:45.540 | and that body, that brain and body reset.

01:37:48.740 | There are, however, a few papers

01:37:51.940 | that have not found that result.

01:37:55.060 | So I think right now we don't truly know

01:37:57.180 | if the lucid state is associated with unrefreshing sleep

01:38:01.700 | and unrestorative sleep.

01:38:02.980 | But if that proves true,

01:38:04.360 | then I think that that's one argument.

01:38:06.740 | The other argument I would put forward against it

01:38:09.400 | from that perspective would be,

01:38:11.300 | think about what we've said

01:38:12.420 | regarding the functions of dreaming, memory processing,

01:38:15.820 | but particularly emotional therapy

01:38:19.060 | to gift us mental health.

01:38:21.140 | If we then come along and say, presumably,

01:38:26.700 | nature through millions of years of evolution

01:38:30.780 | has come up with this blueprint manifesto

01:38:34.820 | of exactly what should be served up

01:38:38.340 | on the dream menu this evening.

01:38:42.340 | There's a reason for that.

01:38:44.820 | And that reason has been sculpted over millions of years

01:38:48.660 | to become wonderfully optimal for us

01:38:52.660 | and our emotional mental health.

01:38:54.500 | And then we come along in the space of a lifetime,

01:38:57.460 | and perhaps you could argue a little bit humoristically,

01:39:00.680 | we think, I perhaps know a little bit better

01:39:04.500 | than a couple of million years of evolution.

01:39:06.740 | I'm going to push those things off the rank ordering chart

01:39:10.280 | of what gets served up into my dreams.

01:39:12.420 | And I'm going to supersede that

01:39:14.140 | and decide what I would prefer to be dreaming about.

01:39:18.660 | And again, I think that there's no good evidence

01:39:21.380 | that you could argue that that isn't true,

01:39:24.260 | but equally that it is true.

01:39:25.820 | We just don't know yet.

01:39:27.700 | If that is the case that lucid dreaming

01:39:30.980 | does produce unrestorative sleep,

01:39:34.000 | in some ways, it also begs the question,

01:39:36.420 | well, what is happening in your brain during lucid dreaming?

01:39:40.060 | Is there anything in your brain

01:39:41.900 | that would explain why you don't feel refreshed?

01:39:45.140 | And early studies looking at lucid dreamers

01:39:48.380 | when we put them inside of a brain scanner,

01:39:50.540 | I told you at the start of this episode,

01:39:52.820 | dream sleep has a unique brain signature.

01:39:55.780 | Memory regions, emotion regions,

01:39:58.380 | motor regions and visual regions, they're all lighting up.

01:40:02.380 | But then there's this one part of your brain

01:40:04.020 | that does the opposite,

01:40:04.940 | which is the lateral left and right sides

01:40:08.060 | of your prefrontal cortex.

01:40:09.500 | The logical, rational thinking,

01:40:12.140 | controlling regions of your brain, those go offline.

01:40:16.740 | But early studies demonstrated that the activity

01:40:19.700 | and including the electrical activity

01:40:22.060 | over those frontal regions would be down

01:40:25.380 | as you were in non-lucid dreaming.

01:40:28.480 | But then when people rise back up and said,

01:40:30.980 | now I'm lucid dreaming with those leftward flicks,

01:40:34.520 | that activity was brought back online,

01:40:38.980 | which makes a lot of mechanistic sense,

01:40:41.100 | which is all of a sudden the part of your brain

01:40:43.460 | that prevented you from having rational logical control

01:40:48.300 | has been re-engaged.

01:40:49.900 | And as a consequence, you yourself can re-engage

01:40:53.420 | in volitional dictation of the outcome

01:40:56.460 | of what you're dreaming.

01:40:57.660 | Some studies, however, have not replicated that finding

01:41:03.500 | because when they looked at it and they took out

01:41:06.180 | some sort of what we call these covariates

01:41:09.940 | or these confounding factors,

01:41:11.900 | and I can bore you with what that principally is,

01:41:15.140 | it removed that result.

01:41:17.020 | And all of a sudden the prefrontal cortex

01:41:19.300 | went back to seemingly being non-active.

01:41:23.280 | They did find an alternate result.

01:41:25.260 | What they found is that the electrical activity

01:41:27.580 | of the brain, when you go into a lucid dreaming state,

01:41:31.780 | seems to be a bit more frenetic, a bit more active

01:41:35.740 | versus non-lucid dreaming states

01:41:38.820 | of electrical brain activity.

01:41:40.740 | And if that's the case, if the cortex,

01:41:42.760 | which is already active,

01:41:44.500 | is forced to become even more frenetically active

01:41:48.200 | when you are in this lucid dream state,

01:41:51.040 | is that part of the reason that when you wake up

01:41:53.260 | from the lucid dreaming and you go about your day,

01:41:56.140 | your brain just doesn't seem to be at the same

01:42:00.100 | operating ability because it's being fatigued

01:42:03.700 | above and beyond.

01:42:04.540 | It's like saying I do a standard workout

01:42:06.620 | and I always go to one or two reps before failure.

01:42:11.620 | But now as I'm lucid dreaming,

01:42:13.580 | I am constantly going to complete muscle failure.

01:42:17.740 | And then the next few days, if you go and do a workout,

01:42:21.220 | and I've been listening, you and I have been trading workouts

01:42:23.540 | I don't want to do an Andrew Huberman workout.

01:42:25.580 | Trust me, you are, this man is.

01:42:27.440 | - Mine are short and sweet.

01:42:29.220 | - I'm, well, we'll work out at some point together,

01:42:32.080 | but it's almost as though then no big surprise

01:42:35.380 | that after you do a legs day,

01:42:37.840 | if I were to wake you up the next day

01:42:39.460 | and say you're back doing legs,

01:42:40.820 | you say I can't do that, I'm toast, I'm hosed,

01:42:43.660 | my legs are done.

01:42:45.260 | And that's what we think could perhaps explain

01:42:48.860 | why you get that fatigue.

01:42:50.280 | Does that make some sense?

01:42:51.860 | - Makes very good sense.

01:42:52.980 | And in the absence of better language to put to it,

01:42:57.240 | I've long thought that one of the best things about sleep

01:42:59.300 | is that we are not engaging our frontal cortex

01:43:03.720 | that much in sleep.

01:43:06.400 | And as we talked about in an earlier episode,

01:43:08.760 | the frontal cortex during waking is responsible for things

01:43:12.080 | such as the suppression of reflexes.

01:43:14.640 | I mean, it has to do that

01:43:15.680 | according to context of a situation.

01:43:17.800 | It's a lot of work.

01:43:19.180 | And the frontal cortex does a great number

01:43:21.800 | of other things as well.

01:43:22.920 | But I think one of the most wonderful things about sleep

01:43:26.000 | is that we get release and a break

01:43:30.700 | from all of that analysis of duration, path, and outcome.

01:43:34.860 | How long is something gonna take?

01:43:35.980 | What path do I need to take in order to get there?

01:43:37.880 | What's the outcome going to be?

01:43:38.940 | All that analysis of things past, present, and future,

01:43:41.660 | it's work, it's mental work.

01:43:44.380 | And I think that if you tell me,

01:43:46.900 | and I think you just did,

01:43:47.820 | that lucid dreaming involves any kind of encroachment

01:43:51.820 | of duration, path, outcome type of analysis into my sleep,

01:43:56.280 | my personal preference is going to be to not lucid dream.

01:43:59.440 | I'd rather just have very robust,

01:44:02.160 | perhaps dreams of different kinds

01:44:04.480 | and try and make sense of them once I wake up.

01:44:07.560 | - It's so tempting though, isn't it?

01:44:09.280 | Because like you, I've had those experiences.

01:44:11.440 | I remember an amazing dream where I was snowboarding

01:44:15.240 | and I am a below average snowboarder.

01:44:20.140 | And all of a sudden I was just taking jumps

01:44:23.360 | and I was doing all sorts of X game.

01:44:25.960 | - You're Shaun White.

01:44:27.040 | - I was, and it was unbelievable.

01:44:30.240 | And I felt so, and I was so happy in the moment.

01:44:33.840 | And I remember waking up and just thinking,

01:44:36.640 | firstly, I'm sad I'm waking up.

01:44:39.220 | And second, that was sublime.

01:44:43.360 | And all I want to do tomorrow night is go back

01:44:46.160 | and now I'm gonna switch my snowboard out for a dirt bike

01:44:49.600 | and I'm gonna do the dirt bike X games version of it.

01:44:52.720 | I'm gonna be doing all sorts of Superman.

01:44:55.140 | - Can't get greedy with mother nature.

01:44:56.780 | - I know, I know.

01:44:57.620 | - She body slams you.

01:44:58.440 | - So I get it.

01:44:59.280 | I know if people out there are enjoying it

01:45:02.540 | or wanting to do that.

01:45:04.280 | And by the way, I didn't answer,

01:45:05.820 | I'm so sorry, your red light question,

01:45:08.140 | which is, if you wanted to do it, how can you do it

01:45:11.900 | if you're not doing it already?

