Speaker 1: My response to people who say, while else to sleep
Speaker 1: when I'm dead is yes, you'll be dead a lot
Speaker 1: sooner and a lot stupider in the meantime, because that's
Speaker 1: what the science says.
Speaker 2: Welcome to One Day University talks with the world's most
Speaker 2: engaging and inspiring professors discussing their most popular courses. This
Speaker 2: podcast is your chance to discover some of our top
Speaker 2: rated lectures on your own schedule. I'm Stephen Shregis. The
Speaker 2: National Institutes of Health calls the brain the crown jewel
Speaker 2: of the human body. It's the most complex organ we have,
Speaker 2: controlling our behavior, memories, emotions, movements, and much more. There's
Speaker 2: quite a lot we don't understand about the brain, and
Speaker 2: even more surprisingly, some of the things we thought we
Speaker 2: knew are actually myths. That's according to Notre Dame psychology
Speaker 2: professor Jessica Paine, she has to talk for One Day
Speaker 2: University called What we Know about the Brain and What
Speaker 2: We Don't. Jessica directs the Sleep, Stress and Memory Lab
Speaker 2: at Notre Dame, and before dispelling misinformation about the human brain,
Speaker 2: she first explains the field of cognitive neuroscience.
Speaker 1: The way I like to explain it is it's a
Speaker 1: blend or a hybrid really of classical cognitive psychology, where
Speaker 1: we're trying to understand cognition, meaning memory, emotion, decision making, attention, concentration,
Speaker 1: and then neuroscience, which is really the study of the
Speaker 1: physical cells that make up the brain, and cognitive neuroscience
Speaker 1: is still a relatively new field where we're trying to
Speaker 1: put the two things together. So when we talk about
Speaker 1: I'll just use memory as an example because that's my
Speaker 1: area of expertise. As you're trying to remember things, what
Speaker 1: regions of the brain are you leveraging to do that.
Speaker 1: So we're trying to get at not just the behavioral
Speaker 1: experimental aspect of what is a memory, how does it operate,
Speaker 1: what can people retrieve, and why how long do memories last,
Speaker 1: But we're also trying to understand the systems and the
Speaker 1: structures in the brain that are going to participate in
Speaker 1: those types of tasks.
Speaker 2: Not that many years ago, something called an fMRI was
Speaker 2: invented and now it's used all the time. What is
Speaker 2: that and why is it so important in this field?
Speaker 1: Well, and it's related to what I just said. So
Speaker 1: when we studied cognitive issues back in the day, I
Speaker 1: mean even as early the eighties the nineties, we didn't
Speaker 1: have tools that could help us understand where things occurred
Speaker 1: in the brain. So fMRI and other neuroimaging tools allow
Speaker 1: us to image the brains at work. So while you're
Speaker 1: performing memory task, for example, or maybe it's a language task.
Speaker 1: Maybe you're bilingual and you're speaking in one language and
Speaker 1: flipping to the other, we can look inside the brain
Speaker 1: and determine what regions are active when you're performing these
Speaker 1: different cognitive tasks. So we really didn't have the ability
Speaker 1: to look inside the brain before that, at least not
Speaker 1: an intact neurotypical brain. We were reliant on quote, normal
Speaker 1: human subjects in psychology tasks and had to deal with
Speaker 1: this black box in place of the brain. We just
Speaker 1: didn't really know how to talk about the brain because
Speaker 1: most neuroscience studies at that time were going on in
Speaker 1: animals or in patients, and so we were able to
Speaker 1: derive some conclusions from animals and patients. But now we're
Speaker 1: able to study the neurotypical brain because fMRI is not dangerous.
Speaker 1: You're using a magnet, there's no radiation or anything like that,
Speaker 1: and so we're able to image the brain at work
Speaker 1: on these different cognitive tasks that really brought the neuroscience
Speaker 1: into cognitive neuroscience, at least in part.
Speaker 2: I've got a few questions now regarding so called facts
Speaker 2: that a lot of people believe that perhaps aren't really true.
