Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert Lamb. I'm Julie Douglas. So Julie,
Speaker 1: how how you been sleeping lately? Have you've been inducted
Speaker 1: by aliens? Has your head exploded anything like that? Reason? No,
Speaker 1: I haven't had any weird sleep disorders that makes me
Speaker 1: feel like I'm being probed or anything ricocheting around my head, thankfully.
Speaker 1: But if we've discussed in the past, you had a
Speaker 1: little uh bit of the exploding head syndrome. I did, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which was terrifying because it sounded like a door just
Speaker 1: shutting in my head really loud, and I thought for
Speaker 1: sure someone had entered the house and it was about
Speaker 1: to hack meat a bits. But no, yeah, because I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the key things about dreams is that to
Speaker 1: the dream or the dream is generally real, our mind
Speaker 1: completely buys its reality, and so it's a really telling
Speaker 1: thing on on a larger level about how our brains
Speaker 1: can believe anything, and it can be a you know,
Speaker 1: and you can argue that well of our brains can
Speaker 1: believe this is a dream. Then what's to say that
Speaker 1: everything going on right now is not a dream. Well,
Speaker 1: and dreams in the in the brain are is still
Speaker 1: one of those areas of research that's pretty untapped. And
Speaker 1: and just now are people really starting to understand what's
Speaker 1: going on with our brains when we're sleeping and why
Speaker 1: we do the things we do and think the things
Speaker 1: we think are happening to us and a general like
Speaker 1: generally for my part, I have pretty normal sleep. So
Speaker 1: I tend to have nights where I have like a
Speaker 1: good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep, or I
Speaker 1: have um no dreams, stupid dreams, really cool dreams, or
Speaker 1: sometimes like stress dreams or nightmares. But that's pretty much it.
Speaker 1: But there is we're going to discuss in this podcast.
Speaker 1: There's a whole world of extreme sleep out there, of
Speaker 1: crazy and sometimes very tragic um sleep disorders that can
Speaker 1: occur and plague people for years. Yeah. Yeah, And the
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis, which we have mentioned in the alien abductions.
Speaker 1: That is pretty much the sleep paralysis. This feeling that
Speaker 1: that you know you're being tied down in your muscles,
Speaker 1: are are you're not working basically, but you're awake. That
Speaker 1: sort of brief moment that's really responsible for a lot
Speaker 1: of people trying to square what's happening to them and
Speaker 1: coming out on the other end thinking they've been abducted
Speaker 1: by aliens, by the way, because their muscles are still
Speaker 1: locked down. Like the basis here is when you when
Speaker 1: you're sleeping, UH, we're having uh. You know, our bodies
Speaker 1: arresting for the most part, and we need a we're
Speaker 1: we have all this mental activity that's still going on,
Speaker 1: so we the brain shuts down the rest of the
Speaker 1: body so that if in your dream you are karate
Speaker 1: chop and zombies, you won't actually be throwing karate chops.
Speaker 1: And then when you wake up, they the idea is
Speaker 1: to release these constraints, unlock everything, and let you carry on.
Speaker 1: But in sleep paralysis, somebody forgot to undo under the locks.
Speaker 1: You know what you're a but I'm awake. I should
Speaker 1: be able to control my muscles now, but I'm not.
