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 and I'm Julie Douglas. And
Speaker 1: if I may, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask our producer
Speaker 1: knowl to uh down a little spooky music, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to read a quote from HP Lovecraft. Wait, hold on,
Speaker 1: let me turn on the white We are submerged in
Speaker 1: complete darkness right now. It's a little weird. Wait, holding
Speaker 1: this really difficult, but okay, there, all right? This is
Speaker 1: from Lovecraft supernatural horror. In literature, children will always be
Speaker 1: afraid of the dark, and men with mind sensitive to
Speaker 1: hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the
Speaker 1: hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life, which made poll
Speaker 1: sat in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously
Speaker 1: upon our own lobe in unholy dimensions which only the
Speaker 1: dead and the moon struck can limps. That was beautiful.
Speaker 1: And if you guys haven't guessed out there, we are
Speaker 1: diving way into the deep dark in this episode. And
Speaker 1: I love that because it really does evoke the sort
Speaker 1: of primal fear that darkness has particularly for children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the great thing about this topic is that
Speaker 1: light and dark, those are the cycles that have defined
Speaker 1: our lives, that have defined life for the most part
Speaker 1: for so long. I mean, life here on Earth exists
Speaker 1: within these cycles of light and dark, and that has
Speaker 1: played into uh the evolutionary ascent of of almost all organists.
Speaker 1: And it's so important to us that we have woven
Speaker 1: it into this symbolic level, right, I mean the ying
Speaker 1: and yang of dark and light, these opposites which really
Speaker 1: represent these ideas of not just values, but of the
Speaker 1: spheares that we inhabit. Because on one level of the
Speaker 1: world of light, the word the sunlit world, I mean
Speaker 1: that's an area of the known, and then the world
Speaker 1: of darkness that isn't an area of the if not
Speaker 1: the unknown, at least the uncertain. The other the possible.
Speaker 1: They had sort of the quantum state where the darkness
Speaker 1: can be simply emptiness. The darkness can be something you
Speaker 1: could trip over, it could be a thief, it could
Speaker 1: be a monster. There's there's room for just about any
Speaker 1: fear within that undefined space of shadow. And that undefined
Speaker 1: space of shadow is largely what occupied the the human
Speaker 1: experience and in fact, if you look at archaeological evidence
Speaker 1: that suggests that, you know, just four d thousand years
Speaker 1: ago or so, early humans mastered fire before that, what
Speaker 1: would you do. I mean, you didn't. You didn't really
Speaker 1: have that access to something that could glow and provide
Speaker 1: some sort of illumination in the dark. Now skip ahead
Speaker 1: to today, where we have a possibility for twenty four
Speaker 1: hour light environments, and we kind of take that for
Speaker 1: granted that darkness really did rule the night. Indeed, I
Speaker 1: mean for the longest, to borrow a phrase from historian
Speaker 1: William Manchester, you had a world uh lit only by fire,
Speaker 1: right at least a night lit only by fire. So
Speaker 1: you even if you had you had fire, you had candles,
Speaker 1: you had torches, you had campfires. Eventually you get gas
Speaker 1: lighting and and and lanterns and other uh luminary innovations.
Speaker 1: But but for the most part, you're sort of carving
Speaker 1: out a little bit. You were reclaiming a little bit
Speaker 1: of the night, but it's not quite as good as
Speaker 1: the daylight, and you're still surrounded by all these shadows
Speaker 1: and just gulfs of impenetrable darkness. Right until you had
Speaker 1: like a really good um widespread source of artificial light.
Speaker 1: All you have those dying embers to light the space
Speaker 1: around you. So what would you do. You would submit
Speaker 1: to that dark and most of us would go to sleep.
Speaker 1: And that brings up this idea which we've touched upon before,
Speaker 1: of two a sleep. Yeah, I mean this is pretty simple.