01:45:14.140 | There are in fact two scientific methods

01:45:17.380 | that have been developed.

01:45:18.660 | One of them actually has a vague whiff

01:45:22.200 | of relationship to the light device.

01:45:24.520 | Although that's one of those things where if,

01:45:27.920 | you know, if a friend sent it to me or a random person said,

01:45:30.960 | oh, Dr. Walker, I've seen this in the back of a magazine,

01:45:34.320 | how do you think it works?

01:45:35.880 | I would just say, please go and spend your $199

01:45:38.880 | on something that is going to be--

01:45:39.720 | - Yeah, I think I was about 11 or 12 years old.

01:45:42.220 | I think it costs something like 1099 or something,

01:45:45.660 | which at the time for me was a lot of money,

01:45:47.280 | but I had a paper route back then

01:45:49.880 | and I had a little bit of a dispensable income,

01:45:53.600 | but it was cool 'cause it was probably

01:45:56.360 | one of my first experiments.

01:45:57.880 | I've been running experiments since I was a kid,

01:45:59.480 | but I think self-experimentation can be fun.

01:46:02.000 | - Oh, it's great, and you can see that.

01:46:03.520 | But sorry, coming back to your red light,

01:46:05.460 | the two methods, one of them is something called

01:46:08.160 | the MILD technique, which stands for

01:46:11.040 | the Mnemonic Induction of Lucid Dreaming, M-I-L-D.

01:46:16.600 | Mnemonic just meaning a memory-based technique.

01:46:19.720 | Induction, obviously what we're trying to induce something,

01:46:22.320 | and what is it?

01:46:23.160 | We're trying to induce lucid dreaming.

01:46:25.000 | And it's a very simple technique,

01:46:27.540 | which is that you consistently rehearse before bed

01:46:31.760 | this notion that I will remember my dreams

01:46:35.400 | and I will instigate control in my dreams.

01:46:39.280 | And you do this, and it sounds just so hokey

01:46:42.920 | and non-scientific.

01:46:44.420 | Sure enough, you do this over and over again,

01:46:46.840 | the probability that you will lucid dream increases.

01:46:51.720 | I think the better one, maybe the more effective one,

01:46:54.480 | is called the Reality Testing Method.

01:46:57.440 | And it was probably made famous in a brilliant movie.

01:47:01.020 | If you haven't seen it, everyone should watch it.

01:47:03.040 | It's called "Waking Life."

01:47:05.240 | And it is an amazing, Richard Linklater, the director,

01:47:10.240 | just for the philosophy alone in it,

01:47:13.120 | it will blow your mind.

01:47:15.960 | It's exceptional, but it's a beautiful treatise

01:47:20.000 | on dreaming and lucid dreaming.

01:47:22.320 | And in that, they describe a method

01:47:25.840 | where during the waking day, you are constantly,

01:47:29.440 | perhaps you can set an alarm,

01:47:31.240 | and you're constantly reminded to go over to,

01:47:33.720 | let's say the wall, and flip the light switch on and off,

01:47:37.560 | on and off, on and off.

01:47:38.460 | And sure enough, what happens?

01:47:39.680 | The lights go on and off.

01:47:40.780 | Why? Because it's the real world,

01:47:42.440 | and it complies and it's complicit with the laws of physics.

01:47:46.140 | So you do this time and time again,

01:47:48.600 | and you start to train yourself that at unique moments

01:47:52.080 | throughout your waking experience,

01:47:54.220 | you always go over and you test some version of reality,

01:47:57.320 | or it could just be,

01:47:58.320 | I'm going to press my hand into something solid,

01:48:01.040 | and this table is resisting my hand right now

01:48:03.280 | as I'm pressing it, and I just keep doing that.

01:48:05.940 | And then at some point, it becomes routine enough

01:48:09.560 | that you start to do that same thing when you are dreaming.

01:48:12.440 | But now, when I press my hand against the table

01:48:15.320 | or press my hand against the wall,

01:48:17.700 | my hand goes straight through the wall,

01:48:20.160 | or I flip the light switch on and off,

01:48:22.320 | and the lights do nothing.

01:48:24.640 | And all of a sudden, that's my cue to say,

01:48:26.880 | I'm not awake, am I?

01:48:30.200 | I'm dreaming.

01:48:32.020 | And therefore, at that point, I gain lucidity,

01:48:35.080 | and it increases the probability.

01:48:37.160 | So those are the two methods that people have used.

01:48:39.080 | And statistically, scientifically,

01:48:40.960 | they do seem to have some degree of success.

01:48:43.940 | - I love it.

01:48:45.720 | I love it.

01:48:46.540 | I personally am going to opt to not encourage lucid dreaming

01:48:49.920 | because I'm, and myself,

01:48:51.540 | because I'm working on getting my sleep deeper and longer

01:48:56.560 | through the night with fewer waking episodes.

01:49:00.120 | - We will get there.

01:49:00.960 | Do not worry. - We will get there.

01:49:01.840 | Using the tools described in the previous

01:49:04.880 | and this episode of the series that we're doing here.

01:49:09.000 | My sleep's been excellent at times,

01:49:11.000 | pretty good at other times, and lousy at others,

01:49:13.000 | which I think makes me well-qualified

01:49:15.080 | to talk about tools for sleep

01:49:17.320 | because I feel like I've come at it

01:49:18.480 | from every level of performance.

01:49:20.920 | - Very much.

01:49:21.760 | And by the way, shield and sword in hand,

01:49:23.360 | I'm right there by your side.

01:49:24.640 | We'll make it happen.

01:49:26.120 | Don't worry.

01:49:26.960 | - Well, thank you, truly.

01:49:29.000 | Okay, so sadly, we are nearing the end

01:49:32.720 | of this six-episode series,

01:49:35.040 | and here we are in the sixth episode.

01:49:38.240 | However, last night, before leaving the studio,

01:49:41.600 | I decided to put out a word on social media

01:49:45.040 | on X, aka Twitter, and on Instagram,

01:49:48.720 | asking people what questions they have about sleep.

01:49:52.840 | And I made it very broadband.

01:49:54.280 | You know, I said, "Ask anything you want about sleep.

01:49:56.160 | "Matt Walker will do his best to answer."

01:49:59.640 | And of course, we had thousands and thousands

01:50:02.280 | and thousands of questions. - You did great.

01:50:04.240 | - And we're grateful for-

01:50:05.080 | - Let's push on through till dawn,

01:50:06.920 | which completely violates every one of the six episodes.

01:50:09.680 | No, I'm kidding.

01:50:10.520 | - They'll benefit, we'll struggle.

01:50:11.840 | However, we were able to bin those responses

01:50:16.200 | into most frequently asked,

01:50:18.600 | most frequently liked, et cetera.

01:50:20.560 | And so, while we can't ask every question of you,

01:50:23.240 | what I thought would be fun

01:50:24.760 | and very informative for the listeners

01:50:27.680 | is to ask 10 of the most popular questions.

01:50:31.560 | - Fingers on buzzers, no conferring, here we go.

01:50:35.040 | - And these are questions for which

01:50:36.240 | I think there are practical answers.

01:50:38.320 | And so, we'll do this, not in rapid fire Q&A,

01:50:41.080 | but in, let's just say, a bridged format.

01:50:44.120 | And then, perhaps, we have you back another time

01:50:48.040 | to answer more of the questions.

01:50:50.340 | Before we get into these questions,

01:50:51.840 | I will say that many of the questions that were asked

01:50:54.520 | by the audience in those comments

01:50:58.520 | were, in fact, answered in the earlier five episodes

01:51:03.480 | of this podcast series with Matt Walker,

01:51:06.560 | as well as the one that we held today

01:51:09.000 | on dreams and lucid dreaming.

01:51:10.800 | So, if you don't hear the answer to these,

01:51:15.160 | to your question here, and you have a burning question,

01:51:17.560 | chances are your question was answered

01:51:19.600 | in a previous episode.

01:51:20.760 | And all of those episodes are timestamped

01:51:23.160 | in a lot of detail, so people can navigate quickly

01:51:25.800 | to the topics most of interest to them.

01:51:27.920 | So, without further ado, questions from the audience.

01:51:33.540 | First question is about best practices

01:51:37.580 | for managing rumination and negative thoughts

01:51:40.100 | when trying to fall asleep.

01:51:41.340 | Meaning, if somebody is ruminating

01:51:43.740 | and they're having negative thoughts

01:51:44.860 | when they're trying to fall asleep,

01:51:46.020 | what should they do in order to get past that

01:51:49.260 | and fall asleep?

01:51:50.500 | - Short-circuit.

01:51:52.020 | You need to short-circuit that situation.

01:51:55.740 | And the way that you can do that

01:51:57.200 | is through a variety of methods.

01:51:58.780 | There are multiple methods for short-circuiting rumination.