Speaker 2: So I'll start with this one. Most people only use
Speaker 2: ten percent of their brain.
Speaker 1: It has me crazy. Yep, you know, I honestly don't
Speaker 1: even know where that came from. I've tried to trace
Speaker 1: it back. It's very clearly misinformation. We are utilizing most
Speaker 1: of our brains most of the time. So even if
Speaker 1: you look at one of these language tasks, now that
Speaker 1: we can use fMRI, you see that you're using a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of different regions of the brain to produce
Speaker 1: or comprehend language. Even when you retrieve a memory, you're
Speaker 1: going to preferentially activate a region of the brain called
Speaker 1: the hippocampus, which is probably the most important structure we
Speaker 1: think for learning and memory. But it's not as if
Speaker 1: it's the only structure. It collaborates with other structures all
Speaker 1: over the place. In the frontal lobe, which is the
Speaker 1: most recently evolved part of our brain, the at a lobe,
Speaker 1: other regions of cortex to complete the act, say of
Speaker 1: retrieving a memory. So I can't really think of any example,
Speaker 1: even during sleep where you're not utilizing quite a bit
Speaker 1: of your brain.
Speaker 2: You're telling me it's not true that when you sleep
Speaker 2: your whole brain turns off and nothing much is happening,
Speaker 2: not at all.
Speaker 1: In fact, I like to say nothing could be further
Speaker 1: from the truth, because when you're asleep, and particularly when
Speaker 1: you're in rapid eye movement sleep, some of these regions
Speaker 1: that I was just talking about, like the memory and
Speaker 1: surrounding cortical structures that are important for memory, they're just
Speaker 1: wildly activated. Same with the amygdala, which is so important
Speaker 1: for emotion and emotional learning and memory. They're in some
Speaker 1: cases even more active than when people are wide awake.
Speaker 2: Jessica, you mentioned that our brains are never shut off.
Speaker 2: Is that always a good thing? Is that sometimes a
Speaker 2: bad thing?
Speaker 1: You know? It's a good question. I think it's a
Speaker 1: good thing in the sense that the brain has a
Speaker 1: lot of information to process, needs to not just encode
Speaker 1: do information and store it for later reference, but it
Speaker 1: needs to transform information in interesting ways so that we
Speaker 1: can come up with these creative solutions to problems, as
Speaker 1: I was saying, but I think the potential downside of
Speaker 1: our active brains is when that activity turns into something maladaptive,
Speaker 1: like rumination. And that's why I think it's better to
Speaker 1: try to redirect our cognition in more useful ways, because
Speaker 1: it can it really can backfire on people if you
Speaker 1: can't stop thinking about something, can't stop flashing back on something.
Speaker 1: This is pretty characteristic of a lot of different mental
Speaker 1: health disorders. By the way, rumination or flashbacks when it
Speaker 1: comes to negative events. You see that in anxiety disorders
Speaker 1: like PTSD. You see rumination in anxiety and in depression.
Speaker 1: So there's something really interesting about the brain being unconstrained
Speaker 1: and sort of running a muck on you when the
Speaker 1: content that's going through your head is negative.
Speaker 2: Next one right brain versus left brain. Except we've all
Speaker 2: heard about what's the basis for it and is there
Speaker 2: a reason there is?
Speaker 1: And in that case there's at least a good reason.
Speaker 1: It turns out again, in neurologically normal people, there just
Speaker 1: aren't that many interesting differences there. I mean, there's a
Speaker 1: big one, which is language. And so for the majority
Speaker 1: of people, something like ninety five plus percent of right handers,
Speaker 1: and I think over seventy percent of left handers have
Speaker 1: language lateralized to their left hemispheres, and that is true
Speaker 1: in most people. But where the real you know, drawing
Speaker 1: on the right side of the brain. And a lot
Speaker 1: of these oversimplifications and the media came from, I think,
Speaker 1: are based in what are known as split brain patient studies.