Speaker 1: What happens when it gets dark? And again you may
Speaker 1: have some some some light at your disposal, you may
Speaker 1: have a camp fire your disposal, but your abilities are
Speaker 1: greatly reduced. So you go to sleep. You simply call
Speaker 1: it a day, except something happens about about halfway through,
Speaker 1: right you wake because according to historian Rogert Eckert, who
Speaker 1: published a book on the matter called at Days Closed
Speaker 1: Night in Times Past, which by the way, was a
Speaker 1: culmination of his sixteen years of research that uncovered more
Speaker 1: than five references to a segmented sleeping pattern, he found
Speaker 1: that you would wake in this fourteen hour sleep pattern
Speaker 1: for maybe an hour or two, get up, tend your animals,
Speaker 1: do a little white house keeping in the moonlight, have sex,
Speaker 1: lay in bed, thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with
Speaker 1: your bed fellows. In fact, and we've mentioned before, I
Speaker 1: love this. It's widely known that Benjamin Franklin would light
Speaker 1: a candle and take cold air baths, reading naked in
Speaker 1: a chair. Indeed, that was his his strategy for this
Speaker 1: this period between the two sleeps. And one thing I
Speaker 1: love about this is it also really defines that idea
Speaker 1: about the middle of the night, right because for us,
Speaker 1: the middle of the night is typically more a situation
Speaker 1: of staying up late enough for it to be the
Speaker 1: middle of the night. But you go back to to this,
Speaker 1: this earlier mode of sleep, and it's it's not merely
Speaker 1: a stage of lateness, but a true in between that
Speaker 1: this this little space, this little uh clutch of the
Speaker 1: darkness that you end up occupying between these two dominant
Speaker 1: phases of sleep. Now and Stephen Johnson's book How We
Speaker 1: Got to Now in the PBS series, there is a
Speaker 1: section on light and he talks about that. He talks
Speaker 1: with historian Craig Koslovsky, who says that you know, are
Speaker 1: kind of nighttime wakenings now or even insomnia may be
Speaker 1: attributed to this original for seen our sleep phase. In
Speaker 1: other words, it's kind of normal that we get up sometimes,
Speaker 1: you know, midnight or two o'clock in the morning, and
Speaker 1: we can't get back to sleep for a while. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's the biological norm. That's what we evolved
Speaker 1: to do. And it's only been in the last hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years, two hundred years, that we've really carved
Speaker 1: out a substantial zone of the night and and ReLit it.
Speaker 1: According to Stephen Johnson in the in the book of
Speaker 1: How We Got to Now, in that that chapter and
Speaker 1: Light points out that today's night sky burned six thousand
Speaker 1: times brighter than it did in me or one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty years ago. So it's it's transforms. It's transformed
Speaker 1: the way we sleep, the way we work and uh.
Speaker 1: And that's of course spiral of office, Johnson explains in
Speaker 1: his book into the creation of global networks of communication.
Speaker 1: Uh and and and a lot of our modern technological world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because all of a sudden, you have improved street lighting,
Speaker 1: you had the advent of social opportunities at the in
Speaker 1: during the evening, you have you know, restaurants and cafes
Speaker 1: to go to. And that cause is a shift in
Speaker 1: people sleep patterns because before that, according to Koslovski, you
Speaker 1: had associations with the night that we're not so good.
Speaker 1: We're talking about before the seventeenth century. He says the
Speaker 1: night was a place populated by people of disrepute, criminals, prostitutes,
Speaker 1: and drunks. And he said even the wealthy who could
Speaker 1: afford candle light had better things to spend their money
Speaker 1: on than burning their candles all night long. There really
Speaker 1: wasn't any prestige or social value. And staying up all night, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean nightfalls. You locked the door because the only
Speaker 1: people out there are going to be people that are
Speaker 1: probably up to no good. You don't want anything to
Speaker 1: do with that. And the walls to the city, if
Speaker 1: you have walls around your your here in which you live,
Speaker 1: those are gonna close because anyone entering the city in
Speaker 1: the night again up to no good. And hey, don't
Speaker 1: forget about those nighttime predators of the animal ilk, right,
Speaker 1: that's right. I mean it takes us back to our
Speaker 1: primeval self, right. Uh, the idea that that there are
Speaker 1: predators out there that will eat us and the night
Speaker 1: belongs to to those creatures, not to us. Um. And
Speaker 1: you know, you can spiral off from that into a
Speaker 1: lot of our our fears of the of the dark,
Speaker 1: of the dark, and concerns about the night and uh,
Speaker 1: and that basic type one error and cognition that we
Speaker 1: make when we believe a connection is really there and
Speaker 1: uh when it isn't. We're hardwired to make type one
Speaker 1: errors because a type to air a false negative gets
Speaker 1: you killed. Always better to assume that their predators out
Speaker 1: there in the dark. Always better to assume their thieves
Speaker 1: and criminals and and whatever out there in the shadows,
Speaker 1: because it's a safer bed. Now we'll talk later about
Speaker 1: how this type one into cognition errors can uh kind
Speaker 1: of mess us up here in our modern world. But
Speaker 1: for now, let's try to figure out why we respond
Speaker 1: so greatly to light and dark in the first place.
Speaker 1: And in order to do that, we got to look
Speaker 1: our old friends on the tree of life. I'm talking
Speaker 1: about single filled bacteria because again, this comes back through
Speaker 1: the very the basic nature of the evolution of life. Right,
Speaker 1: Life evolved on a world that experiences period clockwork, periods
Speaker 1: of night and day of light and darkness, and so
Speaker 1: life itself is taking form within these environmental constraints yep.
Speaker 1: And one of these constraints is a circadian rhythm, which
Speaker 1: tracks a standard Earth day's twenty four hour cycle. It's
Speaker 1: a secret to why we can adjust to different time
Speaker 1: zones and their accompanying sleep patterns. And according to Annally Knew,
Speaker 1: it's writing for I O nine in the article this
Speaker 1: is why you Can't sleep quote, it's likely that circadian
Speaker 1: rhythms evolved in sino bacteria blue green algae over three
Speaker 1: billion years ago. And so you would say, okay, fine,
Speaker 1: why but why did that blue green algae need to
Speaker 1: have some sort of circadian rhythm? And the answer is
Speaker 1: that it's all about energy. Because single cell bacteria they
Speaker 1: need energy, but to get at their bodies had to
Speaker 1: carry out two different chemical processes that interfered with each other.