Speaker 1: So it's very confusing. And then with other para so omnias,
Speaker 1: you have the the opposite going on, where you know
Speaker 1: the safety should be on and you're sleeping, and yet
Speaker 1: your local motor part of your brain is directing you
Speaker 1: in all sorts of places and you're you're running a
Speaker 1: muck in the neighborhood. I think yesterday I was trying
Speaker 1: to do like an elaborate Jurassic Park electric tarance dinosaurs
Speaker 1: kind of analogy. But I think the more apt analogy
Speaker 1: would be roller coasters. Like sleep paralysis is the roller
Speaker 1: coaster has come to a stop, but you're still locked
Speaker 1: into the roller coaster harness, and you're like, why is
Speaker 1: this not releasing? And then uh, some of these other
Speaker 1: situations we're talking about are the roller coaster is moving
Speaker 1: and the harness is not locked down. Yeah, and you're
Speaker 1: just you know, you're going down the hill and you're
Speaker 1: trying to float out of your seat. Yes, that's the feeling,
Speaker 1: and that's the analogy. UM, as far as statistics to go,
Speaker 1: sleep paralysis actually pretty common, and surveys from different countries
Speaker 1: show a wide range of estimates anywhere from twenty to
Speaker 1: six of that particular population experiencing sleep paralysis. So, you know,
Speaker 1: we're not going to really talk about sleep paralysis, but
Speaker 1: we'll talk a little bit more about a parasomnia. And
Speaker 1: we're when we're talking about a parasomnia, it's anything that
Speaker 1: happens that sort of out of the ordinary parasomnia, abnormal
Speaker 1: sleep basically right, yeah, yeah, And some examples are eating disorders,
Speaker 1: you know, sleep eating sleep, sleepwalking, night terrors. So we're
Speaker 1: not talking like midnight snack. We're talking you get up
Speaker 1: in you you are stuffing your pie hole with a
Speaker 1: table butter. That's what we're talking about. Something that you
Speaker 1: normally wouldn't do, right, um, and then hopefully you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be doing that. And then rem sleep behavior disorders and
Speaker 1: sleep aggression. And then there's them, say the cherry on
Speaker 1: the top six omnia which is sometimes called sleep sex. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that refers to actual acts they're carried out by
Speaker 1: a person who is sleeping. This is this is real. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Actually went to a panel at the World Science Festival
Speaker 1: about sleep and Dr Carlo Shank was one of the panelists,
Speaker 1: and he says that parasomnia is represent extreme states of
Speaker 1: mixed sleep wakefulness and that brain research has shown that
Speaker 1: when the brain is globally asleep, there are still parts
Speaker 1: of the brain that are awake. With parasonnia's release of
Speaker 1: behavior is not accompanied by proper judgment, and sleep behavior
Speaker 1: is non culpable behavior, which is important in your judgment
Speaker 1: is still in the dream world. That your movements are
Speaker 1: in the real world. So yeah, yeah, And we can
Speaker 1: talk a little bit more about this later. But there
Speaker 1: have been people who have had a sleep disorder defense
Speaker 1: for murders and have gotten off because they could prove
Speaker 1: that what they did while they were sleeping really wasn't
Speaker 1: intentional by their waking self. You know, I feel like
Speaker 1: I have some sort of a sleep disorder now that
Speaker 1: we're talking about it is I'll be having a dream
Speaker 1: and well, this is an example. I'll have the dream
Speaker 1: and then suddenly a guy will come to me in
Speaker 1: the dream and be like, Hey, I have this pegasus here.
Speaker 1: Would you like to ride this pegasus around and fly
Speaker 1: around and experience unbridled you know, joy. And I will
Speaker 1: be like, I don't know, this sounds kind of scary.
Speaker 1: I have something I need to do, like like, I
Speaker 1: don't embrace like I'm bringing too much real world judgment
Speaker 1: into my dreams. Was this guy Harry Hamlin? Um No,
Speaker 1: I don't think it was because of the yeah, clash
Speaker 1: the touch. Okay, so you can't really turn off that
Speaker 1: part of your brain that's see the judgment to to
Speaker 1: sort of let yourself go with it, right, Like if
Speaker 1: I'm in the dream personally, it seems like crazy things
Speaker 1: don't really happen. Sometimes weird things too, but it's it's
Speaker 1: only when I'm like a third person perspective, when it's
Speaker 1: like a movie dream, then things will be awesome. But
Speaker 1: if it's just me, it's like I'll pass on the pegasus,
Speaker 1: you know, and and other things will occur and I'll
Speaker 1: be like, oh, I'm not really into that, whereas and
Speaker 1: then I'll wake up and be like, well, that was
Speaker 1: a dream. I could have done anything. Well. I wonder, like,
Speaker 1: I know that sleep patterns are now being connected to genetics.
Speaker 1: I wonder if your dreaming patterns could be as well. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And this is actually from Wired dot com Sleep Disorders
Speaker 1: Trace to Genes that says researchers only began to seriously
Speaker 1: explore the genetics asleep in the mid ninety nineties, and
Speaker 1: they're far from determining which genes are in charge of
Speaker 1: the body clock. Even so, there appears to be general
Speaker 1: consensus that many of us don't voluntarily choose to be
Speaker 1: short sleepers or long sleepers, or morning people or night people,
Speaker 1: which is kind of interesting because you know, independently of this,
Speaker 1: the researchers have found that people with a certain gene
Speaker 1: are more likely to feel sleepy or fatigued, but have
Speaker 1: difficulties sleeping after only four hours of sleep compared to
Speaker 1: people without this gene. And this gene is associated with narcolepsy.
