This episode is all about the two major kinds of dreams and the sorts
of learning and unlearning they are used for. I discuss REM-associated
dreams that control emotional learning and their similarity to various
trauma treatments such as ketamine and EMDR. I also discuss Non-REM
dreams and their role in motor learning and learning of detailed, non-
emotionally-laden information. I relate this to science-backed tools
for accessing more of the types of sleep and learning people may want.
Other topics are listed in the time stamps below. Please put any
questions or thoughts (or dreams!) you have in the comments section.
-- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and
science-based tools for everyday life. [upbeat music] I'm Andrew
Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at
Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching
and research roles at Stanford. It is however, part of my desire to
bring you zero cost to consumer information about science and science
related tools. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Helix Sleep. Helix
Sleep makes mattresses that are ideally suited to your sleep needs.
Helix mattresses are amazing. I can say this because I've been
sleeping on one and I've been sleeping better than I've ever slept
before. The interesting thing about Helix mattresses is that they're
tailored to your unique body type and sleeping style. What's a
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quiz, it takes about two minutes, as to whether or not you sleep on
your stomach, your side, your back, whether or not you flip back and
forth, or whether or not you don't know in what position you sleep, as
well as whether or not you tend to run hot or run cold, wake up cold,
wake up hot, et cetera. If you do that then it will match you to the
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Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral
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started using it because I had a lot of confusion about what vitamins
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out there now identifying the gut microbiome and the importance of the
gut-brain axis for immune function, metabolic function and so forth.
If you want to try Athletic Greens you can go to
athleticgreens.com/huberman. And if you do that they'll also send you
a year supply of liquid vitamin D3, K2. There are a lot of data
starting to surface about the importance of vitamin D3 for immune
function, metabolic function, endocrine function, and so forth. In
addition, if you go to athleticgreens.com/huberman, you'll get the
year supply of D3 and K2 as well as five free travel packs, which are
a little packets of Athletic Greens in addition to your normal order.
And those are great for when you're on the plane, or you're otherwise
traveling. They mix up really easily without any mess or the needs of
spoon out powder and things of that sort. So the things that are easy
to do at home are kind of harder on the road, those packets make it
easy while on the road. Today we're gonna talk about dreaming,
learning during dreaming and unlearning during dreaming.
In particular unlearning of troubling emotional events. Now my
interest in dreaming goes way back. When I was a child I had a friend
and he came over one day and he brought with him a mask that had a
little red light in the corner. He had purchased this thing through
some magazine ad that he had seen, and this mask was supposed to
trigger lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is the experience of dreaming
during sleep, but being aware that one is dreaming. And in some cases
being able to direct one's dream activities. So if you're in a lucid
dream and you wanna fly, for instance, some people report being able
to initiate that experience of flying. Or to contort themselves into
an animal, or to transport themselves to wherever they want within the
dream. I tried this device. The way it worked is you put on the mask
during a waking state, I'm wide awake, and you look at the little
light flashing in the corner, and then you'd also wear it when you
went to sleep at night. And indeed, while I was asleep I could see the
red light presumably through my eyelids. Although, for all I know I
had opened my eyes. I don't know I was asleep. And then, because I was
dreaming and I was experiencing something very vivid, I was able to
recognize that I was dreaming and then start to direct some of the
events within that dream. Now lucid dreaming occurs in about 20% of
people and in a small percentage of those people they lucid dream
almost every night. So much so that many of them report their sleep
not being as restorative as it would be otherwise. Now all of this is
to say that, lucid dreaming and dreaming are profound experiences. We
tend to feel extremely attached to our dream experience. This may
explain the phenomenon of people who have a very intense dream they
need to somehow tell everybody about that dream, or tell someone about
that dream. I don't really know what that behavior is about, but
sometimes we wake up and we feel so attached to what happened in this
state that we call dreaming that there seems to be an intense need to
share it with other people, presumably to process it and make sense of
it. Now numerous people throughout history have tried to make sense of
dreams in some sort of organized way. The most famous of which of
course is a Sigmund Freud who talked about symbolic representations in
dreams. A lot of that has been kind of debunked. Although, I think
that there's some interest in what the symbols of dreaming are. And
this is something that we'll talk about in more depth today, although
not Freud in theory, in particular. So I think in order to really
think about dreams and what to do with them and how to maximize the
dream experience for sake of learning and unlearning, the best way to
address this is to look at the physiology of sleep, to really address
what do we know concretely about sleep. So first of all, as we get
sleepy we tend to shut our eyes, and that's 'cause there's some
autonomic centers in the brain, some neurons that control closing of
the eyelids when we get sleepy.
And then we transitioned into sleep. And sleep, regardless of how long
we sleep is generally broken up into a series of 90 minute cycles.
These ultradian cycles. So early in the night these 90 minute cycles
tend to be comprised more of shallow sleep and slow wave sleep. So
stage one, stage two, et cetera, and what we call slow wave sleep.
I'll go into detail about what all this means in a moment. And we tend
to have less so-called REM sleep, R-E-M sleep, which stands for rapid
eye movement sleep. And I'll talk about rapid eye movement sleep in
detail. So early in the night, a lot more slow wave sleep and less
REM. For every 90 minute cycle that we have during a night of sleep we
tend to start having more and more REM sleep. So more of that 90
minute cycle is comprised of REM sleep and less of slow wave sleep.
Now this is true regardless of whether or not you wake up in the
middle of the night to use the restroom or your sleep is broken. The
more sleep you're getting across the night, the more REM sleep you're
going to have. And REM sleep and non REM, as I'll refer to it, have
distinctly different roles in learning and unlearning, and they are
responsible for learning and unlearning of distinctly different types
of information. And this has enormous implications for learning of
motor skills, for unlearning of traumatic events, or for processing
emotionally challenging as well as emotionally pleasing events. And as
we'll see, one can actually leverage their daytime activities in order
to access more slow wave sleep or non REM sleep as we'll call it, or
more REM sleep depending on your particular emotional and physical
needs. So it's really a remarkable stage of life that we have a lot
more control and power over then you might believe. We'll also talk
about lucid dreaming. We're also gonna talk about hallucinations and
how drug induced hallucinations have a surprising similarity to a lot
of dream states and yet some really important differences.
Okay. So let's start by talking about slow wave sleep, or non REM
sleep. And I realized that slow wave sleep and non REM sleep aren't
exactly the same thing. So for you sleep aficionados out there, I am
lumping right now. As we say in science, there are lumpers and there
are splitters and I am both. Sometimes I lump, sometimes I split. For
sake of clarity and ease of conversation right now I'm gonna be a
lumper. When I say slow wave sleep, I mean non REM sleep generally.
Although, I acknowledge there is a distinction. Slow wave sleep. So
slow wave sleep is characterized by a particular pattern of brain
activity in which the brain is metabolically active, but that there's
these big sweeping waves of activity that include a lot of the brain.
If you wanna look this up you can find evidence for sweeping of waves
of neural activity across association cortex, across big swaths of the
brainstem, the so-called pons geniculate occipital pathway. This is
brainstem, thalamus, and then cortex for those of you that are
interested. Although, more of that is going to occur in REM sleep. Now
the interesting thing about slow wave sleep are the neuromodulators
that tend to be associated with it, that are most active and least
active during slow wave sleep and here's why. To remind you
neuromodulators are these chemicals that act rather slowly but their
main role is to bias particular brain circuits to be active and other
brain circuits to not be active. These are like the music playlist. So
think of neuromodulators and these come in the names of,
acetylcholine, norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, think of them
as suggesting playlists on your audio device. So, you know, classical
music is distinctly different in feel and tone and a number of other
features from like third wave punk, or from, you know, hip hop, right?
