back to indexMatt Walker: Sleep | Lex Fridman Podcast #210
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The following is a conversation with Matt Walker,
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sleep scientist, professor of neuroscience
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and psychology at Berkeley, author of Why We Sleep,
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and the host of a new podcast called The Matt Walker Podcast.
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It's 10 minute episodes a couple of times a month,
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covering sleep and other health and science topics.
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I love it and recommend it highly.
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It's up there with the greats,
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like the Huberman Lab Podcast with Andrew Huberman,
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and I think David Sinclair is putting out
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an audio series soon too.
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I can't wait to listen to it.
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I'm really excited by the future of science
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in the podcasting world.
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To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors,
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Stamps.com, Squarespace, Athletic Greens,
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BetterHelp, and Onnit.
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Their links are in the description.
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As a side note, let me say that to me,
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a healthy life is one in which you fall in love
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with the world around you, with ideas, with people,
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with small goals and big goals, no matter how difficult,
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with dreams you hold onto and chase for years.
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Life should be lived fully.
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That, to me, is the priority.
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That, to me, is a healthy life.
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Second to that is the understanding and the utilization
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of the best available science on diet, exercise,
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supplements, sleep, and other lifestyle choices.
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To me, science in the realm of health is a guide
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for what we should try, not the absolute truth
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of how to live life.
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The goal is to learn to listen to your body
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and figure out what works best for you.
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All that said, a good night's sleep can be a great tool
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in making life awesome and productive,
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and Matt is a great advocate of the how and the why of sleep.
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We agree on some things and disagree on others,
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but he's a great human being, a great scientist,
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and, as of recently, a friend with whom I enjoy
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having these wide ranging conversations.
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This is the Lux Friedman podcast,
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and here is my conversation with Matt Walker.
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You should try these shades on.
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Let's see what you look like.
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So they are now your shades, and that's not the question.
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It's the same thing as Putin took the Super Bowl ring,
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and it's now his ring.
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Yeah, one wonders if he was offered it,
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but they are yours.
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When did you first fall in love with the dream
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of understanding sleep?
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Like, where did the fascination with sleep begin?
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So back in the United Kingdom,
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you can sort of start doing medicine at age 18,
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and it's a five year program,
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and I was at the Queen's Medical Center in the UK,
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and I remember just being fascinated
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by states of consciousness, and particularly anesthesia.
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I was thinking, isn't that, within seconds,
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I can take a perfectly conscious human being,
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and I can remove all existence of the mentality
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and their awareness within seconds,
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and that stunned me.
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So I started to get really interested in conscious states.
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I even started to read a lot about hypnosis,
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and all of these things, hypnosis,
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even sleep and dreams at the time,
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they were very esoteric.
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It was sort of charlatan science at that stage,
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and I think almost all of my colleagues and I
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are accidental sleep researchers.
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No one, as I recall, in the classroom
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when you're sort of five years old,
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and the teacher says,
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what would you like to be when you grow up?
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No one's putting their hand up and saying,
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I would love to be a sleep researcher.
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And so when I was doing my PhD,
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I was trying to identify different forms of dementia
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very early on in the course,
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and I was using electrical brainwave recordings to do that,
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and I was failing miserably.
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It was a disaster, just no result after no result.
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And I used to go home to the doctor's residence
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with this sort of little igloo of journals
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that at the weekend I would sort of sit in and read,
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and which I'm now thinking,
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do I really want to admit this?
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Because it sounds like I had no social life,
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which I didn't, I was a social leper.
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But, and I started to realize that some parts of the brain
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were sleep related areas,
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and some dementias were eating away
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those sleep related areas.
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Other dementias would leave them untouched.
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And I thought, well, I'm doing this all wrong.
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I'm measuring my patients while they're awake.
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Instead, I should be measuring them while they're asleep.
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Started doing that, got some amazing results.
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And then I wanted to ask the question,
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is that sleep disruption that my patients are experiencing
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as they go into dementia,
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maybe it's not a symptom of the dementia.
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I wonder if it's a cause of the dementia.
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And at that point, which was, cough, cough, 20 years ago,
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no one could answer a very simple fundamental question.
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And I at the time didn't realize
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that some of the most brilliant minds in scientific history
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had tried to answer that question and failed.
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And at that point, I just thought, well,
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I'm going to go and do a couple of years of sleep research
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and I'll figure out why we sleep.
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And then I'll come back to my patients
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in this question of dementia.
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And as I said, that was 20 years ago.
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And what I realized is that hard questions
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care very little about who asks them.
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They will meter out their lessons of difficulty
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And I was schooled in the difficulty of the question,
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But in truth, 20 years later,
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we've had to upend the question
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rather than saying, why do we sleep?
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And by the way, the answer then was
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that we sleep to cure sleepiness,
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which is like saying, we eat to cure hunger.
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That tells you nothing about the physiological benefits
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of food, same with sleep.