Speaker 1: So's there's certainly underlying factors going on here when we
Speaker 1: talk about sleep disorders, um or even diseases like something
Speaker 1: called the fatal familial insomnia. Oh now this one's yeah,
Speaker 1: this is a brutal it's awful. Um again, it's another
Speaker 1: it's it's a type of sleep disorder. Although it's it's
Speaker 1: a bit of a disease. It runs in families, and
Speaker 1: Pierre Luigi Gambetti, one of the discoveries of the condition,
Speaker 1: claims that it is the worst disease that you could get. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and he's not overstating this. Our own Josh Clark wrote
Speaker 1: a little bit about this and what do I think?
Speaker 1: It was ten amazing things your brain can do, which
Speaker 1: you can just find just a search for fatal insomnia
Speaker 1: on the House of Works home page and you'll find
Speaker 1: this a particular article. But yeah, it's actually a prion disease,
Speaker 1: which is a kin to like curu. The disease among
Speaker 1: human animals. Yeah, and then also akin to mad cow
Speaker 1: disease as well. So it's a it's a it's an
Speaker 1: abnormal like protein encoding thing. Only twenty eight families worldwide
Speaker 1: so far have they discovered have this. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's it's brute like. There was this this one
Speaker 1: who had and I mean it's like months of not
Speaker 1: being able to sleep, like just falling into the resulting
Speaker 1: that comes with this. And uh, I mean they eventually
Speaker 1: like tried to shut his brain down and put him
Speaker 1: in an artificial comma, but his brain was still awake
Speaker 1: in there. Yeah, this is this is the case of Um,
Speaker 1: it's a Chicago music teacher, Michael Cork. Yeah. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: at the age of forty, he just had an awful
Speaker 1: bout of insomnia. You're right, completely quit sleeping, which is
Speaker 1: the marker of this disease. You quit sleeping, your your
Speaker 1: brain and your body begin to shut down. He deteriorated
Speaker 1: into dementia, and doctors actually even induced the coma in
Speaker 1: in him, hoping that that would help shut down that
Speaker 1: part of the brain. But no, this is his brain
Speaker 1: continued to be active. Um, and so I believe it
Speaker 1: was six months after the initial onset of insomnia that
Speaker 1: he died. So this is fatal um. In some cases,
Speaker 1: people can live up to three years, but they will
Speaker 1: die UM. And what's unusual about this is that it
Speaker 1: doesn't really come into existence until and that's something like
Speaker 1: the forties fifties. UM, that's when it's going to show up.
Speaker 1: And because it's an autosomal dominant gene mutation, there's a
Speaker 1: fifty percent chance that you can pass this along to
Speaker 1: your kid. So it's relatively um new to us in
Speaker 1: terms of its discovery, and it's very rare. And again
Speaker 1: it's very hard to spot because if your kid doesn't
Speaker 1: develop this until they're an adult, you know, they're forty
Speaker 1: fifty years old, then you know, prior to us even
Speaker 1: knowing about it, you would just not you would assume
Speaker 1: that it was some sort of freak accident that you're
Speaker 1: you know, that your child expired from. So it's a
Speaker 1: It is awful because you're wasting away in your mind
Speaker 1: is wasting away, and you're not sleeping, and you just
Speaker 1: shut down, your body shuts down. You know. Insomnia is
Speaker 1: one of these things that I think it's difficult for
Speaker 1: people to imagine if you've never suffered through it, because
Speaker 1: I mean, if for people with normal sleep patterns, you
Speaker 1: might think like, well, I wouldn't be able to sleep. Oh,
Speaker 1: I guess I'll have to play video games all night
Speaker 1: or a while. I'd get so much work done or
Speaker 1: reading done. Is sometimes it's especially in a busy life
Speaker 1: or life full of a lot of hobbies. Um, you think, well,
Speaker 1: sleep's kind of in the way. It's kind of like eating.
Speaker 1: It's if I didn't have to do this, it would
Speaker 1: free up a lot of time. But but but when
Speaker 1: you have insomnia, when you have trouble sleeping, Um, it's
Speaker 1: it's not like you have a gift of usable time
Speaker 1: on your hands, you do know, I mean yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean basically, insanity sets in the longer amount of time
Speaker 1: that you know you're sleep deprived. Um. And we've talked
Speaker 1: about this before. You've had a couple of all night
Speaker 1: ers maybe, Um, you know, whether you're studying or you
Speaker 1: were doing something else, a couple of days after you
Speaker 1: were seriously debilitated in your ability to think critically. And
Speaker 1: that's just a couple of nights. Can you imagine six
Speaker 1: months of not sleeping? Um? You know that and and
Speaker 1: that would make sense why he descended into dementia. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is. I mean this is fiction. But Stephen King's
Speaker 1: book Insomnia um, which that's the title implies, has to
Speaker 1: do with insomnia, but it it ultimately involves, of course
Speaker 1: some stup for natural elements and ties into the whole
Speaker 1: Dark Tower series. But there are some great chapters as this.