Speaker 1: So the bacteria began keeping time by tracking the sun.
Speaker 1: So when it was light outside the cyanobacteria, we'd get
Speaker 1: energy from photosynthesis, and when it was dark they could
Speaker 1: get energy by sequestering nitrogen. But if these two processes
Speaker 1: were done simultaneously, they would cancel each other out. But
Speaker 1: sequentially keeping track of light and dark and went to
Speaker 1: do these chemical processes allowed a maximum gathering of energy. Now,
Speaker 1: the other idea is that at that time there were
Speaker 1: life forms who shared the same environment, and this was
Speaker 1: also a way to compete with each other for food.
Speaker 1: So some evolved to feed during the day and others
Speaker 1: to feed at night. And then you go forward and
Speaker 1: you have us bipedal energy hogs really taking advantage of
Speaker 1: this whole circadian rhythm thing. And of course this brings
Speaker 1: us back to our old friend, the pineal gland, which
Speaker 1: we we did an entire episode about about the pineal gland.
Speaker 1: I think we called it my third eye peneal optics
Speaker 1: um and uh, certainly go back and listen to that
Speaker 1: one if you want a deeper dive into this, but
Speaker 1: just to refresh, pineal gland is a small organ shaped
Speaker 1: like a pine cone, hence the name, and it's located
Speaker 1: on the mid line attached to the posterior end of
Speaker 1: the roof of the third ventricle in the brain and
Speaker 1: humans is roughly one sentiment or in length, and the
Speaker 1: pennel is composed of penelocytes and giggle cells. In older animals,
Speaker 1: the penel often contains calcium deposits or brain stand Now,
Speaker 1: it's it's not an eye, it's not a true eye,
Speaker 1: but it is. It does have optical properties, and it
Speaker 1: does and light does play a role in what it does.
Speaker 1: So light exposure to the retina relays to the hypothalamus,
Speaker 1: and this is an area in the brain that is
Speaker 1: involved in the in the coordination of biological clock signals.
Speaker 1: UH and fibers from the hypothalamus descend to the spinal
Speaker 1: cord and project to the superior cervical ganglia, from which
Speaker 1: post a ganglionic neutrons ascend back to the pineal gland.
Speaker 1: So the penneal transduces signals from the sympathetic nervous system
Speaker 1: into a hormone linal signal, and it produces several important hormones,
Speaker 1: including melotonin, in response to environmental lighting. So the human
Speaker 1: penel regulates the rhythm that beats out the biological thought
Speaker 1: by secreting a substance melatonin according to the light stimulus
Speaker 1: received through the eyes and from the skin. Yeah, the
Speaker 1: penel gland acts as a control tower for the biological clock.
Speaker 1: Inside of this directing some body functions like sleep based
Speaker 1: on the data that it's getting back from these light
Speaker 1: sensing skills. And I love this idea that this third
Speaker 1: eye does have all the components of an eye, but
Speaker 1: is not an eye, and it is taking in all
Speaker 1: of these environmental cues in order to tell the body. Hey,
Speaker 1: time to wake up or time to go to sleep? Now, Um.