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Now we've actually have to ask the question,
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is there any physiological system in the body
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or any major operation of the mind
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that isn't wonderfully enhanced when we get sleep
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or demonstrably impaired when we don't get enough?
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And so far, for the most part, the answer seems to be no.
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So far, the answer seems to be no.
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So why does the body and the mind crave sleep?
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How can we begin to answer that question then?
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So I think one of the ways that I think about this
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or one of the answers that came to me is the following.
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The reason that we implode so quickly
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and so thoroughly with insufficient sleep
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is because human beings seem to be one of the few species
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that will deliberately deprive themselves of sleep
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for no apparent good reason, biological.
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And what that led me then to was the following.
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Mother nature as a consequence.
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So no other species does what we do in that context.
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There are a few species that do undergo sleep deprivation,
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but for very obvious, clear biological reasons.
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One is when they're in a condition of severe starvation.
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The second is when they're caring for their newborn.
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So for example, killer whales will often deprive themselves.
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The female will go away from the pod, give birth,
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and then bring the calf back.
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And during that time,
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the mother will undergo sleep deprivation.
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And then the third one is during migration
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when birds are flying trans oceanographic 2,000, 3,000 miles.
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But for the most part,
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it's never seen in the animal kingdom,
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which brings me back to the point,
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therefore mother nature in the course of evolution
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has never had to face the challenge of this thing
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called sleep deprivation.
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And therefore she has never created a safety net in place
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to circumnavigate this common influence.
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And there is a good example where we have,
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which is called the adipose cell, the fat cell.
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Because during our evolutionary past,
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we had famine and we had feast.
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And mother nature came up with a very clever recipe,
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which is how can I store caloric credit
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so that I can spend it when I go into debt?
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And the fat cell was born, brilliant idea.
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Where is the fat cell for sleep?
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Where is that sort of banking chip for sleep?
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And unfortunately we don't seem to have one
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because she's never had to face that challenge.
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So even if there's not some kind of physics,
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fundamental need for sleep
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that physiologically or psychologically,
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the fact is most organisms are built such that they need it.
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And then mother nature never built an extra mechanism
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for sleep deprivation.
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So it's interesting that why we sleep
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might not have a good answer,
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but we need to sleep to be healthy is nevertheless true.
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Yeah, and we have many answers right now.
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In some ways the question of why we sleep
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was the wrong question too.
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It's what are the plory potent many reasons we sleep?
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We don't just sleep for one reason
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because from an evolutionary perspective,
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it is the most idiotic thing that you could imagine.
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When you're sleeping, you're not finding a mate,
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you're not reproducing,
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you're not caring for your young,
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you're not foraging for food,
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and worse still, you're vulnerable to predation.
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So on any one of those grounds,
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especially as a collective,
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sleep should have been strongly selected against
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in the course of evolution.
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But in every species that we've studied carefully to date,
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Yeah, so it is important.
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So like you're right.
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I think I've heard arguments
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from an evolutionary biology perspective
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that sleep is actually advantageous,
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maybe like some kind of predator prey relationships.
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But you're saying,
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and it actually makes way more sense what you're saying
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is it should have been selected against.
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Like why close your eyes?
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Because there was an energy conservation hypothesis
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which is that we need to essentially go
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into low battery mode, power down,
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because it's unsustainable.
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But in fact, that actually has been blasted out the water
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because sleep is an incredibly active process.
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In fact, the difference between you just lying on the couch
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but remaining conscious versus you lying on the couch
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and falling asleep,
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it's only a savings of about 140, 150 calories.
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In other words, you just go out
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and club another baby seal or whatever it was,
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and you wouldn't worry.
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So it has to be much more to it than energy conservation,
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much more to it than sharing ecosystem space and time,
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much more to it than simply predator prey relationships.
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If sleep really did,
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even very old evolutionary organisms like earthworms,
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millions of years old,
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they have periods where they're active
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and periods where they're passively asleep.
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It's called lethargicus.
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And so what that in some ways suggested to me
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was sleep evolved with life itself on this planet,
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and then it has fought its way through heroically
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every step along the evolutionary pathway,
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which then leads to the sort of famous sleep statement
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from a researcher that if sleep doesn't serve
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an absolutely vital function or functions,
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then it's the biggest mistake
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the evolutionary process has ever made.
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And we've now realized Mother Nature
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didn't make a spectacular blender with sleep.
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You've mentioned the idea of conscious states.
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Do you think of sleep
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as a fundamentally different conscious state than awakeness?
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And how many conscious states are there
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so when you're into it,
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you're understanding of what the mind can do,
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do you think awake state, sleep state,
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or is there some kind of continuum?
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There's a complicated state transition diagram.
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Like how do you think about this whole space?
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I think about it as a state space diagram.
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And I think it's probably more of a continuum
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than we have believed it to be or suggested it to be.