Speaker 1: The lead characters an older man and he's he's gradually
Speaker 1: developing insomnia where it's like each night he's getting less
Speaker 1: and less sleep. And King does a really great job
Speaker 1: of in these these early chapters, especially really making you
Speaker 1: feel the frustration and weariness of someone who is having uh,
Speaker 1: who is suffering from insomnia. Yeah, it's grueling, right. Um. So,
Speaker 1: I mean I've had it several times in my life
Speaker 1: and I cannot imagine having having it just im perpetuity.
Speaker 1: How do you fix it? I mean, eventually my body
Speaker 1: could just got so tired that I, you know, fell asleep.
Speaker 1: But it really is one of those things that your
Speaker 1: brain can drive you insane because you're constantly thinking and
Speaker 1: and and and most of the time it's not deep
Speaker 1: thoughts or interesting thing. This is a very Buddhist idea there,
Speaker 1: How's that well, it's constantly thinking, right, and you need
Speaker 1: to be able to clear your mind right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which is where meditation comes. Right. Um, So let's let's
Speaker 1: talk about something called REM sleep behavior disorder. This is
Speaker 1: something that Dr Shank talked about a lot, and this
Speaker 1: is particularly um interesting because people are acting out their
Speaker 1: aggressions and and oftentimes it can actually be dangerous to partners,
Speaker 1: spouses who have to live with someone who has what's
Speaker 1: called an rb D, the rem sleep behavior disorder. And
Speaker 1: it's actually cultural as well. So you can see in
Speaker 1: every different culture there there are going to be examples
Speaker 1: of r b D, and um, those aggressions, these dreams
Speaker 1: that are very violent are going to be playing out
Speaker 1: and whatever sort of cultural story that they're telling. Uh.
Speaker 1: We saw a clip again at this panel at the
Speaker 1: World Science Festival of this Japanese man who was having
Speaker 1: a dream about a Samurai sword which he was wielding
Speaker 1: around and then plunging into his opponent yuse I guess
Speaker 1: lying in repose on the on the floor, and it
Speaker 1: was this very allowed britt uh movement that he was
Speaker 1: doing that was I mean, you could practically see the
Speaker 1: Samurai sword in his hand. It was that convincing he
Speaker 1: did not actually have a sword. No, no, no, he
Speaker 1: was dreaming about this. Did not let that man sleep
Speaker 1: with the sword, right, And you probably don't want to
Speaker 1: cuddle up next to someone like this, right. Um, You've
Speaker 1: heard plenty of other accounts of I think it was
Speaker 1: my great grandfather, I want to say, um, like he
Speaker 1: had a little of this where he would like start
Speaker 1: kicking and punching his sleep. Or you've heard of accounts
Speaker 1: of people who like strangle somebody in their sleep, you know, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's actually it's male dominant this RBD, which is
Speaker 1: interesting and Dr Shank has said that a lot of
Speaker 1: his RBD patients were just mild mannered folks during the day,
Speaker 1: really nice people, but they would have these terrifyingly aggressive
Speaker 1: dreams at night and their spouses would say, please help me,
Speaker 1: because you know, my my husband tried to come me
Speaker 1: last night. And in fact, there was an example mel Abel,
Speaker 1: again mild mannered retiree, who almost strangled his wife Harriet
Speaker 1: to death one night while dreaming that he was finishing
Speaker 1: off a deer that he had just shot in his dream,
Speaker 1: and in his dream, the deer would not die, and
Speaker 1: so he took it by the jaw and he started
Speaker 1: to twist it and try to snap its neck and
Speaker 1: that wasn't working, so then he started to strangle the
Speaker 1: deer while the deer was his wife, and his wife
Speaker 1: was screaming, you know, blood curling screams, and thankfully it
Speaker 1: woke him up right before he he almost killed her.
Speaker 1: And that's, of course when he went to go seek help.