So think of them as biasing toward particular genres of neural circuit
activity, okay. Mellow music versus really aggressive fast music, or
rhythmic music that includes lyrics versus rhythmic music that doesn't
include lyrics. It's more or less the way to think about these
neuromodulators. And they are associated as a consequence with certain
brain functions. So we know for instance and just to review,
acetylcholine in waking states is a neuromodulator that tends to
amplify the activity of brain circuits associated with focus and
attention. Norepinephrine is a neuromodulator that tends to amplify
the brain circuits associated with alertness, and the desire to move.
Serotonin is the neuromodulator that's released intense to amplify the
circuits in the brain and body that are associated with bliss and the
desire to remain still. And dopamine is the neuromodulator that's
released and is associated with amplification of the neural circuits
in the brain and body associated with pursuing goals and pleasure and
reward. Okay. So in slow wave sleep something really interesting
happens. There is essentially no acetylcholine. Acetylcholine
production and release and action from the two major sites, which are
in the brainstem, which from a nucleus if it's a parabigerminal
nucleus, if you really wanna know, or from the forebrain, which is
nucleus basalis. And you don't need to know these names but if you
like, that's why I put them out there. Acetylcholine production
plummets. It's just almost to zero. And acetylcholine as I just
mentioned, is associated with focus. So you can think of slow wave
sleep as these big sweeping waves of activity through the brain and a
kind of distortion of space and time, so that we're not really
focusing on any one thing. Now the other molecules that are very
active at that time are norepinephrine. Which is a little bit
surprising 'cause normally in waking states norepinephrine is gonna be
associated with a lot of alertness and the desire to move. But there's
not a ton of norepinephrine around in slow wave sleep, but it is
around. So there's something associated with the movement circuitry
going on in slow wave sleep. And remember, this is happening mostly at
the beginning of the night, your sleep is dominated by slow wave
sleep. So no acetylcholine, very little norepinephrine, although there
is some and a lot of serotonin. And serotonin again is associated with
this desire, this sensation of kind of bliss or wellbeing, but not a
lot of movement. And during sleep you tend not to move. Now in slow
wave sleep you can move, you're not paralyzed. So you can roll over.
If people are going to sleep walk, typically it's going to be during
slow wave sleep. And what studies have shown through some kind of
sadistic experiments where people are deprived specifically of slow
wave sleep, and that can be done by waking them up as soon as the
electrode recording show that they're in slow wave sleep or by
chemically altering their sleep so that it biases them away from slow
wave sleep.
What studies have shown is that motor learning is generally occurring
in slow wave sleep. So let's say the day before you go to sleep you
were learning some new dance move, or you were learning some specific
motor skill, either a fine motor skill or a course motor skill. So
let's say, it's a new form of exercise or some new coordinated
movements. This could be coordinate movement at the level of the
fingers, or it could be coordinated movement the level of whole body
and large limb movements. It could involve other people, or it could
be a solo activity. Learning of those skills is happening primarily
during slow wave sleep in the early part of the night. In addition,
slow wave sleep has been shown to be important for the learning of
detailed information. Now this isn't always cognitive information.
We're gonna talk about cognitive information, but the studies that
have been done along these lines involve having people learn very
detailed information about very specific rules and the way that
certain words are spelled, they tend to be challenging words. So if
people are tested and in terms of their performance on these types of
exams and they're deprived of slow wave sleep, they tend to perform
very poorly. So we can think of slow wave sleep as important for motor
learning, motor skill learning and for the learning of specific
details about specific events. And this turns out to be fundamentally
important because now we know that slow wave sleep is primarily in the
early part of the night, and motor learning is occurring primarily
early in the night, and detailed learning is occurring early in the
night. Now for those of you that are waking up after only three, four
hours of sleep, this might be informative. This might tell you a
little something about what you are able to learn and not able to
learn if that were to be the only sleep that you get. Although,
hopefully that's not the only sleep that you get. But we're going to
dive deep into how it is that one can maximize motor learning in order
to extract say, more detail information about coordinated movements
and how to make them faster or slower. So that might be important for
certain sports. It might be almost certainly important for certain
sports. It's gonna be important for any kind of coordinated movement,
like say learning to play the piano, or for instance, how to learn
synchronized movements with somebody else. So maybe I mentioned the
example of dance earlier. Like me a few years ago, I set out to learn
tango because I have some Argentine relatives and I was a Bismal. I
need to return to that at some point. I was just a Bismal. And one of
the worst things about being a bismal at learning dance is that, that
somebody else has to suffer the consequences also. So I don't know
maybe in the month on neuroplasticity, I'll explore that again as a
self experimentation. But, the key things to know are slow wave sleep
is involved in motor learning and detailed learning. There's no
acetylcholine around at that time, has these big amplitude activity
sweeping throughout the brain and that there's the release of these
neuromodulators, norepinephrine and serotonin. And again, that's all
happening early in the night. So athletes, people that are concerned
about performance, if you happen to wake up after just a couple hours
of, you know, three, four hours of sleep because you're excited about
a competition the next day, presumably if you've already trained the
skills that you need for the event you should be fine to engage in
that particular activity.
Now it's always going to be better to get a full night's sleep. And
that, you know, a full night's sleep for you is six hours then it's
always gonna be better to get more sleep than it is to get less.
However, I think some people get a little bit overly concerned that if
they didn't get their full night's sleep before some sort of physical
event that their performance is going to plummet. Presumably, if
you've already learned what you need to do, and it's stored in your
neural circuits and you know how to make those coordinated movements,
what the literature on slow wave sleep suggest is that you would be
replenished. That the motor learning and the recovery from exercise is
going to happen early in the night. Okay. So we'll just pause there,
and kind of shelve that for a moment and then we're gonna come back to
it. But I wanna talk about REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep. REM
sleep and rapid eye movement sleep, as I mentioned before, occurs
throughout the night, but you're gonna have more of it. A larger
percentage of these 90 minute sleep cycles is going to be comprised of
REM sleep as you get toward morning.
REM sleep is fascinating. It was discovered in '50s when a sleep
laboratory in Chicago, the researchers observed that people's eyes
were moving under their eyelids. Now, something very important that
we're going to address when we talk about trauma later is that, the
eye movements are not just side to side they're very erratic in all
different directions. One thing that I don't think I've never heard
anyone really talk about publicly is, why eye movements during sleep,
right? Eyes are closed. And sometimes people's eyelids will be a
little bit open and their eyes are darting around, especially in
little kids. I don't suggest you do this. I'm not even sure it's
ethical. But, it has been done where you, you know, pull back the
eyelids of a kid while they're sleeping and their eyes are kind of
darting all over the place. I think people do this to their passed out
friends at parties and things like that. So again, I don't suggest you
do it, but I'm telling you it because it's been done before and
therefore you don't have to do it again. But rapid eye movement sleep
is fascinating and occurs because there are connections between the
brainstem, an area called the pons, and areas of the thalamus and the
top of the brain stem that are involved in generating movements in
different directions, sometimes called saccades. Although, sometimes
during rapid eye movement sleep it's not just rapid, it's kind of a
jittery side to side thing and then the eyeballs kind of role. It's
really pretty creepy to look at if you see. So what's happening there
is the circuitry that is involved in conscious eye movements is kind
of going haywire, but it's not haywire. It's these waves of activity
from the brainstem up to the so-called thalamus, which is an area that
filter sensory information and then up to the cortex. And the cortex
of course, is involved in conscious perceptions. So in rapid eye
movement sleep there are a couple of things are happening besides
rapid eye movements. The main ones are that they're, I should say, in
contrast to slow wave sleep. In REM sleep serotonin is essentially
absent. Okay? So this molecule, this neuromodulator that tends to
create the feeling of bliss and wellbeing and just calm placidity is
absent. All right. So that's interesting. In addition to that,
norepinephrine this molecule that's involved in movement and alertness
is absolutely absent. It's probably one of the few times in our life
that epinephrin is essentially at zero activity within our system. And
that has a number of very important implications for the sorts of
dreaming that occur during REM sleep and the sorts of learning that
can occur in REM sleep and unlearning. First of all in REM sleep, we
are paralyzed. We are experiencing what's called atonia, which just
means that we're completely laid out and paralyzed.