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So we used to think absent of anesthesia
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that there were already three main states of consciousness.
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There was being awake, being in non rapid eye movement sleep
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or non dream sleep,
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and then being in rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep.
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And those were the three states
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within which your brain could percolate and be conscious.
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Conscious during non REM sleep is maybe a stretch to say,
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but I still believe there is plenty of consciousness there.
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I don't believe that though anymore.
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And the reason is because we can have daydreams
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and we are in a very different wakeful state
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in those daydreams than we are when we are as we are now
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together present and extra septively focused
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rather than intra septively focused.
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And then we also know that as you are sort of progressing
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into those different stages of sleep during non REM sleep,
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you can also still dream,
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depends on your definition of dreaming,
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but we seem to have some degree of dreaming
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in almost all stages of sleep.
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We've also then found that when you are sleep deprived,
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there are even individual brain cells will fall asleep.
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Despite the animal being, you know,
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behaviorally from best we can tell awake,
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individual brain cells and clusters of brain cells
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will go into a sleep like state.
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And humans do this too.
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When we are sleep deprived,
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we have what are called microsleeps
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where the eyelid will partially close
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and the brain essentially falls lapses
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into a state of sleep,
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but behaviorally you seem to be awake.
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And the danger here is road traffic accidents.
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what we call these sort of microsleep events at the wheel.
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Now, if you're traveling at 65 miles an hour
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in a two ton vehicle,
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you know, it takes probably around one second
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to drift from one lane to the next
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and it takes two seconds to go completely off the road.
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So if you have one of these microsleeps at the wheel,
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you know, it could be the last microsleep
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that you ever have.
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But I don't now see it as a set of,
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you know, very binary distinct,
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you know, step function state.
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It's not a one or a zero.
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I see it more of a, as a continuum.
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So I've for five, six years at MIT
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really focused on this human side of driving question.
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And one of the big concerns is the microsleeps,
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drowsiness, these kinds of ideas.
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And one of the open questions was,
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is it possible through computer vision to detect
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or any kind of sensors?
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The nice thing about computer vision
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is you don't have to have direct contact to the person.
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Is it possible to detect increases in drowsiness?
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Is it possible to detect these kinds of microsleeps
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or actually just sleep in general?
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Among other things, like distraction,
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these are all words that have so many meanings
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and so many debates, like attention is a whole nother one.
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Just because you're looking at something
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doesn't mean you're loading in the information.
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Just because you're looking away
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doesn't mean your peripheral vision
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can't pick up the important information.
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There's so many complicated vision science things there.
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So I wonder if you could say something to,
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they say the eyes are the windows to the soul.
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Do you think the eyes can reveal
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something about sleepiness through computer vision,
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just looking at the video of the face?
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And Andrew Huberman and I, your friend,
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have talked about this.
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I would love to work on this together.
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It's a fascinating problem.
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But drowsiness is a tricky one.
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So there's, what kind of information?
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There's blinking and there's eye movement.
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And those are the ones that can be picked up
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with computer vision.
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Do you think those are signals that could be used
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to say something about where we are in this continuum?
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And I think there are a number of other features too.
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I think, you know, aperture of eye.
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So in other words, partial closures, full closures,
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duration of those closures, duration of those partial
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closures of the eyelid.
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I think there may be some information in the pupil as well,
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because as we're transitioning between those states,
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there are changes in what's called
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the automatic nervous system,
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or technically it's called the autonomic nervous system,
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part of which will control your pupillary size.
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So I actually think that there is probably
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a wealth of information.
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When you combine that probably with aspects of steering,
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angle steering maneuver.
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And if you can sense the pressure on the pedals as well,
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my guess is that there is some combinatorial feature
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that creates a phenotype of,
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you are starting to fall asleep.
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And as the autonomous controls develop,
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that it's time for them to kick in.
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Some manufacturers, auto manufacturers sort of have
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something beta version, maybe an alpha version of this
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already starting to come online,
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where they have a little camera in the wheel
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that I think tries to look at some features.
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Almost everybody doing this and it's very alpha.
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So, you know, the thing that you currently have,
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some people have that in their car,
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there's a coffee cup or something that comes up
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that you might be sleepy.
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The primary signal that they're comfortable using
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is the steering wheel reversals.
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So basically using your interaction with the steering wheel
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and how much you're interacting with it
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as a sign of sleepiness.
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So if you have to constantly correct the car,
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that's a sign of like you starting to drift
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I think that's a very, very crude signal.
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It's probably a powerful one.
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There's a whole nother component to this,
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which is it seems like it's so driver and subject dependent.
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How our behavior changes as we get sleepy and drowsy
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seems to be different in complicated, fascinating ways
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where you can't just use one signal.
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It's kind of like what you're saying,
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there has to be a lot of different signals
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that you should then be able to combine.
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The hope is there's the searches for like universal signals
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that are pretty damn good for like 90% of people.