Speaker 1: So these are fascinating patients who are quite rare that
Speaker 1: actually have their hemispheres separated from one another. There's a
Speaker 1: big white matter track that's called the corpus colosum that
Speaker 1: connects the two hemispheres, and it's like an information super highway.
Speaker 1: Its whole job is to really make sure the two
Speaker 1: hemispheres communicate together all the time, and due to intractable epilepsy,
Speaker 1: in some very rare patients, they will actually sever that
Speaker 1: so that they separate the two hemispheres from one another
Speaker 1: so that the seizures can't spread from one hemisphere to another.
Speaker 1: And this is obviously only in very very rare cases
Speaker 1: where medication isn't working, nothing else is working. But those patients,
Speaker 1: if you meet them, and I've had the pleasure of
Speaker 1: actually meeting one, you would never know that they actually
Speaker 1: have two hemispheres that don't talk to each other. They're
Speaker 1: very quote normal seeming, But if you design the right
Speaker 1: kinds of tasks, that's where you see some of these
Speaker 1: asymmetries where the right side of the brain tends to
Speaker 1: be much better when it comes to visual and spatial
Speaker 1: information and the left brain much more specialized when it
Speaker 1: comes to language. Now, those types of strict asymmetries, though,
Speaker 1: you just don't see in an intact brain where the
Speaker 1: two hemispheres are communicating. So there's a little bit of
Speaker 1: truth to it. I mean, certainly language is lateralized. The
Speaker 1: right hemisphere may be a little bit better at dealing
Speaker 1: with global processing, gestalts and this visual spatial ability I'm
Speaker 1: talking about. But when I hear about consultants who are
Speaker 1: on the road, you know, teaching people to be more
Speaker 1: less right or left brain, there's just nothing to that.
Speaker 1: It's real pop psychology.
Speaker 2: Let's keep going. Our memories are accurate snapshots of what
Speaker 2: really happened in our past. Is there a reason to
Speaker 2: doubt that?
Speaker 1: There's every reason to doubt that. In fact, we know
Speaker 1: that they're not and I'm on the record just to
Speaker 1: be controversial. At some memory conferences saying there's no such
Speaker 1: thing as a memory. There's no such thing as a real, true,
Speaker 1: verritical memory. In most cases, insofar as we're talking about
Speaker 1: episodic memories or memories for the episodes and experiences of
Speaker 1: our past, we know that we're incredibly biased as human
Speaker 1: beings even when we're encoding or acquiring new information, and
Speaker 1: that sort of bias only gets worse as you are
Speaker 1: processing information over time. And I think it's much more
Speaker 1: helpful to understand the memory system as a system that
Speaker 1: really evolved more to help us figure out how to
Speaker 1: problem solve in the future than it did to accurately
Speaker 1: reflect the past. So it's not that it can't do that.
Speaker 1: I mean, anybody who's been a student knows that you're
Speaker 1: going to have to have a fairly accurate memory system
Speaker 1: in order to perform well on tests. So it can
Speaker 1: perform those tasks up to a point, especially with very
Speaker 1: simplistic materials, But when it gets into you know, the
Speaker 1: real world memories of people's pasts, they're not at all accurate.
Speaker 1: And I don't think that they necessarily should be, because
Speaker 1: I think the goal of that system is to encode
Speaker 1: and store information in a flexible way, so that you
Speaker 1: can use what you've learned, not just to spit it
Speaker 1: back out in some high fidelity version of the way
Speaker 1: you originally learned it, but to be able to use
Speaker 1: it creatively and flexibly in this unpredictable world that's constantly
Speaker 1: changing on us.
Speaker 2: I'm going to follow up a little that I've heard
Speaker 2: you speak a bit about memories made during highly significant
Speaker 2: emotional events. So, for instance, I'm one hundred percent sure
Speaker 2: I know where I was when the innocent verdict in
Speaker 2: the OJ Simpson case was released. Is my memory of
Speaker 2: that probably accurate?
Speaker 1: It's probably not. And this is what's fascinating. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm convinced that I can tell you exactly where I
Speaker 1: was and what happened to the detail during nine to eleven.