Speaker 1: Alison louder Milk, who is whenres senior editors here, had
Speaker 1: brought up the point before, and I think she was
Speaker 1: like talking about whales at the Georgia Aquarium who are
Speaker 1: affected by daylight savings time she ran up the point
Speaker 1: of what what would happen if you weren't exposed to
Speaker 1: light at all? Yeah, this brings to mind some research
Speaker 1: from two thousand eleven UH into the nature of the
Speaker 1: Mexican blind cave fish. Now, despite what the name would
Speaker 1: have you think, this species exists in both subterranean and
Speaker 1: surface populations. Now the surface fish swim with the benefit
Speaker 1: of sighted eyes, while their underground can go about blindly
Speaker 1: in laboratory populations this UH. In this two thousand eleven
Speaker 1: to say, the surface fish slept while the cavers darted
Speaker 1: around all night. Uh. The researchers discovered that the differing
Speaker 1: sleep behavior hinged on a few dominant gene mutations that
Speaker 1: became fixed in the cave populations when they took to
Speaker 1: the dark. After All, as we've discussed in our truck
Speaker 1: lafonta episode of food is scarce in the subterranean environments
Speaker 1: particularly in Subtranian waters. So natural selection favors the scavengers
Speaker 1: who are willing to work long, long hours. Um. This
Speaker 1: research also brings to mind the account of researcher Christina Lanzoni,
Speaker 1: who spent a whopping two hundred and sixty nine days
Speaker 1: of solitary confinement in the subterranean under lab in the
Speaker 1: Frasasi Caves in central Italy. Now, granted she didn't have
Speaker 1: to swim about all night scaven scaven for food, but
Speaker 1: her sleep patterns altered significantly. On average, Lanzoni's waking days
Speaker 1: stretched on for fifty four to fifty six hours, followed
Speaker 1: by fourteen to sixteen hours of sleep. For furthermore, that
Speaker 1: sleep was much more like that of an infant, as
Speaker 1: she fall immediately into rim sleep and dream of wide
Speaker 1: and open spaces. So UM, what I like about those
Speaker 1: two studies is that they do really drive home how
Speaker 1: crucial light and dark um is. Do an organism be
Speaker 1: it to being an organism's uh evolutionary advancement into a
Speaker 1: into a realm of darkness, or its continuing existence in
Speaker 1: a room of light, or just taking a single organism
Speaker 1: and taking it out of that that flow of light
Speaker 1: and dark and putting it into a subterranean world. Now,
Speaker 1: in those examples, as are those are all organisms who
Speaker 1: could detect light. But the question becomes, what if you
Speaker 1: were never indoctrinated into light in the first place. We're
Speaker 1: going to take a quick break when we get back,
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about blindness. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: twenty four hours sleep wake disorder and fear of the dark.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back, and we're discussing darkness. But it's
Speaker 1: like to to live as an organism in a world
Speaker 1: of light and dark and how light and dark rules
Speaker 1: less at a very basic biological level. But what about
Speaker 1: those of us whose ability to perceive light and darkness
Speaker 1: is significantly degraded or almost erased, almost completely, at least
Speaker 1: at the retina level. Yeah, and we'll talk about that
Speaker 1: in a moment, about people who are blind and what
Speaker 1: their sleep patterns are like. But first you have to
Speaker 1: kind of go back to the whole spartadian rhythm in
Speaker 1: the first place. And it turns out that most of
Speaker 1: us have body clocks that run a little longer than
Speaker 1: twenty four hours, and this can sometimes lead to something
Speaker 1: called the twenty four hours sleep wake disorder. Or non
Speaker 1: twenty four And according to the non twenty four site,
Speaker 1: if your body clock is say twenty four point five
Speaker 1: hours long, today, you're running a half hour behind. Tomorrow
Speaker 1: you're an hour behind, and so on until your natural
Speaker 1: rhythms have you sleeping during the day and a week
Speaker 1: at night. Now this can go on and on and on.
Speaker 1: So what basically what this um is saying is that
Speaker 1: you could go to sleep at ten o'clock every night,
Speaker 1: but if you have this non twenty four disorder, you know,
Speaker 1: you might false ip at ten thirty and then eleven,
Speaker 1: and then so on and so forth, and it just
Speaker 1: keeps pushing that needle of your body clock around this
Speaker 1: twenty four hour cycle, and in some cases it takes
Speaker 1: up to say one and a half months to get
Speaker 1: back to where you are simped up to say a
Speaker 1: normal cycle that the rest of the world, at least
Speaker 1: your time zone is on. I feel like this this
Speaker 1: matches up at a symbolic level with with pretty much
Speaker 1: everything uh in my modern life. Imagine with a lot
Speaker 1: of people that you have within the the the calendar year,
Speaker 1: within the the the confines of clock time, you have
Speaker 1: x amount of time to spend on a given thing.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately that thing actually takes x point five um to
Speaker 1: to complete and it all adds up and you end
Speaker 1: up just sort of not sticking to any particular schedule,
Speaker 1: but just sort of falling through it. And this with
Speaker 1: this amorphous sleeps cycle, with the amorphous attention to detail
Speaker 1: and various corners of your life. UM and I feel
Speaker 1: like my own just my own sleep sometimes falls like this,
Speaker 1: like I'm not never never, just like to go to
Speaker 1: sleep at this time, wake up at this It's like
Speaker 1: like it'll it'll sort of flow and shift throughout a
Speaker 1: given week. Well. As a former insomniac scept for, I
Speaker 1: try to keep really close to the times that I
Speaker 1: fall asleep and wake up because that helps a lot
Speaker 1: in terms of regulation. But I understand what you mean.
Speaker 1: I read on twenty four and I was like, well,
Speaker 1: this is this does kind of feel like sleep can
Speaker 1: become this very random thing and as you say, something
Speaker 1: that you fall through as opposed to just being completely
Speaker 1: SYNCD up on. And it turns out that among people
Speaker 1: who are totally blind, as many as seventy suffer from
Speaker 1: the effects of NON twenty four, which again comes about
Speaker 1: because of this light of light perception, or more specifically,
Speaker 1: the transmission of ocular light from the retina to their
Speaker 1: circadian clock that is impaired, So you don't have that
Speaker 1: sort of reset button, and you don't have that sort
Speaker 1: of environmental cue of hey, let's wake up, and it
Speaker 1: can be much more prevalent among the blind. So, you know,
Speaker 1: we talked about that, this this idea that I can
Speaker 1: take a month and a half to get sinked back
Speaker 1: up to that cycle that at least your time zones on.