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But I don't think we need
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to take necessarily quite that approach.
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I think what we could do in some clever fashion
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is using the individual.
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So what you and I are perhaps suggesting here
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is that there is an array of features
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that we know provide information
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that is sensitive to whether or not
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you're falling asleep at the wheel.
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Some of those, let's say that there are 10 of them,
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for me, seven of them are the cardinal features.
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For you, however, you know, six of them
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and they're not all the same sort of overlapping
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are those for you.
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I think what we need is algorithms
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that can firstly understand when you are well slept.
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So let's say that people have sleep trackers at night
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and then your car integrates that information
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and it understands when you are well slept.
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And then you've got the data of the individual behavior
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unique to that individual, snowflake like,
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when they are well slept.
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This is the signature of well rested driving.
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Then you can look at deviations from that
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and pattern match it with the sleep history
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of that individual.
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And then I don't need to find the sort of, you know,
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the one size fits all approach for 99% of the people.
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I can create a very bespoke tailor like set of features,
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a Savile Row suit of sleepiness features.
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You know, that would be my,
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if you want to ask me about moon shots and crazy ideas,
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that's where I go.
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But to start with, I think your approach is a great one.
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Let's find something that covers 99% of the people
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because the worrying thing about microsleeps of course,
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unlike, you know, drugs or alcohol, which you know,
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certainly is a terrible thing to be behind the wheel.
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With those often you react too late.
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And that's the reason you get into an accident.
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When you fall asleep behind the wheel,
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you don't react at all.
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You know, at that point,
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there is a two ton missile driving down the street
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and no one's in control.
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That's why those accidents can often be more dangerous.
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Yeah, and the fascinating thing is,
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in the case of semi autonomous vehicles,
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like Tesla autopilot,
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this is where I've had disagreements with Mr. Elon Musk,
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and the human factors community,
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which is this community that one of the big things they study
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is human supervision over automation.
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So you have like pilots, you know, supervising an airplane
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that's mostly flying autonomously.
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The question is, when we're actually doing the driving,
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how do microsleeps or general,
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how does drowsiness progress
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and how does it affect our driving?
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That question becomes more fascinating, more complicated
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when your task is not driving,
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but supervising the driving.
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So your task is to take over when stuff goes wrong.
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And that is complicated,
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but the basic conclusions from many decades
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is that humans are really crappy at supervising
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because they get drowsy and lose vigilance much, much faster.
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The really surprising thing with Tesla autopilot,
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it was surprising to me,
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surprising to the human factors community,
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and in fact, they still argue with me about it,
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is it seems that humans in Teslas with autopilot
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and other similar systems are not becoming less vigilant,
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at least with the studies we've done.
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So there's something about the urgency of driving.
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I can't, I'm not sure why,
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but there's something about the risk,
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I think the fact that you might die
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is still keeping people awake.
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The question is, as Tesla autopilot
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or similar systems get better and better and better,
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how does that affect increasing drowsiness?
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And that's when you need to have,
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that's where the big disagreement was,
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you need to have driver sensing,
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meaning driver facing camera
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that tracks some kind of information about the face
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that can tell you drowsiness.
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So you can tell the car if you're drowsy
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so that the car can be like,
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you should be probably driving or pull to the side.
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Right, or I need to do some of the heavy lifting here.
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Yeah, so there needs to be that dance of interaction
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of a human and machine,
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but currently it's mostly steering wheel based.
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So this idea that your hands should be
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on the steering wheel,
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that's a sign that you're paying attention
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is an outdated and a very crude metric.
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I think there are far more sophisticated ways
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that we can solve that problem if we invest.
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Can I ask you a big philosophical question
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before we get into fun details?
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On the topic of conscious states,
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how fundamental do you think is consciousness
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to the human mind?
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I ask this from almost like a robotics perspective.
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So in your study of sleep,
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do you think the hard question of consciousness
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that it feels like something to be us,
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is that like a nice little feature,
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like a quirk of our mind,
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or is it somehow fundamental?
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Because sleep feels like we take a step out
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of that consciousness a little bit.
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So from all your study of sleep,
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do you think consciousness is like deeply part of who we are
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or is it just a nice trick?
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I think it's a deeply embedded feature
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that I can imagine has a whole panoply
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of biological benefits.
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But to your point about sleep,
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what is interesting if you do a lot of dream research
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and we've done some,
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it's very, very rare at all, in fact,
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for you to end up becoming someone
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other than who you are in your dreams.
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Now you can have third person perspective dreams
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where you can see yourself in the dream
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as if you're sort of,
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you've risen above your physical being.
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But for the most part,
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it's very rare that we lose our sense of conscious self.
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And maybe I'm sort of doing a sleight of hand
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because it's really what I'm saying,
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it's very rare that we lose our sense
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of who we are in dreams.
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Now that's not to suggest that dreams aren't utterly bizarre.