Speaker 1: But we have run studies and multiple labs have done
Speaker 1: this confirming that we are very confident in those memories.
Speaker 1: But they're not much more accurate than any other types
Speaker 1: of memories. They're just more vivid and more detailed, which
Speaker 1: makes us more confident in them. And the way we
Speaker 1: know that is because there have been studies done on
Speaker 1: nine to eleven where people have been asked immediately after
Speaker 1: the event what they remember, and then they've been followed
Speaker 1: up later, and the memories change over time, just like
Speaker 1: most normal memories do. So that's a fascinating finding that
Speaker 1: the confidence we have in our most emotional memories is high,
Speaker 1: but we're not necessarily much more accurate.
Speaker 2: After the break. How words actually can hurt you, and
Speaker 2: why sleep deprived people make Jessica mad I'm just going
Speaker 2: to ask for a couple of sentences about two other concepts,
Speaker 2: mind wandering good or bad, and meditation good or bad,
Speaker 2: or both.
Speaker 1: Wandering and actually mind wandering the answers both. Mind wandering
Speaker 1: gets a bad rap, and in some sense deservedly so,
Speaker 1: because most people think about mind wandering in the context
Speaker 1: of say a student in a classroom who can't concentrate
Speaker 1: because his or her mind is wandering, or an employ
Speaker 1: at work who's not getting as much done because his
Speaker 1: or her brain is mind wandering. So it can be
Speaker 1: tied to distractability, and that makes it quote bad. But
Speaker 1: mind wandering also is tied to creativity. So if your
Speaker 1: mind is wandering about a problem that you're trying to solve,
Speaker 1: or even just wandering when you don't have thoughts that
Speaker 1: need to be constrained, you can come up with some
Speaker 1: really cool and unusual ideas. So I think it's all
Speaker 1: about the affective tone, the valance, whether it's positive or negative,
Speaker 1: and sort of the regimented nature of your thoughts, whether
Speaker 1: there's something happening in a repetitive way, which is again
Speaker 1: more along the lines of rumination, or if what you're
Speaker 1: being distracted by is completely unrelated to anything in your
Speaker 1: life versus something that could be right. So it really
Speaker 1: just depends on the context about whether that's good or bad,
Speaker 1: whether that's distraction or whether that's the brain problem solving
Speaker 1: in a way that could yield some useful insights.
Speaker 2: And meditation and meditation there's.
Speaker 1: A downside to everything. I mean, there are some stet
Speaker 1: that have been looking at the downside of meditation, but
Speaker 1: I'd say on the whole, especially if you're doing it
Speaker 1: the way most Americans do, which is probably no more
Speaker 1: than ten twenty thirty minutes a day max, it seems
Speaker 1: to be extremely beneficial. There's evidence out there that suggests
Speaker 1: that meditation even changes the brain, not just functionally, meaning
Speaker 1: the way you process information that we can see using fMRI,
Speaker 1: but even structurally, and you're building new neural tissue in
Speaker 1: key emotion and emotion regulation areas of the brain like
Speaker 1: the ventral medio prefernal cortex and the insula. So meditation
Speaker 1: to me is one of the more interesting topics in
Speaker 1: the neuroscience field right now, because what we know from
Speaker 1: our research on stress is that stress can if it's
Speaker 1: elevated for long enough and it's chronic enough, especially exposure
Speaker 1: to stress hormones like cortisol. If it's really really high
Speaker 1: and really chronic, you end up with problems, and you
Speaker 1: end up with some neural deficits, including a reduction in
Speaker 1: plasticity and even shrinkage in certain brain areas like the
Speaker 1: hippocampus being so important for memory, and regions of the
Speaker 1: ventromedial prefrontal cortex as well potentially. But when you do
Speaker 1: something like meditate, which involves a relaxation component and a
Speaker 1: breathing component, which is very helpful for dropping those stress hormones,
Speaker 1: and then most, if not all, meditation techniques have an
Speaker 1: attentional component where you're focusing over and over again on
Speaker 1: the breath and if your mind wanders, you catch that,
Speaker 1: but you nonjudgmentally come back to the mantra or to
Speaker 1: the breath, and there's something about I believe the combination
Speaker 1: of the breathing and the relaxation and the reduction in
Speaker 1: andreenergic and tone of cortisol in addition to that attentional
Speaker 1: piece that seems to create these beneficial again not just functional,
Speaker 1: but structural changes in the brain, which makes it I think,
Speaker 1: stronger and potentially more resilient to future negative emotional events
Speaker 1: and threats in the future.