01:52:02.180 | The first I would recommend,

01:52:03.540 | and it's something I practice, meditation.

01:52:06.580 | But really, all of these that I'll describe

01:52:08.660 | are about getting your mind off itself.

01:52:11.500 | That's the biggest problem regarding anxiety

01:52:14.300 | and sleep onset insomnia,

01:52:16.420 | which is what I think this person is describing.

01:52:19.440 | So, meditation allows you, it's either guided

01:52:23.100 | and you're speaking about what you should be doing

01:52:25.300 | with your breathing or relaxation guided meditations.

01:52:30.100 | All of those stop your mind

01:52:32.220 | from being able to play on itself

01:52:34.980 | and go through that Rolodex of anxiety.

01:52:37.700 | You can do breathing techniques.

01:52:39.740 | You can listen to sleep stories.

01:52:42.860 | You can do your own type of body scan.

01:52:45.500 | Anything that you can do, and something we described,

01:52:48.360 | which seems to be a quite effective method,

01:52:50.800 | is taking yourself on a mental walk.

01:52:52.960 | Close your eyes.

01:52:54.260 | And a walk that you know intensely well

01:52:57.220 | with vivid 4K detail.

01:53:00.180 | Replicate that to the letter.

01:53:02.900 | I left foot on the first step, down the steps,

01:53:05.940 | take a right at the driveway, up I go, walk up the hill,

01:53:09.980 | look to the left, the bay is out there.

01:53:12.620 | It's 5 p.m., the sun is starting to set.

01:53:15.120 | That level of detail.

01:53:17.100 | And usually when you do any one of these things,

01:53:20.180 | the next thing that you remember

01:53:22.320 | is that you're waking up in the morning

01:53:24.140 | because you are able to short circuit.

01:53:27.660 | That would be the best advice.

01:53:29.500 | - Terrific.

01:53:30.340 | And I must say the other night,

01:53:31.380 | I woke up in the middle of the night

01:53:32.940 | and was having a little bit of trouble falling back asleep.

01:53:35.320 | And I used this mental walk approach

01:53:36.980 | and it worked very, very well.

01:53:39.420 | So thank you.

01:53:40.260 | The next question is,

01:53:43.460 | what is the best position to sleep in?

01:53:45.460 | Best body position.

01:53:46.560 | Best body position is probably the absence of the worst.

01:53:51.700 | That would be your back.

01:53:53.900 | And it's ill-advised mostly for people who snore.

01:53:58.900 | When you are on your back,

01:54:00.960 | the likelihood of you snoring

01:54:03.340 | and that airway collapsing entirely

01:54:05.580 | and you having what's called a hypoxic event

01:54:08.140 | where you stop breathing entirely

01:54:10.500 | is significantly higher than if you sleep on your side

01:54:14.180 | or on your front.

01:54:15.760 | So I would say that for most people,

01:54:18.220 | if you know that you don't snore,

01:54:20.040 | if your partner says, I don't hear you snoring,

01:54:22.440 | that's partial confirmation that you do not snore.

01:54:25.300 | If you are curious and everyone should be,

01:54:28.580 | everyone should be curious as to whether they snore.

01:54:31.440 | I would say, download an app and we can link to it.

01:54:34.220 | I have no affiliation with whatsoever.

01:54:36.900 | I pay my money.

01:54:37.980 | I think it's like pennies on the dollar.

01:54:39.580 | I can say $2 a month or something.

01:54:41.820 | And it is called Snore Lab.

01:54:43.980 | So the word snore and then L-A-B.

01:54:47.460 | And you download it and it's an app.

01:54:49.380 | And it is something that you install on your phone.

01:54:53.620 | And then you say, start recording

01:54:55.940 | and you place your phone face down

01:54:58.680 | and it listens to you all night.

01:55:00.700 | And it records your breathing, nothing more.

01:55:03.260 | Can't know what you're doing or saying.

01:55:05.460 | Don't worry, there's privacy.

01:55:07.280 | But it assesses your breathing.

01:55:09.220 | And then it will show you a distribution

01:55:11.540 | of your snoring throughout the night.

01:55:13.500 | And it categorizes that snoring from quiet, no snoring

01:55:18.420 | to mild snoring, to moderate, to epic.

01:55:22.140 | And it literally is like a Richter shock.

01:55:25.220 | And you will see very clearly if you are snoring or not.

01:55:29.980 | Worse still and impactful most is that you can go

01:55:33.700 | to those spikes when you are snoring and you can replay it.

01:55:38.140 | And it is quite frightening

01:55:39.700 | to hear yourself struggling for breath.

01:55:42.980 | If you see a confirmation of snoring

01:55:45.980 | by way of that SnoreLab, go and see your doctor.

01:55:49.780 | That is the best advice.

01:55:51.460 | 80% of people who have sleep apnea or snoring

01:55:55.380 | or in cessation of breathing are undiagnosed right now.

01:55:58.620 | And it will take years off your life.

01:56:00.820 | And when you get treated, it is transformational.

01:56:03.780 | Patient once told me when I got treated

01:56:06.600 | with my Sleep App device, I felt like I was 10 years younger.

01:56:10.980 | It was almost as though,

01:56:12.100 | and I'll remember it to the day I die.

01:56:14.140 | It was almost as though someone came along

01:56:16.540 | and wiped a fogged glass clear.

01:56:19.580 | And I could finally see that was the transformation.

01:56:22.900 | So my advice is if you think you are snoring,

01:56:25.840 | stay away from back sleeping.

01:56:27.640 | - From sleeping on your back.

01:56:28.740 | - From sleeping on your back.

01:56:30.140 | And even if you don't suspect you are a snorer,

01:56:33.420 | just download this app.

01:56:34.260 | You get a couple of nights for free.

01:56:35.660 | Just do it for a couple of nights consistently.

01:56:37.900 | And then ask also, by the way, if you take on board alcohol

01:56:41.100 | and you have mild snoring, it is very clear.

01:56:44.260 | I would be highly surprised if on the nights that you drink,

01:56:47.100 | you don't get a significant increase

01:56:49.660 | in your score of snoring.

01:56:51.820 | - Terrific.

01:56:52.660 | The next question is, why does my body wake up at 3.30 AM?

01:56:57.260 | And I'm presuming their mind as well,

01:56:59.020 | no matter what time I go to sleep.

01:57:01.620 | - So to that question,

01:57:04.860 | and we will have spoken about this before,

01:57:06.700 | my first response is, how do you know it's 3.30?

01:57:10.340 | And their response is, because I look at the clock,

01:57:12.540 | that's the first problem.

01:57:14.100 | Take all clock faces away from your site

01:57:17.740 | when you are sleeping.

01:57:18.900 | It is only going to reinforce it.

01:57:21.260 | The second is that 3.30 can sometimes,

01:57:24.140 | or if it's a consistent time,

01:57:25.860 | there's no sort of special thing about 3.30,

01:57:28.500 | it's just for this person.

01:57:30.220 | People wake up at very specific times, quite reliably so.

01:57:33.580 | Part of that is because they're going through

01:57:35.260 | very reliably timed sleep cycles.

01:57:37.780 | And every time we finish a REM sleep period, we wake up.

01:57:42.100 | But it's normally very brief.

01:57:43.500 | And the reason is because we've been in paralysis

01:57:46.060 | and the body needs to move.

01:57:47.820 | So we wake up, we make a postural shift,

01:57:50.540 | we move in our bed just slightly,

01:57:52.180 | and then we go back to sleep.

01:57:53.620 | It happens to us all.

01:57:54.820 | For some of us, we will wake up and then we will stay awake.

01:57:58.060 | And that's why it seems to be so religiously timed

01:58:01.340 | to certain specific moments in our night.

01:58:04.460 | But this other sort of individual mentioned,

01:58:07.220 | no matter what time I go to bed,

01:58:09.380 | I seem to always wake up there.

01:58:11.620 | That to me smells of a suggestion of reinforced learning,

01:58:16.500 | that you've woken up a couple of times,

01:58:18.540 | you've checked the clock,

01:58:20.100 | and now you have taught your brain very quickly

01:58:23.060 | that I always wake up at 3.30 in the morning.

01:58:27.060 | And lo and behold, what happens is that

01:58:29.180 | you start to do that more frequently.

01:58:31.180 | The more frequently it happens,

01:58:32.900 | the more times that you check,

01:58:34.220 | the stronger that memory association becomes,

01:58:36.580 | the more likely it is to happen.

01:58:38.700 | Remove the clock face from the bed, room.

01:58:42.660 | - Terrific.

01:58:45.100 | Can we bank sleep or catch up on lost sleep?

01:58:48.500 | - It's a great question.

01:58:52.220 | You can and you cannot bank sleep.

01:58:55.860 | And it is directional.

01:58:58.140 | So what we found is that for certain things,

01:59:01.020 | such as, let's say, an immune vaccination

01:59:05.780 | or learning and memory,

01:59:07.580 | if you are sleep deprived,

01:59:10.220 | let's say the night after learning a specific task,

01:59:13.820 | and lots of people have done this.