Speaker 1: And all of this is like, it's it's sensational, it's
Speaker 1: it's nuts, but um and I think one one of
Speaker 1: the things that's pointing to is that there are underlying
Speaker 1: factors going on here. And what Dr Shank found is
Speaker 1: that of rbd UH disorder sufferers will then convert into
Speaker 1: Parkinson's disease, Yeah, which is crazy. And he thinks that
Speaker 1: this is it's definitely a lot of insight and an
Speaker 1: opportunity to have insight into Parkinson's and try to intervene early. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: you know, you think that these things are going on
Speaker 1: your head and that it's just some sort of anomaly. Well,
Speaker 1: in fact, you know, there's some sort of physical basis
Speaker 1: uh for your for your your emotions, your mind, your
Speaker 1: body reacting to all of this and playing out you know,
Speaker 1: an aggression. So it'll be interesting to see what sort
Speaker 1: of extrapolations they make with Parkinson's in rb D. But
Speaker 1: now let's get back to that tub of butter. Oh
Speaker 1: but before we get to that, to a butter Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: we guess we're take a quick break. This presentation is
Speaker 1: brought to you by Intel Sponsors of Tomorrow, and we're
Speaker 1: back tub of butter. Sleep eating. Let's do this all right.
Speaker 1: We have a great article on our site called the
Speaker 1: House Sleepwalking More exply Katie Lambert, and uh, you might
Speaker 1: associate sleep eating with ambient right right, Yeah, that's typically
Speaker 1: that's the whole story, all these nightmare scenarios where someone
Speaker 1: gets a prescription for ambient and uh, and then all
Speaker 1: their friends him, Oh, well, I I know a friend
Speaker 1: who blah blah blah. They you know, ate a pack
Speaker 1: of cigarettes where they or they got up and they
Speaker 1: cooked dinner or they did something crazy or they saw
Speaker 1: something crazy and then they don't take the ambiance that
Speaker 1: was prescribed to them by a doctor. Well, but Katie's
Speaker 1: article points out that as the drug groom popularity, you
Speaker 1: had more of these instances of sleep eating happening. Interesting fact,
Speaker 1: Katie wrote that article while sleep typing and sleep eating
Speaker 1: at the same time. Yeah, and uh. In fact of
Speaker 1: this is the first person to count here. And she
Speaker 1: says they ate from tubs of margarine that some of
Speaker 1: the subjects, um, I'm just kidding. Of course, Kati wouldn't
Speaker 1: do that. Uh. And they ate cigarettes and raw meat.
Speaker 1: And again, what you're seeing, what you're seeing here are
Speaker 1: are hopefully hallmarks of what they would not be doing
Speaker 1: right in daytime activities. And people would wake up with
Speaker 1: rumbs all over the bed and have no idea, you know,
Speaker 1: why the crumbs were there. They'd start gaining weight and
Speaker 1: they'd say, I don't understand why I'm gaining weight. Well,
Speaker 1: I understand sometimes too, it would be even if they're
Speaker 1: eating something normal, there'd be something abnormal about the way
Speaker 1: they were doing it, Like like there was some account
Speaker 1: where somebody who's doing something weird with their pinky finger
Speaker 1: while eating. Oh yeah, yeah. Dr Schunky talks about that
Speaker 1: and he says that, um, he said he showed a
Speaker 1: video actually in this panel of the woman eating a brownie.
Speaker 1: In each bite, she would put her pinky at the
Speaker 1: entrance of her mouth and then she'd nibble at her pinky,
Speaker 1: and she'd do other little weird things while she was eating.
Speaker 1: It was it was pretty curious. Um. And of course
Speaker 1: she would never eat that way during the day. Um.
