Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking. Hey there everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking
Speaker 1: the podcast and the looks at the future, and says, hey,
Speaker 1: Mr Sayman, bring me a dream. I'm Jonathan Strickling and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And Lauren is not asleep. She's actually
Speaker 1: feeling under the weather, so she's not here. She might
Speaker 1: be asleep. I mean, if she's feeling under the weather,
Speaker 1: I hope she's asleep. She just emailed me, so I mean,
Speaker 1: she could be a sleep emailer. But this is kind
Speaker 1: of leading into the fact that we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about the future of sleep, so it was actually on
Speaker 1: topic for once. I'm hoping that in the future we
Speaker 1: can just phase out sleep entirely. It's just a waste
Speaker 1: of time. I'm one of those people who, I mean,
Speaker 1: like I I enjoy getting rest when I've been working
Speaker 1: hard and I'm very tired, but you know, it would
Speaker 1: be great to just have more time in the day. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, there there are I've seen people say that
Speaker 1: if you were able to adopt a an ideal sleeping
Speaker 1: schedule as an ideals in this is the least amount
Speaker 1: of time that you could theoretically spend sleeping that you
Speaker 1: would essentially have the equivalent waking hours to get eleven
Speaker 1: more years of life if you started in your early twenties. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I wonder if that's one of those things being propagated
Speaker 1: by these weird sleep pattern enthusiasts on the internet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we'll get to that and talk about what those weird
Speaker 1: sleep patterns are and uh, the implications of them. Yeah. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so if we're going to talk about the future of
Speaker 1: sleep hacking sleep, how sleep patterns can change over time,
Speaker 1: first we should talk about sleep itself, because it's kind
Speaker 1: of a weird and mysterious topic in science, and in fact,
Speaker 1: there's still a lot we do not know about the
Speaker 1: sleep cycle that weird. It is weird to think that
Speaker 1: this is something that we all do. You know, we
Speaker 1: all do it regularly, whether or not you get good
Speaker 1: sleep or not, you still, I assume are going to
Speaker 1: sleep or I don't know how you're listening to this podcast.
Speaker 1: Um So from a survival perspective, it first seems kind
Speaker 1: of weird because I mean, I can't imagine how it
Speaker 1: would confer an evolutionary advantage to lay down and expose
Speaker 1: yourself to predators for eight hours or however long. Well,
Speaker 1: let's let's think about this for a second. So there
Speaker 1: are a lot of different theories about what happens when
Speaker 1: we're asleep, and we'll get into those. But one thing
Speaker 1: I might suggest as a reason why we need to
Speaker 1: have this this time to sleep is just purely and
Speaker 1: this this is just a hypothesis here. There's no necessarily
Speaker 1: science to back this up, but purely from an energy perspective, right,
Speaker 1: it requires energy for us to be awake. We're active,
Speaker 1: we we consume energy. That's why we have to eat
Speaker 1: throughout the day in order to maintain that level of energy,
Speaker 1: or else we are no longer capable of being active
Speaker 1: and alert. If we were active and alert all the time,
Speaker 1: we would require to eat more frequently. And because we're
Speaker 1: not evolved to be able to do something like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, navigate pitch black darkness without falling over ourselves
Speaker 1: and hurting ourselves, uh being able to gather food or
Speaker 1: hunt food at night, we we can't. It's harder for
Speaker 1: us to do that. So it may be that it's
Speaker 1: evolutionary beneficial for us to go ahead and well shut
Speaker 1: down during the time of day when we can't really
Speaker 1: be effective. It's just cut your losses. It's a calculated
Speaker 1: risk to say, like, you're not going to be doing
Speaker 1: much useful at night anyway, and you're gonna be burning
Speaker 1: all these calories. That's the hypothesis. And keep in mind
Speaker 1: that when we're talking about evolution, evolution happens over the
Speaker 1: course of hundreds of thousands of years, right, because you
Speaker 1: could argue, well, today we've got artificial lights. You know,
Speaker 1: the difference between night and day is not as great.
Speaker 1: But it's not like we could evolve past what we
Speaker 1: have already established in the relatively short amount of time.
Speaker 1: Like if you're looking on a geological scale, it's a
Speaker 1: blink of an eye since we've had any kind of
Speaker 1: artificial light source. Uh. Well, we we can't evolve that
Speaker 1: fast as a whole species. But it might be interesting
Speaker 1: that some certain individuals of the human race have a
Speaker 1: certain mutation that helps them in this environment where we
Speaker 1: have artificial light and can do things useful at night.
Speaker 1: But first, and we'll talk about that later. Also, Uh, first,
Speaker 1: let's back up and talk about other animals. Do do
Speaker 1: all animals sleep? No? No, mammals, birds, and reptiles sleep
Speaker 1: all right, So they're the higher vertebrates. You can think
Speaker 1: of it that way. So when you're looking at the
Speaker 1: animal king too, the higher vertebrates all sleep like more
Speaker 1: complex brains. Yeah, yeah, that would be part of it.
Speaker 1: More complex nervous systems would probably be a better way
Speaker 1: of putting it. But yes, uh, if you look at
Speaker 1: fish and amphibians, most of those have some means of
Speaker 1: shutting down some of their awareness, but there's still not asleep.
Speaker 1: They're still awake, but they're kind of it's like they
Speaker 1: go to impulse power instead of warp speed, right, So
Speaker 1: they're able to power down a little bit and and recuperate,
Speaker 1: but they don't go to sleep. Sleep insects may not
Speaker 1: sleep at all, but they just have periods of activity
Speaker 1: versus inactivity, whether it's day or night or whatever. It
Speaker 1: depends on the insect, but they don't go to sleep.
