Speaker 1: And let me tell you that sleep is a misnomer.
Speaker 1: I mean, sleep actually is a catch all term for
Speaker 1: what is really a dramatically diverse collection of different brain states.
Speaker 1: And they are so different electrophysiologically, and chemically and hormonally
Speaker 1: that they bear very little relationship to one another. They're
Speaker 1: all a different type of consciousness. In fact, you're not
Speaker 1: unconscious while you're sleeping. A Science of Happiness, Appreciating modern painting,
Speaker 1: dilemmas of modern medicine. Abraham Lincoln at the Civil War,
Speaker 1: History of the artistic genius, Michelangelin When intuition changed American
Speaker 1: mystic psychology of religion. One Day University. The most acclaimed
Speaker 1: and popular professors from top colleges. They're best lectures, fascinating conversations. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Richard Davies. Let's learn the fact that here we
Speaker 1: are in and we are still needing this process called sleep,
Speaker 1: the fact that it is been demonstrated in every single
Speaker 1: animal speech. My name is Jessica Paine, and the name
Speaker 1: of my lecture is the science of stress and sleep,
Speaker 1: how they affect creativity, concentration, and memory. And our ancestors
Speaker 1: did in fact, as we build more tissue in the
Speaker 1: fernal cortices of our brain, which is the most recently
Speaker 1: evolved part of our brains. We may be actually sleeping
Speaker 1: a little bit more. In your one day university lecture,
Speaker 1: what do you hope people take away from it? You know,
Speaker 1: if there's one thing I'd like them to take away
Speaker 1: from it, it's understanding that the sleeping brain is highly
Speaker 1: intensively active. Because if you go out and you talk
Speaker 1: to your average person on the street and you ask
Speaker 1: him what is sleep, what does it do? You'll inevitably
Speaker 1: get answers like, well, it's just a time where the
Speaker 1: brain is sort of switched off and it's recovering, you know,
Speaker 1: it's rejuvenating. And that's partly true. But what they don't
Speaker 1: understand is that the sleeping brain is actually busily at work.
Speaker 1: For you, the hippocampus, which is important for memory, the
Speaker 1: amygdala parts of the pre final cortex, are actually highly
Speaker 1: active during rapid eye movement sleep, and then there's an
Speaker 1: actual communication that goes on during non realm sleep between
Speaker 1: cortical areas and hippocampal areas, which we know are essential
Speaker 1: for memory consolidation. So if people respect that, they're not
Speaker 1: wasting time when they're sleeping, that they're sleeping brains are
Speaker 1: actually doing something for them, something important, helping them remember,
Speaker 1: helping them process emotions, helping them make creative connections. Then
Speaker 1: the last thing we should do is curtail sleep and
Speaker 1: have be the first thing to go. And we get
Speaker 1: stressed out and busy, but it should be one of
Speaker 1: those things we retain because it's where incredible feats of
Speaker 1: cognitive prowers happen. It's some of our most creative ideas
Speaker 1: come from, and it's absolutely necessary to truly learn and
Speaker 1: remember things in the long run. So when when people
Speaker 1: think about sleep, very often they think about length of sleep.
Speaker 1: Is that the most important thing? Or is it type
Speaker 1: of sleep? Actually it's a little bit of both. The
Speaker 1: length of sleep is important. Although I object to this
Speaker 1: idea that everybody needs to get their eight hours. I
Speaker 1: just want you to shout it out at me. How
Speaker 1: many hours when we talk about sleep, how many hours
Speaker 1: do human beings need to get at night? Okay? So eight?