Speaker 1: And that was a good indicator that her mind and
Speaker 1: her brain were still in this weird sleep mode. And
Speaker 1: um and and and yet she had this motor activity
Speaker 1: going on. And this is interesting too that that sleep
Speaker 1: eating is usually considered a final common pathway disorder, meaning
Speaker 1: that a variety of other sleep problems could be at
Speaker 1: So you've got sleepwalking, restless leg syndrome, or even sleep apnea,
Speaker 1: which the sleep athnia. Is it the same one who
Speaker 1: was punching? No, No, that was I think that was
Speaker 1: the That was his wife's father. Okay, yeah, I was
Speaker 1: gonna say, because that could have that could have been
Speaker 1: what sort of tipped the scale in terms of activity
Speaker 1: at night when he slept he had like an air mask. Okay,
Speaker 1: all right. So I mean we do see we see
Speaker 1: these ambient induced sleep eating things, and then we also
Speaker 1: see where it's not ambient induced, it just happens to
Speaker 1: be sort of a byproduct of other sleep disorders. And
Speaker 1: I should I really want to stress. Having gone through
Speaker 1: this with a member of my family. Uh, if your
Speaker 1: doctor prescribes ambient too, you don't listen to all your
Speaker 1: crazy friends about like some encounter they had with somebody
Speaker 1: who had some sort of crazy thing. Listen to your
Speaker 1: doctor for you know, you know you say that, and
Speaker 1: then I'm going to be honest and say to you
Speaker 1: that I'm not necessary. Well, I don't take a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff like that anyway, so it's it's just not
Speaker 1: sort of my thing. But I take medicine when I
Speaker 1: need it, but I don't necessarily seek out sleep aids,
Speaker 1: and even though I probably should sometimes, but I do
Speaker 1: have this fear that if you make it sound like
Speaker 1: like rifling through everyone's desk when they go home in
Speaker 1: the evening to look for sleeping No, no, no, I'm
Speaker 1: talking about like if someone if you're prescribed it by
Speaker 1: your doctor. Yes, I know, but you have to understand
Speaker 1: that it is. There's just part of of people who say,
Speaker 1: I really don't want to wake up having, you know,
Speaker 1: finding myself having a urinated on a policeman after stuffing
Speaker 1: ten donuts into my mouth in the middle of nowhere.
Speaker 1: I know nobody wants that. Who wants to bring that
Speaker 1: upon them, even if it happens to like one person
Speaker 1: out of and I'm really hurt that you keep bringing
Speaker 1: this up because that was an isolated incident for me
Speaker 1: to donut and the urination thing on the cop. But
Speaker 1: you say you say that, yeah, but we just did
Speaker 1: a podcast about lying, So how can I how can
Speaker 1: I be sure you just look me straight in the
Speaker 1: eye and said that. I UM. But anyway, so s yes,
Speaker 1: sleepingting is definitely one of those. Um that is is
Speaker 1: brought on by other disorders, as is sexomnia. Alright, so yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the main event. This is I hope people
Speaker 1: I mean, I hope they didn't you didn't fast forward
Speaker 1: to this part, but get to the sexomnia. Yeah, people
Speaker 1: with sexomnia tend to be sleepwalkers and have other parasomnias. Again,
Speaker 1: and that makes sense because the locomotive system is activated.
Speaker 1: So there are kind of two different scenarios for sexomnia. UM,
Speaker 1: if you've had a long history of multiple parasomnias, some
Speaker 1: of them beginning in childhood, or if you've got obstrictive
Speaker 1: sleep apnea. And I should also stress that, um and
Speaker 1: for anyone who wasn't aware, uh, sexual arousal during sleep
Speaker 1: is normal generally happened, especially in men, like happens every night.
Speaker 1: Like um, lack of an erection during sleep tends to
Speaker 1: um uh be a telling factor in there being other
Speaker 1: like erectile this functions going on. So, I mean the
Speaker 1: very the medieval idea that you're being visited by a
Speaker 1: demon at night. Yeah, succubus are an incubus that are
Speaker 1: causing you to have these these you know, erotic fantasies
Speaker 1: in your head. Um. No, it's just we're talking about
Speaker 1: something purely biological here. Well, in the case of sleep,
Speaker 1: ap near where you're you know, you could be snoring,
Speaker 1: um and you sort of wakes you up, except you're
Speaker 1: not quite awake, yeah, just enough to Like we we
Speaker 1: keep talking about about how it's like these lockdowns that
Speaker 1: are released in these different parasomnia encounters. And now I've
Speaker 1: got a different metaphor in mine, and that is of
Speaker 1: a like a cell block in a prison, lockdown at night.
Speaker 1: But and so in some in this cell you've got
Speaker 1: sex in this cell, you've got eating in this cell,
Speaker 1: you've got um, samurai sword usage and uh. And in
Speaker 1: some of these encounters, everything locks down, but oh the
Speaker 1: sex cell is open and then uh and it's free
Speaker 1: to wander the halls at night and it's snoring. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's snoring and Dr Schenk is now calling it snoregasm.
Speaker 1: That's actually what here before referred to with the sleep apnea.