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And I mean, when you slept last night,
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which I know may have been perhaps a little less than me,
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but when you went into dreaming,
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you became flagrantly psychotic.
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And there are five essentially good reasons.
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Firstly, you started to see things which were not there,
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so you were hallucinating.
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Second, you believe things that couldn't possibly be true,
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so you were delusional.
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Third, you became confused about time and place and person,
link |
so you're suffering from what we would call disorientation.
link |
Fourth, you have wildly fluctuating emotions,
link |
something that psychiatrists
link |
will call being affectively labile.
link |
And then how wonderful, you woke up this morning
link |
and you forgot most if not all of that dream experience,
link |
so you're suffering from amnesia.
link |
If you were to experience any one of those five things
link |
while you're awake,
link |
you would probably be seeking psychological help.
link |
But so I place that as a backdrop
link |
against your astute question,
link |
because despite all of that psychosis,
link |
there is still a present self nested at the heart of it,
link |
meaning that I think it's very difficult for us
link |
to abandon our conscious sense of self.
link |
And if it's that hard,
link |
the old adage in some ways,
link |
that you can't outrun your shadow.
link |
But here it's more of a philosophical question,
link |
which is about the conscious mind
link |
and what the state of consciousness actually means
link |
So I think that that to me,
link |
you become so dislocated from so many other rational ways
link |
of waking consciousness.
link |
But one thing that won't go away,
link |
that won't get perturbed or sort of, you know,
link |
manacled, is this your sense of conscious self?
link |
Yeah, that's a strong sign that consciousness
link |
is fundamental to the human mind.
link |
Or we're just creatures of habit
link |
who gotten used to having consciousness.
link |
Maybe it just takes a lot of either chemical substances
link |
or a lot of like mental work to escape that.
link |
I mean, it's like trying to launch a rocket.
link |
You know, the energy that has to be put in
link |
to create escape velocity
link |
from the gravitational pull of this thing
link |
called planet earth is immense.
link |
Well, the same thing is true
link |
for us to abandon our sense of conscious self.
link |
The amount of biological, the amount of substances,
link |
the amount of wacky stuff that you have to do
link |
to truly get escape velocity from your conscious self.
link |
What does that tell us about then
link |
the fundamental state of our conscious self?
link |
Yeah, it also probably says that it's quite useful
link |
to have consciousness for survival
link |
and for just operation in this world.
link |
And perhaps for intelligence.
link |
I'm one of the, on the AI side,
link |
people that think that intelligence requires consciousness.
link |
So like high levels of general intelligence
link |
requires consciousness.
link |
Most people in the AI field think like consciousness
link |
and intelligence are fundamentally different.
link |
You could build a computer that's super intelligent.
link |
It doesn't have to be conscious.
link |
I think that if you define super intelligence
link |
by being good at chess, yes.
link |
But if you define super intelligence
link |
as being able to operate in this living world of humans
link |
and be able to perform all kinds of different tasks,
link |
consciousness, it seems to be somehow fundamental
link |
to richly integrate yourself into the human experience,
link |
It feels like you have to be a conscious being.
link |
But then we don't even know what consciousness is
link |
and we certainly don't know how to engineer it
link |
I love the fact that there are still questions
link |
that are so embryonic because, you know,
link |
I suspect it's the same with you.
link |
Answers to me are simply ways to get to more questions.
link |
You know, it's questions where, you know,
link |
questions turn me on, answers less so.
link |
And I love the fact that we are still embryonic
link |
in our sense of arguing about
link |
even what the definition of consciousness is.
link |
But I also find it fascinating.
link |
I think it's thoroughly delightful
link |
to absorb yourself in the thought.
link |
Think about the brain and we can move back
link |
across the complexity of phylogeny
link |
from, you know, humans to mammals
link |
to sort of birds to reptiles, amphibians, fish.
link |
You can, bacteria, whatever you want.
link |
And you can go through this and say, okay,
link |
where is the hard line of, you know,
link |
what we would define as consciousness?
link |
And I'm sure it's got something to do
link |
with the complexity of the neural system.
link |
Of that, I'm fairly certain.
link |
But to me, it's always been fascinating.
link |
So what is it then?
link |
You know, is it that I just keep adding neurons
link |
to a Petri dish and I just keep adding them
link |
and adding them and adding them.
link |
At some point when I hit a critical mass
link |
of interconnected neurons, that is the mass of the,
link |
you know, the interconnected human brain, then bingo.
link |
All of a sudden it kicks into gear
link |
and we have consciousness.
link |
Like a phase shift, phase transition of some kind.
link |
But there is something about the complexity
link |
of the nervous system that I think
link |
is fundamental to consciousness.
link |
And the reason I bring that up is because
link |
when we're trying to then think about creating it
link |
in an artificial way, does that inform us
link |
as to the complexity that we should be looking at
link |
in terms of development?