Speaker 1: The other thing that's interesting this related to this is dreaming,
Speaker 1: and we'll talk a lot about dreaming in this episode
Speaker 1: as well. But reptiles do not dream, they don't, birds
Speaker 1: dream a little bit, and all mammals dream. And this
Speaker 1: is based off of various scientific studies where the scientists
Speaker 1: were monitoring brainwave activity during sleep cycles for these various
Speaker 1: types of animals. So the next time you see like
Speaker 1: an alligator and you're wondering, what's that alligator dreaming of
Speaker 1: the answer is nothing at all, because alligators don't dream. Wow,
Speaker 1: not even delicious raw chicken. Nope, Nope, they just they
Speaker 1: to them. The world just goes away for a while
Speaker 1: and then it comes back. Uh so yeah, so you
Speaker 1: know that that's the basics. But then we get into
Speaker 1: some other you know, this raises some other questions, like,
Speaker 1: all right, so these larger, the more developed vertebrates all
Speaker 1: all sleep and and most of them dream to some
Speaker 1: extent um. Why is this happening? Why why do your
Speaker 1: bidies even need to sleep in the first place? Um?
Speaker 1: Do we grow while we sleep? Well, as when we're children,
Speaker 1: we do. Yeah, because when your kid and you are sleeping,
Speaker 1: your body releases growth hormone, and so it's very important
Speaker 1: in those phases. It doesn't release during your wake cycle,
Speaker 1: So when you're awake, you know, this growth hormone doesn't
Speaker 1: get secreted, but when you go to sleep it does.
Speaker 1: Also very important for immune system. If you were to
Speaker 1: suffer sleep deprivation, for long enough, your immune system would
Speaker 1: start to really suffer. As a result, you end up
Speaker 1: kind of secreting again these chemicals in your body that
Speaker 1: help maintain your immune system. So sleep is very important
Speaker 1: there too. Um And you know, also there are other
Speaker 1: hypotheses out there that are again are are There may
Speaker 1: be a lot of truth to them, there may be
Speaker 1: very little truth, and maybe that all of them are true,
Speaker 1: but things like that's when our body repairs itself. So
Speaker 1: if you were to suffer injury, then when you're sleeping,
Speaker 1: your body can really get onto the job of fixing
Speaker 1: tissue and getting you know, shedding dead cells, that kind
Speaker 1: of stuff. I know, there are a lot of different
Speaker 1: hypotheses about what's going on in the brain during sleep,
Speaker 1: like or they're sort of necessary internal brain maintenance tasks
Speaker 1: that has been only when you're asleep. That's a big one,
Speaker 1: the idea that you know, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: different theories about what's going on when you're dreaming, and
Speaker 1: that whether or not dreaming is part of your brain
Speaker 1: trying to make sense of the information that you've gathered
Speaker 1: since you were last asleep. So it's kind of like
Speaker 1: you know, the filing of at the end of the
Speaker 1: day sort of that kind of thing, or that it's
Speaker 1: just kind of getting rid of nonsense information. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of different hypotheses out there, but there are
Speaker 1: some things we can definitively point at. One is that
Speaker 1: when you go to sleep, your breathing rate slows down,
Speaker 1: your heart rate slows down, uh, and your brain begins
Speaker 1: to generate different types of brain waves. So these waves,
Speaker 1: you know, they have oscillation frequencies, right, are electrically measurable. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you put if you put in a uh, you know,
Speaker 1: you put sensors on the on the skull and you're
Speaker 1: reading those brain waves just like you've probably seen in
Speaker 1: some television shows or movies. You could actually monitor the
Speaker 1: brain activity and normal wakeful activity. You have alpha waves
Speaker 1: that are generated when you're kind of you know, in
Speaker 1: a relaxed, chilled out state. Beta way waves are generated
Speaker 1: when you're really alert. So those are the two that
Speaker 1: are the most frequent in your in your wakeful moments.
Speaker 1: When you go to sleep, you start to generate uh,
Speaker 1: different brain waves, the delta waves and the theta waves. Um.
Speaker 1: So these are slower, they have slower or lower frequencies,
Speaker 1: I should say, And the slower pattern kind of indicates
Speaker 1: how deep asleep you're in, and the slower the pattern,
Speaker 1: the deeper the sleep. So it's harder to wake someone
Speaker 1: up when they're having uh delta wave activity. And these
Speaker 1: are variable based on your sort of your sleep cycle,
Speaker 1: right that you go through different stages of sleep exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's your activity does change. There are times when
Speaker 1: the activity starts to spike, like an r e M
Speaker 1: sleep that's rabbid eye movement sleep. This is when we're
Speaker 1: talking about dreaming. So if you've ever been awakened while
Speaker 1: you were in R e M sleep, then you probably
Speaker 1: have at least some recollection of what your dream was.
Speaker 1: It's a lot harder to member for most people what
Speaker 1: they dreamed or didn't dream if they wake up and
Speaker 1: non r E M sleep, it's just because the activity
Speaker 1: is removed from when they actually wake up. Um. And
Speaker 1: most people have between three to five sessions of R
Speaker 1: E M sleep per night, tends to be about a
Speaker 1: quarter of a typical good night's sleep. So you get
Speaker 1: about R E M sleep and non r E M sleep.
Speaker 1: You know it's again this also appears to be pretty important.
Speaker 1: It's one of those things that if you don't get
Speaker 1: that r E M sleep, that's considered like you can
Speaker 1: start suffering sleep deprivation. So you could, you know, catch
Speaker 1: little naps here and there. But if you're not getting
Speaker 1: r EM sleep, you're not getting that RESTful sleep. You
Speaker 1: don't you don't feel rested. That's the hard stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's what's really good. It's the stuff when you
Speaker 1: when you wake up after a really good night's sleep
Speaker 1: and you feel refreshed, it's because you had that R
Speaker 1: E M sleep. So it's not just because you were
Speaker 1: inactive and RESTful, it's because this has been going on. Okay,
Speaker 1: so this is really useful. What happens to the body
Speaker 1: when we don't get enough sleep? And I can speak
Speaker 1: from experience on this one. Yeah, it's uh, it's no fun.