We also tend to experience whatever it is that we're dreaming about as
a kind of hallucination, or a hallucinatory activity. Long ago I
looked into hallucinations and dreaming I was just fascinated by this
in high school. And there's some great books on this if you're
interested in exploring the relationship between hallucinations and
dreaming. The most famous of which are from a guy, a researcher at
Harvard, Alan Hobson, you know, wrote a book called, Dream Drug Store.
And talked all about the similarities between drugs that induce
hallucinations and dreaming in REM. So you can explore that if you
like. So in REM our eyes are moving, but the rest of our body is
paralyzed and we are hallucinating. There's no epinephrin around.
Epinephrin doesn't just create a desire to move and alertness. It is
also the chemical signature of fear and anxiety. It's what's released
from our adrenal glands when we experience something that's fearful or
alerting. So if a car suddenly screeches in front of us, or we get a
troubling text message, adrenaline is deployed into our system.
Adrenaline is epinephrin, those are equivalent molecules. And
epinephrin isn't just released from our adrenals it's also released
within our brain. So there's this weird stage of our life that happens
more toward morning, that we call REM sleep, where we're hallucinating
and having these outrageous experiences in our mind, but the chemical
that's associated with fear and panic and anxiety is not available to
us. And that turns out to be very important. And you can imagine why
that's important. It's important because it allows us to experience
things, both replay of things that did occur as well as elaborate
contortions of things that didn't occur. And it allows us to
experience those in the absence of fear and anxiety, and that it turns
out is very important for adjusting our emotional relationship to
challenging things that happened to us while we were awake. Those
challenging things can sometimes be in the form of social anxiety, or
just having been working very hard or concern about an upcoming event,
or sometimes people report for instance, dreams where they find
themselves late to an exam, or naked in public, or in some sort of
situation that would be very troubling to them. And that almost
certainly occurs during REM sleep. So we have this incredible period
of sleep in which our experience of emotionally laid in events is
dissociated. It's chemically blocked from us having the actual
emotion. Now probably immediately some of you are thinking, "Well,
what about nightmares? I have nightmares and those carry a lot of
emotion, or sometimes I'll wake up in a panic."
Let's consider each of those two things separately because they are
important in understanding REM sleep. There's a good chance that
nightmares are occurring slow wave sleep. There are actually some
drugs that I don't suggest people take. In fact so much so I'm not
gonna mention them that give people very kind of scary or eerie dreams
and this kind of feeling that things are pursuing them, or that they
can't move when they are being chased. That's actually a common dream
that I've had. I guess, it's more or less a nightmare. The feeling
that one is paralyzed and can't move and is being chased. A lot of
people have said, "Oh, that must be in REM sleep." Because you're
paralyzed and so you're dreaming about being paralyzed and you can't
move. I think that's probably false. The research says that because no
epinephrine is absent during REM sleep, it's very unlikely that you
can have these intense, fearful memories. So those are probably
occurring in slow wave sleep. Although, there might be instances where
people have nightmares in REM sleep. The other thing is some people
experience, certainly I've had this experience, of waking up and
feeling very stressed about whatever it was that I happen to be
thinking about, or dreaming about in the moments before.
And that's an interesting case of an invasion of the dream state into
the waking state and the moment you wake up epinephrine is available.
So the research on this isn't fully crystallized, but most of it
points in the direction of the experience of waking up and feeling
very panicked.
Maybe, I wanna highlight may, but maybe that you were experiencing
something that was troubling in the daytime, you're repeating that
experience in your sleep, epinephrine is not available, and therefore
the brain circuits associated with fear and anxiety are shut off. And
so you're able to process those events and then suddenly you wake up
and there's a surge of adrenaline of epinephrin that's now coupled to
that experience. So nightmares very likely in slow wave sleep and that
kind of panic on waking from something very likely to be an invasion
of the thoughts and ideas, however distorted in REM sleep invading the
waking state. In fact, that brings to mind something that I've
mentioned once before, but I wanna mention again, this atonia, this
paralysis that we experience during sleep can invade the waking state.
Many people report the experience of waking up and being paralyzed.
They're legitimately waking up, it's not a dream. Waking up and being
paralyzed, and it is terrifying. I've had this happen before. It is I
can tell you terrifying to be wide awake, and as far as I could tell
fully conscious, but unable to move. And then generally you can jolt
yourself out of it in a few seconds, but it is quite frightening. Now
some people actually experience waking up, being fully paralyzed and
hallucinating. And there is a theory in the academic and scientific
community at least, that what people report as alien abductions have a
certain number of core characteristics that map quite closely, yearly
similarly to these experiences.
A lot of reports of alien abduction involve people being unable to
move, seeing particular faces, hallucinating, extensively feeling like
their body is floating, or they were transported. This is very similar
to the experience of invasion of atonia into the waking state, waking
up and still being paralyzed. As well as the hallucinations that are
characteristic of dreaming and REM sleep. Now I'm not saying that
people's alien abductions were not legitimate alien abductions, how
could I, I wasn't there. And if I was there I wouldn't tell you 'cause
that would make me an alien, and I wouldn't want you to know. But it
is quite possible that people are experiencing these things and they
are an invasion of the sleep state into the waking state and they can
last several minutes or longer. And because in dreams, space and time
are distorted, our perception of these events could be that they
lasted many hours and we can really feel as if they lasted many hours,
when in fact they took only moments. And we're gonna return to
distortion of space and time in a little bit. So to just recap we've
gone so far. Slow wave sleep early in the night. It's been shown to be
important for motor learning and for detailed learning. REM sleep has
a certain dream component when which there's no epinephrin, therefore
we can't experience anxiety, we are paralyzed. Those dreams tend to be
really vivid and have a lot of detail to them. And yet in REM sleep
what's very clear is that the sorts of learning that happened in REM
sleep are not motor events. It's more about unlearning of emotional
events. And now we know why, because the chemicals available for
really feeling those emotions are not present. Now that has very
important implications. So let's address those implications from two
sides. First of all we should ask, what happens if we don't get enough
REM sleep? And a scenario that happens a lot where people don't get
enough REM sleep is the following. I'll just explain the one that I'm
familiar with 'cause it happens to me a lot, although I figured out
ways to adjust. I go to sleep around 10:30, 11:00, I fall asleep very
easily and then I wake up around 3:00 or 4:00 AM.
I now know to use a NSDR, a non sleep deep rest protocol and that
allows me to fall back asleep. Even though it's called non sleep
depressed it's really allows me to relax my body and brain, and I tend
to fall back asleep and sleep till about 7:00 AM. During which time I
get a lot of REM sleep. And I know this because I've measured it, and
I know this because my dreams tend to be very intense of the sort that
we know is typical of REM sleep. In this scenario, I've gotten my slow
wave sleep early in the night and I've got my REM sleep toward
morning. However, there are times when I don't go back to sleep, maybe
I have a flight to catch, that's happened. Sometimes I've got a lot on
my mind and I don't go back to sleep. I can tell you, and you've
probably experienced that the lack of REM sleep tends to make people
emotionally irritable. It tends to make us feel as if the little
things are the big things.