link |
I also think that it's a missed opportunity
link |
in the sort of digital space for us
link |
to try to recreate human consciousness.
link |
We've already got human consciousness.
link |
What if we were to think about creating
link |
some other form of, why do we have to think
link |
that the ultimate in the creation of, you know,
link |
an artificial intelligence is the replication,
link |
you know, of a human state of consciousness?
link |
Can we not think outside of our own consciousness
link |
and believe that there is something even more incredible
link |
or more complimentary, more orthogonal?
link |
So I'm sometimes perplexed that people
link |
are trying to mimic human consciousness
link |
rather than think about creating
link |
something that's different.
link |
I think of human consciousness or consciousness in general
link |
as this magic superpower that allows us
link |
to deeply experience the world.
link |
And just as you're saying, I don't think that superpower
link |
has to take the exact flavor as humans have.
link |
That's my love for robots.
link |
I would love to add the ability to robots
link |
that can experience the world and other humans deeply.
link |
I'm humbled by the fact that that idea
link |
does not necessarily need to look anything like
link |
how humans experience the world.
link |
But there's a dance of human to robot connection
link |
the same way human to dog or human to cat connection,
link |
that there's a magic there to that interaction.
link |
And I'm not sure how to create that magic,
link |
but it's a worthy effort.
link |
I also love, just exactly as you said,
link |
on the question of consciousness
link |
or engineering consciousness,
link |
the fun thing about this problem
link |
is it seems obvious to me that a hundred years from now,
link |
no matter what we do today,
link |
people, if we're still here,
link |
will laugh at how silly our notions were.
link |
So like, it's almost impossible for me to imagine
link |
that we will truly solve this problem fully in my lifetime.
link |
And more than that,
link |
everything we'll do will be silly a hundred years from now,
link |
but it's still, that makes it fun to me
link |
because it's like you have the full freedom
link |
to not even be right, just to try.
link |
Just to try is freedom.
link |
And that's how I see that.
link |
Get me that T shirt, please.
link |
So, and human robot interaction is fascinating
link |
because it's like watching dancing.
link |
I've been dancing tango recently
link |
and just, it's like, there is no goal.
link |
The goal is to create something magical
link |
and whether consciousness or emotion
link |
or elegance of movement,
link |
all of those things aid in the creation of the magic.
link |
And it's a free, it's an art form to explore
link |
how to make that, how to create that
link |
in a way that's compelling.
link |
Yeah, I love the line in Sense of a Woman with Al Pacino
link |
where he's speaking about the tango
link |
and he said, really, it's just freedom
link |
that if you get tangled up, you just keep tangoing on.
link |
I still, to this day, I think first or second time
link |
I talked to Joe Rogan on his podcast,
link |
I said, we got into this heated argument
link |
about whether Sense of a Woman
link |
is a better movie than John Wick.
link |
Because it's one of my favorite movies for many reasons.
link |
One is Sense of a Woman.
link |
I didn't know that, by the way.
link |
Yeah, I didn't know if you would actually know
link |
No, yeah, I said, I love the tango scene.
link |
I love Al Pacino's performance.
link |
It's a wonderful movie.
link |
Then Joe was saying, John Wick is better.
link |
So we, to this day, argue about this.
link |
I think it depends on what conscious state you're in
link |
that you would be ready and receptive to.
link |
But Sense of a Woman, I think it has one of the best
link |
monologues at the end of the movie
link |
that has ever been written or at least performed.
link |
When Al Pacino defends the younger.
link |
Yeah, I often think about that.
link |
There's been times in my life, I don't know about you,
link |
where I wish I had an Al Pacino in my life,
link |
where integrity is really important in this life.
link |
And sometimes you find yourself in places
link |
where there's pressure to sacrifice that integrity.
link |
And you want, what is it, Lieutenant Colonel
link |
or whatever he was.
link |
To come in on your side and scream at everyone
link |
and say, what the hell are we doing here?
link |
Being, you know, unfortunately British
link |
and sort of having that slightly awkward
link |
sort of Hugh Grant gene.
link |
It's very, very, very at the opposite end of the spectrum
link |
of the remarkable feat of Al Pacino
link |
at the end of that scene.
link |
But, and yeah, integrity is, it's a challenging thing
link |
and I value it much.
link |
And I think it can take 20 years to build a reputation
link |
and two minutes to lose it.
link |
And there is nothing more that I value than that integrity
link |
and, you know, if I'm ever wrong about anything,
link |
I truly don't want to be wrong for any longer
link |
than I have to be.
link |
You know, that's what being in some ways a scientist is.
link |
You're just driven by truth.
link |
And the irony relative to something like mathematics
link |
is that in science, you never find truth.
link |
What you do in science is you discount the things
link |
that are likely to be untrue,
link |
leaving only the possibility of what could be true.
link |
But in math, you know, when you create, you know, a proof,
link |
it's a proof for, you know, from that point forward,
link |
there is truth in mathematics.
