Dr. Gina Poe: Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm ander huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optometry gy at stanford school of medicine. today.

My guest is dr. Geno poe. Doctor geno poe is a professor in the department of integrated biology and physiology at the university of california, los Angeles. Her laboratory and research focuses on the relationship between sleep and learning, in particular, how specific patterns of brain activity that are present during specific phases of sleep impact our ability to learn and remember specific types of information, for instance, procedure information, that is, how to perform specific cognitive or physical tasks, as well as encoding of emotional memories and discarding emotional memories. Indeed, her research focuses on how specific phases of sleep can act as its own form of traumatic erp y, discarding the emotional tones of memories.

In addition, her laboratory focuses on a specific phases of sleep impact, things like the release of growth hormone, growth hormone e of course placed critical roles in metabolism m and tissue repair, including brain tissue repair, and therefore has critical roles in vitali in longevity. Today, you will learn many things about the relationship between sleep learning, emotionality and growth or moon. One basic but very important take away that you're learn about today, which was news to me, is that it's not just the duration and depth of your sleep that matter, but actually getting to sleep at relatively the same time each night ensures that you get adequate growth horon release in the first hours of sleep.

In fact, if you require, let's say, eight hours of sleep per night, but you go to sleep two hours later than your typical bets on on any given night, you actually miss the window for growth home on release. That's right. Getting growth home on release and sleep, which is absolutely critical to our immediate and long term health, is not a prerequisite of getting sleep even if we are getting enough sleep.

As doctor paul explains their critical brain circuits and underground, that is hormone circuits that regulate not just the duration, in depth and quality and timing of sleep, but when we place our belt of sleep, that is, when we go to sleep each night, plus remind, is about a half hour, so strongly dictates whether that we will experience all the health promoting, including mind promoting, benefits of sleep. Today's episode covers that, and a lot more in substantial detail. You will learn for incense how to you sleep in order to optimize learning, as well as forgetting for those things that you would like to forget.

So during today's episode, dr. Geno poe shares critical information about not just neuroscience, but physiology and the hormonal systems of the brain body that strongly informed mental health, physical health and performance. So by the end of today's episode, you will be far more informed about sleep and how IT works, the different roles that performs.

And you'll have several new actionable steps that you can take in order to improve your mental health, physical health and performance. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford. IT is, however, part of my desired effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, i'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is element. Element is an electrode drink with everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of salt, magnesium and potassium, the so called electronic and no sugar.

Now salt magnesium um in paci um are critical to the function of all the cells in your body, in particular to the function of your nerve cells, also called neurons. In fact, in order for your neurons to function properly, all three electrical lights need to be present in the proper ratios. And we now know that even slight reductions in extra light concentrations or dehydration of the body can lead to deficits.

And cognitive and physical performance element contains a science back to electronic ratio of one thousand milligrams that one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of plastic um and sixty milligrams of magnesium. I typically drink element first thing in the morning when I wake up in order to hydrate my body and make sure I have enough. And while I do any kind of physical training, and after physical training as well, especially if i've been sweating a lot, if you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element that's element dot com slash huberman to claim a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that drink element, element t dot com slash huberman and now for my discussion with doctor geno poe. Doctor geno poe, welcome.

Thank you.

I've really been looking forward to this conversation because i'm familiar with your work, and I know that many people are going to be excited to learn about your work as IT relates to sleep, as IT relates to problem solving, creativity, addiction and craving 2 laps and a number of other important topics。 So to start things off, I would love for you to educate us a bit about this thing that we are all familiar with and yet very few of us understand, which is sleep.

And if you would, could you describe the various spaces of sleep that exist, what distinguished them, and perhaps frame this within the context of what would a perfect nigh sleep look like? Okay, how long would IT last, more or less? And what would the biology look like? What is a perfect night sleep?

Oh yeah, that's a great question, right? So sleep is really different from wakefulness and in fact can't be replaced by any state of wakeful ness that we've been able to come up with so far. Um our brain chemistry is completely different.

And in the different stages of sleep, which there are non rem and rim are the two major states of sleep in every animal we studied so far seems to have both of those states anyway, those two states are entirely different from one, another, two, and even within non them, there are three states. Stage one, which is what you slip into when you first falling asleep, it's dozing. There's kind of interesting rythm that goes on in the brain, is kind of a fast gamma rythm.

And then their stage two, which is a really cool state, we sort of used to ignore sly researchers because IT was a transient state between en wakeful, this in the deep. Stage three, slow asleep, which is the most impressively different, and then, and between that and red sleep. So stage two of talk a little bit more about and then the deep, slower sleep state, which is when big, slow way sweep through our brain.

And now we realized that IT cleaned our brain. One of the things that those big, slow waves do is cleaned our brain. And there's other really important things to restore us from a day awakened and then then sleep, which is the most popular, because that's where we have the most active dreams.

And when you wake up, someone out of them sleep, though, almost always report having dreams, something really bizarre. That's called a brand sleep rapid, I movement sleep. So those are the four states of sleep of human sleep.

And we cycle through them every ninety minutes or so when we go to sleep, say ten, ten, 10， eleven o'clock. Um our first rem sleep period comes about one hundred and five minutes after we fall asleep and last about twenty minutes. Actually IT comes about ninety five minutes and last ten or fifteen minutes and then we start over again and we have about five of those pronet for a perfect night's left, four or five something like that.

So a perfect night's lepe is seven a half, eight hours. There was a really great study that put people in a semi dark and droom with nothing but the bed for twelve hours every day for a month. And what people did initially is because, because we are a sleep deprived nation, is that they slept a lot more than usual, like ten or eleven hours of the twelve, and then they leveled off after a week or two, two, about eight hours and fifteen minutes asleep. So you actually can't overlean. I mean, they had nothing else to do but sleep, and they would round off to an average hours and fifteen minutes at night, and then they spend the rest of time toodle ling their sums, hummy tunes, daydreaming.

I wants to get back to the counter of a perfect night sleep. But i'm intreated by this idea that people can't oversleep. I'm often asked whether or not we can get too much sleep and whether not sleeping too log long, excuse me, can make us groggy the next day. Is there anything to that um and how does one determine how long they should sleep?

On average average ah well, that's interesting because different people need seem to need different amounts of sleep, but we don't really even know exactly what sleep is for. So what they need is you know kind of it's you, marky, marky. So we do know a lot of things that sleep do does now for us, but we don't know how long those things take.

So how long that we need to sleep is also just a big question work. But some people don't feel arrested until you've slept nine hours. Some people don't feel arrested after three or four and half.

But most people, if they consistently deprive themselves of sleep so that they're only sleeping four, four and half hours at night, build up a cognitive deficit that just build up over time. The more at nights you have with sleep deprivation, the more cognitive deficit you have. And so you need sleep again, sleep more to recover. Now the question you had about, can you over can .

you see you sleep to the point where it's too much? You know that we growing up when I was in high school, my girlfriend's dad had this belief that no one should sleep in past six A M. So he would, he wake all the, there were two children in the home, he would wake up the kids in that house, he had something against over sleep. And regardless of when people went, went to sleep. And I was thought there was an interesting mentality.

Yeah, I don't not terrible actually because what that will do is it'll put you make you sleep here the next night to get to bed on time, so it'll build up your homeostatic need if you wake up too early.

But um so I don't think you can oversleep, but people who sleep a lot like people who sleep over nine hours, probably indicative of some other problem because in fact, if you have a lot of different conditions, IT will cause you to sleep a lot more. Probably because what that does is interference with your efficient lead, the efficiency of your sleep. So if you find yourself sleeping consistently nine hours plus every night, then you might want to consult a doctor about maybe what else that might be IT could be cancer.

IT could be sleep at night. That is affects a lot of people. That could be that you're sleep is super inefficient because you're snowing a lot more than you know or you're waking up a lot more than you know every night so you might want to sleep. Steady just to see how you sleep is and then see what else might be causing you to sleep so much.

And that wouldn't be if somebody is sleeping nine or ten hours, you know, every once in a while. You mean if they're consistently sleeping for more more than nine hours.

feel like they needed in order to function cognitively the next day, if that might be that your sleep is just not efficient and you might look into why that that's the case.

interesting. Forgive me for the anecdo, but I can't resist.

Years ago I went to an and um he gave me these red pills of which I don't know what they contained but I took them because he said they would help with my sleep and I would fall asleep about thirty minutes after taking them and I would have incredibly, excuse me, vivid dreams and i'd wake up four, five hours after having gone to sleep feeling completely rested, something that never really experience ed testing on a consistent basis. I wanted do mash back on these pills. I still have no idea what was .

in them .

whatsoever exactly. Some people got that perhaps they had G H B gema draxy butera which is by the way, illegal drug that can kill you. It's not not something you wanted take um but anyway, if if ever someone can figure out what the red pills were all be very and this is not a red pill of the of the other short red pill. This is just the red sleep pills. interesting.

I could have even a policy al effect because policy is extremely strong.

So although I don't know there was really something to these red good so shout out to the active punster ous and and the eastern medicine um but to return this to this idea of the architecture of a perfect knight sleep so he said, um we fall asleep the first ninety minutes of sleep, red sleep, rapid di movement sleep will arrive at about ninety five minutes in.

Yeah, does that mean that the rest of that ninety minutes is consumed with slow wave sleep? Yeah, none. Rn sleep, okay.

And what about the sleep where we are lightly asleep? And we might have a dream that has us somehow thinking about movement, or that we jolt ourselves awake. That often happens .

early in the night. Yeah, yeah. That's the first stage, stage one. And stage to sleep. And stage to sleep is really cold because that has something called sleep spindles and k complexes.

And what sleep spines are, are a little of activity that tend to fifteen hurts in frequency. It's a conversation between the farmers and the cortex. The filament is the gateway of consciousness and the new cortex, you know, processes of our cognition.

And so it's these spines. They are called sleep spindles. And if you wake up out of that state, you will often report a dream, like a hallucination style dream.

IT won't be a long dream report, like you have out of room sleep. But there will be some destination state during while we are falling asleep. One of the reason we call IT falling asleep is because in stage one, in stage two, our muscles are relaxing.