01:59:15.940 | So you are deprived the first night after learning.

01:59:19.340 | And that first night we know is critical

01:59:21.140 | for consolidating and saving those memories.

01:59:23.340 | But then the next day,

01:59:24.820 | I don't test you in the way I would normally do.

01:59:27.820 | Instead, I give you a full recovery night of sleep,

01:59:30.420 | or maybe I give you two full recovery nights of sleep,

01:59:33.660 | and then I test you.

01:59:35.260 | Do you show any evidence of a memory consolidation benefit?

01:59:39.780 | And the answer is no, you don't.

01:59:42.060 | In other words,

01:59:42.900 | if you don't sleep the first night after learning,

01:59:46.300 | you lose the chance to consolidate those memories.

01:59:49.740 | So there, sleep in that sense

01:59:51.300 | is an all or nothing phenomenon.

01:59:53.060 | If you don't snooze, you lose in that regard.

01:59:55.780 | And there are other examples of that downstairs in the body.

01:59:59.380 | That is what happens when you go into a debt,

02:00:04.060 | and then you try to pay it back with later credit,

02:00:07.940 | and it fails.

02:00:09.500 | You can't seem to do that with sleep.

02:00:11.180 | So in that sense,

02:00:12.020 | sleep is not like the bank in that direction.

02:00:14.540 | You can't accumulate a debt.

02:00:16.260 | And then let's say at the weekend

02:00:17.540 | after short sleeping during the week,

02:00:19.340 | see if you can pay off that debt

02:00:21.020 | at some later point in time.

02:00:22.180 | It doesn't work like that.

02:00:23.660 | So for example,

02:00:24.500 | if I deprive you, Andrew Huberman, of sleep tonight,

02:00:27.180 | let's say it's an eight-hour opportunity,

02:00:29.860 | and then tomorrow I give you

02:00:31.420 | all of the recovery sleep that you want,

02:00:33.700 | and then on a second night, third night, fourth night,

02:00:35.980 | do you sleep longer those subsequent nights?

02:00:38.020 | Yes, you do.

02:00:39.500 | But you only sleep back about 50%,

02:00:42.380 | about four extra hours.

02:00:44.460 | In fact, if you look at the data, it's usually less.

02:00:46.300 | It's usually around two.

02:00:47.460 | So only about 25% of the eight hours that you lost.

02:00:51.300 | So you are always running a debt.

02:00:54.020 | And if that's the case,

02:00:55.260 | if you can't truly pay back your sleep debt,

02:00:58.740 | and you're constantly running that short sleep cycle,

02:01:01.820 | you are, it's like compounding interest on the loan.

02:01:04.900 | It just escalates dramatically.

02:01:07.060 | And that's why I think we see

02:01:08.340 | that short sleep really does predict ill health outcomes

02:01:12.780 | and early mortality the later and later in life that you go.

02:01:17.780 | However, there is a different form of sleep banking.

02:01:22.020 | I told you that here you're going into a debt

02:01:25.020 | and you're trying to pay it off with credit later.

02:01:28.180 | What if you had the inverse?

02:01:29.700 | Let's say that you are a doctor or a nurse,

02:01:34.300 | or you are working in the emergency services.

02:01:38.100 | And you know that you have two nights

02:01:40.820 | where you're on nights

02:01:42.020 | and you're going to be probably very busy.

02:01:44.820 | And you're not going to be sleeping well

02:01:46.860 | for the next two nights.

02:01:48.900 | And that's going to be next Monday and Tuesday.

02:01:51.220 | And I'm currently on Wednesday in the week prior.

02:01:54.580 | There is something that has been demonstrated

02:01:56.820 | called sleep banking,

02:01:58.220 | which is where I know I'm going to go into debt.

02:02:01.380 | So I sleep longer and I create credit to begin with.

02:02:06.220 | And then I spend that credit as I go into debt.

02:02:09.780 | And it seems to lessen the impact of that debt.

02:02:13.500 | It doesn't remove the impact entirely,

02:02:16.180 | but it does lessen it.

02:02:17.620 | So here it's the inverse.

02:02:19.580 | I'm not going into debt

02:02:20.980 | and then trying to pay it off later.

02:02:23.900 | I build up credit

02:02:25.580 | and then I can spend that credit with debt.

02:02:27.780 | So there is a form of sleep banking

02:02:30.380 | that seems to be present,

02:02:31.900 | but it's not the sleep banking that most people think about.

02:02:34.820 | Does that make, I know it's very confusing,

02:02:36.580 | but I tried to be clear about that.

02:02:37.420 | - No, I think you made it very clear

02:02:38.500 | that you can buffer some of the sleep loss

02:02:41.540 | that you anticipate,

02:02:43.140 | but there's no retroactive saving of what you lost.

02:02:48.380 | - That's right.

02:02:49.220 | - What are some of the best practices

02:02:51.940 | for getting back to sleep

02:02:53.380 | after waking up in the middle of the night?

02:02:56.300 | - There, I would say there are several things.

02:02:59.700 | First, don't try too hard

02:03:04.060 | because trying to get back to sleep

02:03:08.580 | and become frustrated

02:03:10.260 | is very much like trying to remember someone's name.

02:03:13.140 | Sleep is just like this,

02:03:15.100 | that the harder you try,

02:03:17.100 | the further you push it away.

02:03:19.940 | And as soon as you stop,

02:03:22.660 | all of a sudden that name just pops back into your head.

02:03:27.260 | And it's the same way with sleep.

02:03:29.700 | Now, previously I've said,

02:03:31.180 | you don't want to spend a lot of time awake in bed

02:03:34.620 | because you learn the association

02:03:36.540 | that your bed is the place of wakefulness.

02:03:38.420 | And every time you come in at night,

02:03:40.660 | you're always wide awake and you don't know why,

02:03:42.940 | despite having fallen asleep watching television

02:03:45.820 | just 20 minutes earlier.

02:03:47.660 | The other suggestion, however,

02:03:50.940 | is most people don't want to get out of bed.

02:03:54.100 | It's dark, it's cold.

02:03:55.460 | I get it, I understand it.

02:03:56.980 | The other thing to do in this situation

02:04:00.620 | is enjoy the concept of rest.

02:04:04.340 | So wouldn't it be wonderful

02:04:05.940 | if in the middle of your working day,

02:04:08.060 | someone said, look, just come away from your desk now.

02:04:11.380 | And here is a beautiful, calm bedroom.

02:04:14.900 | It smells very nice, nice, dim light.

02:04:18.380 | I would let you to lie down.

02:04:20.380 | No need to fall asleep, don't fall asleep.

02:04:22.300 | Just lie down on the bed or on the couch and just rest

02:04:27.140 | for the next 30 or 40 minutes.

02:04:29.740 | Just have a wonderful, good old rest.

02:04:33.420 | That sounds lovely.

02:04:34.700 | And if you are struggling to fall back asleep

02:04:37.980 | and you've listened to me

02:04:39.740 | and the idiocy of what I've been describing

02:04:41.580 | over the past six episodes,

02:04:43.340 | you could start to get very stressed and say,

02:04:45.340 | gosh, well, sleep is doing this and this and this

02:04:47.820 | and I'm now and it's been 20 minutes and I can't fall back.

02:04:51.220 | You just get more and more stressed.

02:04:53.260 | Instead, take a different approach at that point.

02:04:55.380 | Instead of, if all the techniques that we've spoken about,

02:04:59.300 | getting your mind off itself and we list them just now

02:05:01.860 | and we've listed them in a previous episode,

02:05:04.540 | if none of those are working and you just can't catch it,

02:05:08.660 | don't worry, just say to yourself, you know what?

02:05:11.260 | Tonight is not my night.

02:05:12.660 | And he told me it's okay.

02:05:14.380 | And it really is, it's fine.

02:05:17.100 | Tomorrow night is going to be a better night.

02:05:19.540 | Tonight instead, rather than trying to force myself

02:05:22.180 | to sleep, I'm just going to lie here,

02:05:24.940 | maybe with my eyes open, I'm just gonna rest.

02:05:28.020 | I'm just gonna enjoy and not stress.

02:05:30.900 | I'm just gonna enjoy a good old rest in my bed.

02:05:33.740 | And once again, the next thing that happens

02:05:37.340 | is that the sun has emerged.

02:05:40.060 | It's bright in your room, despite the blackout curtains

02:05:43.180 | and your alarm is going off

02:05:44.700 | because as soon as you relaxed out of the state of trying,

02:05:48.780 | sleep came back in a resplendent way.

02:05:52.240 | - Terrific.

02:05:54.060 | Someone asks, "I used to be a great sleeper,

02:05:58.180 | but as I've gotten older,"

02:05:59.660 | and then they mentioned that they're 65 currently,

02:06:02.880 | "I find that I wake up much earlier than I did previously.

02:06:06.420 | And it's difficult for me to get more

02:06:08.220 | than six hours of sleep."