Speaker 1: Imagine this sort of chronic sleep disorder that would be
Speaker 1: in place, and all the symptoms that would follow. It
Speaker 1: would feel like you had jet leg every single day
Speaker 1: of your life. Yeah, I agree. That's that's the way
Speaker 1: I felt before I had when I had this unaddressed
Speaker 1: to sleep problems a while back. Yeah, And in these cases,
Speaker 1: it's you know, extremely difficult to be on time and
Speaker 1: stay awake at work, to attend school, pursue interest, keep
Speaker 1: your social life intact, and so there aren't many things
Speaker 1: that you can do for this. However, some people have
Speaker 1: found limited relief through treatment with a synthetic version of
Speaker 1: melotonin that will sometimes help to drag forward the body
Speaker 1: clocks reset time by creating that chemical pulse to the
Speaker 1: circadian um body clock. But again this is limited and
Speaker 1: not everybody responds to it. Yeah, but still the synthetic
Speaker 1: melotonin is key, much better than wandering around in the
Speaker 1: middle of the night trying to stuff the pineal glands
Speaker 1: out of people, so that if you're victims skulls. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there are only so many air bath that you can take.
Speaker 1: But I mean, that's one of the things about sleep problems, right,
Speaker 1: There's so many things you have to do in during
Speaker 1: the course of a day, and here you are awake
Speaker 1: in the dead of night, in the dark, and this
Speaker 1: is you and you it's not only is it not
Speaker 1: the time to do most of those things, but even
Speaker 1: even the things that you could conceivably do that you
Speaker 1: can turn on a light and grab a book or
Speaker 1: or whatever, you work on your homework, work on your
Speaker 1: you know, some some of your daylit work stuff, you
Speaker 1: don't have the mindset to do it because what you
Speaker 1: need is sleep at that time. Yeah, And I mean
Speaker 1: it can also lead to other sleep disturbances like nightmares.
Speaker 1: And there was a really interesting study that just came
Speaker 1: out in the journal Sleep Medicine. And granted it is
Speaker 1: one study, and it's very small, but in the study,
Speaker 1: it showed that an average of of the dreams experienced
Speaker 1: by people born blind are nightmares. And when you look
Speaker 1: at sighted people in nightmares, it accounts for only six
Speaker 1: percent of the dreams that they have. So that's you know,
Speaker 1: a fourfold increase if you are born blind in this
Speaker 1: one study. Yeah, Now, I do want to want to
Speaker 1: drive home here that this is this is not something
Speaker 1: that causes excessive trouble for those individuals. So don't think
Speaker 1: about any blind people in your life or just you know,
Speaker 1: uh that you may know and think, oh my god,
Speaker 1: that you know that that poor person they're having to
Speaker 1: just live of nightmare every night, something to that effect,
Speaker 1: because it's not like that. No. In fact, when the
Speaker 1: study participants who are born blinds were told of this
Speaker 1: fourfold increase, they didn't even realize that it was disproportionate.
Speaker 1: And they did they were fine for it. And if
Speaker 1: you think about it, then we'll talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about this. That's maybe because dreams and nightmares kind
Speaker 1: of helped guide us in an odd way. Yeah, we've
Speaker 1: we've talked about dreams and nightmares in the past, and
Speaker 1: I mean, you basically get down to this idea that
Speaker 1: the dreams are, of course not just a screen saver
Speaker 1: like dreams and and everything that's going on in your
Speaker 1: brain at night. It's about processing the information, and from
Speaker 1: the day, it's about processing your environment, your struggles, your stresses,
Speaker 1: the problems that you're facing and working them out in
Speaker 1: the brain. And sort of the the byproduct of all
Speaker 1: that is the dreamscape that you end up inhabiting. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and let's droll down into the nitty gritty of this
Speaker 1: study because I think it tells something about that dreamscape. So,
Speaker 1: people who are born blind, they didn't have dreams with
Speaker 1: visual content, that's one thing, and then that's where their
Speaker 1: dreams became nightmares. Now, people who lost their sight later
Speaker 1: in life may have visual content in their dreams, although
Speaker 1: the longer they've been blind, the fear dreams they had
Speaker 1: with visual content. Now, consider that seven percent of their
Speaker 1: dreams were nightmares, and dreams have normally sided people are
Speaker 1: based on the images and that they had, and they
Speaker 1: have nightmares only six percent a time. Now. The trial
Speaker 1: subjects nightmares were often related to threats experienced in everyday life,
Speaker 1: and one woman had nightmares about being run over by
Speaker 1: a car or getting into embarrassing social situations like spilling
Speaker 1: a cup of coffee on her. And if I remember
Speaker 1: this correctly, I believe the woman was someone who had