And if there is part of our brain that's conscious of enough to out of recognize, that relaxation will feel like we're falling and we will jack awake. So we often that hallucination is called hippogriff allusion, inc. Will feel like we include some falling aspect but we will wake up out of the really .

interesting to me a long felt that sensation of almost dropping back into my head um so much so that if I elevate my feet just slightly and I took my head back just slightly and in order go to see I find I fall asleep much faster but he does feel everyone to fall like almost going to do a backward summer so actually really like the sensation and years because IT proceeds falling deeply .

as yeah that's really interesting and somebody has to do a study of elevated feet and yeah.

there's a little bit on body position and sleep in some of the wash out that will talk about. So really in the night, you these lighter stages of sleep, less rapid I movement sleep. What can we say about the dreams that occur during the, say, first and second, you know, ninety minute cycles of sleep, are they quite different than the patterns of sleep and dreaming that occur later in the night or morning?

Well, okay, that's an interest question. There is a lot of facts to IT. There is some evidence that the first four hours of sleep are very important for memory processing um and in fact, if you learn something new that day or have experienced a new century motoring experience, then your early sleep dreams will incorporate that experience much more than the later sleep dreams later.

As that memory gets consolidated from the early structures, which are the hippocampus deep in the temporal lobe, to the cortex in a distributed fashion, that memory seems to move from that hip campus to the cortex and also the dreams that incorporate that memory also moved later in the night. So um nobody knows why, but IT does. There was a great steady by sidharth riber o who studied the consolation of memories from the cortex, from the hip campus to the cortex in a rat across the period of full day sleep, because rat sleep in the daytime.

And he found that each subsequent rims sleep period moved that memory from the hip campus to the first, first area that projects to IT in the second area, and then the first area. And you can see the memory moving on through that throughout the sleep. cool. Yeah very .

cool after read that study. So there's a number of different hormones associated with the different stages of sleep. We know that melatonin is .

a horse that .

makes a sleepy um what about growth horon release? When does that occur during sleep?

So growth horon release happens all day long and all nighter. But the deep, slowly asleep that you get, the very first sleep cycle, am, is when you get a big bowlers of growth on on release and in men and women equally. And if you miss that first deep, slower, sly period, you also miss that big bullet of growth ARM on release.

And you might get ultimately, across the day just as much overall growth home on release. But android annotation gist will tell you that big boluses do different things than a little bit eked out over time. So that is when we know there's also a big push to synthesize proteins. So that's when the protein synthesis part that builds memories, for example, in our brain, happens in that first cycle of sleep. So you don't want to miss that, especially if you have learned something really big and needs needs more and optic space to encode IT.

How would somebody miss that first .

ninety minutes themself?

So let's say I Normally go to sleep at ten P M. Um and then from ten to eleven thirty would be this first phase of sleep. And that's when the growth, big boss of growth, roman, would be released.

Does that mean that if I go to sleep instead at eleven, thirty or midnight, that I missed that first phase of sleep? yes. Why is not the case that I get that first face of sleep just simply starting later?

IT is beautiful clock that we have in her body that knows when things should happen. And it's every sel in our body has a clock and all those clocks are Normally in chronimed and the rcra dian clock are synchronized and so ourselves are ready to respond to that groth home and release at a particular time. And if we miss IT, and it's a time in relation to the milestones also. So if you miss IT, yeah, you might get some growth home and release, but it's occuring at a time when that your clock is already moved to the next phase. And so it's just a clockwork yeah.

I don't think we can overstate the importance of what you just described. And to be honest, despite knowing a bit about the sleep research and circadian biology, this is the very first time that i've ever heard this, that if you Normally go to sleep at a particular time and growth romo nis released in that first face of sleep that you can't simply initiate you're sleep about later and expect to capture that first phase of sleep yeah that's incredible and I can important and um as many listeners are probably realizing also highly actionable. So what this means is that we should have fairly consistent bad times in addition to fairly consistent wake times.

Is that right? exactly. And in fact, one of the best markers of good news, logical health when we get older is consistent bedtimes.

Wow, okay um I don't want a backtrack but I did write down something that I think is important for me to resolve um or for you to resolve. So i'm going to ask this people that sleep nine hours or more perhaps that reflected an issue at some underlying issue perhaps is being a teenager or an adolescent and undergoing a stage of of development where there's a lot of bodily and brain growth.

And exception to that, because I don't recall sleeping a tone when I was a teenager at a ton of energy. But I know if you teenagers and they sleep a lot, yeah, they'll just sleep and sleep and sleep and steep. Should we let them sleep and sleep and sleep? okay. So that's one .

exception about abies OK. When you're developing something in your brain or best of your body, you really need sleep to help organize that. I mean, sleep is doing really hard work and organizing our brains and and making IT develop, right? And if we deprive themselves of sleep, we will actually also, just like, like, like I said, we have a daily clock. We also have a developmental clock, and we can miss a developmental window if we don't let our so sleep extra like we need to.

What other things inhibit growth, orman release or other components of the first stage of sleep? In other words, if I go to sleep religiously every night at ten pm, are there things that I perhaps do in the proceeding hours of the proceeding day, like in just caffeine or alcohol, that can make that first stage of sleep less effective, even if i'm going to sleep at the same time? Alcoa finally .

will do that, because alcohol is a rem sleep supply and even suppresses some of that stage to transition to rem with those sleep spines and those sleep spindles. We didn't talk about their function yet, but they're really important for moving memories to our cortex.

It's a unique time when our hip campus, the sort of like the RAM of our brains, writes IT to a hard disk and which is the cortex and there are is a unique time when they're connected. So if you don't want to miss that, you don't want to miss them sleep. When is also in part of a consolidation process and um scheme of changing process and alcohol in there. You know before we go to sleep, we'll do that until we've metabolize alcohol and put IT out of our bodies. IT will affect our sleep badly.

so probably fair to say no interest of alcohol within the four to six hours proceeding sleep, given the half life all or at all would be Better. But I know some people refuse to go that way.

Maybe a little bit is OK. I don't know what those responses, but there are studies out there you can look at at. great.

So we're still in the first stage of sleep, and I apologized for slowing us down. But IT sounds like it's an incredibly important first phase of sleep. What about the second and third ninety minute blocks of sleep? Is there are anything that makes those unique? What is their signature um besides the fact that they come second and third in the night.

there's more and more and sleep the later the night we get. There is also a change in hormones. You know the growth hormones and um melatonin levels are starting to decline, but other humans are picking up.

So IT is a really different stage that you also don't want to should change your self and and I think that's the stage many studies are showing that those are the times and sleep when the most creativity can happen. That's when our dreams can incorporate and put together all the new things together into a new new way. And um and our schema are built during that time. So um yeah we can change our mind's best during those phases of sleep.

Could you elaborate a little bit more on schema? And no one I don't think anyone on this podcasts ever discussed schema and a little bit familiar with schema from my courses on psychology, but it's been a while. So I think you just .

a refresh mine and everyone .

and it's still a concept .

me right I think of scheme as um like we have a schema of Christmas, right? We have all kinds of ideas that we saw together and how Christmas and holiday season in the northern hemisphere it's cold. We have sanda class and rain deer and jing bells and even things that are false, that but we Normally associate with Christmas present family gathering, when IT is all of this stuff is sound together until one, there's a thread linking them all.

And we can just give ourselves a list of words and and none of them contain the word Christmas and then ask people later um you know give another list of words and include the word Christmas in the l sao. Yeah that word was there because in their minds they brought up that word Christmas because it's part of that whole scheme. So that's what it's sort of a related a lot of related concepts I guess think about .

sort like the best top of my computer would scare some people, but it's just a ton of folders, but each of the folder named means something very clear and specific to me. And inside of those folders are collections of things that make sense in terms .

of how they're about. Think of and when you're in rem sleep in the later parts of the night and that transition of rem, that's when your computer of your brain is opening holders and comparing documents, seeing if that is there anything the same. These two documents look very much the same, but there's a little bit of difference.

And I can you can link those consecutive ally so that that's probably one of the origins of creativity, finding things that are related maybe just linked a little bit, and you can find that link and strengthen IT if IT make sure scheme interesting. different. Yeah.

very interesting. And many people, including myself, tend to wake up maybe once during the midnight to use the restaurant room. I've tried to drink less fluid before going to sleep. I i've heard also that um the impulse to urinate, forgive the topic, but the lad people deal with this so the impulse to urinate is also dictate by how quickly you drink fluid, not just the total volume. So I i've switched to sipping fluids more slowly for my last beverage of the day, which seems to help.

But the point here is that I think a lot of people wake up once the midnight, often times you use the restaurant room, but often times just around three A M, and might be up for a few minutes, hopefully not on their phone, or viewing any bright light, which can cause more wakeful this, but then go back to sleep. Is there any known detriment to the middle of the night waking? Or should we consider a Normal feature for some people's sleep architect?

I think we shouldn't worry about IT. Actually, I think, you know, sleep is really incredibly well, homeless, esthetically regulated. And so really don't worry about how much you're sleeping as long as you're not intentionally depriving yourself of sleep by doing something really rewarding and exciting because even that is stressful, hear about and deprives you a lot of things we're talking about. So don't worry about IT. It's absolutely Normal to wake up at least once in the end of the night to go to the bathroom and as long as you can get back to sleep in a reason, amount of time, or even if IT takes you an hour, don't worry about IT, as long as you have a life style that allows you to then make up that sleep either the next morning or the next night going to get a little earlier so I understand tly.

there's a little bit of a simec to sleep that catching that first phase of sleep. It's like either get IT or you don't and you have to get IT by going to sleep yeah essentially the same time yeah yeah yes. But then if I wake up the mill the night and go back to sleep, I can not catch up, but I can gather all the sleep that I would have gotten had I just sleep the all way through the night.

right? Yeah, yes. yeah. And and we don't know actually the answer to whether not the left in the middle that early sleep in the late sleep is in fact different for another reason, and whether depriving yourself of sleep from a one, a two thirty in the morning is bad in a different way, we don't know.

Well, I suppose I am the experiment in that case because I do tend to wake up once per night, and i've come to recognized IT as part of my Normal sleep architecture. I don't obsess over IT. I do notice that when I go back to sleep, especially toward morning, that my sleep is incredibly deep.

My dreams are incredibly vivid. I don't always remember them. But what is unique, perhaps, about the architecture of dreams and sleep in the, what, say, the last third of the night or the second half of the night.

right? Yeah, the second half the night you have longer and sleep periods, and those are considered the deepest sleep, even though slow waives sleep big. Slow wave is considered deep. IT is deep. Yeah, they call slow wave sleep.

deep sleep and rem sleep rapid. I mean, but now you're telling me that rem sleeve is actually the deeper sleep. Okay, there needs to be a new nominal creature. Sleep researchers .

got deeper.