Speaker 1: All right, that's what I'm hearing. And you know something,
Speaker 1: I'll tell you that that's both true and false, And
Speaker 1: it's not that advice necessarily, but sleep, like many human variables,
Speaker 1: is actually normally distributed. It just turns out that between
Speaker 1: seven and nine hours and night is with the vast
Speaker 1: majority of us needs somewhere between seven and nine. But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that you have to, you know, get
Speaker 1: exactly eight hours. It's also true there are lucky souls
Speaker 1: out there who literally only need and I don't mean
Speaker 1: you can get buy on, I mean need four hours
Speaker 1: of sleep. But they statistically so rare that when somebody
Speaker 1: tells me that this is what you know they need,
Speaker 1: I don't believe them. When I meet people who say
Speaker 1: that they are just fine on four hours, usually we
Speaker 1: look at their performance in the lab and in terms
Speaker 1: of objective performance that are terrible. Uh. And when I
Speaker 1: hear people saying that they need twelve hours, that is possible,
Speaker 1: but more often than not, it actually raises the specter
Speaker 1: of sleep apnea. Tell me about sleep apnia. What is that? So?
Speaker 1: Sleep apnea is a complete cessation of breathing. So each
Speaker 1: time you have an apnea, you stop breathing, which means
Speaker 1: that your brain is deprived of oxygen. And every time
Speaker 1: you have an apnea event, your brain has to wake
Speaker 1: up or arouse in order to get a breath and
Speaker 1: so when people talk about, well, hey, Dr Pain, I
Speaker 1: think I might be one of your long sleepers. I
Speaker 1: think I might need twelve hours. And when I ask
Speaker 1: them why they think that, they'll say, well, because I'm
Speaker 1: constantly sleep being a lot, and yet I never feel
Speaker 1: well rested. In many cases, when you look at those
Speaker 1: people's sleep, the reason they feel that way is because
Speaker 1: their brains are actually waking up over and over and
Speaker 1: over again, sometimes up to a hundred times or more
Speaker 1: an hour in severe cases of sleep apnea. What's really
Speaker 1: disturbing about this is every time that happens, your brain
Speaker 1: has to wake up to get a breath, but the
Speaker 1: person doesn't remember that, So their perception is that they're
Speaker 1: just sleeping all the time and they never feel rested.
Speaker 1: You bring them into the sleep lab and you see awakening, awakening, awakening, awakening.
Speaker 1: Of course, they're exhausted and their sleep is shattered. And
Speaker 1: what the reason I like to talk about this that
Speaker 1: these events is that we now know that there is
Speaker 1: a very strong and very real relationship between sleep apnea
Speaker 1: and heart attack and stroke. It's very common to hear
Speaker 1: people say, oh, I only need four or five or
Speaker 1: six hours of sleep. Does that kind of talk drive
Speaker 1: you crazy. As a sleep researcher, it does drive me crazy. Well,
Speaker 1: on one hand, I find it fascinating, and I'm still
Speaker 1: looking for a group of people that really are functioning
Speaker 1: at their best on only four hours. When you get
Speaker 1: to six, that's a little bit more possible. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it drives me crazy because where I think that really
Speaker 1: comes from is this cultural message. The problem there is
Speaker 1: that we live in a puritanical culture. We live in
Speaker 1: a culture where there's this first one in, last one
Speaker 1: out mentality. There's this idea that you know, in order
Speaker 1: to work better, you always have to work longer, right,
Speaker 1: And you know students they wear their sleep deprivation as
Speaker 1: a badge of honor. You hear it all the time.
Speaker 1: This drives me crazy as a sleep scientist. Oh well,
Speaker 1: I only got two hours of sleep last night because
Speaker 1: I was studying. Oh well, I pulled an all matter. Well.
Speaker 1: As a memory researcher, there's nothing that makes me more
Speaker 1: crazy because the two things you want to do if
Speaker 1: you want to consolidate memories, which is literally the ability
Speaker 1: to sort of store them long term and actually be
Speaker 1: able to remember them later. You don't just visit something
Speaker 1: once you need to actually sort of inter leave your practice.
Speaker 1: You want to revisit a concept over and over again.