Speaker 2: Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can
Speaker 2: never harm me. My mother used to say that, I
Speaker 2: thought it was true. Not so true, huh, not so true.
Speaker 1: Now, I don't think it's the worst thing for a
Speaker 1: mom to say to her kid. If for kids, you know,
Speaker 1: being bullied, I think you've got to do something. And
Speaker 1: bullying is its own topic obviously, but that's not true.
Speaker 1: I mean we know, in fact, in order to understand
Speaker 1: social exclusion, in order to understand bias, I mean, even
Speaker 1: getting into really difficult topics like racism, words are hurtful,
Speaker 1: and I think there I'm drawing on social exclusion experiments
Speaker 1: where what you see is that when people experience social pain, okay,
Speaker 1: being teased, being bullied, being excluded, you actually see pain
Speaker 1: regions of the brain becoming activated in very much the
Speaker 1: same way, or at least a similar way to the
Speaker 1: way they become activated when you're in physical pain. So
Speaker 1: social pain is real, and it's experienced very similarly by
Speaker 1: the brain to the way pain is. The reason for that,
Speaker 1: I think is because we're a highly social species. We
Speaker 1: evolved in social groups. We're incredibly dependent on our social networks,
Speaker 1: and it's tough to feel excluded or to feel less
Speaker 1: than and the brain data show that quite convincingly, I think.
Speaker 1: So it's all the more reason we should care about
Speaker 1: things like bias and discrimination and bullying, even when it's verbal.
Speaker 2: You explain that taking advil or aspirin when you're feeling
Speaker 2: very badly about how you've been treated is sometimes as
Speaker 2: effective as taking it when you have actual pain.
Speaker 1: Yeah, those studies are fascinating, and I think the phenomenal
Speaker 1: logical experience of the participants is still a little bit
Speaker 1: up for debate whether they actually feel better. I think
Speaker 1: in some studies they suggest that people do actually say
Speaker 1: they feel better, at others they don't. But what it
Speaker 1: definitely seems to do is reduce the pain that people
Speaker 1: experience as a function of social exclusion or other types
Speaker 1: of social pain. So again, I think the message underlying
Speaker 1: these studies that's so important is that social pain and
Speaker 1: physical pain are very, very similar when it comes to
Speaker 1: the way the brain processes these two different types of pain.
Speaker 1: Meaning it's very real. It gets under the skin. These
Speaker 1: words that supposedly can't hurt you really can get under
Speaker 1: the skin to activate the same networks in your brain
Speaker 1: that you activate if you put your hand on a
Speaker 1: hot stove, and in the same way. Part of what
Speaker 1: supports that is that if you take aspirin or advil
Speaker 1: or senemtapin something like that, you end up reducing the
Speaker 1: amount of brain activity that you typically see activated when
Speaker 1: somebody is subjected to its socially painful stimulus.
Speaker 2: Here's something I know a lot of people wonder about dreaming.
Speaker 2: Some people remember their dreams or seem to. Some people
Speaker 2: never do, some people do sometimes Why is that? And
Speaker 2: does everyone dream?
Speaker 1: So we think most people dream? I mean there are
Speaker 1: certain stroke patients who may genuinely not dream, but most
Speaker 1: people who think they don't. I love getting a hold
Speaker 1: of them because we can bring them into the research laboratory,
Speaker 1: hook them up to EEG electrodes, so we can see
Speaker 1: whether they're sleeping or not and what stage of sleep
Speaker 1: they're in. And if you wake people up periodically, especially
Speaker 1: out of rapid eye movement sleep, people who usually don't
Speaker 1: remember their dreams will invariably report dreams, and they surprise
Speaker 1: themselves and it's really fun to see. So most, if
Speaker 1: not virtually all of us dream, but there does seem
Speaker 1: to be this very interesting difference in how regularly people
Speaker 1: remember them. Some people remember them a lot, some people less.