No.

the reason why you cause slowly sleep, deep sleep is because it's difficult to arise people out of that state. And when you do around them out of that state, there is most often confused and just want to go back into sleep and can go back pretty easily. If you arouse someone out of from sleep, there are more likely to report something that was really kind of almost like wait for this and do was so vivid. But in fact, if you give someone a non threatening kind of stimulation, like somebody dropping keys, or a pink or some like that, instead of waking, that same volume will wake someone up out of non rent sleep, but out of them sleep, and instead linked in the amount of time, or make IT even more dense, more rapid I movements more dense and often people will incorporate that sound into .

their dreams so the body and brain are somehow conscious of the um of the sound and i've heard also smells can even make IT into our our dreams in rem sleep but that we IT doesn't around us .

IT doesn't arse us as often yeah and maybe one of the reasons why RAM sleep is deeper is, especially in adults and older people, that deep, slow way sleep goes away. So it's not as deep, it's not as big. The slow waves aren't as large, which is probably problematic, but we are not sure.

And so then rem sleep becomes the deepest stage actually in children. It's kind of a tasted because they is really hard to wake them up out of that deep, slow way sleep in. In fact, fire alarms don't wake them up, even really loud fire alarms out of that state of sleep. So that's why they are trying to change fire alarms so that instead of something that the kids don't associate with, anything like the what I know they don't associate and IT says their name, or something else that may be less loud, but more silent to them, and we make them up. Now, having Carried .

sleeping children in from the car, I don't know that I want children start waking up from sleep, because that's one of the best things when we get home. And the kids are a sleep in the backseat, even literally throw them over your shoulder gently, of course, and put them asleep ment. And if they are completely out, completely out, IT is wonderful.

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In addition, athletic Greens contains a number of adaptations, vitamin minerals, that make sure that all of my foundational nutritional needs are met and IT tastes great. If you'd like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dot com slash huberman and theyll give you five free travel packs that make IT really easy to mix up athletic Greens while you're on the road, in the car, on the plane, at sea, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two。 Again, that's athletic Green dot comm slash humans to get the five travel packs and the year supply of vitamin d three k two. So this enhanced to volume or or proportion of rapid I move sleep in the second half of the night relates to more elaborate dreams of we are paralized during rams, correct? Yes.

Normal way to paralyzed. And that's really good because that's the time when we're actively dreaming storyline dreams and we could. Heard ourselves, we are actually really cut off from the outside world in terms of no responding to, say, this table or a window or a door.

And so different from sleep walking, which is out of slow sleep and out of slowly sleep, that sleep walking is mixture between sleep and wake from this. So you actually will respond to the door. You can cook a full meal, drive your car while you're in deep, slow asleep. It's scary because you never know what you're going to do. You don't have volta a voluntary control over no conscious control of IT, but you can actually safely navigate some situations in sleep walking and actually have a conversation. Although you may not make much sense when you're sleep talking in rent sleep, you're not processing the outside world and instead um when you're acting out your dreams, you could be doing things like walking through a plate class window or falling off of you know down the stairs, things like that so you really want your muscles to be inactivated during rent sleep otherwise you will act out those dreams and really hurt yourself or your bed partner.

What about sleep talking? We're talking in sleep. I don't know how many relationships have been saved by sleep talking, but i'm guessing a few have been destroyed and i'm guessing that i'm talking and sleep could have meaning or perhaps has no meaning just as dreams could have meaning or no meaning as we .

recall them yeah do not take sleep talking seriously. What people say IT doesn't necessarily reflect truth. So it's not like you're being more toothful when you're sleep talking.

you just saved a number .

of relationships.

I'm not directing this at anyone in particular White, I guarantee you just did noted um so as people start to approach morning or the time when they Normally would wake up, i've heard that it's important to, if possible, complete one of these nine, nine cycles prior to waking up that is if you set your alarm for half way through one of these ninety minute cycles that come late in the night of sleep, that IT can lead to um rather groggy patterns of waking. Um so i'll just ask you directly, do you use a alarm cause I do not thankful .

i'm in a mind of work that doesn't require me, norm to do anything. I don't need particular time. I do IT when I do IT unless have to catch a plane. And then I always set my alarm just in place.

Well, as a fellow academic, I can tell you there are plenty of punishing features about being an academic scientists that that offset the fact you don't have to use a alarm. But IT is nice that you can often set your own schedule. yeah. So would you recommend that, if possible, that people not .

use in a alarm clock? Yeah, absolutely. If you can just listen to your body and wake up when you need to wake up, that would be great.

But one of the reasons why we have such a guiness skilled sleep in russia, when we wake up out of the wrong state, which is deep, slow way sleep, is because I like in IT to like a washing machine cycle, this ninety minute cycles, like a washing machine cycle. And and the first part is to add water, right? And then your clothes are soaking wet.

You don't want to open the washing machine and try and function, put them on and wear them around while we're soaking wet and full of soap. So you have to wait until the cycle is through before you can. Well, actually, let's put in the dryer too before you want to wear them.

So yeah, you can function IT just takes a little while for those clothes, that brain to dry out so you can actually function well um but it's Better to wait through the whole cycle is complete. And so that's why you want to set that ninety minute alarm, Clark. And again, that's around ninety minutes because the first stage of sleep, the first cycle of sleep is out that actually a little longer, more like a hundred and five hundred and ten minutes.

But then the second ones and thirty ones, they get sort of shorter and shorter is the night goes on. And in the last few cycles, you're just doing then and to and sleep cycle, which takes less time. And if you wake up out of red sleep, that usually no problem cognitively, you're good to go.

Are you a fan of of sleep .

tracking ers? sure. Yeah.

yeah.

Do you on I have one on. I don't take I don't I don't um live my life by them because they are the best ones right now. About seventy percent effective bit staging your sleep so seventy percent it's OK it's okay. But take IT with a grain of salt is what i'm yeah i've tried .

various ones and I compare the matta space one to actually work on my ankle and that my rist and I do find IT informative. But A A colleague minit stanford ally chrome, who works on mindset and belief effects, um talked me about a study they did where people often will buy us their sense of daytime wakefulness based on their sleeping score more than their subjective score yeah in other words, if they were told they ve got a poor nights sleeve, even if they ve got a great night sleep in the and this was, of course, measured in the sleep loves, they they're able to compare. People report feeling more draggy.

And the opposite is also true that if IT says one hundred percent or ninety percent on your sleeping ore than people, I feel great though they might not have slept well. So this speaks to the, I don't want a placable effect, but the sort belief effects that are woven in with a score. So IT seems to me that combining subjective and objective .

data is probable. And I do believe you should trust your own physiology and the way that your body is telling you to feel. Because, in fact, IT used to be that people with insomnia weren't, were often not believed, because you put them in a sleep lab and they look like they stopped great, and you wake them up in the morning and they save.

I didn't sleep very well at all. And that's because probably we we just came out with a paper that shows that sub cortical structures can be in a completely different sleep state than cortical structures, as which is what we measure in the sleeping lab, what the cortex is doing. So IT might be that people who say, I did not sleep all night long, even though the cortex of saying, oh no, you had great sleep, was because there monitoring their subcritical um hypothenuse, hippocampus um salamis other other structures that the sleep lab just can't access unless you have debt selectors in which nobody really wants.

Great because that requires holes in the goal and wires ow. So does that mean that the last fifty plus years of sleep science is potentially flawed in some way because they're only recording from? I guess this would be the energy would be like recording from the surface of the ocean as opposed to the depth of the ocean.

right, and trying to ascertain the life moving down deep in the depth.

Raise yourself, ells h colleagues at stanford sleep lab and elsewhere. But please just tell us, because I think scientists want to know the truth yeah I mean.

it's not for nothing that you want to know what the cortex is doing. I mean, the core tex is really important for a lot of things, but IT doesn't necessarily tell you what a lot of other really important parts of the brain are doing in terms of sleep. And um but there is hope because in fact, that would be great.

I think that's possible from the paper. If you look at IT, it's in P S. This year that you could detect subtle changes in the coral E E G that might be able to tell you what the are subcritical structures are doing. Things like the absolute power of in that sleep spinal band, that sigma band, would change if the hip pop campus is in red sleep, and the cortex and that sleep spinoff state and advice, very so. So there is some hope um that we can gain from people with debt, the electrodes or animals with debt electrics, that we can backwards machine learn what the cortex might be able to tell us about subcritical structures from the critical E G. So interesting.

this is going to be A A stimulus stay tune as is going be a stimulus for development of new technology, which is always going to assist in scientific discovery. Um there's one more thing I want to ask about the architecture of the nights sleep in terms of early part of the night. Earlier you mention the washout of debris and um the so called glen add system I think is what you're referred to.

Could you tell a little bit more about the wash out that occurs in the brain during sleep, what what that is and what roles it's got to serve? And perhaps if there are any ways to ensure that IT happens? Or do you ensure that IT doesn't happen? Obviously.

we want this to happen. Yeah yeah um alright, great question. We talked about the cryan Clark and how certain things happen at certain times.

While one of the things that happens when we're wake and talking to each other is that there's a lot of plasticity. There's something that i'm learning from you today and you're learning from me. And that changes our synapses and IT changes the way our proteins are going to be folded and and changed during sleep.

Um IT unfolds. This process actually uses a lot of atp, the power um structure, the fuel of the rain. And IT unfolds also proteins while we're doing this, what we're using them. And so during that first part of the night, and when we first while asleep in the first twenty minutes or so, we're building that a deny back into A T P. And that's probably why paranoia are called paranoid, because are actually rebuilding the power.

And then we're also cleaning out through the deep, slow waves of slave sleep, cleaning out all those this folded proteins, unfolded proteins and other things that get broken down and you know, need to be rebuilt when we're asleep because of that used during wakeful ness. So i'd like in that too, you know, having a big party during wakefulness, and you need all those party goals to leave in order to do the cleanup. And so what I think the mechanism is, and this is still something to be tested, is actually slow waves themselves, which is bad news for us as we get older in the slow waves, get smaller and slow sleep goes away.

So um so what happens when a neuron is firing is that IT expands, the membership expands a little bit because it's more translucent. That's we know one of the rays. We know that neurons expand when the fire.

And so every action potential, the membrane expands S A little bit as sodium brings water into the cell. Um and then when they're silent, they contract. And so in doing slow waves, the cool thing is that the reason why you can measure them is that all the around at the same time.

Not all of them, but a good portion of them are firing at the same time and silent at the same time. And so you think about that as contracting and expanding all at the same time. It's kind of like a build pump of the brain so that I can pump out glia are also really important for this in terms of cleaning up debris and transfering IT to where IT needs to go. So so I think of IT actually as a build pump cleaning out our brain. interesting.