Speaker 1: been blind since birth. Now all of that comes to
Speaker 1: suggest that again, that dreamscape is trying to work out
Speaker 1: all of the things that are happening to you emotionally
Speaker 1: and physically throughout the day. So there's this idea that
Speaker 1: increased nightmares and those blind from birth maybe a way
Speaker 1: to remember information that's important to survival and welfare, particularly
Speaker 1: if you think about the more complex interactions with the
Speaker 1: physical world, like navigating traffic. If you don't have any
Speaker 1: sort of mental imagery of that or visual imagery of that,
Speaker 1: then it's harder to create that blueprint. Right, So there's
Speaker 1: there's more work that has to be done at night
Speaker 1: while the bride brain is sleeping to help process all
Speaker 1: that information. So it's just, you know, the situation where
Speaker 1: there's there's a they live in a slightly different sense
Speaker 1: world than cited individuals, and the way they interact with
Speaker 1: that sense world requires more processing in the night. It
Speaker 1: maybe perhaps more fear based processing is a way to
Speaker 1: inform the way that they're going to navigate their their
Speaker 1: world the next day, and again the researchers found like
Speaker 1: zero pronounced anxiety or depression as a result of increased nightmares. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because even when you get don't get down into like
Speaker 1: really like fear with a capital of f A lot
Speaker 1: of our navigation during the course of the day is
Speaker 1: ultimately fear based. You know. Just think of taking the
Speaker 1: train in the morning, which I often think about that
Speaker 1: in terms of of people who who deal with blindness,
Speaker 1: because there are a number of of of blind individuals
Speaker 1: who take the train. We see them, see them every day.
Speaker 1: But and you think about the the effort of doing that.
Speaker 1: You're dealing with a this murderous piece of machinery that
Speaker 1: goes down the tracks, that travels in this uh in
Speaker 1: this pit that has rats in it, and and you
Speaker 1: have to get there, have to go up an elevator
Speaker 1: or take the stairs, and there's there. There's so many
Speaker 1: different places, in different opportunities for me to die in
Speaker 1: the course of of my daily commute, and I have
Speaker 1: the benefit of sight uh to help me. I think
Speaker 1: it also calls in, you know, to light this idea
Speaker 1: that we really do dream with all of our senses
Speaker 1: and those are all available to us. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a different sense world, that's for sure. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and when we get
Speaker 1: back we will talk about being afraid of the dark
Speaker 1: and whether or not having seem to do with insomnia.
Speaker 1: All right, we're back. And this leads us inevitably to nicktophobia,
Speaker 1: to fear of the dark. Now I have a toddler.
Speaker 1: He's not really at the point where he seems to
Speaker 1: have a fear of the dark yet. Um, he's in
Speaker 1: the dark. You just can't see. But uh, your your
Speaker 1: child is a is a bit older. Have you been
Speaker 1: through fear of the dark has played into her experiences
Speaker 1: at all? No, uh, not yet. I mean she's five
Speaker 1: and a half. But I remember when I was um
Speaker 1: around her age that I was definitely afraid of some
Speaker 1: sort of monster lurking in the closet, which would only
Speaker 1: become a fear, of course, when the lights were out.
Speaker 1: When was the last time you slept with all the
Speaker 1: lights on with but with the not not by accident,
Speaker 1: but because you said I am going to leave a
Speaker 1: light on when I go. I can't remember. I mean,
Speaker 1: now I'm like Elvis and I have blackout shades and
Speaker 1: you know, not not one little stream of light gets through.
Speaker 1: What about you? Um? You know, I feel like there
Speaker 1: was a time in the last few years when my
Speaker 1: before my child came and uh, and that's when my
Speaker 1: wife was out of town, and I think, I like,
Speaker 1: I read something kind of spooky or watch something spooky,
Speaker 1: and uh, and without the normal sort of comfort own
Speaker 1: of sharing a bed with someone, I was like, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: it's just me in here. And I ended up sleeping
Speaker 1: at least part of the night with the light on
Speaker 1: because because having that other person there you have, something
Speaker 1: comes for you in the night, either they all hear
Speaker 1: it or they can only really kill one of you
Speaker 1: at once effectively, so someone's going to survive. That's so funny,
Speaker 1: because when we've talked about outsourcing memory before, it's kind
Speaker 1: of like outsourcing responsibility. A murder comes, then you take
Speaker 1: care of it. But I do remember years before when
Speaker 1: I saw The Ring for the first time, I slept
Speaker 1: with definitely slept with the lights on all night after
Speaker 1: seeing that. That one, that one scared me pretty bad.