So it's very clear from laboratory studies where people have been
deprived selectively of REM sleep, that our emotionality tends to get
a little bit unhinged and we tend to catastrophize small things. We
tend to feel like the world is really daunting, we're never gonna move
forward in the ways that we want. We can't unlearn the emotional
components of whatever it is that has been happening, even if it's not
traumatic. The other thing that happens in REM sleep is a replay of
certain types of spatial information about where we were and why we
were in those places. And this maps to some beautiful data and studies
that were initiated by a guy named Matt Wilson at MIT years ago.
Showing that in rodents and it turns out in other non-human primates
and in humans there's a replay of spacial information during REM
sleep, that almost precisely maps to the activity that we experienced
during the day as we move from one place to another. So here's a
common world scenario, you go to a new place, you navigate through
that city or that environment, this place doesn't have to be, you
know, at the scale of a city. It can be a new building. It could be
finding particular rooms, new social interaction. You experience that
and if it's important enough, that becomes solidified a few days later
and you won't forget it. If it's unimportant, you'll probably forget
it. During REM sleep there's a literal replay of the exact firing of
the neurons that occurred while you were navigating that same city
you're building earlier. So REM sleep seems to be involved in the
generation of this detailed spatial information. But, what is it
that's actually happening in REM sleep? So there's this uncoupling of
emotion, but most of all what's happening in REM sleep is that we're
forming a relationship with particular rules or algorithms. We're
starting to figure out based on all the experience that we had during
the day, whether or not it's important that we avoid certain people or
that we approach certain people, whether or not it's important that,
you know, when we enter a building that we go into the elevator and
turn left where the bathroom is, for instance. These general themes of
things and locations and how they fit together and that has a word
it's called meaning. During our day we're experiencing all sorts of
things. Meaning is how we each individually piece together the
relevance of one thing to the next, right?
So if I suddenly told you that, you know, this pen was downloading all
the information to my brain that was important to deliver this
information, you'd probably think I was a pretty strange character.
Because typically we don't think of pens as downloading information
into brains. But if I told you that I was getting information from my
computer that was allowing me to say things to you, you'd say, "Well,
that's perfectly reasonable." And that's because we have a clear and
agreed upon association with computers and information and memory, and
we don't have that same association with pens. You might say, "Well,
duh." But something in our brain needs to solidify those relationships
and make sure that the certain relationships don't exist. And it
appears that REM sleep is important for that, because when you deprive
yourself or people of REM they start seeing odd associations, they
tend to lump or batch things. I know this from my own experience of
I've ever been sleep deprived, which unfortunately happens too often
because I'm terrible with deadlines, pull an all-nighter, the word the
starts to look like it's spelled incorrectly. And the is a very simple
word to spell, but things start to look a little distorted. And we
know that if people are deprived of REM sleep for very long periods of
time, they start hallucinating. They literally start seeing
relationships and movement of objects that isn't happening. And so REM
sleep is really where we establish the emotional load, but where we
also, start discarding of all the meanings that are irrelevant. And if
you think about emotionality, a lot of over emotionality or
catastrophizing is about seeing problems everywhere. And you could
imagine why that might occur if you start linking the web of your
experience too extensively.
It's very important in order to have healthy, emotional, and cognitive
functioning that we have fairly narrow channels between individual
things. If we see something on the news that's very troubling, well,
then it makes sense to be very troubled. But if we're troubled by
everything and we start just saying, you know, "Everything is
bothering me and I'm feeling highly irritable and everything is just
distorting and troubling me." Chances are we are not actively removing
the meaning, the connectivity between life experiences as well as we
could and that almost always maps back to a deficit in REM sleep. So
REM sleep is powerful and has this amazing capacity to eliminate the
meanings that don't matter. It's not that it exacerbates the meanings
that do matter, but it eliminates the meanings that don't matter. And
that bears a striking resemblance to what happens early in
development. This isn't a discussion about early in development, but
early in development the reason a baby can't generate coordinated
movements, and the reason why children can get very emotional about
what seems like trivial events, or what adults know to be trivial
events. Like, "Oh, the ice cream shop is closed." And then the kid
just dissolves into, you know, a puddle of tears and the parents say,
"Okay, well, it'll be open again in another time." The children one of
the reasons that they can't generate coordinated movement, or place
that of the ice cream shop being closed into a larger context, is
because they have too much connectivity. And much of the maturation of
the brain and nervous system that brings us to the point of being
emotionally stable, reasonable, rational human beings is about
elimination of connections between things. So REM sleep seems to be
where we uncouple the potential for emotionality between various
experiences. And that brings us to the absolutely fundamental
relationship and similarity of REM sleep to some of the clinical
practices that have been designed to eliminate emotionality and help
people move through trauma and other troubling experiences, whether or
not those troubling experiences are a death in the family of a close
loved one, something terrible that happened to you or somebody else,
or, you know, an entire childhood or some event that in your mind and
body is felt as and experienced as, bad, terrible, or concerning.
Many of you perhaps have heard of trauma treatment such as EMDR, eye
movement desensitization reprocessing, or ketamine treatment for
trauma. Something that recently became legal and is in fairly
widespread clinical use. Interestingly enough, EMDR and ketamine at
kind of a core level, bear very similar features to REM sleep. So
let's talk about EMDR first. EMDR, eye movement desensitization
reprocessing is something that was developed by a psychologist,
Francine Shapiro.
She actually was in Palo Alto. And the story goes that she was
walking, not so incidentally, in the trees and forest behind Stanford,
and she was recalling a troubling event in her own mind. So this would
be from her own life. And she realized that as she was walking, the
emotional load of that experience was not as intense or severe. She
extrapolated from that experience of walking and not feeling as
stressed about the stressful event to a practice that she put into
work in with her clients, with her patients, and that now has become
fairly widespread. It's actually one of the few behavior treatments
that are approved by the American Psychological Association for the
treatment of trauma. what she had her clients and patients do was move
their eyes from side to side while recounting some traumatic or
troubling event. Now this was of course in the clinic. And I'm
guessing that she removed the walking component and just took the eye
movement component to the clinic because while it would be nice to go
on therapy sessions with your therapist and take walks there are
certain boundaries to that such as, confidentiality. You know, if
there are a lot of people around a person might not feel as open to
discussing things, or weather barriers and things like that, you know,
if it's raining or hailing outside, it gets tough to do. Why eye
movements? Well, she never really said why eye movements. But, soon
I'll tell you why the decision to select these lateralized eye
movements for the work in the clinic was the right one. So these eye
movements, they look silly. I'll do them because that's why I'm here.
They look silly, but they basically involve sitting in a chair and
moving one's eyes from side to side, not while talking. But, you know,
for it's...
And then recounting the events. So it's sometimes talking while moving
the eyes, but usually it was moving the eyes from side to side for 30,
60 seconds, then describing this challenging procedure. Now as a
vision scientist who also works on stress when I first heard this, I
thought it was crazy, frankly. People would ask me about EMDR and I
just thought, "That's crazy." I went and looked up some of the
theories about why EMDR might work and there were a bunch of theories.
"Oh, it mimics the eye movements during REM sleep." That was one. It
turns out that's not true and I'll explain why. The other one was,
"Oh, it synchronizes the activity on the two sides of the brain."