Speaker 1: I went through a lot of years in my life
Speaker 1: when I was not getting a whole lot of sleep. Um,
Speaker 1: it's more recent in my life that I've started getting
Speaker 1: better sleep. Yeah. Yeah, I just in you know, college,
Speaker 1: grad school. I don't know why. I was just one
Speaker 1: of those people. So how many all nighters have you done? Oh? Uncountable? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I've only done a few. I am one of
Speaker 1: those people who I realize what my severe limitations are
Speaker 1: if I don't have enough sleep, because they affect me. Really,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just it's obvious if I haven't had
Speaker 1: enough sleep. Have you ever had hallucinations? I have, I
Speaker 1: have to have not not. These aren't like lucid crazy
Speaker 1: hallucinations like I'm seeing a monster climbing out of the floor.
Speaker 1: It's more like I remember things like after going like
Speaker 1: you know, days in a row with almost no real
Speaker 1: sleep of any kind, seeing feeling like I had seen
Speaker 1: something move in my peripheral vision and I turned to
Speaker 1: look and there'd be nothing there for me. It was
Speaker 1: a point where I could no longer read text because
Speaker 1: it would look like it was melting to me. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I got to a point where I would try and
Speaker 1: read something and then I would start to nod off immediately. Um.
Speaker 1: I've also I've also got into the point where I
Speaker 1: started talking without realizing what I was saying. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a great story about a friend of mine driving me
Speaker 1: home from the airport after a trip where I got
Speaker 1: no sleep. Really, and apparently I had some entertaining, absurd,
Speaker 1: surreal things to say. I had no connection to anything
Speaker 1: connected to reality at all, and that was because I
Speaker 1: had sleep deprivation. So I mean, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: going like a like a day without sleep or a
Speaker 1: day without enough sleep, you're talking about things like maybe
Speaker 1: not being able to focus as as much upon a
Speaker 1: task as you normally would are. It's pretty standard for
Speaker 1: people to report after just one bad night's sleep that
Speaker 1: they lose focus and they have decreased competence at standard tasks,
Speaker 1: right or that, And also that things irritate them a
Speaker 1: little more easily than it might otherwise, that that their
Speaker 1: their thresholds for being irritated as lower. Um And but
Speaker 1: there are some serious effects that can happen, Like those
Speaker 1: hallucinations are pretty bad, but I mean there's some even
Speaker 1: worse effects that can happen. You can actually die from
Speaker 1: lack of sleep. In fact, you know, this is one
Speaker 1: of those wonderful tests that sciences has shown us, which uh,
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's one of the things that it's
Speaker 1: important to know. It's upsetting to think of the actual circumstances.
Speaker 1: But scientists would keep rats awake and watch to see
Speaker 1: what happened with the rats um and the you know,
Speaker 1: it got to a point where rats that had been
Speaker 1: forced to stay awake for several days in a row
Speaker 1: would begin to die and uh, you know, like we said,
Speaker 1: like they're going to sleep that has what means of
Speaker 1: helping regulate your immune system. So there are definite health
Speaker 1: risks to not getting enough sleep. Uh yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: a pretty widespread phenomenon that people don't get enough sleep
Speaker 1: in the United States, at least the CDC that they
Speaker 1: estimated that forty point six million American workers, which is
Speaker 1: about thirty percent of all the people on the job,
Speaker 1: are sleep deprived. That's terrible. Yeah, yeah, I see, here's
Speaker 1: talking about a Singapore management university said that workers were
Speaker 1: wasting time, more time than uh than your average worker
Speaker 1: if they got less sleep. Yeah. This is from a
Speaker 1: from a Wall Street General report on sleep deprivation. It's
Speaker 1: a huge problem, and it's estimated to account for billions
Speaker 1: of dollars of lost productivity in the American workforce. So
Speaker 1: just I mean just written zoning out, you know, people
Speaker 1: not being as efficient at tasks that they do every day,
Speaker 1: right right, having to redo something perhaps, or or just
Speaker 1: taking extra time to be able to do something that
Speaker 1: normally you'd be able to accomplish in half the time whatever,
Speaker 1: Like there are measurable effects, right, So getting sleep is
Speaker 1: important to you. It's important for your health, it's important
Speaker 1: for just being the kind of person you want to be. Um.
Speaker 1: But it's also important on a large scale in in
Speaker 1: your society, Like it's important if you are a government,
Speaker 1: you actually you want to make sure people are getting
Speaker 1: enough sleep because it has large scale implications. That's that's
Speaker 1: definitely true. So one of the things I saw that
Speaker 1: you wanted to talk about was the kinds of sleep
Speaker 1: patterns we see in nature. Yeah. Um, keeping all the
Speaker 1: things that we just talked about in mind that sleep
Speaker 1: deprivation is a really serious problem with serious health effects
Speaker 1: and serious effects to productivity and and all those kinds
Speaker 1: of things. It's still would be great if we could
Speaker 1: maybe get more time, if we could find a way
Speaker 1: to sleep less totally still healthy. That you're just as healthy,
Speaker 1: just as happy, with no negative effects to your to
Speaker 1: your body, your brain, and your and your quality of life. Um.
Speaker 1: And so the first thing I wondered about is, well,
Speaker 1: is the way we sleep now, the way most Westerners
Speaker 1: sleep now, So one long chunk of sleep at night
Speaker 1: that is supposed to be around eight hours or so
Speaker 1: is that normal? Is that normal to the species? So?
Speaker 1: Yes and no. So first of all, there there are
Speaker 1: two main types of sleep patterns that you find in
Speaker 1: the animal world. Monophasic, which is this idea of having
Speaker 1: a big, one chunk. Yeah, and then there's polyphasic, which
Speaker 1: is where you divide this up over multiple like sleep
Speaker 1: sessions throughout a particular cycle. Yeah. And a lot of
Speaker 1: these polyphasic that's actually going to be by phasic, meaning
Speaker 1: you sleep twice. Yeah. By phasic, you would, you could argue,
Speaker 1: is sort of outside of polyphasic polyphasic. I think of
Speaker 1: as a what my dog does, right right. I am
Speaker 1: a fairly recent dog owner, and I've been noticing these
Speaker 1: these dog behavior patterns. My new puppy will sleep for
Speaker 1: an hour and then get up and come look at
Speaker 1: me and wag is sweet little tail, and then go
Speaker 1: lie down and sleep for another hour and repeat. You know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's very typical with canines. And then you have
Speaker 1: other animals you have like cats that will sleep for
Speaker 1: hours and hours and hours and then they'll be active. Um.