Speaker 1: I looked it up and it has other um usages
Speaker 1: as well. But yeah, oh yeah, yeah, Like, well, I
Speaker 1: don't know if I can mention any of them. They're
Speaker 1: they're all significantly less scientific. Bird alert. Well, you put
Speaker 1: this on the outline and I'm like, well, let me
Speaker 1: look this up, and I'm just got that I didn't
Speaker 1: do a Google image search. Well, we'll leave that to
Speaker 1: you guys out there. Uh. The good news though about this,
Speaker 1: I mean, some of this is actually pretty tragic, but um,
Speaker 1: particularly the familial Yeah, but most of this can be
Speaker 1: diagnosed and then treated with something like the clonazepam, which
Speaker 1: has really been very effective. So if you've got an
Speaker 1: rb D or you've got sleep eating or even sleepwalking
Speaker 1: as a child at slip box, so um, I mean
Speaker 1: I can attest to how terrifying that can be to parents. Um,
Speaker 1: of course, I don't think they would give me clonaza
Speaker 1: pam and they just they just locked me in my room. Um,
Speaker 1: but there are things that you can do about it,
Speaker 1: which is great. Oh well, now I will add that
Speaker 1: when we were researching, I ended up running across confusional arousals,
Speaker 1: which I thought was going to be tied in with
Speaker 1: the sex thing, or at the very least I thought
Speaker 1: maybe it was referring to like odd occurrences like when
Speaker 1: your grandmother's cat sitting in your lap or something. But
Speaker 1: but no, it's just this is when a person wakes
Speaker 1: from a deep sleep during the first part of the
Speaker 1: night and uh, and they just they have excessive sleep
Speaker 1: in our show, or sleep drunkenness, so they just come
Speaker 1: out of it. They're just like a zombie. So they
Speaker 1: just roams the house like a zombie. Like, yeah, pretty much.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just people experiencing confusional arousal. They react slowly,
Speaker 1: they have trouble understanding questions, um, problems with short term
Speaker 1: memory and have and they and they have no memory
Speaker 1: of this later in the day. So I guess it
Speaker 1: would be like if if you if you have like
Speaker 1: a spouse that wakes up in the night and they're
Speaker 1: just like a zombie and you're like, whoa crazy to
Speaker 1: get back to bed and go to sleep and then
Speaker 1: the next art they're like, well, I don't remember that
Speaker 1: at all. That's confusional arousing. Yeah. I should also mentioned
Speaker 1: too that um, alcohol can definitely exascerbate a lot of
Speaker 1: these conditions, and particularly night terrors. Yeah. Yeah, And if
Speaker 1: you are going through a lot of emotional distress, you know,
Speaker 1: all this can sort of be the perfect cocktail for
Speaker 1: for a sleep disorder, or at least experiencing it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're if you're experiencing any sleep problems. Um, first
Speaker 1: of all, you can come to house Stuff Works and
Speaker 1: type insomnia into the into the search bar. We have
Speaker 1: an article and there with a number of tips and
Speaker 1: a lot of it's really common sense that like, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe cut down the alcohol in the evening, don't you know,
Speaker 1: don't have coffee afternoon and things of that nature. But
Speaker 1: certainly consider consulting a doctor if you're having yeah, trick
Speaker 1: with the RBD. Yeah, yeah, especially if it's something that
Speaker 1: is extremely out of the out of the ordinary. So
Speaker 1: if you're punching around in the middle of the night,
Speaker 1: get that checked out. Cool. Well, let's check out some
Speaker 1: listener mail. As luck would have it, we received two
Speaker 1: emails related to dreams. Uh. Prior to this recording, completely
Speaker 1: un called for, but welcome we heard from Don, and
Speaker 1: Don says, Hello, Robert and Julie. I'm a little behind
Speaker 1: since I'm relatively recent listener, but Tetris and PTSD reminded
Speaker 1: me of the way my brain operates after I've seen
Speaker 1: a horror movie. Uh. Not always, but sometimes after a
Speaker 1: movie has particularly frightened me. Candy Man and Blair Witch,
Speaker 1: all of these things, I experienced very vivid counting dreams.