Speaker 1: You don't want to cram and you espect actually don't
Speaker 1: want to cram across the night of sleep deprivation. Instead,
Speaker 1: you want to be sort of revisiting this concept and
Speaker 1: you want to sleep on it right after you study
Speaker 1: it for the last time. And yet students across the
Speaker 1: United States do this exactly the wrong way. So, yes,
Speaker 1: it drives me absolutely crazy. What does sleep deprivation due
Speaker 1: to us? If if we are sleep deprived, what happens? Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of really bad things happen, increased traffic accidents, lapses,
Speaker 1: and concentration to memory impairment over time. I think most
Speaker 1: of us have experience with temporary payers of sleep deprivation,
Speaker 1: and our brains are plastic, you know, and we really
Speaker 1: are rugged. We've evolved to tolerate some amount of sleep deprivation.
Speaker 1: So I'm not worried about the person who has one
Speaker 1: poor night of sleep or goes through a difficult patch,
Speaker 1: or even think about new parents. They're going to go
Speaker 1: through several months of poor sleep. We're designed to be
Speaker 1: able to handle that. What I worry about are the
Speaker 1: people who are doing that for these long periods of
Speaker 1: time where people aren't sleep being that kind of sleep
Speaker 1: deprivation actually builds up. You accumulate what's called sleep debt,
Speaker 1: which is a pressure that your brain actually has to
Speaker 1: pay back this depth that it's accumulated. The more sleep
Speaker 1: deprived you become, the more your performance is going to suffer,
Speaker 1: in the same exact way that the more alcohol you consume,
Speaker 1: the more your performance suffers. And what's interesting is that
Speaker 1: in both of these cases people don't have awareness of it.
Speaker 1: People are not necessarily aware that they're impaired when they're drunk,
Speaker 1: and people are definitely not aware that they're impaired when
Speaker 1: they're sleep deprived. You have to bring them into the
Speaker 1: lab and show them their their own data. So we've
Speaker 1: all met that person who thinks they're fine to drive
Speaker 1: after drinking, but we know they're not. It's the same
Speaker 1: exact relationship for sleep deprivation. And then what I fear,
Speaker 1: especially somebody dealing without a lessons and people in college,
Speaker 1: is when you mix those things, you can get into
Speaker 1: a really deadly situation. So if you have even a
Speaker 1: little bit of alcohol but you're sleep deprived on top
Speaker 1: of it, then your risk for traffic accidents and a
Speaker 1: whole host of other mistakes skyrockets. So how do you
Speaker 1: know if you're sleeping well or if you're getting enough sleep?
Speaker 1: There are two ways I can answer that question. The
Speaker 1: first is if you feel like you're at your best.
Speaker 1: Most of us have a sense of when we're at
Speaker 1: our best, and one way to look at that is
Speaker 1: to is to do what I urge everybody to do,
Speaker 1: which is to put twenty extrements of sleep into your
Speaker 1: daily routine, which most of us can benefit from, even
Speaker 1: people who are sleeping pretty well. And if that makes
Speaker 1: you feel better, makes you feel happier and more positive,
Speaker 1: then that's one way to tell the But the real
Speaker 1: answer is I think we should have a sleep study done.
Speaker 1: This is where you go into a sleep laboratory. There
Speaker 1: are physicians that are trained in sleep medicine, and I
Speaker 1: think everybody ought to get a baseline when they're saying
Speaker 1: years old, so that we actually have an objective measure
Speaker 1: of how we're sleeping, so that we can screen for
Speaker 1: things like apnea, so that we can address insomnia before
Speaker 1: it gets bad and difficult, because that's a in part
Speaker 1: A learned cycle that can be very difficult to undo.
Speaker 1: And it blows my mind that when you go to
Speaker 1: your doctor that's not even a question most physicians ask
Speaker 1: is how are you sleeping? Which is crazy in my
Speaker 1: mind because sleep is a real barometer of health, both
Speaker 1: mental and physical health. Talk about naps and why you
Speaker 1: think they're important. Yeah, I actually think we never should
Speaker 1: have stopped napping in kindergarten. The first thing that I
Speaker 1: really want you to try to do, this is the
Speaker 1: single most important takeaway, is just try to get twenty
Speaker 1: extra minutes a day on as many days as you can.