Speaker 1: So those that's the difference between monophasic and polyphasic. And
Speaker 1: then you can have depending upon the type of animal.
Speaker 1: If it's you know, nocturnal, then it's sleeping during the day.
Speaker 1: It may have a it may be monophasic, but it's
Speaker 1: sleep session is in the daytime, not in the nighttime. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've um heard examples of people saying that in history
Speaker 1: people didn't necessarily always sleep just one chunk. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: by PHAs is something that is fairly common, and it's
Speaker 1: still common in some parts of the world. By phasic
Speaker 1: is this idea to Italy and they close all the
Speaker 1: shops Spain as well. Spain is also does this Yeah, um, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: it's the the whole siesta idea. So by phasic means
Speaker 1: that you're dividing up your sleep into two sessions, but
Speaker 1: they're not equal, right, You've got one longer session, which
Speaker 1: is the one at night. Tends to be between five
Speaker 1: and seven hours for most of the these these implementations.
Speaker 1: Sometimes it could be you know, five to eight hours
Speaker 1: something like that, and then you take a second session
Speaker 1: of sleep around the sixth hour of your day whenever
Speaker 1: that day starts. Your day is dependent upon when you
Speaker 1: wake up then when you get up, so it's not
Speaker 1: like it's always going to be at this X hour,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be six hours after you've awakened, and then
Speaker 1: you take another sleep that could be anywhere from a
Speaker 1: half hour to an hour and a half long nap,
Speaker 1: and then you're awake and alert for the rest of
Speaker 1: the day. And in fact, great apes tend to be
Speaker 1: by phasic, so humans tend to be by phasic. But
Speaker 1: most of us work in the Western world, are working
Speaker 1: in environments where taking a nap in the middle of
Speaker 1: a day is discouraged, not not something you can typically do.
Speaker 1: And if you think about humans, are not when we're
Speaker 1: when we're babies, we're polyphasic. We're we're we're not, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: monophasic or by phasic. When we're babies were polyphasic, but
Speaker 1: we gradually kind of move into a by phasic phase.
Speaker 1: That's where you have the kid who will sleep through
Speaker 1: the night but also take a nap in the afternoon. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then eventually society pressures us into being monophasic, even
Speaker 1: though all of us know that are on two pm.
Speaker 1: It would be awesome if we could just lay down
Speaker 1: and go to sleep and no one judged us, or
Speaker 1: at least by all of us, I mean me so
Speaker 1: um so naturally speaking, but for most people, keeping in
Speaker 1: mind that this is you know, this is a blanket statement,
Speaker 1: and there are all aways exceptions to rules. Most people
Speaker 1: would do best with monophasic or biphasic sleep on their own.
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that people haven't tried two come
Speaker 1: up with some alternatives. Yeah, so I want to transition
Speaker 1: to talking about hacking sleep. Can we do it? Can
Speaker 1: you give yourself more waking hours without hurting your level
Speaker 1: of energy when you are awake, or your alertness, or
Speaker 1: your competence at tasks or your health. Can you can
Speaker 1: you get just as good a quality of life with
Speaker 1: less time in bed? Well, there's some famous historical figures
Speaker 1: who have been um the the the idea of getting
Speaker 1: very little sleep or or this whole polyphasic approach where
Speaker 1: you're taking naps throughout the day, uh, seems to have
Speaker 1: been attributed to them, but most of them are the
Speaker 1: questionable questionable. Yeah, the Leonardo da Vinci is a big
Speaker 1: that's the big example. So he's the one everybody talks about.
Speaker 1: He's a you know, great Italian polly, math of the Renaissance,
Speaker 1: um painter, inventor of everything, basically at least on paper, right,
Speaker 1: I didn't necessarily build everything, but he sure did invent
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff. Yeah, but he is famous for
Speaker 1: supposedly taking advantage of polyphasic sleep, so he would take
Speaker 1: a number of naps throughout the day instead of one
Speaker 1: long chunk, and it would total to much less time
Speaker 1: than the average person spent sleeping in their in their
Speaker 1: chunks at night. Um. But that he would function perfectly
Speaker 1: well with this. I have had a hard time confirming this,
Speaker 1: and I'm very suspicious that it's an urban legend. I'm
Speaker 1: pretty sure it is. Uh. The the next one you
Speaker 1: have on our list is actually a little bit more
Speaker 1: of a credible, uh example in a way. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: Buckminster Fuller Bucky tell us about him, Jonathan Well, Bucky
Speaker 1: was supposedly getting by on just taking half hour naps.
Speaker 1: According to Dr Wozniac. Dr Piotr Wozniak, who's a biologist
Speaker 1: who has written extensively on the subjects of polyphasic sleep
Speaker 1: and and monophasic sleep by phasic sleep as well, UM
Speaker 1: suggest that perhaps this was a reputation that was not
Speaker 1: fully accurate, that it was more that Fuller would take
Speaker 1: naps whenever he could, but would also grab like a
Speaker 1: decent six hours sleep whenever the opportunity arose. It's just
Speaker 1: that sometimes the schedule would not allow it. I guess
Speaker 1: it's hard to prove something like this. Yeah, So beyond
Speaker 1: Da Vinci and Bucky, we have a few other names
Speaker 1: that are sometimes associated with this idea of polyphasic sleep,
Speaker 1: and they are there's some pretty pretty impressive names. If
Speaker 1: only there were evidence to support the fact that they
Speaker 1: were actually polyphasic sleepers. Uh, Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla.