Speaker 1: I remember the book I Am Legend, which I got
Speaker 1: from you, Richard Matheson that terrified. We had a hard
Speaker 1: time going to say that's a good one. That's a
Speaker 1: good fear of the dark book for sure, because it
Speaker 1: has to deal with a character who, on top of
Speaker 1: all of his his angst and his problems and his
Speaker 1: his alcoholism, when the sun goes down, dark things come
Speaker 1: out of of the shadow and come for him and
Speaker 1: call for him, and uh and he must resist sleep
Speaker 1: in order to survive. Yeah, it's it's it's an impressive book. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not to mention his alcoholism too, which is that's not
Speaker 1: a good time to be an alcoholic when you've got
Speaker 1: the bloodthirstay at your door, alright, So uh yeah, nickophobia,
Speaker 1: it is this anxiety reaction which is characterized by an obsessive,
Speaker 1: irrational fear of the dark. And typically you see that
Speaker 1: in children, and you know they tend to grow out
Speaker 1: of it, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people are still
Speaker 1: feared of the dark. And there's this idea that um
Speaker 1: sleep disturbances could just be a fear of the dark.
Speaker 1: And there's a paper call quote, are people with insomnia
Speaker 1: afraid of the dark? Pilot study from Ryerson University Sleep
Speaker 1: in Depression Lab, And it looks at a possible link
Speaker 1: between sleep disorders and the dark. Yeah, and this study,
Speaker 1: nearly half of the students who reported having poor sleep
Speaker 1: also reported a fear of the dark, and researchers confirmed
Speaker 1: this objectively by measuring blink responses to sudden noise bursts
Speaker 1: in light and dark surroundings. Good sleepers became accustomed to
Speaker 1: the noise burst, but the poor sleepers grew more anticipatory
Speaker 1: when the lights went down. So you end up with
Speaker 1: a situation where the poor sleepers were far more easy
Speaker 1: to startle in the dark compared to the good sleepers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the reason for all the eye theatrics, according to
Speaker 1: Dr Colleen Karney of Ryerson University, is that if you're
Speaker 1: already a little anxious, the noise will make you flinch.
Speaker 1: And she said, we looked at eye reactions because it
Speaker 1: is one of the most robust ways to measure this anxiety.
Speaker 1: If you blink immediately after the noise, that means it
Speaker 1: startles you. It's It's an interesting thing about this in
Speaker 1: terms of phobias because, as we recently discussed in our
Speaker 1: Fear of Holes episode where we discussed phobias a bit,
Speaker 1: I mean, phobias come out of in many cases anyway,
Speaker 1: they stem from a realistic fear. And certainly it's realistic,
Speaker 1: as we've discussed, to have some apprehension about the dark,
Speaker 1: because at the very least, the dark is the environment
Speaker 1: where you will not see the whole you're about to
Speaker 1: step into. Yeah, it's again it's that uncertainty that's stepping
Speaker 1: into the unknown. And so when you say, like you know,
Speaker 1: a spouses out of town, all of a sudden, those
Speaker 1: those noises in the dark become much larger in your
Speaker 1: mind than they possibly are, and um, you respond to
Speaker 1: them in a much more robust way. So the interesting
Speaker 1: thing about this study is that it got the researchers
Speaker 1: to thinking if some people with sleep disorders like insomnia
Speaker 1: they have an active and untreated phobia of the dark,
Speaker 1: that treatment methods may need to be reevaluated. In other words,
Speaker 1: could the underlying cause of the insomnia be a phobia
Speaker 1: to the dark. So in other words, maybe we're better
Speaker 1: off treating the phobia if it's there, rather than the
Speaker 1: inability to sleep. Yeah, and again this is more like
Speaker 1: a hunch of the study, so you know, and they're
Speaker 1: saying that they're just there's some people who do not
Speaker 1: respond to behavioral drug therapy. Therefore, maybe there's something else
Speaker 1: going on and it could relate to this. It's certainly
Speaker 1: this would be a good one to hear from from
Speaker 1: listeners because I know we have listeners. I know for
Speaker 1: a fact we have listeners that have had problems with sleep.
Speaker 1: And so, yeah, I ask yourself, to what extent do
Speaker 1: you are you, honestly, um apprehensive about the dark and
Speaker 1: do you feel that plays into your scenario or is
Speaker 1: your scenario definitely not associated with that, because I know
Speaker 1: I have a friend or I have one friend in
Speaker 1: particular who has had always hadn't been plagued by insomnia,
Speaker 1: and I know he's not afraid of the dark kind
Speaker 1: of a guy like I think he just goes out
Speaker 1: and walks in the dark. If you can't sleep, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then I mean there could be other underlying conditions
Speaker 1: that you could have an anxiety just where you could
Speaker 1: have PTSD. So it's not really um that apparent that
Speaker 1: it could be just a more general phobia of the dark. Um.
Speaker 1: But if you are afraid of the dark, if it's
Speaker 1: something that bothers you, imagine being placed into this fictional
Speaker 1: room outfitted and the darkest material known to man. WHOA,
Speaker 1: you're of course talking about Zanta black. That's right. It's
Speaker 1: so dark that any light that gets through the cracks
Speaker 1: will essentially vanish into this material, which was created by
Speaker 1: the company Surrey Nano Systems. And we're talking about a
Speaker 1: dense forest of carbon nanotubes, single atom carbon tubes ten
Speaker 1: thou times thinner than human hair that drink in nine
Speaker 1: six percent of all incoming radiation. Yeah, it's super black,
Speaker 1: it's infinite black. It's the gothiest material possible. Uh and uh,
Speaker 1: you're probably wondering, why would you why would you create this?