I've heard about the glimpse atic system the father wash out. I've never thought about the mechanical aspects of IT before. I always thought that for some reason that now it's obviously me there had to be something mechanical. But only now that you've educate me about this, I thought that for some reason the the several special flu just starts washing through. But here you're talking about literally an expansion and the contraction of the neurons in unison and pushing the fluid through yeah cleaning out any mission ded proteins or debris that might occur yeah on the basis of these metabolic ways and the consequence of that is to to what to leave the brain in a state of a more pristine action for for the next day yeah right yeah. You think of IT .

again like a party. And if you don't clean up after that party, you try and to hold another one the next day it's going to get more clogging. Its people have a hard i'm moving around and enjoying themselves and um if that builds up day after day, you know it's gonna cognition an that would be the party goers moving around becomes card yeah and so this build .

pump that you describe as associated with the big slow waves of of um deep well of slow waves sleeve yeah so this is going to call r more less than the first third of the night. Right right. And are there things that inhibit this process? And are there things that facilitate this process?

Yeah I so well one thing to inhibit its not to get IT but right and here too sorry .

into but and is this similar to the case with growth hormone where if you go to sleep later than you would Normally, you miss the washout ah you it's not you don't delay, you miss you miss the so .

if you go to sleep at one or two in the morning, your sleep is still going to be dominated by and two and then sleep not by slowly sleep. So you need to you need to get that first bit sleep.

Would a covet that be if somebody Normally goes to sleep at one or two A M and wakes up at ten A M, if that's their Normal sleep cycle? Yeah um that should .

be okay IT should be OK. Um you would probably want to do somebody would want to do a sleep study with people who do that Normally and see if also the military and releases later in the quoter castone rise that happens Normally in the morning, also happens later. So if everything shifted good okay .

yeah there there are few studies have come across that really do argue for the fact that waking up so cus sunrise that doesn't mean at sunrise but within an hour two maybe three hours of sunrise and going to sleep within four hours after sunset or so ah is actually Better for the health of all human beings. Then is being a night and the night all. There's almost like a night pi out there, especially on social media. They get very upset when you say that you should see morning sunlight, that after ten am you kind of miss the boat and they get very upset because I think there are about twenty thirty percent of people perhaps who um who really feel like they function Better staying up late and waking up late and they function much less well waking up early, going to bed early. But the data on health metric suggest that sorry night was yes, that they are wrong.

yeah. Sorry me.

because I an apology. I'm not a really early morning person. I'm typical if I wake up naturally around six thirty, somewhere between six thirty and seven thirty, go to sleep somewhere between ten and eleven.

Pm, yeah, these are averages. But I do notice that when I forced myself to get up earlier and go to sleep a little earlier, that my mood and alertness and just overall productivity is much higher. And there could be other variables there too.

And night, I love staying up late at night, doing know, writing grants, writing paper is watching whatever IT is. I love you, but I like you and like every human being on earth that do Better if I go to Better earlier and wake up earlier. So one good thing for a night dose is to have a child because they will wake up their circadian rhythms.

ms. Are so strong, they will wake up. And even if you deprive them of sleep in the first half of the night, they will still wake up like clock work because they are circling.

Rythm are so strong at six A M. And so what you you haven't done anything good for your kid. You haven't moved their cycle to later and be more in line with yours. In fact, you just sleep deprive them and made them miss the window and made them crankie the next day and made your life more miserable. So go to bed soon after your kids go to bed and wake up with them.

That's the way to do IT the child alarm block children, yes, I got a dog, a puppy, and then I became a dog specifically. Well, for many reasons, but one reason was I wanted to be one of those early morning, five thirty A M every morning, but I ended up getting a bulldog that would literally sleep sixteen hours if he got a nuclear bomb could go off and he wouldn't ke up.

But what I started to learn was that bulldogs actually a sleep happening there. As far as I know that the only species that has a genetically um essentially an in read um sleep effect ah and so I actually don't encourage people to get bulldogs because it's kind of a cruel breed. They suffer a lot in that body that they're orn into anyway. Um a dog can accomplish some some of this, but get that get the a the breed of dog that is going to wake up early but you .

know interestingly, all all predatory animals like dogs and cats and lions and s um well, more dogs, cats and lions, then as wills can sleep, you know sixteen hours a day, fair our predatory they can .

say I used to, sadly also used to work on fair is publish a number of papers. Delightful animals .

yeah and great because you can study development. It's really cool because they're born very authorial like we are with brains that are not very well developed. And cy, you can see what happens to development and how important these different phases of development really are. But yes, um yeah maybe we're not as predators as much predators as we think because in fact we are sleep is somewhere between the prey and the predators um in terms of the amount of sleep that we usually need tonight but those predators can sleep sixteen hours, napping all day long and and and more capacity lar perhaps like their .

prayer m so and yeah yeah .

down dusk active um yeah but anyway yes uh children and dogs actually in if there is a poll done by the national sleep foundation to see what the number one thing is that wakes people up at night and number two is going to the bathroom. Number three is children because um you know when your children are Young but that only last a few years if they will you up um when their babies but the number one things pets and pets needed to go out or cats wanting to curl up with you or whatever IT is pet needs will wake you up more in the middle of night than anything else.

Another reason to not get an afternoon pet people who get hamsters pretty quickly realized that they are not internal. They want to run on the wheel around.

in the living room, away from where you sleep.

I vote fish tank, folks, fresh water fish tank, that all sorts of reasons to not get a aware, think fresh water fish tank or a child. I appreciate that vote and appreciate you mentioning ferrets and by the way, folks, they are cardinals they are not rodents and they are they have very elaborate brain structures and they're very smart um in the same families and honeybunch ers and the other muslims and well I know I shouldn't geek out too much on on the mustards else i'll take the the remainder of all our time i'd love for you to tell us about rem sleep in the sleep later in the night as IT relates to dreams and emotionality and this is probably on the appropriate time for you to introduce us to this incredible structure in the brain which is the locus seul us, a difficult on structure to spell, but a beautiful, a beautifully named structure. Um I find local released to be just fascinating and I know I you know a small fraction of what he does and i'm hoping you're going to educate me and in our audience about more about what he does and hopefully tell us a little bit about its relationship to epinephrine. K A A drennen.

Yeah, i'm so glad you break this up because I can totally geek out on the localities. Please do spot or place and list mean blue so you could just count the blue spot um that's the easiest every um animal with a brain has a blue spot and yeah and I mean every anyone with a brain because of course um there are animals with nervous systems that are not centralized like jellyfish, but anyway are digressing there.

So the local a realists filled with neurons that have in them european after which is the brains version of epiphone or a drennen, is also called na drennen. And what IT does is IT just like a journey in in the rest of our bodies that helps premise to respond to our environment. So when locus less neons fire and fire in a burst, we can switch our attention um and they will fire in a burst if, for example, of loud noise happens in the middle of you're concentrating on something so you can IT helps fires and IT helps you switch your attention to that thing and then learn quickly from IT.

So it's really important in a stress response IT helps us do quick one trial learning and in an attack ic activity during the day when you're just you know doing you Normal going about your Normal concentration kind of active activities is really good for sustained attention. Um IT IT works with a colony gic system of our basel for brain, which is really important for learning a memory also to help us learn about things and put things together. Um but just tonic level levels are signature of wakeful ness and alertness.

So too much is panic with the australian activity, a burst is switching attention and the tonic levels are sustained constant attention. And then when we go to sleep, the legal alist slows and come goes from about on average two hurts to about one hurts, one cycle per second tone nics um and then when we go into and sleep at the only time when IT shots off completely and appears that that complete silence is really, really important for a number of things. And the main thing that I think it's important for is the ability to errors and break down synapse ses that are no longer working for us.

So then code things that are false now, or they are encoding things that we learned in the novelty encoding pathway in of our of our brain that have now been consolidated, other pathways. And so we need to now erase them from the novelty encoding pathway. And that is really, really important for being able to continue to learn um things all of our lives. So like erasing that RAM um or .

that we call this disks .

that he is the you Carry around all day long. And then during sleep you write that down drive to the cortex to the long term memory structures, and you need to refresh that them drive. And that's what happens during red sleep when the locals realises off.

Because whenever it's on and neutrino is there, IT helps us to put things together. IT helps us to learn and strengthened synapses. But IT doesn't not allow us to actually weak synapses that are also a really important part for life, important part of life, lung learning. Um yeah so much more I could say about .

that yeah look is really a sounds fascinating so it's connected to the basel for brain call energy c system the news in locus from not mistaken release no an american perhaps eef rent as well.

Um well now the brains version of appendant isn't nor up and if the everything that also the precursor ch north american is depine. And so the source of doped in the hip campus seems to be the local areas and it's still a mystery, is under what conditions the locus also releases dopamine. But it's really important when we're learning something new to also release dopamine or to at least activate the dopa energy c receptors in our hip campus.

So yeah so dope mean in orban afan. Um and then there's also um gallon in which is important for releasing and restore sed and that helps also without rapid learning. Um IT works in concert with north and eren and in doing what he needs to do to strengthen synapses is so that we learn really quickly.

I I love um that there are multiple molecules involved because that signals us to a principal, which is that even if people can't remember all all the names, that rarely in biology is something handled by just one molecular pathway that redone and see is the rule yeah because signaling attention to specific events is so important so i'm going to use that is just so story always say I wasn't consulted that the design face but IT makes sense to me as to why redundantly would exist .

in the system and in fact, when we form hypothesis about the brain, we're always wrong. And the reason why we're always wrong is because it's more complicated than we would like to think. And because in our brains, when we're forming hypotheses, it's we fail to account for all of the factors that are involved, the the neuropace tides, the neurotransmitters, the physical structure of syntaxes.

And so when I was going through grad school thirty five years ago, uh, we the dog mo is that every neuron contains one newer transmitter or and releases one newer transmitter. R and you had excited tory or transmitters and inhibitory neurotransmitter tors and new modulator newer transplant ors. But that is complicated. That and then we have started talking about neuropathic and people said, oh no, please don't don't complicate IT. And then we started talking about how neurons contained both neuro peptides .

and neurotransmitters.

and maybe more than one neuro trans hormones. Ord, it's just so complicated, got admitted. That's why IT works, right? And every time the brain teaches us something new about itself that we didn't have propose, we say all, of course, that wouldn't work if the way I have opposite zed IT for IT know we actually need redundant. We need all of these systems to work .

together yeah it's daunting sometimes but IT also ensures many, many careers and science and neuroscience in particular so um note that aspiring scientists, there's plenty of room for discovery .

do you to talk about .

so i've love for you to talk about this you what role this lack of north p and never released during rapid eye movement sly yeah is thought to achieve and maybe could also review some of your work describing conditions under which now up and F N invades.