Well, sort of, I mean, when you look into both sides of the binocular
visual field you activate the visual cortex. But, this whole idea of
synchrony between the two sides of the brain is something that I think
modern neuroscience is starting to, let's just say, gently or not so
gently move away from. This whole right brain, left brain business. It
turns out however, that eye movements are the sort that I just did and
that Francine Shapiro took from this walk experience and brought to
her clients in the clinic, are the sorts of eye movements that you
generate whenever you're moving through space, when you are self-
generating that movement. So not so much when you're driving a car,
but certainly if you were riding a bicycle, or you were walking or you
were running, you don't realize it but you have these reflexive
subconscious eye movements that go from side to side, and they are
associated with the motor system. So when you move forward your eyes
go like this. There've been a number of studies showing that these
lateralized eye movements helped people move through or dissociate the
emotional experience of particular traumas with those experiences,
such that they could recall those experiences after the treatment and
not feel stressed about them, or they didn't report them as traumatic
any longer. Now the success rate wasn't 100%, but they were
statistically significant in a number of studies. And yet there are
still some critics of EMDR. And frankly, for a long time I still
thought, "Well, I don't know. This just seems like kind of a hack." It
just seems like kind of something that for which we don't know the
mechanism, and we can't explain, But in the last five years, there
have been no fewer than five and there's a sixth on the way, high
quality peer reviewed manuscripts published in Journal of
Neuroscience, Neuron, Cell Press Journal, Excellent Journal, Nature
Excellent Journal. These are very stringent journals and papers
showing that lateralized eye movements of the sort that I just did,
and if you're just listening to this it's just moving the eyes from
side to side with eyes open. That those eye movements but not vertical
eye movements suppress the activity of the amygdala, which is this
brain region that is involved in threat detection, stress, anxiety,
and fear. There are some forms of fear that are not amygdala
dependent, but the amygdala it's not a fear center, but it is critical
for the fear response and for the experience of anxiety. So that's
interesting. We've got a clinical tool now that indeed shows a lot of
success in a good number of people, where eye movements from side to
side are suppressing the amygdala. And the general theme is to use
those eye movements to suppress the fear response, and then to recount
or repeat the experience and over time uncouple the heavy emotional
load, the sadness, the depression, the anxiety, the fear from whatever
it was that happened that was traumatic. This is important to
understand because, you know, I'd love to be able to tell somebody who
had a traumatic experience that they would forget that experience, but
the truth is you never forget the traumatic experience. What you do is
you remove the emotional load. Eventually it really does lose its
potency. The emotional potency is alleviated. Now EMDR I should just
mention, tends to be most successful for single event or very specific
kinds of trauma that happened over and over, as opposed to say an
entire childhood or an entire divorce. It tends to be most effective
for single event kinds of things, car crashes, et cetera, where people
can really recall the events in quite a lot of detail. So it's not for
everybody and it should be done... If it's going to be done for trauma
it should be done in a clinical setting with somebody who's certified
to do this. But that bears a lot of resemblance to REM sleep, right?
This experience in our sleep where our eyes are moving, excuse me,
although in a different way, but we don't have the chemical
epinephrine in order to generate the fear response, and yet we're
remembering the event from the previous day or days. Sometimes in REM
sleep we think about things happened a long time ago. So that's
interesting. And then now there's this new treatment, this chemical
treatment with the drug ketamine, which also bears a lot of
resemblance to the sorts of things that happen in REM sleep. Ketamine
is getting a lot of attention now.
And I think a lot of people just don't realize what ketamine is.
Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic. It is remarkably similar to the
drug called PCP, which is certainly a hazardous drug for people to
use. Ketamine and PCP both function to disrupt the activity of a
particular receptor in the brain called the NMDA receptor, N-methyl-D-
aspartate receptor. This is a receptor that's in the surface of
neurons or on the surface of neurons for which most of the time it's
not active, but when something very extreme happens and there's a lot
of activity in the neural pathway that impinges on that receptor, it
opens and it allows the entry of molecules, ions that trigger a
cellular process that we call long-term potentiation. And long-term
potentiation translates to a change in connectivity so that later you
don't need that intense event for the neuron to become active again.
Let me clarify a little bit of this. The NMDA receptor is gated by
intense experience. One way you could think about this is, typically I
walk in my home, I might make some food and sit down at my kitchen
table, and I don't think anything about explosions.
But were I to come home one night, sit down to a bowl of chicken soup
and there was a massive explosion the neurons are associated with
chicken soup in my kitchen table would be active in a way that was
different than they were previously, and will be coupled to this
experience of explosions such that the next time, and perhaps every
other time that I go to sit down at the kitchen table, no matter how
rational I am about the origins of that explosion, maybe it was a gas
truck that was down the road and there's no reason to think it's there
today, but I would have the same experience. Those neurons will become
active and I'd get an increase in heart rate. I'd get an increase in
sweating, et cetera. Ketamine blocks this NMDA receptor and prevents
that crossover and the addition of meaning to the kitchen table,
kitchen soup, excuse me, chicken soup explosion experience. So how is
ketamine being used? Ketamine is being used to prevent learning of
emotions very soon after trauma. So ketamine is being stocked in a
number of different emergency rooms, where if people are brought in
quickly and, you know, these are hard to describe even but, you know,
a horrible experience of somebody seeing a loved one next to them
killed in a car accident and they were driving that car. This isn't
for everybody, certainly and you need to talk to your physician, but
ketamine is being used so they might infuse somebody with ketamine so
that their emotion it can still occur, but that the plasticity, the
change in the wiring of their brain won't allow that intense emotion
to be attached to the experience. Now immediately you can imagine the
sort of ethical implications of this, right? Because certain emotions
need to be coupled to experiences. I'm not saying that people should
be using ketamine, or shouldn't be using ketamine, certainly not
recreationally it's quite dangerous. It can be lethal and like PCP it
can cause pretty dramatic changes in perception and behavior. But in
the clinical setting the basis of ketamine assisted therapies is
really to remove emotion. And I think the way I've been hearing about
it talked about in the general public is a lot of people think it's a
little bit more like the kind of psilocybin trials or the NMDA trials,
where it's about becoming more emotional or getting in touch with a
certain experience. Ketamine is about becoming dissociative or removed
from the emotional component of experience. So now we have ketamine,
which chemically blocks plasticity and prevents the connection between
an emotion and an experience. That's a pharmacologic intervention. We
have EMDR, which is this eye movement thing that is designed to
suppress the amygdala, and it's designed to remove emotionality while
somebody recounts an experience. And we have REM sleep, where the
chemical epinephrin that allows for signaling of intense emotion and
the experience of a tense emotion in the brain and body is not
allowed. So we're starting to see a organizational logic, which is
that a certain component of our sleeping life is acting like therapy.
And that's really what REM sleep is about.
So we should really think about REM sleep and slow wave sleep as both
critical. Slow wave sleep for motor learning and detailed learning.
REM sleep for attaching of emotions to particular experiences. And
then for making sure that the emotions are not attached to the wrong
experiences and for unlearning emotional responses if they're too
intense or severe. And this all speaks to the great importance of
mastering one sleep, something that we talked about in episode two of
the podcast. And making sure that if life has disruptive events,
either due to travel or stress, or changes in school hours or food
schedule, something that we talked about in episodes three and four,
that one can still grab a hold and manage one sleep life. Because
fundamentally the unlearning of emotions that are troubling to us is
what allows us to move forward in life. And indeed the REM deprivation
studies show that people become hyperemotional. They start to
catastrophize. And it's no surprise therefore, that sleep disturbances
correlate with so many emotional and psychological disturbances. By
now it should just be obvious why that will be the case. In fact, the
other day I was in a discussion with a colleague of mine who's down in
Australia, Dr. Sarah McKay. I've known her for two decades now from
the time she was at Oxford. And Sarah studies among other things
menopause in the brain. And she was saying that a lot of the emotional
effects of menopause, actually are not directly related to the
hormones.