Speaker 1: And there are, obviously there are three different ways to
Speaker 1: do that. You can either go to bed earlier, you
Speaker 1: can sleep later, meaning don't hit the snooze button, which
Speaker 1: is a very bad idea actually just let your brain
Speaker 1: stay locked in. But you're going to get the most
Speaker 1: bang for your buck if you start to incorporate daytime napping.
Speaker 1: But the idea here, okay, is that when it comes
Speaker 1: to napping, you do not want to nap any longer
Speaker 1: than twenty minutes. And I am mean set your alarm
Speaker 1: for twenty minutes, because I don't even want you to
Speaker 1: sleep that long. Because if you're sleep deprived and your
Speaker 1: brain is built up the sleep debt, you're going to
Speaker 1: run the risk of going into slow wave sleep, and
Speaker 1: if you wake up out of that, you're gonna be groggy,
Speaker 1: feel terrible. It's not gonna help. Napping is a great
Speaker 1: way to recharge your brain in the middle of the day,
Speaker 1: and depending on the length of the nap, you can
Speaker 1: do anything from boosting memory and cognition to rejuvenate in
Speaker 1: the brain and cleaning the cash if you will. I'm
Speaker 1: a big advocate for nap pods in corporate culture because
Speaker 1: people actually, we know that they perform better if they're
Speaker 1: able to get even a very brief nap. I envisioned
Speaker 1: a world will where one day, you know, somebody told
Speaker 1: me recently that they could get fired. It's in a
Speaker 1: contract that they could get fired for sleeping on the job,
Speaker 1: and that to me, it's just so backward. I imagine
Speaker 1: one day companies will want to actually harness the power
Speaker 1: of the sleeping brain. So if you can imagine people
Speaker 1: in their cubicles with little signs that say sleeping brain
Speaker 1: at work, innovation and progress, that's the world I imagine
Speaker 1: where it's okay to go offline, whether that's taking a
Speaker 1: twenty minute nap, or just getting out for a relaxing
Speaker 1: walk or reflective walk, or doing a meditation or relaxation exercise.
Speaker 1: All of these ways of taking the brain offline actually
Speaker 1: allow their brain to perform better and people will be
Speaker 1: much more productive, not to mention, happier and and just
Speaker 1: in a better mood. You make a really compelling case
Speaker 1: for sleep helping your creativity, helping your memory. What about emotion?
Speaker 1: Does it help regulate your emotion? Calm you down? Sleep
Speaker 1: absolutely helps regulate emotion. In fact, it's a built in
Speaker 1: stress and emotion regulator. So as I just mentioned, if
Speaker 1: you're sleep deprived, if you're not getting enough sleep that
Speaker 1: is a stressor your body will secrete stress hormones like cortisol.
Speaker 1: When you're sleeping, that system gets regulated number one and
Speaker 1: number two, you tend to it. It doesn't just calm
Speaker 1: you down, but it regulates the way that you process
Speaker 1: difficult to negative things that happened during the day. So
Speaker 1: we like to think of sleep doing two things. For
Speaker 1: emotional experiences, Sleep actually helps you remember the emotional, even
Speaker 1: the negative, which, if you think about it, you need
Speaker 1: to do because you need to be able to learn
Speaker 1: from your mistakes. It's also incredibly adaptive at a species level.
Speaker 1: But you also want sleep to help strip away the
Speaker 1: emotional tone of that experience. The amigula is incredibly important
Speaker 1: for emotion, and especially for negative emotion motions like fear
Speaker 1: also more active during sleep than wink, which is both
Speaker 1: good and bad. Right, Like, you need to process emotion
Speaker 1: in order to be healthy, but you don't want to
Speaker 1: process it without also regulating, which is why it's also
Speaker 1: a good thing that parts of your what we call
Speaker 1: medial prefernal cortex, Okay, in here in the front of
Speaker 1: the brain, there's a region within that called the anterior cingulate.