Yeah we sleep .

rapid eye movement, sleep in other patterns of sleep and how that can be determined.

Yeah, so a lot of this epithetic al, that based on a lot of good evidence that we're sowing together into a schema from which these hypotheses comes on, a model scheme from which this hypothesis come back, one thing that happens to people with posttraumatic stress disorder is that there is a lot of evidence that the local realist doesn't stop firing in red sleep.

So whether their levels of north of end might be similar to the people without ptsd during the day and even during the first part of the night, during the three hours of the morning. And when you measure your panic on levels from meta lights in the bladder of the six three respite of fluid, you see that people with ptsd, it's during the we hours of the morning when you have the most sleep, that they have their european f levels differentiate most from those that don't have P T, S D. And so that's evidence that the local social is not shutting down during RAM sleep like IT should other evidence in his heart rate variability, when our logo realist is firing.

Um our heart rates that are generally a little higher and they don't vary as much as they do when the localities is not firing. So during slow of sleep, Normally we have this big juicy variability and hearts rate with every breath in and breathe out, because our nerve c levels, our north and afro levels, are lower during room sleep that goes away entirely in our her rate is, is, is dominated by paris, sympathetic rather than sympathetic activity. And also what our brain is driving.

And what are dreaming about, for example, of for a dreaming we're running. Our heart rates will go up, but europe and different levels still should be low or off. So um people with P T S D that north general ics were studying these and rats too is IT true that our local sales doesn't shut off when we have posture matic stress disorder.

And the preliminary evidence is, yes, it's true that IT doesn't shut off. So what that would do is um nor of an american would act at synapses is to prevent that weakening that you really need, for example, of novelty and putting structures and IT keeps memories in that novelty in coding structure, even once it's consolidated to the rest of the brain. So in the hippocampus, which is important for remembering things throughout our lives and and is that some drive um we we need IT to be your race so that we can learn new things once it's been consolidated to the the hard drive of our cortex.

And so if we're not able to do that, we fill up that RAM um really quickly or that some dive really quickly, we are not able to learn new thing. So for example, after a trauma, I thought all the luxurious responding and stressful situations, that's great. It's very adaptive. But then you need IT to stop. Once you've learned what you need to learn from IT and you wanna go to to sleep, you need the look as for us to calm down.

And during rem sleep, you wanted to start, because then when you've consolidate that traumatic memory of the cortex, you need to erase IT from the novelty and coding structures, for example, in the hippo campus, so that then when you're in the context of safety, you can learn those new things. There is new context, and and stop responding to the same stimuli as though you're in that original situation. So you're not able to race that throw drive. You will always feel like that trauma happened that same day, like earlier that same day and respond as you would to an early a recent trauma which is with beating hard and all of that um so even memories that are years passed. If you are never able to downscale that novelty in coding structure and you approach that from that traumatic memory, IT will stay fresh and new and then become maladaptive.

What approaches are you aware of that can turn down the output of loss relist during these phases of sleep? And for that matter, what things can cause ramping up of luxurious during this phase of sleep? We've had a couple podcast episode and solo episodes and with guests talking about trauma, we had doctor paul ki who's a stanford a train harvard train psychiatry.

You talked a lot about trauma, rode an excEllent book on trauma and um certainly sleep was emphasized as as a key thing like get enough sleep. But here you're saying even if somebody with tramp gets enough sleep, if local as as hyperactive during sleep, those traumas are going to persist. And most of the trauma treatment that i'm aware of, our everything ranging from cogan, behavioral therapy, talk therapy, drug therapy, E M D R, nosis. Now there's a lot of interest in attention on clinical studies on expLoring psychiatrically h hyda suicide n. And so that's a vast landscape, one of which, as far as I know, is really focused on sleep specifically.

No, they're not and they should be because actually psychic alics is a sleep like state, A M sleep like state, although of course there are some major differences. So yeah, so much to talk about here. So and depression um are often nord logic or certain gic reuptake inhibit.

So they leave european american actually out there in the synapses. And what that does is that inhibits red sleep. And if you are able to get RAM sleep, IT would probably be red sleep with some more general c activity. So actually, I think anyway, I am not a physician that anty depression are counter indicated. You don't want to take them if you've experienced ed a trauma and during experience from ptsd because of anything, it's going to make IT worse or at least prevent the type of adaptive reflect that you really need in order to resolve those emotions and move on. Is that statement .

specific to enter the presence that ticket an energy c pathway? So the one that comes to mind is on a can never pronounce a group of piron, which is I think bRandy is well beautie. It's a dopo gic and naderi c agonist. That's the net effect as opposed to the project s all after Ariely, which are access arise?

Yes, yes, but S S S themselves also a problem matter of because we didn't talk about IT yet, but the dorso raf fe nucleus, which produces sera in which specific aton in specific sera on and reacted, inhibited. Block from being react taken leaves too much saton's out there. And what serota also is another energies and another nor a transmitter that's down regulated during and sleep, that's specifically off during and sleep.

And what serret an does is that waits all of our cognition to being able to recognize novelty again. So IT sort of weights um our brain away from a sense of familial and tord novelty. And IT might be one reason why it's an effective and to depression because IT makes the world feel fresh, new again right um but you when you have a too much, you're holding a novel traumatic memory in your novelty encoding structure too strongly already.

You don't want to again wait things toward novelty. You need that absence of satan and also to help you get that sense of familiarity and to start raising the novelty encoding structures. So you need both to be absent.

It's really interesting um we hear a lot about saturn and and it's not often discuss in terms of its features related to novelty enough I think um and what you just described accuse me to something that uh doctor paul ti and others have have said in terms of trauma here and periphery of my apologies to them for not getting this exactly right that that an effective treatment for trauma does not erase the traumatic memory but IT causes a transition of what once was disturbing and invasive and maladaptive to eventually just become kind of a boring old story that has kind of a fussy texture to IT as opposed to this kind of sharp high friction texture that invades, are thinking and obviously are sleeping states as well.

So um again and I appreciate the decca imer, the copy ots around you know not being a clinician sector, but I do think that there's a lot of interest now and whether or not antidepressants are effective for trauma or not. And I think these these aspects of neuromodulation as they relate to, let's call IT erasing traumas, are changing the emotional load of traumas during sleep is something important to take note. We also have a lot of clinicians that listen to this podcast, so they should also take note. Yeah um please. So if I want to reduce the amount of north pan american released from los ulia during rapid move and sleep, to eliminate the troubled ling or baby in traumatic memories, yeah, and allow late stages of sleep each tonight to have their maximum positive effect, is there anything that I can do besides avoiding avoiding traumas, certain logic or magic compound.

well, I would also avoid anything just prior to going to sleep that might excite those systems. So a lot of novelty um a lot of you know exciting um stress and ducks video games um try and enter sleep with as much calm as you can. So maybe deep breathing exercises that a beautiful way to calm your sympathetic fighter fight system is deep breathing.

And we haven't been able to test this with rats because we can ask them to do a deep breathing exercise. There might be a way we can do that, but I haven't found out or figured that out yet um but if there is a way you can make your sympathetic system, nervous system, calm down before you go to sleep might free for you meditation or deep breathing exercises might be for some a warm bath or a comforting book. Nothing too exciting but also I think too boring perhaps um just something right in the middle which makes you feel happy and calm as what you should do.

And if you instead go to sleep while your anxious or um you're helped up, then your sleep could become maladaptive another thing that happens in rats that we have yet to know if IT happens in women is that female rats have three phases of their extra cycle that their local stra doesn't seem to calm down during and sleep as much and we don't know why. But during the high estrogen phases of their extra cycle, the locals shuts down just like IT doesn't mall rats but in the other three phases, IT doesn't. So um one thing that might work, and in fact there are few studies that showed that could work really well, is um uh giving women after a trauma event um something that contains estrogen because estrogen somehow is protective against ptsd and they know that through a retroactive cof studies where they gave women an emergency room either a pill with estrogen or without and those that had pill with estrogen in IT were much less like we to get ptsd from that trauma has measure a year later than those that had the pill without.

Um there is really good studies by Brown win gram. She's out of australia to really hold in. And how much student do you need and also test string just so you know gets converted to a gen in the brain.

So testa an also can be protective because IT is converted to estrogen. But there's something about a strict en that's really helpful and protective about that from from the high locus firing. And this is again preliminary data that we don't have for you have all the answers yet and um we are looking into actively right now.

But it's a really important the other thing about women is that we are two to four times more subtitle to anxiety related mental health disorders, including postal matic s stress disorder. So if we could figure out what's happening to the local eros during sleep in women, that and then figure out a way to Normalize that, so the local realism silentness IT needs to be silent. I think we could go a long way in in helping women be more resilient to stressed related these disorders .

or what are some other sex differences as they relate to sleep.

Yeah yeah that's a really good question. There have been very few studies, unfortunately um of women in sleep, women and astro cycle or menstrual cycle in sleep. And um but what we have found, which actually largely replicated the study in nineteen sixty um is that that women or females, rather at high astringent, high hormonal faces of their extra cycle or reinstall cycle, sleep at less, but that sleep is more efficient, so that sleep is more dense in the sleep spindles, which I haven't gone into what they might do accept this connection between they hit the campus cortex, but as those sleeps spindles are more dense and more coherent across the brain areas.

The data cycle, which is five to ten hurts in the hip campus, important for one you're learning and also important during and sleep is also bigger and juicier during the high harmonic faces. So even though there's less sleep but it's more efficient and Better, but um so so all of that efficiency seems to be reduced in those other formal of faces. Um so even though you might sleep a little more, um you might need more sleep. In fact, in order accomplish the same thing that you can get with that short, very efficient sleep of high phone on our faces.

very interesting. I think there is a growing trend, at least among N H funded grants to require um that um as they refer to IT in the grants of biological sex as a variable here and here we talk not him about sex the um the variable though i'm sure they're studies about that too. But while logical sexes are variable because there is a dirt of studies expLoring sex differences in in most everything yes, there is there all sorts of reasons for that but more importantly, the fortunately the trend is shifting .

um and even when you study males, racist females, a lot of people just say include females in their studies. But then down track the extra cycle, remonstrate cycle and hormones have huge effects on our behavior. I mean, just think about what you had sex um you know before harmons come in. We're not interested in IT and suddenly you know that kind of a main driver of behavioral harmons can definitely change who we are and what we do. So we should be studying harmons.

not just sex. We say that poverty is perhaps the most massive transformation and rate of aging that any of us go through in a short amount time. An individual, their cognition changes, their world of you changes. And that's largely hormonal driven and and obviously neural architectures change to i'm very happy that you mentioned i'm trying to get into commerce states prior to sleep in some ways to do that. I'm a big fan and i've talked a lot before in this podcast about things like yoga nedra, which is a non movement based practice, sometimes called non sleep depressed, where people actually take some time each day to practice how to go into a more parasympathetic A K relaxed state deliberately.