There've been some really nice studies showing that the disruptions in
temperature regulation in menopause mapped to changes in sleep
regulation that then impact emotionality and an inability to correctly
adjust the circuits related to emotionality. And I encourage you to
look at her work. We'll probably have her as a guest on the podcast at
some point in the future, 'cause she's so knowledgeable about those
sorts of issues, as well as issues related to testosterone and in
people with all sorts of different chromosomal backgrounds. So sleep
deprivation isn't just deprivation of energy. It's not just
deprivation of immune function. It is deprivation of self-induced
therapy every time we go to sleep. Okay. So things like EMDR and
ketamine therapies are in-clinic therapies, but REM sleep is the one
that you're giving yourself every night when you go to sleep. Which
raises, I think, the other important question which is, how to get and
how to know if you're getting the appropriate amount of REM sleep and
slow wave sleep. So that's what we'll talk about next. So how should
one go about getting the appropriate amount of slow-wave sleep and REM
sleep and knowing that you're getting the right amount.
Well, short of hooking yourself up to an EEG, it's gonna be tough to
get exact measurements of brain states from night to night. Some
people nowadays are using things like, the Oura Ring or a WHOOP band,
or some other device to measure the quality and depth and duration of
their sleep. And for many people those devices can be quite useful.
Some people are only gauging their sleep by way of whether or not they
feel rested, whether or not they feel like they're learning and
they're getting better or not. There are some things that one can
really do. And the first one might surprise you in light of everything
I've said, and probably everything you've heard about sleep. There was
a study done by a Harvard undergraduate, Emily Hoagland, who was in
Robert Stickgold's lab at the time. And that's the study explored how
variations in total sleep time related to learning, as compared to
total sleep time itself. And to summarize the study, what they found
was that it was more important to have a regular amount of sleep each
night as opposed to the total duration. In other words, and what they
showed was that improvements in learning or deficits in learning were
more related to whether or not you got six hours, six hours, five
hours, six hours, that was better than if somebody got for instance,
six hours, 10 hours, seven hours, four or five hours.
See you might say, "Well, that's crazy because I thought we were just
all supposed to get more sleep and there's more REM towards morning."
It turns out that forsake of learning new information and performance
on exams in particular, that's what was measured, limiting the
variation in the amount of your sleep is at least as important and
perhaps more important than just getting more sleep overall. And I
think this will bring people great relief, many people great relief
who are struggling to "get enough sleep." Remember, a few episodes ago
I talked about the difference between fatigue and insomnia. You know,
fatigue tends to be when we are tired. Insomnia tends to lead to a
sleepiness during the day when we're falling asleep. And you don't
want that, you don't want either of those things really. But, I found
it striking that the data from this study really point to the fact
that consistently getting about the same amount of sleep is better
than just getting more sleep. And I think nowadays so many people are
just aiming for more sleep, and they're rather troubled about the fact
that they're only getting five hours, or they're only getting six
hours in some cases. It may be the case that they are sleep deprived
and they need more sleep, but some people just have a lower sleep
need. And I find great relief, personally, in the fact that
consistently getting, for me, about six hours or six and a half hours
is going to be more beneficial than constantly striving for eight or
nine and finding that some nights I'm getting five and sometimes I'm
getting nine and varying around the mean. As I recall, and I think I'm
gonna get this precisely right, but if not I know that I'm at least
close. For every hour variation in sleep regardless of whether or not
it was more sleep than one typically got, there was a 17% reduction in
performance on this particular exam type. So this is powerful. This
means that we should strive for a regular amount of sleep. And for
some of us that means falling asleep and waking up and going back to
sleep. For some people means falling asleep and waking up and not
getting back to sleep. Now ideally, you're getting the full compliment
of slow wave sleep early at night and sleep toward morning, which is
REM sleep. Which brings us to, how to get more REM sleep. Well, there
are a couple of different ways but here's how to not get more REM
sleep. All right. First of all, drink a lot of fluid right before
going to sleep.
One of the reasons why we wake up in the middle of the night to use
the bathroom is because when our bladder is full there is a neural
connection, literally a set of neurons and a nerve circuit that goes
to the brain stem that wakes us up. Actually some people that I know
and won't be mentioned, actually use this to try and adjust for their
jet lag when they're trying to stay awake. Having to urinate is one of
the most anxiety evoking experiences anyone can have. If you really
have to go to the bathroom it's very hard to fall asleep or stay
asleep. And bedwetting, which happens in kids very early on is a
failure of those circuits to mature until, you know, I think we all
assume that babies are gonna pee in their sleep, but adults aren't
supposed to do that. And the circuits take some time to develop and in
some kids they develop a little bit later than others. So having a
full bladder is one way to disrupt your sleep. You don't wanna go to
bed dehydrated, but that's one way. On the other hand there is
evidence that if you want to remember your dreams more, or remember
more of your dreams there is a tool that you can use. I don't
necessarily recommend it, which is to drink a bunch of water before
you go to sleep. And then what happens is you tend to break in and out
of REM sleep. It tends to be fractured. And with a sleep journal and
they've done these laboratory studies. Believe it or not, people will
recall more of their dreams because they're in this kind of semi-
conscious state because they're constantly waking up throughout the
night. I suggest not having a full bladder before you go to sleep.
That one's kind of an obvious one, but nonetheless. The other one is
if you recall that during REM sleep we have a shift in
neurotransmitter such that we have less serotonin, right? Just wanna
make sure I got that right. Excuse me, less serotonin. There are a lot
of supplements out there geared toward improving sleep. I've taken
some of them and I've taken many of them, if not all of them at this
point.
So I could report back to you. And I think I mentioned on a previous
episode that when I take tryptophan, or anything that contains 5-HTP,
which is serotonin or a precursor to serotonin, serotonin is made from
tryptophan, I tend to fall very deeply asleep and then wake up a few
hours later. And that makes sense now based on the fact that, you just
don't want a lot of REM sleep early on. What was probably happening is
that I was getting a lot of REM sleep early on, because low levels of
serotonin are typically associated with slow wave sleep and that comes
early in the night. So for some people those supplements might work,
but be aware serotonin supplements could disrupt the timing of REM
sleep and slow wave sleep. And in my case led to waking up very
shortly after going to sleep and not being able to get back to sleep.
Now if you want to increase your slow wave sleep. That's interesting.
There are ways to do that. One of the most powerful ways to increase
slow wave sleep, the percentage of slow wave sleep, apparently without
any disruption to the other components of sleep and learning is to
engage in resistance exercise.
It's pretty clear that resistance exercise triggers a number of
metabolic and endocrine pathways that lend themselves to release of
growth hormone, which happens early in the night. And resistance
exercise therefore can induce a greater percentage of slow wave sleep.
It doesn't have to be done very close to going to bed time. In fact,
for some people the exercise could be disruptive, for reasons I've
talked about in previous episodes. But resistance exercise, unlike
aerobic exercise does seem to increase the amount of slow wave sleep,
which as we know is involved in motor learning and the acquisition of
fine detailed information not general rules, or the emotional
components of experiences. For those of you that are interested in
lucid dreaming and would like to increase the amount of lucid dreaming
that you're experiencing, I haven't been able to track down that
device with the red light that I described at the beginning, but there
are a number of just simple zero technology tools that one could use
in principle.