Speaker 1: During the dreams, I see numbers almost exclusively, and any
Speaker 1: horrifying images are conspicuously absent. I can also only guess
Speaker 1: it's my brain's version of copying. I think in the
Speaker 1: future I shall try Tetris after a scary movie to
Speaker 1: potentially avoid the number dreams, as they also frequently weighted
Speaker 1: me up. Thanks for the great podcast. Let's see now
Speaker 1: that there are a number of awesome things going on
Speaker 1: in that that. I mean, on one hand, you know,
Speaker 1: it's like the idea of someone having scary dreams after
Speaker 1: his watching a movie that's you know, every day, but
Speaker 1: she's having like nightmare number dreams. That's amazing. It's almost
Speaker 1: it's like a form of synaesthesia in a way. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: the now, the the the tetris pocket. That may have
Speaker 1: been an old one. I think that may have been.
Speaker 1: It may have been like a step in the science
Speaker 1: lab one. But but it's some pretty internet. The idea
Speaker 1: being that, um, when traumatic things happening happened, there's a
Speaker 1: stage afterwards where we we start building this story about
Speaker 1: what happened. That the the idea that it's like, all right,
Speaker 1: I say a dog chase me, and then afterwards I'm like,
Speaker 1: oh my goodness, I was chased by a dog. A
Speaker 1: dog chased me. I was walking down the street and
Speaker 1: a dog chased me? You know what was that all about?
Speaker 1: How dare he? You know? And all and then all
Speaker 1: these connotations come with it. I like, I am at
Speaker 1: risk of being chased by a dog every day? Um,
Speaker 1: how dare a dog chase me? I should be unchasable?
Speaker 1: You know. It depends on this situation. But there's that
Speaker 1: period where we formed that story and it and it
Speaker 1: in it and it forms the trauma, it like entrenches
Speaker 1: it in our memory. And so if you could interrupt
Speaker 1: that process, it's like so instead of the set of
Speaker 1: performing that story, you're chased by a dog and then
Speaker 1: you whip out your smartphone and are playing Tetris. Tetris
Speaker 1: has been found to like interfere with that the formation
Speaker 1: of the traumatic memory. Tetris has been used a lot
Speaker 1: in uh in sleep research, right, yeah, because I believe
Speaker 1: it's been using dreams too to see how people learn. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they dream about Tetris to see the patterns. And it's
Speaker 1: not just people loving Tetris and being like I got
Speaker 1: to incorporate this into my words, get away with it.
Speaker 1: But yeah, so that was a fascinating email. It was
Speaker 1: that was it was interesting to hear about. We also
Speaker 1: heard from Mario. Mario right in and says, hello, Robert
Speaker 1: and Julie. I was currently listening to the episode you
Speaker 1: did in January, a dream podcast. You talked about how
Speaker 1: dreams can help solve problems. To me, dreams are becoming
Speaker 1: more important to me every night. I don't know if
Speaker 1: they helped me solve problems, but they sometimes give me
Speaker 1: problems to solve in the dream, and it's sort of
Speaker 1: a role playing dream. I treat dreams like totally different
Speaker 1: world and it's its own thing. They're not real, but
Speaker 1: they exist. Keep up the great podcast. Your thirteen year
Speaker 1: old listener. Oh, very cool. One of the things that
Speaker 1: I learned on that World Science Festival panel is that, um,
Speaker 1: we do dream in non rem and when we dream
Speaker 1: in non rem it's more about UM it's less like
Speaker 1: a cohesive story and it's sort of a little bit
Speaker 1: more like just raw data sitting there that you sipped through,
Speaker 1: which I thought was very interesting in terms of trying
Speaker 1: to um, you know, figure out all the information the
Speaker 1: stimulants that you amass that day and going through it
Speaker 1: and categorizing it. Well, Hey, if you want to share
Speaker 1: your dreams with us or share in the dream that
Speaker 1: is stuff to blow your mind, then you can find
Speaker 1: us on Facebook and Twitter. We are blow the Mind
Speaker 1: on both of those and you know, if you're fan
Speaker 1: of the show, check them out. Each feed is a a
Speaker 1: little differently, but like every day, we're switching through all
Speaker 1: sorts of like cool cool articles online, different studies, and
Speaker 1: we'll pop some of those up, whether they're related to
Speaker 1: something we're covering or not. We'll keep you in touch
Speaker 1: with what we're what we're recording, what we're thinking about recording,
Speaker 1: and uh, we do in fact take requests, so and
Speaker 1: the stuff that you're writing to which is very cool. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can also drop us a line if you
Speaker 1: want to keep in touch at below the Mind at
Speaker 1: how stuff works dot com. Be sure to check out
Speaker 1: our new video podcast, Stuff from the Future. Join how
Speaker 1: Stuff Work staff as we explore the most promising and
Speaker 1: perplexing possibilities of tomorrow.