Is this a bit of a skill? A yeah it's and there there are some good data, really must say, out of a laboratory and skin naba showing huge increases in um negotiator dopamine um when people go basically engaging in a practice of deliberate um non movement and that the brain actually enter states a very shallow sleep, so sort of nap ish but the ideas that we stay awake but motionless and IT does seem to restore a certain number of features of neurochemistry but perhaps more importantly, IT teaches people to to relax which is something that most people are not very good at yeah um but in any event um and people who listen this part I have heard me say this over and over again so I sound like a broken record but this practice as a zero cost practice that doesn't require any um from a college does seem to really enhance people's ability to fall asleep more quickly and to fall back to sleep if they wake up in the midnight. So in any bit another plugged for n sdr yogananda.

Well, I just also want to add that that's one of the reasons why in salmoni is so and serious is because when people feel like they haven't gotten ough sleep and they're not getting ough sleep and become anxious about getting ough sleep and then they are ancient before going to sleep like like i'm not going to all sleep as can be forty five minutes and and then that's a positive feedback loop so you need to break that loop, say, okay, my body's gonna get as much sleep as IT needs I needn't worry about IT and then practice this relaxation to say, hi, it's all OK.

It's gonna all right and and then concentrate on things that relax you and whether it's concentrating or not concentrating, whatever IT is you mentioned um yoga edra and that reminded me of transient dental meditation, which is something that also hasn't been studied well, are largely because we can't ask non human animals to do IT. And so we don't know what's happening with our neurochemistry and our brain activity in a deep, meaningful way. But one thing that has has been shown in those can do IT really well is that that data activity that I said happens when you're learning something or when you're in red sleep.

It's well established and and increases during the translate deon meditation. So IT might be that. Some states of meditation could, in some ways, we replace or mimic some functions of, for example, from sleep. But again, we don't know if all the door chemistry is right to do. For example, the thing that I was talking about, which is you're raising the novelty in coding structures of the brain that needs an absence of european an and serotonin, which we don't know that goes away with with transient meditation we just don't know answers yeah the studies .

on on the organize and sleeper replacement are kind of interesting um IT does seem to be the case that nothing can really replace sleep except sleep but that if one is sleep deprived there is having trouble falling back to sleep that these um things like and I hear it's I acknowledge this is essentially like the organizer but we now call IT non sleepy breast's nsd r because often times for names like organization act as a kind of a barrier for what what other be people willing to try a practice that sounds mystic IT, sounds like flying carpets and who, you know, sounds like you have to go to asylum, by the way, asylum a beautiful place, but IT sounds like you have to go there or live in the west coast to to believe in this stuff.

But it's simply not the case. These are practices that that are really just self directed relaxation as a practice that that allows people to get Better and Better at directing the rain states towards more relaxation. And most people have any symmetry, like, for instance, most people can force themselves to stay up later, but they have a heart time going to sleeping later. And that just speaks to the assembly that's probably adaptive in survival base that we can cramp ourselves up far more easily than we intend to calm ourselves down.

Actually, to appeal to other Christians like me, prayer can be a wonderful way to calm yourself down. Because through prae, you're giving your tears to god and saying, you know and then you are relaxed, more relaxed and I just want to say that because the same reason that you go might put some people off IT might put some people laugh um to to talk about prayer, but it's the same process of being able to relax and yeah and get outside their .

own experience out.

get a world view that might actually also help us to relax.

Well you might be surprised at how many clinical and scientists who have come on this podcast um have mentioned things like prayer from various perspective and I dum muslim traditions and others that um as as a parallel to all of these things. And I think what IT speaks to is the fact that ultimately the biological architectures that we're all contending with are going to be identical and there are different ways to tap into them and and ones that are um congruent with people's beliefs, I think is are great yeah yeah because .

anything and no congeries pent with your releases also stressed well.

my n feels force and that's why you know this idea of calling IT non sleeve deep breath in addition to yoga edra was not to detract from the naming or the history around organiser. But I was funding that. I was a barrier.

You likewise, the organization tends to include things like intentions where as n sdr scripts. And by the way, we will provide links to some nsc r organiser scripts. But nsd r has no intention, is simply a body can be relaxation base.

So it's sort of the scientific version of all of the stuff. And actually we study IT in the laboratory and and some of the brain states that people go into. But that's a discussion for another turning.

this. My mother used to tell me, when I said where we could play, I can go to sleep sh'd say, well, you know, start with your toes and relax. So you would class your muscles around your toes and you relax them and do that all the way from your toes all later ahead.

And I don't know where you got this. That might have been her own common sense, or SHE might have from this p mp. R showed called the mind, can keep you well SHE still listen to. But that's another intentional relaxation that the focuses on the body and rather than on your own. My mental process, I do a little .

bit of work with the military and um there is a method within certain communities special Operations in the U. S. Military where if they can't sleep, they're having chAllenges sleeping yeah they will deliberately try and relax their facial muscles in particular like so grape the facial muscles and um use long or excel emphasize breathing um does seem to increase the probability of transitioning back in to sleep and those are hallMarks of yoga edra non sleep depressed body scans and and so I think all of these things converge on a on a common theme, you know, is neutral logic. We can say all of the things that we are describing certainly move the needle away from locus to release activation. And we haven't done the experiment to really look at that, but seems all these things .

are counter to release. Another one is yi yi and itself is with that kind as retention of all the big muscles in your face and then relaxing them. So might be why we yon we don't know why we Young yet, but um IT might also have be really great actually .

animals Young too. If he wasn't sleeving was and .

IT would be interesting to see what yawning does to the local trust. Does that also come you in switch local as activity? Because it's an interesting that facial nerve, like trigeminal nerve, you know, through the vegas, connects indirect way to the socialist and has powerful effect on that.

Interesting, a common, I think, front of bars and direct colleague years. Jack feldman was a guest on us podcast telling us about all the amazing structures he and others have discovered in in respiration and breathe thing. Yeah, sounds like we have a collaboration brewing the three of us should definitely Carry out.

I'd love for you to share with us a little bit more about these spindles that have come up a few times. And I don't know it's relevant to this. So if it's not, let's separate IT out. I love for you to tell us a little bit about the role of in problem solving and creativity and if spindles are involved, and i'll consider myself lucky for batching them in the same question.

And if they're not involved to be feel free to separate and involved involved lot more in the first while the first thing that we knew first while we ignored them, then we thought they had something to do with keeping us to sleep. And that was their functioning when the an external stimulus came, they would keep us asleep because they would have arise.

But now we know that the density of our sleeps spines, the number that we produce per minute, is well correlated with our intelligence in the first place. And that no matter what your intelligence is and no matter what you sleep spinal density is, if you learn something during the day and increased sleep spinal density, it's really almost perfectly correlated our ability to consolidate that information and incorporated into the schema that we are already have in our brain. So if you try and learn something new, even if you're sleep spending density at basically, if you don't increase your sleep spending, that you're not going to, you know, you sleep to really incorporate IT interesting lead sleep spindles are poor in those with schizophrenia.

A is one of the characteristic signature of sleep um is that sleep spindles are very few and far between which might mean that um that people who script sophana might not be able to incorporate new information into already existing scheme and instead it's sort of flaps in the breeze out there and can be access to irony ously at times when you you know you don't want you to be involved so um I digress. So sleep spending and creativity. So one of the things we now know through some great studies by Julie sea and the need to Lucy is that sleep spindles are accompanied by an incredible plasticity out in the distal dendrites, the listening branches of our neurons that listen to other cortical areas.

So there are proximal and rights and our neons that listen to the external world and are conducted through the families. And then there are distant rates which listen to an internal kind of conversation that's having happening in our brains. It's kind of our internal state, really.

And during sleep spindles, that's when those distance and rights are able to best learn from other cortical areas and from the hip campus. Um IT is doing sleep spinks at the hip campus in the cortex are best a connected and when incredible plastics we can happen. When I talk about schema, that's a tico critical thing.

That's when you know the image of santo laws and presence you know comes together. It's not through some external thing. Once we learn those things together, it's our cortex that that encodes that and brings those images back up together. And that's during sly spindles when that's happening, when that um there's big surges of calcium into those distorted den rights and where plastic tics happens in in just huge amounts during that sleeps, spinal stage of sleepers and two stage.

There's also some other excited tory uh event that comes all away from the brain stem and projects everywhere in our cortex, which is called P G O S, just p for pons g from genetic late nucleus of the files, which is where their first discovered and oh for excited al area, which is our visual area, which is again where their first discovered. But in fact it's now been shown that P G O S which we should generalize the pea waves because they come from the pounds and go to the filament and then the cortex happens all over the brains. And that is where um glue to mate, which is a major excited to in our transmitter involved in learning and plasticity, is being released in big amounts also in those distant and rites.

So p waves and spines work together to cause plasticity and so our scheme IT together, which could be the origins for um insights, creativity. Now when P G O waves or p waves or free discovered IT was thought to be random because this small area that generates p waves all over the brain, you h projects all all over the salaries and causes p waves all over, and you don't measure p waves all over the brain at the same time. In fact, it's just seems sporadic, random.

So that's probably in p waves are also happening even more during rem sleep rap and I move in sleep. So that's probably that's why people think that rem dreams are so random is because these p waves are random and they could generate dreams because they're an internal source of exciting that kind of replaces the outside world during our dream state. And so these p waves, if they are random, could could function, could be the underlying reason why we sleep dreams are random and IT might also be why creative can happen there is because we're randomly activating, co activating. Different things in our brain that we can then so together, but IT might not be as random as we think. So that's a cabe out there.

I just learned a lot from you because I teach brain stem to medical students and talk about the pounds. And the pounds is like this dense collection of all these different nuclear eye involved in a bunch of different things. And it's close by a bunch of interesting things.

And it's still kind of a mysterious brain area. But when I learned about pg. o. Waves, I thought pans generate, accept al, because accept als, most commonly associated with the visual cortex. I thought I was the origin of the visual component of dreams.