One is to set a queue. The way this works is you come up with a simple
statement about something that you'd like to see, or experience later
in dreams. You can, for instance, write down, you know, something
like, I want to remember the red apple. I know it sounds silly and
trivial, and you look at that you would probably wanna write it down
on a piece of paper. You might even want to draw a red apple, and then
before you go to sleep you would look at it and then you would just go
to sleep. There are some reports that doing that for several days in a
row can lead to a situation in which you are suddenly in your dream
and you remember the red apple, and that gives you a sort of tether to
reality between the dream state and reality that allows you to
navigate and shape and kind of adjust your dreams. Lucid dreaming does
not have to be, or include the ability to alter features of the dream,
you know, to be able to control things in the dream. Sometimes it's
just the awareness that you are dreaming, but nonetheless some people
enjoy lucid dreaming. And then for people that have a lot of lucid
dreams that feel kind of overwhelmed by those, that's going to involve
trying to embrace protocols that can set the right duration of sleep.
There's a little bit of literature not a lot that shows that keeping
the total amount of sleep per night to say six hours such that you
begin sleep and end at the beginning and end of one of these ultradian
cycles, can be better than waking up in the middle of one of these
ultradian cycles. So try and find the right amount of sleep that you
need, that's right for you, and then try and get that consistently
night to night. If you're a lucid dreamer and you don't like it, then
you may want to start to make sure that you're waking up at the end of
one of these ultradian cycles. So in this case, it would be better to
wake up after six hours than after seven and if you did sleep longer
than six hours, maybe you'd wanna get to seven and a half hours.
'Cause that's gonna reflect the end of one of these 90 minute cycles,
as opposed to waking up in the middle.
Alcohol. Alcohol and marijuana are well known to induce states that
are pseudo sleep like. Especially, when people fall asleep after
having consumed alcohol or THC, one of the active components of
marijuana. Alcohol, THC and most things like them, meaning things that
increase serotonin, or GABA are going to disrupt the pattern of sleep.
They're going to disrupt the depth. They're going to disrupt the
overall sequencing of more slow wave sleep early in the night and more
REM sleep later in the night. That's just the reality. There are some
things that at least, in a few studies that I could find seem to
suggest that you could increase the amount of slow wave sleep using
things like arginine, the amino acid arginine. Although, you really
wanna check. Arginine can have effects on heart, et cetera has other
effects. But, alcohol, THC, not gonna be great for sleep and depth of
sleep. You might feel like you can fall asleep faster, but the sleep
that you're accessing really isn't the kind of deep restorative sleep
that you should be getting. Now, of course, if that's what you need in
order to sleep and that's within your protocols, I've said here
before, I'm not suggesting people take anything. I'm not a medical
doctor. I'm not a cop. So I'm not trying to irregulate anyone's
behavior. I'm just telling you what the literature says. Some of you
may want to explore your dreams and meaning of dreams, et cetera. You
know, there's not a lot of hard data about how to do this, but a lot
of people report keeping a sleep journal, where a dream journal can be
very useful. So they mark when they think they fell asleep the night
before, when they woke up and if they wake up in the middle of the
night, early in the morning they'll just write down what they can
recall of their dreams.
And even if they recall nothing, many people have the experience of
mid morning or later afternoon that suddenly comes to them that they
had a dream about something and writing that down. I kept a dream
journal for a while. It didn't really afford me much. I didn't really
learn anything except that my dreams were very bizarre. But, there are
some things that happen in dreams that are associated with REM sleep
as compared to slow wave sleep, which can tell you whether or not your
dream likely happened in REM sleep or slow wave sleep. And the
distinguishing feature it turns out is something called theory of
mind. Theory of mind is actually an idea that was developed for the
study and assessment of autism.
And it was initially that phrase, theory of mind, was brought about by
Simon Baron Cohen, who is Sacha Baron Cohen, the comedians brother.
Simon Baron Cohen is a psychologist and to some extent an
neuroscientist at Oxford. And theory of mind tests are done on
children. And the theory of mind test is some what like the following,
a child is brought into a laboratory and watches a video of a child
playing with some sort of toy. And then at the end of playing with
that toy they put the toy in a drawer and they go away, and then
another child comes in and is looking around and then the experimenter
asks the child who's in the experiment, the real child and says, "You
know, what does the child think? You know, what are they feeling?" And
most children have a particular age, five or six or older will say,
"Oh, you know, he or she is confused, they don't know where the toy
is." Or, they'll say something that implies what we call theory of
mind, that they can put their ideas and their mind into what the other
child is likely to be feeling or experiencing. That's theory of mind.
And it turns out that this is used as one of the assessments for
autism, because some children, not all, but some children that have
autism or that go on to develop autism don't have this theory of mind.
They tend to fixate on the fact that the first child put the toy in
the drawer. They'll say it's in the drawer as opposed to answering the
question which is how does the second child feel about it, or what are
they experiencing? So theory of mind is something that emerges early
in life as a part of the maturation of the circuits in the brain
associated with emotional learning and social interactions. And we
experienced this in certain dreams. So if you had a dream that you're
puzzled about, or that you're fixated on and you're thinking about,
you might ask, "In that dream was I assessing somebody else's emotion
and feeling, or was I very much in my own first person experience?"
And that the tendency is that theory of mind tends to show up most in
these REM associated dreams. Now this isn't a hard and fast rule, but
chances are if you were in a dream and you were thinking about other
people who wanted to do something to you, you were thinking about
their desire to chase you or help you, or something that was related
to someone else's emotional experience. It was probably a REM dream.
That dream occurred in rapid eye movement sleep as opposed to slow
wave sleep. And that makes sense when you think about the role of REM
in emotional unlearning of associations with particular life events.
That REM is rich with all sorts of exploration of the emotional load
of being chased, or the emotional load of having to take an exam the
next day, or being late for something. But again, if you're fixated or
you can recall thinking a lot about, or feeling a lot about what
somebody else's motivations were then chances are it was in REM and if
not chances are it was in slow wave sleep.
Today we've been in a deep dive of sleep and dreaming, learning and
unlearning. And I just want to recap a few of the highlights and
important points. A lot more slow wave sleep and less REM early in the
night, more REM and less slow wave sleep later in the night. REM sleep
is associated with intense experiences without this chemical
epinephrine that allows us the anxiety or fear. And almost certainly
has an important role in uncoupling of emotion from experiences. Kind
of self-induced therapy that we go into each night. That bears
striking resemblance to things like EMDR and ketamine therapies and so
forth. Slow wave sleep is critical, however, it's critical mostly for
motor learning and the learning of specific details. So REM is kind of
emotions and general themes and meaning, and slow wave sleep, motor
learning and details. I personally find it fascinating that
consistency of sleep, meaning getting six hours every night is better
than getting ten one night, eight the next, five the next, four the
next. I find that fascinating and I think I also like it because it's
something I can control better than just trying to sleep more, which I
think I'm not alone and agreeing that that's just hard for a lot of
people to do. This episode also brings us to the conclusion of a five
episode streak where we've been focusing on sleep and transitions in
and out of sleep, non sleep depressed. We've talked about a lot of
tools, morning light, evening light, avoiding lights, blue blockers,
supplements, tools for measuring sleep duration and quality. We've
been covering a lot of themes. I like to think that by now you're
armed with a number of tools and information. Things like knowing when
your temperature minimum is, knowing when you might wanna view light
or not, when you might wanna eat or take hot showers, or God forbid a
cold shower, something that most people including me more or less
loath, but can have certain benefits. And that will allow you to shape
your sleep life and get this consistent, or more or less consistent
amount of sleep on a regular basis.
Nobody's perfect. In fact I have this little joke that I sometimes
tell, it's not funny. Like, most of the jokes I tell I'm told are not
funny, but, you know, there's so much excitement now about
intermittent fasting. Sometimes I think that someone should start
something on intermittent sleep deprivation, although we're already
doing that. We are all experiencing lack of sleep from time to time.