Speaker 1: There's some evidence that people who don't tend to remember
Speaker 1: their dreams at all are better and deeper sleepers. But
Speaker 1: I've also met people who remember their dreams periodically that
Speaker 1: sleep quite well, and they report sleeping well, and their
Speaker 1: EEG tells me the same thing. So I think there's
Speaker 1: just natural human variation in that, just like there are
Speaker 1: in so many of these domains, and it's a fascinating
Speaker 1: area to study. It's one of my great passions for sure.
Speaker 2: Speaking of passion, there's something I've seen you get real
Speaker 2: worked up about, and it's those people who talk about
Speaker 2: denying themselves sleep. You call them the a sleep when
Speaker 2: I'm dead group. Yes, why did they upset you so much?
Speaker 2: What's going on there?
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you're right, you have a good eye, because
Speaker 1: I think I've nearly like followed off the stage thrown
Speaker 1: my microphone. And my response to people who say, well, else,
Speaker 1: just sleep when I'm dead is yes, you'll be dead
Speaker 1: a lot sooner and a lot stupider in the meantime,
Speaker 1: because that's what the science says. Yes. And I get
Speaker 1: angry about that because it's a myth, it's a cultural myth.
Speaker 1: It's not backed up by data. These people who seem
Speaker 1: to think that they're not just find but great on
Speaker 1: three and four hours of sleep are so difficult to find.
Speaker 1: I have had many people tell me they're that person,
Speaker 1: but I haven't actually found one of these short sleepers yet.
Speaker 1: I mean they exist. Again, the amount of sleep we
Speaker 1: need seems to be normally distributed, so most of us
Speaker 1: need somewhere between seven and nine. But if you go out,
Speaker 1: you know, to standard deviations on this, you know, normal
Speaker 1: distribution or Bell curve, you can find people who probably
Speaker 1: really only need four. But again, they're just so satistically
Speaker 1: rare that I can't find them. And yet I find
Speaker 1: plenty of people who brag about it. Right, it's the
Speaker 1: CEO who's you know, constantly working. It's the student at
Speaker 1: Notre Dame or prior to that, Harvard who thought they
Speaker 1: were doing the right thing by sleep depriving themselves to
Speaker 1: learn more. And I'm a memory researcher. The two worst
Speaker 1: things you can do for your ability to learn and
Speaker 1: remember are one cram and two sleep deprive yourself while
Speaker 1: you're doing it. So the two best things to do
Speaker 1: or distribute or stagger your practice across multiple study episodes
Speaker 1: and to sleep on it. It's frustrating to me because
Speaker 1: it's based, I think in this cultural ideology that we
Speaker 1: have where we really think that we're only worth as
Speaker 1: much as our human capital, you know, and so we
Speaker 1: need to be using every single ounce of our time
Speaker 1: and energy to produce. And I have a lot of
Speaker 1: issues with that just socially, but I have a big
Speaker 1: issue with the fact that if you want people to
Speaker 1: be more productive, you need to do the revolutionary thing
Speaker 1: of let them sleep, let them have time with their families,
Speaker 1: let them have down time, let them exercise. It's about efficiency,
Speaker 1: and the brain simply can't perform very well if it's
Speaker 1: highly stressed out and sleep deprived. That's the world we're
Speaker 1: living in We've got most companies out there thinking that
Speaker 1: that's a good thing, when the truth is it's a
Speaker 1: bad thing, which is why I've gotten into so much
Speaker 1: corporate work and doing a lot of leadership trainings in
Speaker 1: across domains, but especially in healthcare, where it's particularly upsetting
Speaker 1: because I feel like they ought to know better. So
Speaker 1: sleeping is one of the best things you can do
Speaker 1: for your cognitive performance. I think it's one of the
Speaker 1: most powerful tools we have at our disposal. I've just
Speaker 1: been waiting for our kind of corporate culture to catch
Speaker 1: up with what the neuroscience facts say.