I ably, i'm very happy to learn that they should be called pee waves, because they include lots of different areas of the brain. And that makes really good sense to me why the kind of soda randiness of dreams, especially these late night on, early morning, later in sleep, I should say, and early morning dreams seem to be cobble together from 这 desperate experiences。 I know you walk through the door and suddenly it's a completely different context and landscape.

yeah. beautiful. yeah. I I like this idea and he makes intuitive sense. That makes biological sense. IT also gives me something to talk about the medical next quarter. When I talk about pounds.

you want to talk about where in the pounds? It's right below the local series. It's called the subseries. There are good ometepec also called uh S L D. So batter al dorsal nucleus so .

that so um note to any aspiring neuber logic, there's H A vast landscape of yet to be undiscovered structure and functions in the ponds. You want to work on something that is sure to reveal something novel work on the ponds because it's in every textbook it's clinically very important structure. I'm sadly uh goma can and another cancer of the brain can sometimes can often surface in in the ponds.

But but we still know very little about IT. I read a paper this last year or and I think he was in a bit of popular press, that during rapid eye movement, sleep, people can solve problems or respond external stimuli, like, for instance, that we give the math problems that whispers in their ear while they were in room sleep, two plus two. And people would say, even though they were paralized, apparently they could still move their mouth because it'd say four or something like that.

Or they d say, you know, what's your name? And people could respond. And so that in red sleep, perhaps people, some elements of cognition are still active.

I'm glad you at that.

What do you think? And I don't know the authors of that study and and listen, if ever I say something wrong, it's great on this podcast because someone will tell us on the youtube comments it's one of the great uses of youtube comments. But i'd love to know your thoughts on that study. I mean, that just kind of a an odd feature that or does this have meaning? Should we actually care about this result?

There is no just about IT. It's really actually intriguing and and might relate to this paper. I talked about where we where we said different areas of the brain can be in different states at the same same time. So lucid dreaming is another thing we can't ask animals to do, or can't ask them if they've done IT, but we can certainly humans to do that. And some people can do IT really well.

And IT would be really interesting to see in those people who could lose a dream really well, whether they spend more or less time in this asem trc state, where one air the brain is in one state, and another area the brain is in another. And IT might be that those people can respond to questions during RAM sleep. Best are those that have the most asian try, or or this similarity or dissociation between subcritical and critical structures or IT, might be that they are the ones with the most symmetry.

We don't know. I do worry a little bit about Lucy dreaming because people is a fat people are really excited about IT. And to be able to remember one's dreams is fun often, unless they are nights res, and that is really interesting. Or to be able to direct wines, if they are nightmare, is this really wonderful power to have to be able to redirect and nights are that there's been repeated to something else, and then kick yourself out of that repetitive nightmare is really nice. But I worry a little bit about because we know so little about what's actually going on in the brain.

And if this lucid dreaming state is preventing us from, for example, from the local realist from coming down, or the certain logic system from silencing like IT should, and maybe what we're doing during the state is, yeah, we're activating the learning and memory structures, but in a way that's maladaptive in terms of the uranium that we needs to do. So maybe one of the reasons why most people don't remember most of their dreams for good reason your hippo campus is in a state where it's not writing new memory is in fact, it's writing out. It's the memories IT learned during the day to the cortex and it's immune from incoming new information.

So um so maybe lisa dream as bad because you you're activating the hyp the campus and away that's writing new memories and IT might be really maladaptive for things like you know ptsd. On the other hand, let me just argue myself right out of this when I used to have a repeated nightmare when I was a kid, my mother, who was so wise, would tell me, well, listen, just next time you're in that dream, you know, say, hey, i'm in a dream and then change something about IT. So SHE and I rehearsed to at the horrible dream that I was, I was a big monster you running after me, and my legs were like mud, and I couldn't run away, and I was just terrifying.

And that was a dream I would have, you know, time and time again. He said, okay, next time what are you going to do in that monster? Come after away? No, that's what you do every time.

And it's always the same outcome you can't run. So let's do something different. What what could you do that's different? So I game up with, well, I can turn around and punch IT in the nose, said, yeah, that's great.

So the next time I had that dream, I did recognize this is that same old dreams, which means that there is part of my brain that's conscious enough to know that I mean a dreaming state. And then I didn't have the courage in my dream because I was stoked, terrified, punch them or touch to the ammons ter in any way. But I did have the cross to turn around and look at in the eye and said, no, that was enough.

I said, no, and that was enough to knock me out of the reach of that dreams so that I never had IT again. I never had that same dream again. And in fact, IT gave me a piece about dreaming, because I knew that if ever there was a nightmare that was just too scary, I could probably do something to change IT, and not myself out of IT. So even though I don't recommend lusa dreaming on a Normal day day basis, if it's enough, that can can knock you out of a red. One thing that happens with people with ptsd, they have the same repeated horrible nightmare, which is often a reliving of the day's trauma that they so maybe lucent dreaming can be used on occasion to be a powerful tool, because there is so much plasticity that happens during rem sleep to knock you out of that right of of reliving that event and and just change IT you know and you could probably practice that during weaklings um rehearse the event that happened that was so traumatic and then just introduced a new element like, you know now i'm safe now you know the sound that was associated with that really traumatic thing I should now associate with something else and next time I have that dream i'm going to change IT so that sound is now this new thing that I should be associated with safety and that might be enough maybe I hope um to knock you out of that repeated nightmare and maybe even starting on the path to recovery because if you can calm down about those nightmare states of sleep, then maybe you're localize so which is involved in stress can also relax and you can do the racial parts that need to be done.

I love IT. I seem to recall a paper and i'll have to find the reference and send to you. We will also put in the shower captions that described a protocol essentially matches this um idea. And what I think what they had people do is either cue themselves to a particular smell or tone in wakefulness then to try to recall a recurrent nightmare yeah. Then during the nights sleep they had the tone playing in the background, which are then kill them to the wakeful state they're still asleep might do but in the suda Lucy or lust state and then try and change some variable, as you're describing some either look the predator in the eyes or do something different, and then in the waking state, take a little bit of time to try and script out a different narrative altogether. And IT took several nights, as I recall, or more, but that they were able to escape .

this recurring nightman .

like a week or something. Yeah.

you study a beautiful study.

I loved IT put reference to that. I I need to revisit that. I was pretty recent, but I I need to dive into IT again, because I think I didn't go as deep into IT as I .

shouted no no but the one thing that you that you we said many right things but one of the things he said is that they were able to quee the dreamer um when knew and they ever going to end sleep and then they played the sound or had the older now when you are Normally asleep alone in your bed you're not going to be able to cue yourself but that might be that rehearsal enough before you go to sleep is enough to you help cue you to that repeated nights are remembering what the nightmare is and then figuring out how to q cue yourself to do something different.

For years I had the same recurrent nightmare over and over and over again, and I was so sAiling and so clear. And i'm not gna share what IT is because it's um it's something like that disturbing was just I think IT was the emotional load of IT and just how sAiling in certain features were like one person in um who is a real life person had a particular clothing here on. And it's like in that just served as this queue and yeah, I don't know if I ever did in a direct work to try and deal with IT, but now IT almost seems silly to describe IT.

Yes, well.

dreams are usually slow to this, but island .

dream and motion system is so. Gear IT up doing and sleep which is another thing we could .

talk about yeah please I would love yes so I would look as as as ideally suppressed so we can't release nw up and everyone we can't act out our dreams um this uh during these very emotionally laid in thoughts and and storylines during sleep almost I started to sound like a little bit of a built in while sleeping trauma therapy because most traumatic erp ies involved trying to get people in the states of countered to what most people think you actually want to get close to the trauma.

Ms, of the narrative, trying to suppress the emotional activity of IT. And I guess that the motivation for kedem based therapies for trauma, or i've also heard, and this is still perplexed y that other waking bed trauma errors ies involved, taking people the other way, make IT very cathartic. C take them to the peak of the emotional response, but then allow that to finally cycle down into a more relaxed response. So please, um if there's anything about loss, realize and and dreams and they can help people basically extinguished traumas or traumatic features to the real life events and we definite want .

to know about yeah yeah well I think one of the things that people of fat might help after a trauma like a school shooting or whatever when a car accident is to talk about IT and in but in fact, that ended up being counterproductive. And I think one of the reasons I was counterproductive is because I didn't take you them back down IT brought them up and continue to reactivate the emotions of IT but then didn't you know emphasize the safety effect that is over, or help them work through how they might avoided IT again in the future to calm the sympathetic nervous system down again before they went to sleep. And and none of these studies have sleep ever been considered.

But to me, that's the key part, is bringing down your sympathetic new system before you go to sleep so that your sleep can be adaptive, your look as through as can shut off like that Normally does or should do and then able to erase the novelty of IT. The other thing that um I just mentioned a minute ago is that the emotional system is highly activated in rem sleep and that's definitely true and that might seem counter productive in terms of you know the nightmares and and how to help them sleep be a therapeutic thing rather than than in reinforcing the emotionality of the trauma. And I think the key to that again is the absence of an error, an american.

So even though the emotional system is in high gear without north anf in, you can actually um divorce those highly activated emotions from the cognitive parts of the memory that you have just written out in that into stage of sleep when the sleep spines are going. So um so you've just now consolidate the information that you'll need to survive and you know to make that adaptive and now you need to divorce from that schema and from that semantic parts of memory the emotional part because whenever you remember something is fine if you remember the being emotional at the time but you don't want to bring back and so into that memory all of the same emotional systems you don't want to bring back. You know the heart rate changes in the sweating and and all of that you wants to be able to remember all the parts of IT and even remember that you were traumatized and that you did cry and that you did and all your heart was racing.

But when you are talking about IT years later, you don't want to have to relive all that otherwise. Who would ever want to recall a dramatic memory because you're basically putting yourself through the same trauma, which is what people with ptsd have. They don't want to recall this traumatic memory because it's reliving IT.

It's like it's just happening again. So that's what we're thinking is that the emotional parts are now long, are not able to be divorced because in our benefits system is not downscale during red sleep. And so that rem sleep served instead reinforce and in fact amplify the emotions because your your emotional system is up socialises hi re sowing in every night the emotionality of those memories and .

with the memory itself um told us, what about lucus in eur an offer from lucilius? Is there any role for? No an f, an f an court is all released from the adrin als, my understanding is that eur, an and neuron will not cross the blood brain barrier, which is probably why we have a brain based energy c system locus is and other neurons. Well, actually that's a question I should ask you. Other other sites in the brain where europe and effortless released from .

or IT just look just released so there seven, nine, seven, six yes, there's nine different, different .

structures. But I just occurred to me that in some cases, like with rafa, there are other sources of certain magic drive in the brain. But raft is like.

yeah that's the one that goes the cortex and and and the local rules is also the one that goes to the cortex.