Speaker 1: It's job is to literally put a break on the amigala,
Speaker 1: so they kind of talk to each other, and when
Speaker 1: the imigia leaguets out of control, it breaks it so
Speaker 1: that you don't actually get out of control in terms
Speaker 1: of your emotions. So there's a cross top going on
Speaker 1: between these two structures that allow you to process emotional
Speaker 1: experience that you've had, but while also regulating it. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: when I like, what I like to say about this
Speaker 1: in terms of memory, for example, is you don't want
Speaker 1: to forget all of the negative experiences that happen to you,
Speaker 1: because you'd never be able to learn from them. You
Speaker 1: need to be able to remember the most negative things
Speaker 1: from your life, but you also need to regulate the
Speaker 1: negative emotion that comes along with that, so you don't
Speaker 1: develop an anxiety, right, so that you don't develop depression.
Speaker 1: So you're not only processing your emotions and your emotional experiences,
Speaker 1: but you're regulating your affect or your emotion to them.
Speaker 1: So that's one of the reasons we think that most
Speaker 1: many actually mental health conditions, and definitely affective disorders like
Speaker 1: depression and anxiety are often associated with sleep deficits. In
Speaker 1: your lecture, your talk about memory, and I know that
Speaker 1: as people get older, especially over the age of fifty
Speaker 1: or sixty, they worry about will I suffer from dementia?
Speaker 1: Will I be someone who gets Alzheimer's? Is there any
Speaker 1: relationship between getting your eight hours a night and lowering
Speaker 1: your risk for dementia? Well, again, it's early days, you know.
Speaker 1: As a scientist, I like to see data replicated over
Speaker 1: and over again. But there is a link. It's preliminary,
Speaker 1: but it's important. One. There are two lines of evidence
Speaker 1: that suggesting there's a correlation there. One, it is true
Speaker 1: that people who have a history of poor sleep are
Speaker 1: at higher risk for developing dementia, including Alzheimer's disease. So
Speaker 1: we've known that for a long time that there's a
Speaker 1: link there. Now that's just a correlation. Correlations does not
Speaker 1: imply causation. But that's one link. The other link is
Speaker 1: new research showing that you need to get sleep, especially
Speaker 1: deep slow wave sleep, which again is the deepest stay
Speaker 1: of sleep you get in order to literally clean out
Speaker 1: the brain. So your brain produces metabolite, right, I mean,
Speaker 1: as you go about your day to day, your brain
Speaker 1: is working away and all the by products, all the
Speaker 1: waste of that metabolism needs to get cleaned out somehow.
Speaker 1: Beta amyloid is one of the waste products that needs
Speaker 1: to get cleaned out of the brain. So when you sleep,
Speaker 1: when you achieve especially the deep slow wave sleep that's
Speaker 1: so important also for memory consolidation, you're also getting the
Speaker 1: benefit of cleaning out what's called the interstitial space, So
Speaker 1: cleaning out the spaces and the blaine. You can really
Speaker 1: think about it is cleaning out the gunk, you know,
Speaker 1: or taking out the trash, and sleep is clearly linked
Speaker 1: to the ability to do that. So if you don't
Speaker 1: clean out the beta amyloid, the problem, obviously is that
Speaker 1: that is what causes the plaques. That's what the plaques
Speaker 1: are made out of, and that's one of the defining
Speaker 1: characteristics of Alzheimer's disease. So I'll say they're preliminary, but
Speaker 1: I think that this is a very interesting line of
Speaker 1: work that's going on now, looking at poor sleep in
Speaker 1: its relation to dementing diseases on the one hand, and
Speaker 1: of course you can flip that are good sleepers at
Speaker 1: much less risk for dementing diseases, and that those data
Speaker 1: are coming And as I said earlier, it takes a
Speaker 1: long time and a lot of replications for me to
Speaker 1: become convinced of something. But that's certainly a story I'm