And I don't think we should catastrophize that too much. I think that
what we wanna do rather than accumulate a sleep anxiety is to... You
know, if we get a bad night's sleep, we want to adjust, we want to get
back on track and just get the consistent amount of sleep. Use those
non sleep deep rest protocols to help us relax when we're feeling
anxious, we're having trouble waking up in the middle of the night.
There are a lot of tools out there, and most of them are zero cost.
And so I hope you'll find those beneficial. If you've been hearing
Costello snoring throughout this episode. I apologize in his behalf.
As I said, in the welcome video to this podcast he's an integral part
of the podcast. A few people have said, "Hey, that noise in the
background is really disruptive." Hey, what can I say? Costello is a
ten-year-old bulldog mastiff.
The lifespan on those animals is about 10 years. So I'm not trying to
make you feel guilty, but, you know, after he's gone there won't be
any snoring, although I'll probably get a different dog. So sort of a,
what were the kids say, sorry not sorry. Sorry not sorry about the
snoring and I'm sorry if it's disruptive genuinely, but he's here for
the hall. So that's what that's about. As we close out the segment on
sleep we are moving into a new theme and topic for the next four to
five episodes.
We are going to discuss the science and the tools related to
neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a remarkable feature of the
nervous system. In fact, it's the defining feature of the nervous
system, which is its ability to change itself in response to
experience. That is unlike every other tissue and collection of cells
and organ in our body. It's really what makes us us as a species and
it's what makes us us as individuals, and it's really where our
potential lies. Everything that we know, everything we can do, and our
true potential in terms of what we will ever be able to know, do, say,
in life is set by the limits of neuroplasticity. So we're going to
explore learning and childhood, learning and adulthood. We're going to
discuss detailed protocols as they relate to sensory plasticity.
Learning new sensory information, versus motor plasticity or sensory
motor integration. We're going to talk about language acquisition.
We're going to be talking about emotional acquisition and breadth. As
well as, I think a topic a lot of people are gonna find fascinating
is, the relationship between plasticity set during childhood
attachment to parent or other caregiver, and how that maps onto adult
relationships. Many of you have probably heard about secure attach or
insecure attach. The A, B and C, D babies as they're called from the
classic studies of Bowlby and others. But now there's actual
neuroscience that can say which circuits were active during those
early life attachment and how those map to adult attachment styles,
challenges, and what makes us more likely to select certain partners
and styles of attachment, as well as how to change those. It's really
fascinating and I think neuroscience's time has come for
neuroplasticity. We're also gonna talk, of course, about supplements
and chemicals and machines and devices that can assist in speeding up
the plasticity process. Or believe it or not, there are some cases
where you might want to delay plasticity in order to get more depth of
learning and have that learning last longer. Something that is just
absolutely spectacular literature. So I'm very excited to move on to
that topic soon. I hope that the tools that you've acquired so far and
the knowledge that you've acquired so far is helping you with your
self evaluation and experimentation as you see fit, and is allowing
you to not just sleep better, but feel better while you're awake. And
hopefully has set the stage for you to learn better as we start to
march into the month on neuroplasticity. Many of you have asked how
you can help support the Huberman Lab Podcast and we greatly
appreciate the question. You can help support the podcast by
subscribing to the YouTube channel, if you haven't already and leaving
comments and questions in the comment section. If you could subscribe
on Apple and or Spotify, that's helpful. And there's a place on Apple
Podcasts to leave a rating, as well as comments about how you feel
about the podcast. If you could suggest the podcast to friends and
coworkers and anyone else that you think would benefit from the
information that also really helps us get the word out. And of course,
check out our sponsors because that's a very direct way to help us
continue to get this information out to the general public. Many of
you have asked about supplements and where I personally get my
supplements. I've partnered with Thorne and I get my supplements from
Thorne because, by my view they have the highest level of stringency
and precision in terms of what's in the bottle. And they also have
very high quality standards. They're partnered with the Mayo Clinic
and all the major sports organizations. If you wanna try Thorne
supplements you can go to thorne.com. So that's Thorne spelled
thorne.com/u/huberman. And if you do that you can see the formulations
that I take. And you'll also get 20% off, not just those formulations,
but anything that Thorne makes. That's thorne.com/u/huberman to get
20% off anything that they provide. Last but not least, a few people
wrote to me with some questions/corrections about things that I said
in previous podcasts.
So in keeping with my goal of making the information accurate and
clear, I just want to correct myself about a few things that I said.
One of those and I'm guessing it probably came from an endocrinologist
or somebody else that knows a lot about testicles said, "Huberman, you
mentioned that testosterone is made by the sertoli cells of the
testes, and it's not. It's made by the leydig cells of the testes."
And indeed you are correct. And so I want to make sure that I clarify
that. Testosterone is made by the leydig cells of the testes, not by
the sertoli cells. The sertoli cells make 5 alpha-reductase and
aromatase, and some other enzymes involved in conversion of
testosterone into things like DHT and estrogen. So thank you for that
correction. I genuinely appreciate it. I misspoke. The other thing I
said, was at one point I said, "Typical temperature is 96.8 when I
actually meant to say 98.6." So it was a dyslexic slip on my part and
I apologize. I don't know that I'm dyslexic. I know I haven't been
clinically diagnosed with dyslexia, but I swapped them, which
sometimes happens when I'm going fast. So I apologize. I'll use this a
moment to just say temperature varies a lot across the day and night,
that was a theme of previous podcasts. So we can't really talk about
average temperature anyway, but I do want to be clear that most people
think about average temperature as 98.6. I misspoke, my error and I
apologize. Thank you for joining me in this journey of the nervous
system in biology and trying to understand the mechanisms that make us
who we are and how we function in sleep and in wakefulness.
It's really an incredible landscape to consider and I hope that you're
getting a lot out of the information. As always thank you for your
interest in science. [upbeat music]
Thank you to our sponsors:
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Timestamps below.
00:00 Introduction
03:00 The Dream Mask
06:00 Cycling Sleep
08:10 Chemical Cocktails of Sleep
13:00 Motor Learning
16:30 High Performance with Less Sleep
17:45 Rapid Eye Movement Sleep
20:30 Paralysis & Hallucinations
23:35 Nightmares
24:45 When REM & Waking Collide
25:00 Sleeping While Awake
26:45 Alien Abductions
29:00 Irritability
30:00 Sleep to Delete
32:25 Creating Meaning
34:10 Adults Acting Like Children
36:20 Trauma & REM
37:15 EMDR
39:10 Demo
44:25 Ketamine / PCP
45:45 Soup, Explosions, & NMDA
48:55 Self Therapy
50:30 Note About Hormones
51:40 Measuring REM / SWS
53:15 Sleep Consistency
56:00 Bed Wetting
58:00 Serotonin
59:00 Increasing SWS
59:50 Lucidity
1:02:15 Booze / Weed
1:03:50 Scripting Dreams
1:04:35 Theory of Mind
1:07:55 Synthesis
1:10:00 Intermittent Sleep Deprivation
1:11:10 Snoring Disclaimer
1:11:40 New Topic
1:15:50 Corrections
1:17:25 Closing Remarks
As always, thank you for your interest in science!
Please note that The Huberman Lab Podcast is distinct from Dr.
Huberman's teaching and research roles at Stanford University School
of Medicine. The information provided in this show is not medical
advice, nor should it be taken or applied as a replacement for medical
advice. The Huberman Lab Podcast, its employees, guests and affiliates
assume no liability for the application of the information discussed.
[Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac https://www.blabacphoto.com/]