Speaker 2: I've got one more untrue statement. We're born with a
Speaker 2: certain number of neurons in our brain, and that's all
Speaker 2: we're going to get, right.
Speaker 1: And isn't that great that that turned out to not
Speaker 1: be true. Yes, it used to just be like it
Speaker 1: was all downhill, And so now we know. There are
Speaker 1: two main types of plasticity in the brain, and one
Speaker 1: is called neurogenesis, and that's the one you're referring to.
Speaker 1: That's the literal birth of new brain cells which seem
Speaker 1: to become functionally active and relevant, especially in memory systems.
Speaker 1: And neurogenesis seems to continue even into the eighties. At
Speaker 1: least some studies really strongly suggest that the other type
Speaker 1: of plasticity is the dendrites, which are sort of part
Speaker 1: of the neuron that has a lot of different connections,
Speaker 1: and it goes out and makes connections with other neurons
Speaker 1: that sort of form our ability to have thoughts and
Speaker 1: store memories and do everything else. That also can change,
Speaker 1: can shrink or grow in the same way neurogenesis can
Speaker 1: sort of be reduced or increased, and the things that
Speaker 1: inhibit that those two to different types of plasticity seem
Speaker 1: to be quite similar. So, for instance, if you're highly
Speaker 1: sleep deprived and extraordinarily stressed for a long time, you're
Speaker 1: actually going to get hit on both of those fronts.
Speaker 1: So the good news, though, is that we do have
Speaker 1: plastic abilities throughout the lifespan, unlike we once thought. The
Speaker 1: bad news is we are still, i think, living in
Speaker 1: social conditions which aren't always benefiting those two types of plasticity.
Speaker 2: Okay, I've got one more question for you. What's something
Speaker 2: we still don't know about the brain that you'd really
Speaker 2: like to know because you'd find it fascinating, but we
Speaker 2: just can't answer it.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are so many things. Really, I would
Speaker 1: like to know definitively how memories actually work. I would
Speaker 1: like to know what dreaming really is. There's new literature
Speaker 1: suggesting that there's such a phenomenon as local sleep, where
Speaker 1: you've got certain patches of the brain sleeping or sleeping
Speaker 1: differently than other patches of the brain. What I love
Speaker 1: about neuroscience and what I love about the brain is
Speaker 1: I think it's by far the most complex system in
Speaker 1: the world, certainly the most complex biological one, and we
Speaker 1: just don't have a huge amount of understanding yet. So
Speaker 1: I'm always trying to recruit people into science to help
Speaker 1: us figure it out. And there are literally probably an
Speaker 1: infinite number of questions to ask about it that we're
Speaker 1: not even really asking yet.
Speaker 2: Now, say, Jessica, thank you so much for doing this.
Speaker 2: We really appreciate it. I love learning about this stuff,
Speaker 2: and I know our listeners do too.
Speaker 1: You're welcome, wonderful seeing you, Stephen.
Speaker 2: Thanks for joining us here at One Day University. Sign
Speaker 2: up at our website one dayu dot com to become
Speaker 2: a member and access over seven hundred full length video
Speaker 2: lectures from the world's finest professors. You can also download
Speaker 2: our app. There you can watch Notre Dame Professor Jessica
Speaker 2: Pain's lectures on the brain, the science of sleep, and more.
Speaker 2: Join us next time. When we talk about the wives
Speaker 2: of Henry, ye, I.
Speaker 3: Think that they can be easily summed up or described
Speaker 3: in one word. You know, one's the temptress, or one's
Speaker 3: the loyal wife, one's the saint. They're too often talked
Speaker 3: about just sort of as these wives who are only
Speaker 3: understood in relationship to Henry and their mostly terrible ends,
Speaker 3: when in fact they have these rich lives that go
Speaker 3: beyond that.
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