Speaker 1: What's the point? Are you just trying to suck the
Speaker 1: soul right right out of this? Well? Uh, this is
Speaker 1: the main applications for this material would relate to sensitive
Speaker 1: optical equipment like telescopes. UM and in fact, a NASA
Speaker 1: Goddard team led by John Hagga Paine has been developing
Speaker 1: nanotube material else like this since the two thousand seven. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's been described by one of the CEOs as um
Speaker 1: deep featureless black. Even when folded and scrunched. He says,
Speaker 1: you expect to see the hills and all you can
Speaker 1: see it's like black. It's like a hole, like there's
Speaker 1: nothing there. It looks so strange. So it's it's a
Speaker 1: wonderfully creepy concept in innovation. I love it. I would
Speaker 1: love to see it. I mean, you put it on
Speaker 1: a gallery wall and let us stare into it, because
Speaker 1: I love I love works of art that are just
Speaker 1: like stark, you know, white and dark, and you can
Speaker 1: sort of lose yourself in the depths of of the darkness. Well,
Speaker 1: and what I think is so interesting about it is
Speaker 1: that even when you're in the dark, you do perceive
Speaker 1: some sort of light. Usually there's a source of somewhere
Speaker 1: if you're never fulling in the dark. But here is
Speaker 1: a possibility to create a room that would truly encase
Speaker 1: you and in total lightlessness. And what I was thinking about,
Speaker 1: um we were talking about this earlier, is that we
Speaker 1: are now entering into fall and very soon it's going
Speaker 1: to be winter, and already the days are getting shorter.
Speaker 1: There's not as much sunlight available to us. And so
Speaker 1: that's why this idea of darkness is so interesting, because
Speaker 1: a lot of us start to turn in word right
Speaker 1: now and we start to see these sort of cracks
Speaker 1: in our psyche and it can be sort of a
Speaker 1: depressive time for some people, and then sometimes it can
Speaker 1: be good. Um yeah, why they plan to do the
Speaker 1: holidays during the darkest period of the year. I never
Speaker 1: understood that can we do it in a happier mind
Speaker 1: at least go outside? Well, I thought I thought I
Speaker 1: could take comfort from this. One aspect of it is
Speaker 1: that if you and not to make light of suffering.
Speaker 1: If if you find that this is a season that
Speaker 1: does make you turn in word and become more serious
Speaker 1: about things or grapple with things, that, um, it's beneficial
Speaker 1: to us ultimately. And because again those cracks in the
Speaker 1: psyche are important. And uh, if I may, I will
Speaker 1: read a quote from Leonard Cohen which goes a little
Speaker 1: like this. There is a crack in everything, and that's
Speaker 1: how the light gets in. So keep that in mind,
Speaker 1: because you lie to candle at five third a p m.
Speaker 1: When the sun goes down in your neck of the woods,
Speaker 1: and lock the doors. Be sure to lock the doors,
Speaker 1: because there are things out there in the night and
Speaker 1: they want to get to you, all right. So there
Speaker 1: you have it. Lots of good uh content in there.
Speaker 1: I think kind of a just a dive into the
Speaker 1: the idea of fearing the dark, our feelings about the dark,
Speaker 1: evolving as a as a as a creature in this
Speaker 1: world of light and darkness. So I'm sure a lot
Speaker 1: of people have some feedback on that. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: go to stuffabol your Mind dot com. That is where
Speaker 1: you'll find all the podcast episodes we've ever done, the videos,
Speaker 1: the blog post links after our social media accounts, and
Speaker 1: on each and every podcast we're putting down these days,
Speaker 1: you know, we're making a point to have a podcast
Speaker 1: landing page. It's gonna have some cool art, it's gonna
Speaker 1: have some links to other related podcast is gonna if
Speaker 1: there are some outside materials of of note, we're gonna
Speaker 1: link to that. Sometimes we'll have a gallery to go
Speaker 1: along with the episode and we'll have a link to
Speaker 1: that of course. So so if you haven't gotten stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your mind dot com, uh, do yourself a favorite,
Speaker 1: go check out. Yeah, there's lots of photos of fully
Speaker 1: clothed man just wink wink. Okay, I'm not gonna find
Speaker 1: that in a lot of places. Okay, I try now,
Speaker 1: I try to include lots of photos of fully dressed
Speaker 1: women too. I keep it. I keep it even sometimes
Speaker 1: sometimes we get some skins, sometimes not sometimes sometimes they're animals,
Speaker 1: sometimes their plans. I want our plant listeners to feel included. Indeed, um,
Speaker 1: all right, and uh, if you've got some ideas on
Speaker 1: this percolating, please do send them to us. So you
Speaker 1: can do that by sending an email to blow the
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