02:06:09.860 | What do you think is going on and what are some remedies?

02:06:13.820 | - The first question I would want to ask is,

02:06:16.400 | how do you feel on six hours of sleep?

02:06:18.140 | And we can go from there.

02:06:19.620 | If you are impaired and you're struggling during the day

02:06:22.700 | and this person sounds as though they are unhappy

02:06:24.680 | with that six hours,

02:06:25.860 | then we can start to have a conversation.

02:06:27.460 | What would that conversation sound like?

02:06:29.580 | I want to understand perhaps the reason

02:06:31.560 | that you can't get back asleep.

02:06:33.020 | And we'll begin these techniques that we've spoken about

02:06:35.780 | for trying to get back to sleep.

02:06:37.400 | Let's say that you've gone to bed at 10

02:06:39.620 | and you normally would like to wake up at six,

02:06:41.720 | but you're always waking up at four.

02:06:43.460 | And there's just nothing you can do at that stage.

02:06:45.880 | You just don't feel the sleepiness over you,

02:06:48.340 | weighing you down.

02:06:49.700 | And there's no amount of these methods

02:06:52.180 | are going to help you.

02:06:53.020 | You just have to get up.

02:06:54.460 | We see this a lot in older adults.

02:06:56.580 | Sleep late in the night is very fragile,

02:06:59.580 | much greater probability of them waking up

02:07:01.980 | in the second half of the night and the last quarter.

02:07:04.620 | It's also miserable because most older adults,

02:07:08.460 | their circadian rhythm shifts earlier.

02:07:10.900 | I told you that as we go through our teen years,

02:07:13.140 | our circadian rhythm shifts,

02:07:15.460 | it gets sort of pushed into the future.

02:07:17.900 | And we like to go to bed much later and wake up much later.

02:07:20.820 | And then into older adult sort of interval adulthood,

02:07:24.220 | it drags back a little bit and we find our sweet spot.

02:07:26.740 | But then as we get older,

02:07:28.380 | it starts to regress back to what happened

02:07:30.540 | when we were children.

02:07:31.660 | We want to stay up late, but we can't.

02:07:33.780 | We go to bed so early and we wake up early.

02:07:36.580 | Some regression happens as we get older.

02:07:38.940 | By the way, it's the reason that there is

02:07:40.420 | the quote unquote early bird special in Florida,

02:07:42.960 | where a lot of people retire.

02:07:44.420 | It's the early bird special because most people are to bed

02:07:46.820 | by 9 p.m. and they want to be eating,

02:07:49.740 | starting to eat at 4 p.m.

02:07:51.860 | So how do you deal with that?

02:07:54.220 | One way is you can use one of the four methods,

02:07:57.540 | the four sort of macros of good sleep that we spoke about,

02:08:00.780 | QQRT, quantity, quality, regularity, timing.

02:08:04.140 | Here I would say,

02:08:05.460 | see if you can delay your bedtime as best you can.

02:08:09.180 | If your bedtime is 10 and you would like,

02:08:12.100 | and you're normally waking up at six,

02:08:13.540 | but you're consistently waking up at four,

02:08:15.340 | start trying to go to bed at 11 p.m.

02:08:18.780 | Push, push, push as hard as you can

02:08:22.540 | until you are so sleepy, you sleep.

02:08:25.260 | And then it will take a couple of days

02:08:28.260 | to build up that sort of remembering

02:08:30.860 | from your brain and the debt that to begin with,

02:08:33.540 | you'll go to bed now at 11 and you'll wake up at four again

02:08:36.300 | and things are even worse.

02:08:37.960 | But after a while, you're building up this pressure to sleep

02:08:41.060 | and all of a sudden you're going to bed again at 11,

02:08:43.900 | but your brain thinks I have had four nights

02:08:46.700 | of now just five hours of sleep.

02:08:48.920 | I'm not doing this anymore.

02:08:51.180 | I'm gonna sleep through until five.

02:08:53.540 | And you can keep moving your schedule later

02:08:56.380 | because when older adults are waking up at four

02:08:58.460 | and they can't get back, it's also miserable

02:09:00.340 | because the rest of the world is asleep

02:09:02.580 | and the people they want to engage with,

02:09:04.540 | have a social life, you know, call the kids,

02:09:07.780 | speak with their grandkids, they can't do any of that.

02:09:10.180 | So it's a very difficult situation.

02:09:12.500 | If those things don't work,

02:09:14.020 | you can also speak to a board certified

02:09:16.460 | sleep medicine clinician.

02:09:18.220 | CBTI, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia,

02:09:20.940 | which we've spoken about in this episode,

02:09:23.380 | is also effective for older adults

02:09:25.320 | to help them stay asleep.

02:09:26.780 | If that doesn't work and you don't like to think

02:09:29.580 | about a psychological treatment,

02:09:31.020 | there are some medications.

02:09:32.800 | People think I'm probably a bit anti-medication

02:09:34.940 | because I've been very vocal about classic sleeping pills.

02:09:39.520 | But there are some sleeping medications

02:09:40.980 | that I think do show promise.

02:09:42.220 | I'm not anti-pharmacology by any means.

02:09:45.100 | One of them that's been shown to be effective

02:09:47.180 | for older adults is something called doxepin.

02:09:50.180 | And trazodone too, although there is some sort of pushback

02:09:54.140 | a little bit by the community against trazodone,

02:09:56.300 | and there's a new class of drugs that we've spoken about

02:09:58.300 | in a previous episode called the DORAS,

02:10:00.540 | the dual orexin receptor antagonists, D-O-R-A small S.

02:10:07.140 | So I've spoken about three there,

02:10:08.680 | trazodone, doxepin, the DORAS.

02:10:11.080 | By the way, I'm a scientist, not a medical doctor.

02:10:13.320 | This is scientifically descriptive,

02:10:14.920 | not medically prescriptive.

02:10:17.160 | Trazodone has perhaps been used more so,

02:10:19.860 | if anything, to help people who struggle to fall asleep.

02:10:22.600 | Doxepin, if you look at the data,

02:10:24.240 | is a medication that's much more helpful

02:10:26.080 | for keeping people asleep and including,

02:10:29.120 | and especially it seems for older adults.

02:10:32.360 | And there it's lower dose doxepin.

02:10:34.560 | I think if you look at the data,

02:10:36.240 | three milligrams and six milligram doses

02:10:39.100 | have been effective.

02:10:40.460 | You can get it in pill form,

02:10:41.660 | although usually not in those doses.

02:10:43.700 | And you have to end up cutting pills in half

02:10:45.660 | because it comes in 12 milligrams.

02:10:47.460 | There is a liquid solution that is provided.

02:10:50.780 | And there, I think the standard dose starts

02:10:52.980 | at around half a milliliter.

02:10:54.860 | So you get a little syringe and it's a one millimeter syringe

02:10:58.260 | and you suck up that half a milliliter.

02:11:02.420 | And then you just put it in a drink

02:11:03.860 | in the last half an hour before bed.

02:11:05.480 | It's tasteless and it helps you stay asleep.

02:11:08.560 | So there are a variety of different things you can do.

02:11:12.260 | Just go try for rest and just give yourself the chance,

02:11:15.540 | push your bed to a later time point.

02:11:17.680 | You can also try cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia

02:11:20.720 | and you can speak with your physician

02:11:22.800 | about some sleep medications.

02:11:24.520 | - Terrific.

02:11:25.780 | There were a good number of people

02:11:27.000 | that asked about sleep and menopause.

02:11:29.960 | One question was, "Since entering menopause,

02:11:33.860 | "I have not gotten a good night's sleep in years."

02:11:37.100 | I think this question dovetails with the previous question.

02:11:39.900 | I mean, it could be age-related, right?

02:11:41.980 | Could be directly related to menopause.

02:11:44.320 | So are you aware of any specific treatments

02:11:50.300 | that you haven't covered in the course of this Q&A

02:11:54.540 | that are unique to menopause?

02:11:56.080 | I think the answer you just gave

02:11:58.420 | to whoever asked the question about how to get more sleep

02:12:02.960 | or better sleep as one has gotten older

02:12:05.320 | should probably handle the answer to this question.

02:12:07.180 | But what of the menopause specific requirements

02:12:12.180 | for getting better sleep?

02:12:14.540 | - It is a huge problem in premenopausal

02:12:19.000 | and perimenopausal women,

02:12:21.040 | and of course, women going through menopause.

02:12:23.920 | It's principally because of what we call

02:12:25.600 | the vasomotor symptoms of menopause,

02:12:30.000 | which is to say these hot flashes

02:12:32.660 | where you just get sort of really, for the body at least,

02:12:35.320 | quite extreme increases in temperature.

02:12:37.740 | You get so hot, and don't forget in our episode two,

02:12:41.500 | we spoke about how you need to regulate temperature,

02:12:44.640 | and there's a very beautiful and complex relationship

02:12:47.240 | between temperature and sleep.