Speaker 1: So the rivals of the Sleep Wars right after the
Speaker 1: the current Wars, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
Speaker 1: have all been listed as being polyphasic sleepers, even though
Speaker 1: there's not really evidence to support that now. Thomas Jefferson
Speaker 1: was the first one I heard, because I actually had
Speaker 1: a friend in high school who was enthusiastic about the
Speaker 1: idea of you know what's commonly called on the internet
Speaker 1: sometimes the ubermench sleep schedule. Uh, this idea that oh, well,
Speaker 1: you know, it's only because we're we're just not evolved
Speaker 1: enough that we are still sticking to this old kind
Speaker 1: of sleep. If you're really with it. If you know
Speaker 1: what's up, you'll take four fifteen minute naps a day,
Speaker 1: or more like half hours. It's more like six half
Speaker 1: hour because it's he's usually it'll it adds up to
Speaker 1: three hours sleep for twenty four hour period. Well, they're
Speaker 1: there are different, uh incarnations are There are a lot
Speaker 1: of different versions of this. But I had a friend
Speaker 1: in high school who I remember talking about this. I
Speaker 1: obviously I don't know if he actually did it. He
Speaker 1: was at least interested in the idea for a while,
Speaker 1: and I remember him talking about trying to do it,
Speaker 1: but he stopped talking about it after a while, which
Speaker 1: makes me wonder if it didn't work, As I think
Speaker 1: in a lot of cases, these people who talk about
Speaker 1: it end up stopping talking about it because there doesn't work.
Speaker 1: There's yeah, I'll tell I'll talk more about that in
Speaker 1: a second too. I've got a friend, his name is
Speaker 1: Eric Sandean. I'm calling him out only because we talked
Speaker 1: about this on a a different podcast that I do occasionally.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine who decided he wanted to try
Speaker 1: this polyphasic sleep thing. And when he told me about it,
Speaker 1: I said, Eric, you are a crazy person. But he
Speaker 1: was determined to try it, and I think he might
Speaker 1: have attempted it for a day before deciding that that
Speaker 1: is probably not the best way of doing this. Well,
Speaker 1: I don't want to make it sound too crazy or anything.
Speaker 1: I mean, like my friend in high school who tried this,
Speaker 1: and he was a smart, capable guy. And a lot
Speaker 1: of the people you see talking about showing enthusiasm at
Speaker 1: least for this plan online, they don't seem like complete nuts.
Speaker 1: But I'm I'm skeptical that it would actually work. Let
Speaker 1: me explain what's what's supposed to happen here. According to
Speaker 1: polyphasic sleep, the idea is that you can get three
Speaker 1: hours total sleep per twenty four hour period and have
Speaker 1: the rest of the time dedicated to waking hours where
Speaker 1: you can actually do whatever you want video games for
Speaker 1: five hours, or you know, or you're inventing curing cancer
Speaker 1: for five hours. Although people who try polyphasic sleep appear
Speaker 1: to have difficulty uh concentrating on any effort that requires
Speaker 1: learning or have yeah, like like they can do certain
Speaker 1: things really well, but anything that requires lots of mental processes,
Speaker 1: particularly learning learning new information, becomes really difficult. But the
Speaker 1: idea is that you you split up your polyphasic sleep.
Speaker 1: You've got these short snap sessions. They're spread throughout the day,
Speaker 1: so you get you get six breaks essentially, so and
Speaker 1: those six breaks you sleep half an hour each. And
Speaker 1: this is one implementation of this approach. Um. And the
Speaker 1: idea is that at first your body and your brain
Speaker 1: are like, what is going on? I can't you know?
Speaker 1: I need to go into R E M sleep so
Speaker 1: that you don't go crazy, and you don't your health
Speaker 1: doesn't fall apart. So you train your brain. Yeah. The
Speaker 1: idea is that after you get through the initial resistance
Speaker 1: of your brain saying this is wrong, you should go
Speaker 1: to sleep now. Um that after a couple of days,
Speaker 1: your brain says, fine, if you're gonna be this way,
Speaker 1: then I'll go ahead and go into R M sleep
Speaker 1: as soon as you go to sleep. Well, here's the deal.
Speaker 1: When you when you suffer sleep deprivation for a long time,
Speaker 1: it is true that you will go into R E
Speaker 1: M sleep faster when you do go to sleep. Then
Speaker 1: you would if you were getting regular night's sleep all
Speaker 1: that time. So Joe, if you if you went and
Speaker 1: you were having eight hours sleep for like three weeks,
Speaker 1: you go into R M sleep eventually after you fall asleep,
Speaker 1: you would get there. But if you stayed up for
Speaker 1: three days and then you went to sleep, you would
Speaker 1: hit r M sleep earlier than you would have been
Speaker 1: during that nice long stretch of of plenty of sleep
Speaker 1: each night. So the idea is that if you were
Speaker 1: able to engineer this and plan it out so that
Speaker 1: you have this half hour break, you would go into
Speaker 1: ari M sleep nearly instantly as soon as you drift off,
Speaker 1: and that that would be enough for it to sustain
Speaker 1: you for the next several hours until you had your
Speaker 1: next break, which would then sustain you until the next break, etcetera, etcetera. Uh,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. Um. The experts I was looking at,
Speaker 1: including Dr Piotr Wozniak, suggest that this is a terrible idea,
Speaker 1: that that it is uh not likely to work. That
Speaker 1: you know, while the basics are kind of sort of
Speaker 1: based on truth, they're not themselves true. That being able
Speaker 1: to go right into ari M sleep does not necessarily
Speaker 1: mean you're getting all the benefits you would with sleep,
Speaker 1: including and probably most importantly, that immune system boost that
Speaker 1: you need. If we don't know everything about sleep yet,
Speaker 1: which we certainly don't, it seems premature to assume that
Speaker 1: if you're just getting that that one of those four
Speaker 1: stages of sleep, that's going to be fine, right, And
Speaker 1: we don't if we don't know exactly what all those
Speaker 1: other stages do. Yeah, he he looked into it quite
Speaker 1: a bit. He actually even conducted interviews with people. He
Speaker 1: said that in every case he was looking at, people
Speaker 1: who adopted this approach gave up on it after a
Speaker 1: short while because it just because their health was failing.