But there are other energy sources, some that um from the brain steamed that descent and help us to ignore pain, for example, um when we are stressed and needing to run away from the tiger with, I don't want to be thinking oh my angle hurts you wanted to be able to ignore IT and go do what you need to do so um yes so there are lots of other energy c nuclei. But the local services is the main one that projects all over the brain. They actually the only place that doesn't project is the dorso strategy.

He talked about ventures, straight m and addiction. The dorso strategy is the only place. The look as for us doesn't protect you and that involved in procedure learning, motor learning, the kinds of learning that take over when your hip campus through example is compromised.

Very latter. If you don't have good hit the campus, you can still do procedural learning and and it's great. It's a redant system.

And so um if your local realist is not working, if you don't have IT anymore, you can still do. If if you don't have a good help campus, you can still do learning through this stores. So straight on structure. So IT might be for those kinds of learning functions, sleep deprivation, where you never let the local real start firing, is OK. Because IT doesn't have any receptors for an american, american.

anyway. So yeah, what about bodily? Like s, you know, I offer mind people, as you know, such thing as a dream.

Al, burn out. Pr, say that a dreams don't to actually burn out, but some people have marginal and sufficiency in of your mother. People have adrenals that are just chronically cracking out a nor and e at the wrong time .

in particular. Yeah so that there's A A great questions. And I think the answers to them have yet to be discovered, the connections between their preferred and our central nervous system. But we know that there are beautiful connections, and its t source of being able to manipulate our brains is to work through our bodies. And so originals do great things. They constrict our blood vessels causing higher blood pressure which help blood rush out to all the reunites that need LED um in our muscles for example for running away from the lion or the .

tiger or meeting a grant deadline yes, or catching a train .

catchin yes the help our hearts from faster our muscles get refused with the blood IT needs diverts blood and everything away from our paris sympathetic system which is rest and I just we don't really need to digest that crisp when you're running for a train. We going to do that later. Um so it's doing really important things.

What we don't know because IT doesn't cross the blood brain berrier is how that affects the brain and whether or if we can independently activate our address ines, um when a time when our brain thinks that we should be fine and calm in a sleep um how our brain detects that is that a feedback through your heart is racing and then our brain stances, what's playing on my heart, is sing and then wakes us up and then our hearts were racing together with our rain racing. We just don't know the answers to these questions yet. There are some good, good studies, old studies um but we need a lot more.

Well, another another not to the fact that there's lots of great work ongoing yeah and still to do d love you to tell us about some of the work that you're doing more recently on the relationship between sleep and opiate use, withdraw, relax and um and craving just an addiction generally A I get a lot of questions about people trying to come off benza dassen ines or people's chAllenges with benza dasa's and other types of addiction. Um yeah what what is the role of sleep in addiction and recovery from addiction and oates .

in particular? Yeah this is a very Young area. And in fact, my laboratory has just decided I have a graduate student who's been in my love for just one year. She's been amazing work already, but completely ground breaking work.

And what he has discovered already, we don't have the paper out yet, but um we're working on IT, is that when animals withdraw from opiate and this has been sort of replicated in other ways with other type of things, um our sleep is disturbed. Our sleep is terribly disturbed and the amount of sleep disturbance predicts relapse behaviors. And you might think, well course, you're going to relax if you can't sleep because obese calm you down.

Rather than the reasons why obese calm you down is because the locus realist again, the spot is covered with opiate receptors and that are Normally really responsive to our indigenous opiate um and so what what happens when we are pleased, for example, or laughing or whatever are and dodges opiate, activate those receptors in the local rules and comment down IT actually um suppresses locally less activity, happy and relaxed. One of the things reasons why opiates are so addictively because IT also comes us down and makes us relaxed. But the problem with exogenous oids is that they really buy strongly bind these these receptors on our and if you take an exigence opiate again and again, like you're recovering from surgery, for example, take these pain medications is that our locals struggles to do what it's supposed to do, which has keep us wake and learning and concentrating on things.

So IT will dawn, regulate, IT will internalize these receptors that are Normally only occupied by andoga, sop, ts and and IT will do this. IT will change our genes that are associated with producing these receptors. So you actually have very many fewer receptors.

So the local rules, at least during wakeful ness, can fire and help us to do these things like learn about our environment. And so if you long term reduce the number of receptors out there um then when you withdraw the exact as open service. Not enough of your indigence that opens to um to be able to occupy those few receptors that are there and our logos.

Als has nothing to calm IT down anymore, no pacifier and IT just fires and fires and fires and that physical and tonic high activity stresses us out because it's Normally associated with stress and so any exogenous stress that adds to that in also activates our local as rules. There's nothing to calm IT down again and so IT just keeps firing IT disturb our sleep um and that's why maybe sleep disturbance is a an indicator of uh hyperactive and um and such a good predictor of relapse behaviors because nobody likes to live in that high stress state and we'll do anything have to get back to Normal. So the problem with with taking these drugs is that IT leaves you excited and very excited and relaxed and happy.

But then when you come off of IT, you're worse than we're when you wear at baseline, you take IT again. And IT only brings you up this far because you have fewer receptors. When you come off IT, you're down even more depressed and an anxious and I depressed, I was a word I used loosely.

and that's not what I certainly central naval system depression, I mean sleepy or less motivated. Ord.

yeah, I mean, our loss real is actually it's it's in the anxiety, kind of depression and actually the anxiety related depression. So um yeah so we don't know yet what and there's some good research going on right now what could restore our own indians receptors so that our own daggers abets can properly calm or locally?

Alist um once that they've been tapped down by exigence, obvious, but that would be really one way that you can access the sleep to stand. So we talked about sleep in the importance of sleep, in terms of learning and memory, the importance of the structure of the ninety minute cycle for all of that. So you can imagine if your sleep is disturbed by too much local al activity, the the structure and the function of the sleep spines and that faded during and sleep, and the and the lack of north an american.

All of those structures, all those functions for for learning something new, like a new behavior that as as an involved of the drugs becomes compromised. And so that's something that tinea logos in collaboration with panel of Kennedy at U C L. A that we we're looking at.

How is learning and memory affected the sleep disturbance if there are way we can um in animals that coming off of opiates, can we restore their sleep to Normal so that then they are less likely done? Do we relax kinds of behaviors? fascinating.

And I I will certainly have to have you back on to tell us the results of those studies. Meanwhile, I think for anyone who is trying to um come off opiates um exogenous opiate and restore these systems, what i'm hearing is that is going to take some time, but that any and all things that people can do to buffer their healthy, Normal sly architecture like morning and daytime sunlight, limiting bright light exposure, lowering the temperature at night, a number of things we have take .

about process the medical what if I would facilitate not just sleep but .

perhaps even accelerate the the recovery and and short in this with raw which from the questions I get and from what I hear um can be absolutely brutal I can imagine .

I had to take opens for I only took IT for three days after giving birth to my first son I think second son one of them and um and just I just said after three days this is enough i'm just going to try thailand all and um so I I myself not mean I just did a sudden sharp cut off and even though I felt I didn't get the high ods when I was taking the talent coding when I went off the boy was like pms times one hundred I was so anxious and upset little things and thankfully only last a few hours but if I had taken IT for a week or two weeks, who knows if my indigence opiate receptors would have been permanently downregulates and I would have been an addict you and I think I would have been addicted, I would say and that there's negative connotations is just a very physiological state. So no judgments at all associated with IT. So um yeah they're powerful powerful painkillers bit can also alter your entire brain and rewire IT.

Ah well all the more reason why I am many others are grateful that you're doing this work to figure out ways that people can recover more quickly and more. I must say you ve taught us a tremendous amount in um in a relatively short amount of time um about the architecture of sleep, the different phases, the relationship between sleep and dreaming and this incredible structure.

Look us and them so happy we got into the ponds that just delights me because we rarely talk about the ponds on this podcasts. Such an interesting structure sex differences um that are important creativity and problems solving and trauma sleep spindles just such a wealth of information and much of IT that's actable for people. So first one, I want to say thank you for taking the time to sit down and have this conversation that so many people are sure to benefit from.

I also want to thank you for doing the work you do even though i'm a fellow neurobiologist. I think that it's not often that um we take a step back and realized that it's really the work of hard thinking, hard um strongly motivated, uh P S P principal investigator, by the way, P S yourself, graduate student and post talks that really drive the discovery forward and that lead to these new theraputics. Physicians are wonderful.

Clinicians are absolutely wonderful. But clinton don't develop new treatments. They they only implement the ones that researchers discovers. So thank you being a brain explore with him with a focus on um growing the good in the world. Um I know I speak for everybody when I say thank you so much.

Thank you so much Andrew. Thank you for being an amazing interviewer. You brought a lot out of me in a coherent fort fashion that Normally I can do, and i'm speaking in public.

I don't know about that. I heard your lectures and they are super r will direct people to somebody other ones.

Well, thank you. And I also want to put a plugging in for graduate students in general in them a key, an amazing role that they play in research. Um I am A P I, as you said, used to be a graduate student in a post c training myself, doing all of this on the ground, hands on, experimental.

It's so hard to do. It's so hard to do, right? It's so hard to think through all of that.

Now, A P, I, I get to be an idea person and just say, hey, why did you do this? And hey, you know, what do you think about that? And they, of course, intellectual contributes so much to these these planned experiments, but they also do the really hard work. And so I just want to say, thank you, graduate students. Thank you to my graduate students and all graduate students out there.

Thank you post underpaid and into the major institutions, stanford, D U C, L A and all other major institutions. Pay them more, please. We need them and they need taba standard of living. Not i'm not afraid to say that despite my primary employer pay them more, they need that.

They deserve IT. They deserve IT absolutely right.

Well, we will absolutely have you back again if you if you'll be willing. And meanwhile, we will direct people to where they can learn more about you and you're exciting work. And once again.

thanks so much. Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining me today for my discussion about sleep, mental health, physical health and performance with doctor gina poe. I hope you found IT to be as informative and as actionable as I did.

In fact, I am already implementing the regularity of bedtime plus minus half an hour in order to get that growth home and release, and I can already see both my sleeve scores improving and my feelings of daytime vigor and focus and other markers of sleeping alth improving as well. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please submit our youtube channel. That's a horrific zero cost way to support us.

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