02:12:48.820 | And we said you need to stay cool to stay asleep.

02:12:51.760 | But here is a situation where when you're asleep,

02:12:54.320 | you're not staying cool, you're doing the opposite.

02:12:56.400 | You're getting warm,

02:12:57.600 | and that is the adversarial thermal situation

02:13:01.180 | for staying asleep.

02:13:02.560 | And so individuals wake up,

02:13:04.360 | and then they struggle to get back to sleep.

02:13:06.560 | I would say, and we know the reasons why, too,

02:13:10.240 | some of the other issues with sleep are problematic.

02:13:12.880 | It has to do with some of the sex hormone changes.

02:13:15.480 | And I think I myself have released a podcast

02:13:19.360 | on this specific issue,

02:13:21.440 | and I won't go into the mechanisms as to why.

02:13:23.720 | I'll speak about the treatments.

02:13:25.680 | One treatment which is non-medication-based

02:13:28.520 | is trying to make your bedroom cool,

02:13:30.480 | but also using these smart mattresses.

02:13:33.800 | Now, I've spoken to Matteo, the CEO of Eight Sleep,

02:13:37.560 | another fantastic product,

02:13:39.440 | and he has had a huge amount of feedback

02:13:42.800 | from menopausal women saying that that cooling mattress

02:13:46.200 | has been very helpful for their vasomotor symptoms.

02:13:48.800 | So that's one method you can go down.

02:13:50.960 | The other is a medication method.

02:13:52.760 | And here I need to be very careful.

02:13:54.960 | I'm going to speak about bio-identical hormone

02:13:57.960 | replacement therapy for menopause.

02:14:00.560 | Now, there is a lot of controversy.

02:14:02.120 | Again, I don't have a horse in the race.

02:14:04.240 | I would simply say, if you want to think about this,

02:14:06.440 | you have done a fantastic podcast on female health

02:14:09.640 | and female reproductive health.

02:14:11.200 | I know our friend, Petra Tia,

02:14:13.000 | has got a very clear stance

02:14:15.600 | on female hormone replacement therapy

02:14:18.200 | and the absence of fear one has to have

02:14:21.440 | around the risk of breast cancer.

02:14:24.080 | And if you listen to him, he will excise,

02:14:27.240 | or at least he has disabused, I think,

02:14:30.200 | many people of the belief that that is a concern.

02:14:33.160 | But it's a very personal choice.

02:14:34.760 | It's a woman's choice.

02:14:36.000 | No one but a woman can decide.

02:14:37.880 | But I would say that when women have gone

02:14:40.800 | into bio-identical hormone replacement therapy,

02:14:45.400 | one of the things that benefits is also sleep

02:14:48.760 | because it brings back under control

02:14:50.680 | some of these symptoms.

02:14:51.960 | It reinstigates some of the renormalization

02:14:55.920 | of aspects of reproductive hormones.

02:14:59.640 | And those are things that can promote sleep,

02:15:02.120 | which when they become absent through menopause

02:15:04.520 | are causing sleep disruption.

02:15:06.760 | - Great.

02:15:08.200 | Someone asks, what does it mean

02:15:10.280 | if I can remember my dreams?

02:15:12.120 | Conversely, what does it mean

02:15:13.440 | if I cannot remember my dreams?

02:15:15.440 | Does this have any reflection on my sleep quality?

02:15:18.040 | Well, some of this was addressed during today's episode,

02:15:20.040 | but maybe just to give a short recap response,

02:15:24.640 | how would you respond to this?

02:15:26.680 | - So I would say that just because you remember your dreams

02:15:30.280 | or you don't remember your,

02:15:31.440 | let's say you don't remember your dreams,

02:15:32.840 | many people will ask me then,

02:15:34.280 | does that mean that I don't get REM sleep

02:15:36.680 | or I don't get enough REM sleep?

02:15:38.200 | No, absolutely it doesn't.

02:15:40.080 | There seems to be no correlation

02:15:41.600 | between how much REM sleep that you're getting

02:15:43.920 | and whether or not you remember your dreams.

02:15:46.760 | That's, I think, point number one.

02:15:48.360 | Point number two is that there doesn't seem

02:15:50.000 | to be a strong correlation

02:15:51.040 | between you remembering your dreams

02:15:53.120 | and the quality of the waking day

02:15:56.360 | that ensues as a consequence

02:15:59.640 | of that dream-remembered sleep from the night before

02:16:03.960 | versus dream-non-remembered.

02:16:06.640 | The only time that we've got a little bit of data

02:16:08.560 | comes onto what we've spoken about today,

02:16:10.200 | which is lucidity,

02:16:11.240 | which is a different sort of one-up level of dreaming.

02:16:14.800 | There may be there's some unrestorative sleep argument,

02:16:18.240 | but for the most part, I would say, do not worry.

02:16:20.720 | If you're not remembering your dreams,

02:16:22.600 | it doesn't mean that you are not dreaming.

02:16:25.240 | By the way, I've got a wacky theory.

02:16:26.640 | It doesn't mean that you are also not storing those dreams

02:16:30.680 | and being influenced by them.

02:16:32.520 | There is something called implicit memory,

02:16:34.840 | and it was long sort of held, you know,

02:16:36.840 | these versions of you go into a movie theater

02:16:39.440 | and for very brief milliseconds of periods of time,

02:16:41.880 | you're shown images of Pepsi cans or Coke cans.

02:16:44.960 | And then during the intermission,

02:16:46.280 | you track people's purchasing of soda,

02:16:48.760 | and sure enough, they will buy more Pepsi

02:16:51.000 | if they get flashed sort of.

02:16:52.440 | So we can actually embed implicit information into people,

02:16:56.000 | and it changes their behavior.

02:16:57.600 | They have no recollection of the memory,

02:17:00.000 | but it's clearly there,

02:17:01.120 | and it's clearly influencing the behavior.

02:17:03.400 | What does this have to do with dreaming?

02:17:05.400 | I have a theory of dreaming where people,

02:17:07.400 | and I told you, most of us forget most of our dreams.

02:17:11.720 | And we think when we forget, those dreams have gone.

02:17:14.560 | They've evaporated from our brain.

02:17:16.600 | What if it's not the case?

02:17:18.440 | Have you ever had that experience

02:17:20.000 | where you are waking up and you know you are dreaming

02:17:23.760 | and you just cannot capture it?

02:17:26.200 | And you think it's gone.

02:17:27.920 | That's it, I've forgotten it.

02:17:29.360 | And then two days later, you're in the shower,

02:17:31.320 | you're looking at the shampoo bottle,

02:17:32.600 | and the label all of a sudden just unlocks

02:17:35.400 | the memory of that dream, and it comes flooding back.

02:17:37.760 | As a neuroscientist, that tells me an important thing.

02:17:40.880 | That memory is in existence,

02:17:43.800 | but previously it was unavailable.

02:17:45.840 | This is the difference between availability

02:17:47.960 | versus accessibility.

02:17:49.720 | The memory was available,

02:17:51.240 | but you'd lost the IP address to go and retrieve it.

02:17:54.560 | Available, not accessible.

02:17:57.320 | Now, if most of our dreams are still always,

02:18:01.240 | quote unquote, implicitly remembered,

02:18:04.280 | but we always fail to have accessibility,

02:18:08.440 | those memories arguably, according to my theory,

02:18:11.040 | are always available.

02:18:12.160 | They're always in our brains.

02:18:13.640 | We just don't have conscious accessibility to them.

02:18:17.320 | That doesn't change the fact that our dreams

02:18:20.000 | may shape a huge amount of our behavior implicitly.

02:18:24.480 | And to me, that's a wild, crazy theory.

02:18:27.400 | And someday when I retire, I'll do the study

02:18:30.560 | and try and disprove it, anyway.

02:18:32.720 | - Love it.

02:18:33.560 | What are the key supplements for sleep?

02:18:37.080 | And I just have to say, that's a huge topic.

02:18:39.720 | That's an entire episode into itself.

02:18:41.280 | - Yeah, you and I should probably do

02:18:43.040 | intellectual jazz on that at some point.

02:18:44.800 | - Yeah, we should do that.

02:18:45.720 | But let's constrain the question a bit for sake of time.

02:18:50.720 | What, if any, supplements do you personally take

02:18:56.960 | or recommend to people with the understanding

02:19:00.680 | that many people perhaps do not need supplements?

02:19:03.600 | We never want to give the impression

02:19:04.680 | that that's the first-line approach

02:19:06.920 | to dealing with sleep issues.

02:19:09.080 | Get your sunlight, get your darkness,

02:19:11.120 | get your QQRT right.

02:19:12.560 | All of that, if it's mysterious to you,

02:19:14.320 | all of that is in the previous episodes

02:19:16.520 | of this podcast series.

02:19:18.800 | But assuming that someone wants to explore

02:19:20.640 | the supplement space, what do you recommend?

02:19:25.360 | What do you take?