Speaker 1: They were not they were not feeling great. Some of
Speaker 1: them were having difficulty being able to concentrate on tasks
Speaker 1: for very long. Uh. He says. You know, there are
Speaker 1: plenty of YouTube videos out there where if you watch
Speaker 1: the people who are talking about you're just thinking, man,
Speaker 1: this person needs a good night's sleep. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: just it's there. It looks rough. And he also talked
Speaker 1: about how a lot of them would end up coming
Speaker 1: down with colds or the flu because their immune systems
Speaker 1: were compromised. They couldn't fight off these diseases that otherwise,
Speaker 1: if they had had healthy sleep, they may have been
Speaker 1: able to. You know, you can't necessarily say there's a
Speaker 1: direct role there, but there's enough of a correlation to
Speaker 1: make you you know, concerned and according to his studies,
Speaker 1: and you know, he's written a couple of different articles
Speaker 1: that are available online that are really helpful and go
Speaker 1: into this in detail. Um, it's just that you know,
Speaker 1: people are generally monophasic or by phasic. Um that you know,
Speaker 1: we tend to to work best under that. And in fact,
Speaker 1: a lot of the names we mentioned, like uh, like Edison,
Speaker 1: are really bi phasic and not polyphasic. That they would get,
Speaker 1: you know, a few hours sleep at night if you
Speaker 1: being like between five and seven, and then they would
Speaker 1: take they would rest in the afternoon. Um and uh.
Speaker 1: And so most of those names, that's exactly what we
Speaker 1: from those that we know what their sleep patterns were like,
Speaker 1: that's what they did. So it wasn't so much this
Speaker 1: whole you know, take a nap and then work for
Speaker 1: hours and then take a nap. It was more get
Speaker 1: a night's sleep and then take a nap in the afternoon,
Speaker 1: which again just like to point out again I think
Speaker 1: we should all be doing. And if they would just
Speaker 1: put cuts into the office, I would be happy to
Speaker 1: do it. I'd have no trouble sleeping in my chair.
Speaker 1: If that just didn't annoy everyone and make me look unprofessional. Yeah, so,
Speaker 1: I mean trying to hack your sleep this way is
Speaker 1: probably not a great idea. Okay, well, let's transition to
Speaker 1: another solution. Okay, is it possible that drugs could give
Speaker 1: us more hours in the day without harming our health? Well,
Speaker 1: i'd say until you said that second part. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: the first part is definitely true. Yes, you can use
Speaker 1: drugs to stay awake longer, um, and lots of people do.
Speaker 1: In fact, lots of us use caffeine to do this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I recently gave it up, but yes, I was heavily
Speaker 1: dependent upon it until recently. Good on you, because it
Speaker 1: turns out so some of the most familiar stimulants you'll
Speaker 1: know about, like caffeine, amphetamines, they're actually you pretty effective
Speaker 1: at giving you the ability to stay awake. What's happen
Speaker 1: to wake you up? It's it's releasing neurotransmitters that either
Speaker 1: they either promote wakefulness or they inhibit the neurotransmitters that
Speaker 1: would uh, that would cause you to be sleepy. So
Speaker 1: in some cases, it's you know, just pricking you up
Speaker 1: by by adding a boost to the chemicals in your
Speaker 1: brain that keep you awake, and in some it's just
Speaker 1: keeping the ones that would put you to sleep at may. Yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely does not make health sense at all to rely
Speaker 1: on amphetamines. That's not going to get you anywhere. And uh,
Speaker 1: and it really does help to not rely too much
Speaker 1: on caffeine either. Yeah. In fact, I was reading recently
Speaker 1: about how caffeine has been linked not not a not
Speaker 1: a proven correlation here or you know, not a causation thing,
Speaker 1: but has been linked two increases in things like cardiovascular diseases,
Speaker 1: and that uh that you know, limiting caffeine is good,
Speaker 1: like if you you can have some caffeine. In fact,
Speaker 1: there's some health benefits to a little caffeine in your diet,
Speaker 1: but you don't tend to want to consume too much
Speaker 1: of it after say two PM or so, because it
Speaker 1: can actually interfere with your sleep cycles even so much
Speaker 1: that you know, let's say that you have some caffeine
Speaker 1: six hours before you go to sleep, and you think
Speaker 1: you've got a great night's sleep. Sleep studies have shown
Speaker 1: that people who had caffeine as late as that, like,
Speaker 1: within that six hour time frame, we're still having interrupted
Speaker 1: sleep cycles. And that it was. You know that, that's
Speaker 1: how how far caffeine can stretch, its effects can stretch.
Speaker 1: So just one of those things that you know, if
Speaker 1: you can, if you can kind of uh have a
Speaker 1: if you really rely on caffeine, if you can have
Speaker 1: your main caffeine boost and not I'm not talking about
Speaker 1: going crazy and getting like a forty eight ounce coffee
Speaker 1: at a coffee shop, but I have your main caffeine
Speaker 1: boost in the morning to get you going in awake
Speaker 1: and then to sort of wean yourself off as the
Speaker 1: day goes on. So you might switch to a lower
Speaker 1: caffine to drink a little bit later in the day,
Speaker 1: and then by the time you get around two o'clock,
Speaker 1: you're you're cutting out the caffeine for the rest of
Speaker 1: the day. That seems to be a pretty good plan
Speaker 1: for being able to get a good night's sleep without
Speaker 1: being h have without having caffeine's effects interrupted. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then there of course uh less familiar drugs that might
Speaker 1: actually be better than your old school uh stimulants. One
Speaker 1: of them that's gotten a lot of talk is the
Speaker 1: drug modaffanel, which I've heard has fewer side effects than
Speaker 1: a lot of these other ones do. Yeah. And of
Speaker 1: course we are not here advocating that you take drugs,
Speaker 1: so we're just talking about this in theory. Um, you
Speaker 1: can find people online who are hyping this drug and saying, oh,
Speaker 1: I you know, I'm getting so much work done and
Speaker 1: I don't have on all these bad side effects. I
Speaker 1: again really want to stress do not use drugs for
Speaker 1: awfully will use. I mean, people should speak to their
Speaker 1: doctors about whatever drugs they're going to use and be
Speaker 1: honest about the reason for which they want to use them.