link |
And there's, I think there's a beauty in that,
link |
but I kind of like the messiness of science
link |
because again, to me, it's less about the truth
link |
of the answer and it is more about the pursuit of questions.
link |
But their integrity becomes more and more important
link |
and it becomes more difficult.
link |
There's a lot of pressures,
link |
just like in the rest of the world,
link |
but there's a lot of pressures than a scientist.
link |
One is like funding sources.
link |
I've noticed this, that, you know,
link |
money affects everyone's mind, I think.
link |
I've been always somebody that I believe money can't,
link |
you can't buy my opinion.
link |
I don't care how much money, billions or trillions.
link |
But that pressure is there and you have to be
link |
very cognizant of it and make sure that your opinion
link |
is not defined by the funding sources.
link |
And then the other is just your own success of, you know,
link |
for a couple of decades, publishing an idea
link |
and then realizing at some point
link |
that that idea was wrong all along.
link |
And that's a tough thing for people to do,
link |
but that's also integrity is to walk away,
link |
is to say that you were wrong.
link |
That doesn't have to be in some big dramatic way.
link |
It could be in a bunch of tiny ways along the way.
link |
Like reconfigure your intuition about a particular problem.
link |
That's, and all of that is integrity.
link |
When everybody in the room, you know,
link |
believes a certain thing,
link |
everybody in the community believes a certain thing,
link |
to be able to still be open minded in the face of that.
link |
Yeah, and I think it comes down in some ways
link |
to the issue of ego that you bond your correctness
link |
or your rightness, your scientific theory
link |
with your sense of ego.
link |
You know, I've never found it that difficult to let go
link |
of theories in the face of counter evidence
link |
in part because I have such low self esteem.
link |
Well, I kind of liked that.
link |
I always liked that combination.
link |
I have the same, I'm like very self critical,
link |
imposter syndrome, all those things,
link |
putting yourself below the podium,
link |
but at the same time having the ego
link |
that drives the ambition to work your ass off.
link |
Like some kind of weird drive,
link |
maybe like drive to be better.
link |
Like thinking of yourself as not that great
link |
and always driving to be better.
link |
And then at the same time,
link |
because that can be paralyzing and exhausting and so on,
link |
at the same time, just being grateful to be alive.
link |
But in the sciences, in the actual effort,
link |
never be satisfied, never think of yourself highly.
link |
It seems to be a nice combination.
link |
I very much hope that that is part of who I am
link |
and I remain very quietly motivated and driven.
link |
And I, like you, love the idea of perfection
link |
and I know I will never achieve it,
link |
but I will never stop trying to.
link |
So similar to you, which sounds weird
link |
because there's all these videos of me on the internet.
link |
So I think I just naturally lean into the things
link |
I'm afraid of and I'm uncomfortable doing.
link |
Like I'm very afraid of talking to people
link |
and just even before talking to you today,
link |
just a lot of anxiety and all those kinds of things.
link |
About talking to me?
link |
Fear in some cases, self doubt and all those kinds of things.
link |
But I do it anyway.
link |
So the reason I bring that up
link |
is you've launched a podcast.
link |
Allow me to say, I think you're a great science communicator.
link |
So this challenge of being afraid
link |
or cautious of being in the public eye
link |
and yet having a longing to communicate
link |
some of the things you're excited about
link |
in the space of sleep and beyond.
link |
What's your vision with this project?
link |
I think firstly to that question, like you,
link |
I am always more afraid of not trying than trying.
link |
That to me frightens me more.
link |
But with the podcast,
link |
I think really I have two very simple goals.
link |
I want to try and democratize the science of sleep
link |
my goal would be to try and reunite humanity
link |
with the sleep that it is so desperately bereft of.
link |
And if I can do that through a number of different means,
link |
the podcast is a little bit different than this format.
link |
It's going to be short form monologues from yours truly
link |
that will last usually less than just 10 minutes.
link |
And I see it as simply a little slice of sleep goodness
link |
that can accompany your waking day.
link |
It's hard to know what is the right way
link |
to do science communication.
link |
Like your friend, mine, Andrew Huberman,
link |
he's an incredible human being.
link |
So he does like two hours of,
link |
I wonder how many takes he does.
link |
I don't know, but it looks like he doesn't do any.
link |
Yeah, I suspect he's that magnificent of a human being.
link |
When I talk to him in like in person,
link |
he always generates intelligent words,
link |
well cited, nonstop for hours.
link |
He's a Gatling gun of information and it's pristine.
link |
And passion and all those kinds of things.
link |
So that's an interesting medium.
link |
it's funny because I wouldn't have done it
link |
the way he's doing it.
link |
I wouldn't advise him to do it the way he's doing it.
link |
Cause I thought there's no way you could do
link |
what you're doing.
link |
Cause it's a lot of work,
link |
but he is like doing an incredible job of it.