Speaker 1: paying attention to. I like that cleaning out the gunk,
Speaker 1: taking out the trash. You talk about how good sleep
Speaker 1: helps creativity in what sort of ways. There are a
Speaker 1: whole host of different theories about that, and the truth
Speaker 1: is we don't know exactly how it works. We do
Speaker 1: know that it does, so it's very clear that sleep
Speaker 1: is one means to reach creative insight. There have been
Speaker 1: many studies showing that I can tell you what I
Speaker 1: think is going on, and this is shared by other
Speaker 1: sleep neuroscientists, is that during sleep, especially during rapid eye
Speaker 1: movement sleep, you have areas of the brain communicating in
Speaker 1: ways that they simply don't during wakefulness. And I just
Speaker 1: can't resist it. I have to tell you that there's
Speaker 1: another area called the Doris lateral prefrontal cortex and it
Speaker 1: is completely deactivated. It is literally switched off during rapid
Speaker 1: eye movement sleep. And what's fascinating about this is that
Speaker 1: this structure of the brain. We literally call this the
Speaker 1: executive control center of the brain. It is the CEO
Speaker 1: of the brain. Yet it's a very it's a very
Speaker 1: sort of literal and linear CEO. This is not a
Speaker 1: This is like not a CEO CEO who thinks outside
Speaker 1: of the box. Okay, this is the We're gonna do
Speaker 1: it in exactly the same way we've always done it.
Speaker 1: This is logical, this is rational. It's also good though,
Speaker 1: because it tells me like I can't walk through that
Speaker 1: wall and I can't fly out to the back of
Speaker 1: the room, So this is good, right. However, it also
Speaker 1: keeps you kind of contained in terms of your creative thinking.
Speaker 1: So during rapid eye movement sleep, with it being switched off,
Speaker 1: while all the while you're doing all of this cognitive
Speaker 1: and information processing, you're you're allowed to kind of run
Speaker 1: them up and have ideas and activate neural representations and
Speaker 1: combine them in new and novel ways in a manner
Speaker 1: that you simply can't do when you're awake. And this
Speaker 1: is one of the reasons why people have Aha moments
Speaker 1: when they wake up from sleep. So it may be
Speaker 1: that all of these different modes of communication, all of
Speaker 1: the ways that your memories are being processed, the information
Speaker 1: that you've learned in the past, is being processed in
Speaker 1: rem sleep is occurring in a way that's really different
Speaker 1: than the way it occurs during wakefulness or even other
Speaker 1: stages of sleep. And because of this regional pattern of
Speaker 1: activation that occurs only in rapid eye movement sleep, it
Speaker 1: really allows us, we think, to take different types of information,
Speaker 1: different fragments of memory, and recombine them in totally novel ways. Now,
Speaker 1: does that lead to the completely bizarre, fragmented nature of
Speaker 1: our dreams? Probably, But those dreams may be a bip
Speaker 1: product of a process that's incredibly important because it can
Speaker 1: also at least at times lead to creative connections, lead
Speaker 1: to insights, and really just new novel ways of looking
Speaker 1: at things. So the best thing to do if you
Speaker 1: are at an impasse, if you're trying to solve a
Speaker 1: problem and you're at an impast you're stuck, is to
Speaker 1: take the brain offline. So in other words, if you
Speaker 1: have a big decision to make that phrase go and
Speaker 1: sleep on it, you should take that literally. You should
Speaker 1: take that literally, whether it's a good problem like you're
Speaker 1: trying to decide which job to take, an emotional problem
Speaker 1: like how to deal with an issue having with your
Speaker 1: spouse or your child, And even if you're trying to
Speaker 1: achieve creative insight, one of the best things you can
Speaker 1: do you have to put the hard work in, but
Speaker 1: then go offline, take that break, and ideally get some sleep.
Speaker 1: That's a great way to end. Jessica Payne, thank you
Speaker 1: very much. Well, thank you very much. I'm Richard Davies.
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