Speaker 1: And I think, you know, if you're using it so
Speaker 1: that you don't have you don't lose so much time sleeping,
Speaker 1: that's going to catch up to you eventually anyway, for
Speaker 1: these other reasons that we've listed in this in this episode. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then we've got something here called short sleepers. So
Speaker 1: is this for people who are four foot tall or less? No,
Speaker 1: this is actually the fact that some people really do
Speaker 1: require less sleep. Oh, so this is an idea of like,
Speaker 1: there are some people out there who who eight hours
Speaker 1: would be too much sleep for them. They might just
Speaker 1: need four or five. Yeah. I've seen different estimates for
Speaker 1: how common this is in the general population. I've seen
Speaker 1: estimates as small as um one in a thousand people,
Speaker 1: up to one percent of the population, or even up
Speaker 1: to five percent of the population. So I don't really
Speaker 1: know how common this is, um but it does seem
Speaker 1: that it actually this. There are some people, and they're
Speaker 1: very rare, but they can get by on less than
Speaker 1: six hours of sleep at night without any trouble. This
Speaker 1: doesn't give them negative health effects. They don't lose any
Speaker 1: of their competency. It's just how they are. It doesn't
Speaker 1: seem to be that you can train your body for this.
Speaker 1: It appears to be a genetic condition. Um So. One
Speaker 1: study I want to talk about though, that's really interesting
Speaker 1: and how this might bear on the future of reducing
Speaker 1: our need for sleep. It's a study led by Dr
Speaker 1: Ying Huifu of the University of California, San Francisco, and
Speaker 1: she was part of a team that discovered a gene
Speaker 1: variant that regulates the length of sleep. Um So. Food's
Speaker 1: team discovered that there's this particular mutation in a gene
Speaker 1: called h d e C two. Yeah, that's one of
Speaker 1: your favorites. But so this gene variant, this mutation was
Speaker 1: correlated with human subjects who averaged about six point to
Speaker 1: five hours of sleep every night, while relatives of those
Speaker 1: subjects who did not carry the mutation slept more than
Speaker 1: eight hours um. And it's important to note that this
Speaker 1: mutation may not be present in all or even most
Speaker 1: short sleepers. It was just correlated in this particular instance,
Speaker 1: and so there may be tons of other genes that
Speaker 1: create short sleepers. Yeah, we've talked in the past about
Speaker 1: how complicated genetics are, like it's it's you know, saying
Speaker 1: that this one gene is responsible for this one and
Speaker 1: only one thing is being overly simplistic in most cases, right.
Speaker 1: But then what Dr Fust team discovered that was very
Speaker 1: interesting was when they started studying transgenic mice. So mice
Speaker 1: have an equivalent gene to the human gene I was
Speaker 1: talking about. Instead of h D e C two, it's
Speaker 1: m d e C two. I don't know, but I
Speaker 1: would hazard to guess. Um. So, when the mice were
Speaker 1: given a substitute h D e C two gene in
Speaker 1: place of that, with the same mutation that these two
Speaker 1: test subjects had who were short sleepers, the mice stayed
Speaker 1: awake longer than normal mice. Well, to be fair, they
Speaker 1: may have been wondering why they kept getting injected with
Speaker 1: human genes. That might have been and they might have.
Speaker 1: You think I'd lose a lot of sleep if you're
Speaker 1: injecting me with mice genes. I definitely like what is
Speaker 1: going on? But well you would just you would be
Speaker 1: kept awake eating cheese all night. I'm okay with that, Okay,
Speaker 1: all right? Uh So, the cool thing about this is
Speaker 1: that it's possible that what we learned about short sleepers
Speaker 1: actually could help somebody else become like them. Obviously that's
Speaker 1: not knowledge that's available to us today, but this kind
Speaker 1: of experiment with the mice shows, oh, you know, it
Speaker 1: might be possible to to introduce genes like this, or
Speaker 1: to at least learn enough about how genes regulate human
Speaker 1: sleeping patterns that we could make changes that would allow
Speaker 1: people to have more free time with no adverse health effects.
Speaker 1: Um And in fact, Dr Feu of this study that
Speaker 1: I was talking about, she was quoted in a Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal article where she was saying, my long term
Speaker 1: goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate
Speaker 1: the sleep pathways without damaging our health. Yeah, that's uh,
Speaker 1: I mean, it would be really interesting to see that
Speaker 1: come to pass. Because again, like we've been telling you
Speaker 1: this whole time, I mean, I understand people who want
Speaker 1: to be able to do more stuff. I mean, I
Speaker 1: certainly feel by the time I go to bed at
Speaker 1: the end of the day that I didn't accomplish nearly
Speaker 1: as much as I had hoped, just because there's too
Speaker 1: much to do and not enough time to do it.
Speaker 1: In So, the idea of being able to shave off
Speaker 1: a few hours from this activity that I need to
Speaker 1: do in order for me not to you know, have
Speaker 1: my immune system breakdown or or suffer mental effects, to
Speaker 1: be able to control that a little bit more is
Speaker 1: it's certainly attractive. I love the idea of it, um,
Speaker 1: you know I, and I like the idea of going
Speaker 1: about it in a scientific manner that it uh is
Speaker 1: not likely to lead to me feeling worse than I
Speaker 1: did when I, you know, I started off. But uh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm curious, would you are you still of
Speaker 1: the mindset where man, I I wish I could get
Speaker 1: rid of some of the sleep. Oh, I mean, certainly,
Speaker 1: if if I could do it without negative health effects,
Speaker 1: If I if I could that that's the whole thing.