02:19:26.440 | And please here, I'm going to encourage you

02:19:28.080 | to not take into consideration at all

02:19:30.520 | what I've ever said about supplements for sleep,

02:19:33.160 | 'cause I think it's actually most useful

02:19:35.040 | if people get a tapestry of opinions.

02:19:38.520 | Please, I'm just going to say that outright.

02:19:40.400 | I don't, yeah.

02:19:41.240 | - Say, maybe you could say a little bit more

02:19:43.960 | about those that you would recommend.

02:19:46.680 | And I think they're going to probably overlap

02:19:48.880 | 'cause I already sort of know some of them, but.

02:19:51.480 | - Sure, recommend, again, I just want to say

02:19:55.760 | that never take anything or remove anything

02:19:58.720 | from your regimen without talking to your doctor first,

02:20:01.320 | but, and always, always make sure

02:20:03.880 | that you're doing all the behaviors correctly first.

02:20:06.920 | But, and there's so many of them, you know,

02:20:08.920 | don't eat too close to bedtime.

02:20:10.000 | Get your morning sunlight, on and on, you know.

02:20:12.600 | But the supplements that I recommend when people ask,

02:20:16.400 | and for supplement recommendation specifically,

02:20:19.560 | are magnesium threonate.

02:20:21.240 | - Yep.

02:20:22.080 | - It's more or less interchangeable

02:20:25.040 | with magnesium bisglycinate.

02:20:26.760 | It has a slight sedative property.

02:20:29.400 | A lot of people are deficient in magnesium anyway.

02:20:32.160 | And this is magnesium taken

02:20:34.800 | about 30 to 60 minutes before bedtime.

02:20:37.760 | The other one is apigenin,

02:20:39.120 | which is essentially a derivative of chamomile.

02:20:42.480 | - Yep.

02:20:43.600 | - And then the third is theanine,

02:20:46.680 | which is known to have a mild anti-anxiety component to it.

02:20:51.680 | The one caveat is that theanine can be problematic

02:20:56.400 | for people that have very vivid dreams.

02:20:58.040 | It can often, people say that it makes their dreams

02:21:00.280 | even more vivid.

02:21:01.480 | And so if you suffer from that, or it's waking you up,

02:21:04.160 | then I suggest leaving out the theanine.

02:21:06.280 | I actually recommend people start with just one thing

02:21:08.400 | and then see how it affects them and then bring more in.

02:21:12.160 | I'll put a link in the show note captions

02:21:14.400 | to the dosages that were contained

02:21:16.240 | within a zero cost newsletter about sleep,

02:21:19.080 | rather than list off dosages here.

02:21:20.800 | And then people can link to that in the show note captions.

02:21:22.880 | Those are the main three.

02:21:23.800 | And then there's one other which,

02:21:25.640 | and I use those by the way,

02:21:27.160 | most every night before sleep.

02:21:30.320 | And it has improved my sleep dramatically.

02:21:32.240 | The other thing that I sometimes use

02:21:34.160 | is 900 milligrams of inositol,

02:21:36.920 | which for whatever reason has, I find,

02:21:40.000 | again, this is anecdata,

02:21:41.320 | makes it easier for me to fall back asleep

02:21:43.040 | when I wake up in the middle of the night,

02:21:44.280 | especially if I haven't eaten

02:21:47.120 | very many starchy carbohydrates in the days preceding.

02:21:50.200 | I try and eat some starches after hard training

02:21:52.320 | and things of that sort.

02:21:53.480 | But sometimes if I'm on a lower carbohydrate regimen,

02:21:57.160 | then I find it extra difficult to sleep.

02:21:59.960 | So I'll throw in some inositol.

02:22:03.800 | I will say there have been nights

02:22:04.840 | where I forget my supplements and just fall asleep.

02:22:07.480 | And so it's tough to say exactly

02:22:10.640 | what each of those is doing and in what combinations.

02:22:12.920 | You always need to think about

02:22:13.920 | how much disposable income somebody has.

02:22:16.080 | Again, get your behaviors right,

02:22:17.640 | get the do's and don'ts that Matt described

02:22:19.800 | during the course of this podcast series right,

02:22:22.600 | and then consider supplementation.

02:22:24.920 | But that's pretty much what I rely on.

02:22:27.080 | - Yeah, I like what you're saying,

02:22:28.840 | both the philosophy of it too,

02:22:30.040 | because the things that we've spoken about,

02:22:31.600 | the QQRT and all the different methods,

02:22:33.880 | they are a log order magnitude greater

02:22:36.800 | in terms of how they will course correct your sleep

02:22:39.360 | than probably any supplement effect that I know of.

02:22:42.040 | But to go back to your MAG-T, MAG-3 and 8,

02:22:45.440 | I think there is some evidence,

02:22:47.320 | definitely interesting evidence.

02:22:48.440 | It was more so in older adults

02:22:50.280 | and they were able to show increases

02:22:52.360 | in the total amount of deep sleep.

02:22:54.280 | I think it was somewhere around about 15 to 20%,

02:22:58.400 | although that's the relative percent difference.

02:23:00.960 | If you look, I think it was only about six

02:23:03.200 | or seven minutes of total deep sleep,

02:23:05.800 | but there is some evidence there.

02:23:07.760 | The evidence by way of you've heard the story

02:23:10.040 | of that magnesium is good for sleep,

02:23:12.200 | it's principally derived from evidence

02:23:14.520 | of people who are magnesium deficient.

02:23:16.720 | And when you make the magnesium normative,

02:23:18.920 | they start sleeping better.

02:23:20.320 | That's a very different question than saying,

02:23:22.400 | I am magnesium normative, I am in normal ranges.

02:23:25.480 | And then I add to it, do I expect any greater benefit?

02:23:29.320 | That's like me saying, you're at an oxygen saturation

02:23:32.400 | of 99.9 and I'm going to give you pure oxygen.

02:23:36.400 | It's not gonna move you above a hundred,

02:23:38.680 | you're already at ceiling.

02:23:39.760 | Whereas if you are at 85% and I give you oxygen,

02:23:42.840 | you're going to get a lovely benefit from that.

02:23:45.440 | So, but I like MAG-3 and 8 because it is based

02:23:49.240 | on the evidence, the only one that does cross

02:23:50.920 | the blood brain barrier.

02:23:52.800 | People have said, well, then why do I get a benefit

02:23:55.480 | from things like the other one that I would speak about

02:23:57.680 | is probably slow MAG, because it can be tough

02:24:00.200 | on some people's tummy and it's a coated form of magnesium.

02:24:03.920 | That doesn't necessarily cross the blood brain barrier,

02:24:06.880 | but magnesium, I would say if one to focus on

02:24:10.440 | would maybe be magnesium chloride.

02:24:13.560 | That seems, maybe Petra Teer has released a podcast

02:24:16.600 | on this too.

02:24:17.440 | That seems to be, I think, an effective one

02:24:20.000 | for bioavailability.

02:24:22.440 | But if it doesn't cross the brain barrier,

02:24:24.240 | how can it be affecting sleep?

02:24:25.640 | Because sleep is of the brain, by the brain,

02:24:27.440 | and for the brain.

02:24:28.520 | One of the reasons is because of muscle relaxation.

02:24:31.400 | So, if you're too tense in your body,

02:24:33.480 | it feeds signals of stress to your brain.

02:24:35.760 | And if you're stressed, as we've spoken about,

02:24:37.600 | you're not going to sleep well.

02:24:38.840 | So, I think there could be indirect effects

02:24:41.760 | of forms of magnesium that do not cross

02:24:44.600 | the blood brain barrier.

02:24:45.920 | Again, assuming that you are magnesium deficient.

02:24:48.880 | I think epigenic chamomile has some good evidence.

02:24:52.280 | Valerian root, unfortunately, if you look at the data,

02:24:55.480 | it doesn't seem to hold up

02:24:56.840 | in terms of any sleep benefit whatsoever.

02:24:59.760 | Probably two that I would add to that list.

02:25:01.920 | The first is glycine.

02:25:03.840 | And here we're talking about doses

02:25:05.280 | of maybe 1.5 to two grams of glycine.

02:25:09.840 | Has quite a reliable, robust literature.

02:25:12.320 | Now, it's not randomized control trials

02:25:14.240 | of a level of a drug, because these are supplements.

02:25:17.120 | You don't get those studies,

02:25:18.680 | but it does seem to have quite a reliable benefit

02:25:20.960 | based on what I've seen in the literature.

02:25:23.240 | The final one I would say, which has very good data

02:25:26.960 | to support its action,

02:25:28.800 | is something called phosphatidylserine,

02:25:32.200 | phosphatidylserine.

02:25:34.600 | And again, I've got no association

02:25:36.640 | with any supplement company whatsoever,

02:25:39.240 | but this has been reliably demonstrated

02:25:41.960 | to tamp down the cortisol response.

02:25:45.120 | Now, that data, you've got to be careful.