Speaker 1: I mean, a lot of these things are like, oh,
Speaker 1: here's a trick, but then we have a lot of
Speaker 1: doubts like oh, well, yes, you can use drugs to
Speaker 1: stay up, but they don't actually like improve your quality
Speaker 1: of life. They're going to make you sick and hurt you.
Speaker 1: You you can do this sleep schedule where you're awake
Speaker 1: for longer, but it seems to just be leading to
Speaker 1: sleep deprivation and people denying it um at least as
Speaker 1: far as we can tell. Maybe maybe somebody's getting by
Speaker 1: on polyphasic sleep, who knows. And then there are these
Speaker 1: short sleepers out there who a lot of people probably
Speaker 1: think they are, but they're not. They're just kind of
Speaker 1: like multitaskers. Yeah, because I think that they are supertaskers,
Speaker 1: but it turns out they're not. Yeah, all right, I'll
Speaker 1: tell you right now. I know I'm not a short
Speaker 1: sleeper and I know I'm not a super test here
Speaker 1: I have to agree on both counts. Though I wish
Speaker 1: I were a short sleeper. I mean, that would be
Speaker 1: great to have more time every day like that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I could see where Uh, you know, there's some things
Speaker 1: I would love to be able to do that I
Speaker 1: have put off because I just know that I don't
Speaker 1: have the time for it, so it would be nice
Speaker 1: to have a little extra time. Uh. And, in much
Speaker 1: more modest news of improving the future of sleep, there
Speaker 1: is this other idea of having something like a sleep
Speaker 1: cycle alarm. If you heard about this, Yeah, is this
Speaker 1: the thing where it kind of monitors how you're doing
Speaker 1: when you're sleeping and wakes you up at the opportune time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And and that actually appeals to me a lot, because
Speaker 1: I I hate getting up in the morning, you know,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, morning times can be great, but getting
Speaker 1: out of bed can be a real drag. Well a
Speaker 1: lot of times. The trouble there is that you are
Speaker 1: waking up your alarm clock is going off at a
Speaker 1: time when it is really not the best time in
Speaker 1: your sleeping cycle. It's completely it's completely external and disconnected
Speaker 1: from what's going on inside you. Yeah. Um, So the
Speaker 1: thinking behind an alarm clock like this is that it
Speaker 1: monitors your sleep cycles and that it can tell oh, okay,
Speaker 1: now is the best time to wake him up? Right,
Speaker 1: You're coming out of one of those those deeper sleep troughs.
Speaker 1: And then this would make it easier and less jarring.
Speaker 1: To get you up at this time, because, like I
Speaker 1: was saying earlier, like you know, when you've got those
Speaker 1: very slow patterns going on in your brain, it's harder
Speaker 1: to wake you up, and that would make you probably
Speaker 1: feel more disoriented and grouchy. I'm a morning person, but
Speaker 1: I hate alarms too. I mean, I would much prefer
Speaker 1: to have one that as long as it was getting
Speaker 1: me up at around the right time each day. I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm I don't need it to be exactly on the
Speaker 1: dot every single day in a row. I would love
Speaker 1: to a Yeah. And so obviously I don't know exactly
Speaker 1: how well this particular model works, but if it could
Speaker 1: work as well as they claim, then I mean, that's
Speaker 1: a cool invention. If I can get one that will
Speaker 1: just gently pat my head and say they're there, it's
Speaker 1: all going to be okay, and then you know, just
Speaker 1: kind of gently leads me down the stairs and cooks
Speaker 1: me breakfast. Mr. There you go. Yeah, get on that
Speaker 1: to turn these pages. Oh I'm waking up now paper. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go read. Uh yeah, No, that really does
Speaker 1: sound appealing to me. I like the idea of you know,
Speaker 1: because again we're not talking necessarily about um cutting down
Speaker 1: on the number of hours you're sleeping, but rather uh,
Speaker 1: you know, finding the best way to wake up so
Speaker 1: that you're you are the most effective you can be
Speaker 1: for as long as you're awake, because I mean, there's
Speaker 1: that time like if you if your alarm goes off
Speaker 1: when you are in deep sleep. You know, I'm sure
Speaker 1: most of us don't aren't as productive or you know,
Speaker 1: proactive or however you want to put it for those
Speaker 1: first few moments because we're battling the fact that we
Speaker 1: we want to still be asleep. So this would allow
Speaker 1: us to kind of transition more effectively into that wakeful state.
Speaker 1: So I think that would be great. Um. Anyway, that
Speaker 1: kind of wraps up our discussion about the future of sleep.
Speaker 1: I don't think we'll be genetically engineering it completely out
Speaker 1: of our systems anytime soon. Maybe when the Singularity comes
Speaker 1: and we become robots, we won't need to sleep anymore.
Speaker 1: But until that time, make sure you get your sleep.
Speaker 1: You know, if you if you can sneak in a nap,
Speaker 1: I highly recommend it. Yeah, if you can sleep in
Speaker 1: a nap at my work, that's weird because I don't
Speaker 1: think any of my coworkers listen to this podcast, and
Speaker 1: so would just be a strange person to sleep in
Speaker 1: the office. But hey, if you can pull it off,
Speaker 1: that's kind of exciting. Um, don't try and pull it off.
Speaker 1: People I don't I don't want to be responsible for
Speaker 1: can just be email I got fired because you I
Speaker 1: thought you're supposed to help me. I don't want to
Speaker 1: get the angry email from our site director saying you're
Speaker 1: gonna get fired because of the people. That's what I
Speaker 1: don't want. But what I do want is for our
Speaker 1: listeners to write in let's know what you think? You
Speaker 1: know what, what do you think about the future of
Speaker 1: sleep or what other topics would you like us to
Speaker 1: talk about. Let us know. You can send us an
Speaker 1: email or addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com,
Speaker 1: or drops a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.
Speaker 1: We're at all three of those with the handle f
Speaker 1: W thinking, and we'll talk to you again really soon,
Speaker 1: Pleasant Dreams. For more on this topic and the future
Speaker 1: of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you
Speaker 1: by Toyota. Let's go Places