02:25:46.680 | If you look at it and read the studies, which I have,

02:25:48.880 | it's principally in athletes

02:25:50.360 | and they use an athletic performance intervention

02:25:53.440 | to brute force cortisol to go up.

02:25:55.760 | And then they use this medication

02:25:57.400 | and it brings it back down, but it is reliable.

02:26:00.600 | I bring this up because we spoke about

02:26:02.440 | in one of our episodes,

02:26:04.200 | insomnia patients, as they're trying to fall asleep,

02:26:07.320 | cortisol is coming down just like it is

02:26:09.200 | in all healthy people.

02:26:10.360 | And it drops low just as we're about to fall asleep.

02:26:13.120 | But in insomnia patients, it spikes back up again.

02:26:15.400 | And then it does in the middle of the night.

02:26:17.040 | So here is a medication that one could try

02:26:19.440 | to try to tamp down that cortisol specifically

02:26:22.760 | as you're going into sleep.

02:26:24.080 | And that may be of help too.

02:26:25.640 | So those are the only two that I would give

02:26:27.720 | with the same caveat that get everything else straight,

02:26:32.400 | stop worrying about buying supplements

02:26:34.520 | and thinking it's going to be a quick fix,

02:26:36.520 | get the basics in place.

02:26:38.320 | And then we can think about fine tuning you

02:26:40.840 | for the final couple of percent optimization

02:26:43.440 | that you get from supplements.

02:26:45.640 | - Terrific answer.

02:26:48.320 | The final question of this sixth

02:26:51.640 | and final episode of this podcast series

02:26:55.520 | on sleep with Dr. Matthew Walker.

02:26:57.280 | - I'm so sad.

02:26:58.120 | I don't want to leave.

02:26:58.960 | I don't want to stop speaking about sleep.

02:27:00.240 | - Well, we can always do another.

02:27:01.600 | - I would love to.

02:27:02.440 | - If the literature changes, it evolves,

02:27:03.920 | we can do another.

02:27:06.240 | And another is the following.

02:27:09.440 | If you could give just one tip for getting better sleep,

02:27:12.920 | what would that be?

02:27:13.880 | - Regularity.

02:27:17.800 | Just keep things regular.

02:27:20.280 | If you get regular sleep,

02:27:22.600 | a lot of things will start to take care of themselves.

02:27:26.000 | And after that, if they don't,

02:27:27.920 | we'll have another conversation

02:27:29.000 | and we'll go back to the other three keys,

02:27:31.080 | the other three of the four macros of sleep,

02:27:33.400 | quantity, quality, and regularity,

02:27:36.040 | as I've spoken about in timing,

02:27:37.480 | and then all of the other protocols that we've mentioned.

02:27:40.080 | But start with regularity, get that straight.

02:27:44.800 | And I would also say your timing too,

02:27:47.160 | the R and the T of QQRT, figure out your chronotype,

02:27:51.400 | get good with your chronotype as best you can,

02:27:54.600 | and then get regular.

02:27:56.280 | If you do those two things,

02:27:58.000 | sleep in synchrony with your chronotype

02:28:00.000 | rather than against it,

02:28:01.400 | and you are being regular weekdays and weekends,

02:28:05.160 | you will get a long way to getting better sleep.

02:28:08.640 | - Fantastic.

02:28:09.520 | Well, I'll put one in.

02:28:10.560 | If you could give just one tip for getting better sleep,

02:28:13.280 | what would it be?

02:28:14.240 | I suggest you listen to all six episodes

02:28:16.720 | of the "Huberman Lab" podcast guest series

02:28:19.960 | with Dr. Matthew Walker about sleep

02:28:22.120 | and ways to improve sleep,

02:28:23.320 | because episode one covers the biology and the basics

02:28:26.920 | of how to get better sleep and what sleep is.

02:28:30.160 | Episode two gets into the more advanced tools,

02:28:32.300 | although I think they are tools that everyone,

02:28:34.680 | I know they are tools that everyone can and should consider.

02:28:38.200 | Episode three gets into the power of naps, caffeine, food,

02:28:42.640 | and the timing of those.

02:28:44.240 | Oh, so powerful.

02:28:46.480 | Episode four gets into the role of sleep

02:28:49.060 | in learning, memory, and creativity.

02:28:51.480 | What's more interesting than that?

02:28:53.960 | Episode five, we discussed sleep

02:28:56.560 | and its impact on emotional health and mental health.

02:28:59.480 | And today we were discussing dreaming and lucid dreaming.

02:29:05.320 | And here is where I get to say,

02:29:08.420 | Dr. Matthew Walker, thank you oh so much,

02:29:13.280 | oh so much for giving us a absolutely world-class grand tour

02:29:18.280 | of this incredible aspect of our lives that we call sleep.

02:29:23.600 | And in doing so, also making it extremely clear,

02:29:29.240 | extremely actionable at every step,

02:29:31.600 | and very, very thorough in a way

02:29:33.760 | that really honors the interest and intellect

02:29:37.720 | and just real sincere interest in this topic

02:29:42.920 | on the part of the audience.

02:29:44.580 | So I could not think of a single better person

02:29:48.720 | for this series than you, alive or dead.

02:29:51.560 | Fortunately, you're alive.

02:29:53.400 | And I just want to say on behalf of myself,

02:29:57.480 | everyone else here at the Huberman Lab Podcast,

02:30:00.040 | and the many, many millions of people listening to

02:30:04.560 | or watching this series, thank you ever so much.

02:30:08.480 | - For having me on, for giving me this opportunity,

02:30:12.120 | firstly, thank you.

02:30:13.800 | But also for the generosity of your heart, your intellect,

02:30:18.800 | and your willing to disseminate knowledge

02:30:24.040 | to millions of people, myself included.

02:30:27.080 | It is my privilege to sit next to you, across from you,

02:30:31.720 | and I've received so much wisdom and knowledge from you

02:30:35.640 | as so many others have.

02:30:37.400 | You are an international treasure.

02:30:40.040 | Thank you, Andrew.

02:30:41.420 | - Well, thank you.

02:30:43.180 | I'll try and take that in.

02:30:44.660 | I'm grateful for you being a colleague and a friend.

02:30:49.300 | And my favorite sign-off with people I love is more soon.

02:30:54.300 | - Take care.

02:30:56.380 | - Thank you for joining me for today's episode

02:30:58.180 | with Dr. Matthew Walker.

02:30:59.740 | To learn more about Dr. Walker's research

02:31:01.940 | and to learn more about his book

02:31:03.540 | and his social media handles,

02:31:04.860 | please see the links in our show note captions.

02:31:07.220 | If you're learning from and/or enjoying this podcast,

02:31:09.780 | please subscribe to our YouTube channel.

02:31:11.660 | That's a terrific zero-cost way to support us.

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02:31:19.420 | you can leave us up to a five-star review.

02:31:21.820 | Please also check out the sponsors at the beginning

02:31:23.820 | and throughout today's episode.

02:31:25.360 | That's the best way to support this podcast.

02:31:27.820 | If you have any questions for me

02:31:29.060 | or comments about the podcast,

02:31:30.700 | or topics or guests that you'd like me to feature

02:31:32.620 | on the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:31:34.140 | please put those in the comments section on YouTube.

02:31:36.620 | I do read all the comments.

02:31:38.540 | On many episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:31:40.540 | we discuss supplements.

02:31:42.020 | While supplements aren't necessary for everybody,

02:31:44.160 | many people derive tremendous benefit from them

02:31:46.180 | for things like improving sleep,

02:31:47.580 | for hormone support, and for focus.

02:31:49.540 | To learn more about the supplements

02:31:50.700 | discussed on the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:31:52.340 | go to livemomentous, spelled O-U-S,

02:31:54.900 | that's livemomentous.com/huberman.

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02:32:02.740 | So that's Instagram, X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and threads.

02:32:06.220 | And on all those platforms,

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02:32:10.020 | some of which overlaps with the content

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02:32:12.980 | but much of which is distinct from the content

02:32:14.820 | covered on the Huberman Lab podcast.

02:32:16.340 | So again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms.

02:32:19.620 | If you haven't already subscribed

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02:32:22.540 | our Neural Network Newsletter is a zero-cost newsletter

02:32:25.420 | that provides podcast summaries as well as protocols

02:32:28.260 | in the form of brief one-to-three-page PDFs

02:32:30.740 | that cover everything from neuroplasticity and learning

02:32:33.380 | to sleep, to deliberate cold exposure,

02:32:35.440 | and deliberate heat exposure.

02:32:36.860 | We have a foundational fitness protocol and much more,

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02:32:50.760 | with anybody.

02:32:51.700 | Thank you once again for joining me

02:32:53.040 | for today's discussion all about sleep

02:32:55.180 | with Dr. Matthew Walker.

02:32:56.780 | And last but certainly not least,

02:32:58.820 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:33:00.780 | (upbeat music)

02:33:03.360 | (upbeat music)

Dr. Matt Walker: The Science of Dreams, Nightmares & Lucid Dreaming | Huberman Lab Guest Series

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