link |
I just think it's the same with like Dan Carlin
link |
and hardcore history.
link |
I thought that the way Andrew's doing it
link |
would crush him the way it crushes Dan Carlin.
link |
So Dan has so much pressure on him to do a good job
link |
that he ends up publishing like two episodes a year.
link |
So that pressure can be paralyzing.
link |
The pressure of like putting out like
link |
strong scientific statements
link |
that can be overwhelming.
link |
Now, Andrew seems to be just plowing through anyway.
link |
If there's mistakes, he'll say there's corrections and so on.
link |
I actually haven't talked to him too much about it.
link |
Like psychologically, how difficult is it
link |
to put yourself out there for an hour to a week
link |
of just nonstop dropping knowledge.
link |
Any one sentence of which could be totally wrong.
link |
It could be a mistake.
link |
And there will be mistakes.
link |
And I, in the first edition of my book,
link |
there were errors that we corrected
link |
in the second edition too.
link |
But there will be probabilistically,
link |
if you've got 10 facts per page of a book
link |
and you've got 350 pages,
link |
odds are it's probably not going to be
link |
utter perfection out the gate.
link |
And it will be the same way for Andrew too.
link |
But having the reverence of
link |
and simply accepting the things that are wrong
link |
and correcting them and doing the right thing.
link |
I know that that's his mentality.
link |
I do want to say that I'm just kind of honored to be,
link |
it's a cool group of like scientific people
link |
that I'm fortunate enough to now be interacting with.
link |
It's you and Andrew and David Sinclair
link |
has been thinking about throwing his hat in the ring.
link |
David is another one of those very special people
link |
So it's cool because podcasts are, it's cool.
link |
It's such a powerful medium of communication.
link |
It's much freer than more constrained
link |
like publications and so on.
link |
Or it's much more accessible and inspiring than like,
link |
I don't know, conference presentations or lectures.
link |
And so it's a really exciting medium to me.
link |
And it's cool that there's this like group of people
link |
that are becoming friends and putting stuff out there
link |
and supporting each other.
link |
So it's fun to also watch how that's going to evolve
link |
in your case, because I wonder it'll be two a month.
link |
Or devolve is the answer to that.
link |
Well, I mean, some of it is persistence
link |
through the challenges that we've been talking about,
link |
I think I've got a lot to learn.
link |
But I will persist.
link |
Can I ask you some detailed stuff?
link |
You mentioned that.
link |
Oh my goodness, go anywhere you wish with sleep.
link |
So I'm a big fan of coffee and caffeine.
link |
And I've been, especially in the last few days,
link |
consuming a very large amount.
link |
And I'm cognizant of the fact that my body is affected
link |
by caffeine different than the anecdotal information
link |
that other people tell me.
link |
I seem to be not at all affected by it.
link |
It's almost, it feels like more like a ritual
link |
than it is a chemical boost to my performance.
link |
Like I can drink several cups of coffee right before bed
link |
and just knock out anyway.
link |
I'm not sure if it's a biological chemical
link |
or it has to do with just the fact
link |
that I'm consuming huge amounts of caffeine.
link |
All that to say, what do you think is the relationship
link |
between coffee and sleep, caffeine and sleep?
link |
If there's an interesting distinction there.
link |
There is a distinction.
link |
So I think the first thing to say,
link |
which is going to sound strange coming from me
link |
The health benefits associated with drinking coffee
link |
are really quite well established now.
link |
But I think that the counterpoint to that,
link |
well, firstly, the dose and the timing make the poison.
link |
And I'll perhaps come back to that in just a second.
link |
But for coffee, it's actually not the caffeine.
link |
So, a lot of people have asked me
link |
about this rightful paradox between the fact
link |
that sleep provides all of these incredible health benefits
link |
and then coffee, which can have a deleterious impact
link |
on your sleep has a whole collection of health benefits.
link |
Many of them Venn diagram overlapping
link |
with those that sleep provides.
link |
How on earth can you reconcile those two?
link |
And the answer is that, well, the answer is very simple.
link |
It's called antioxidants, that it turns out
link |
that for most people in Western civilization
link |
because of diet, not being quite what it should be,
link |
the major source through which they obtain antioxidants
link |
is the coffee bean.
link |
So the humble coffee bean has now been asked
link |
to carry the astronomical weight of serving up
link |
the large majority of people's antioxidant needs.
link |
And you can see this if, for example,
link |
you look at the health benefits of decaffeinated coffee,
link |
it has a whole constellation
link |
of really great health benefits too.
link |
So it's not the caffeine.
link |
And that's why I liked what you said,
link |
this sort of separation of church and state
link |
between coffee and caffeine.
link |
It's not the caffeine, it's the coffee bean itself
link |
that provides those health benefits.
link |
But coming back to how it impacts sleep,
link |
it impacts sleep in probably at least three different ways.
link |
The first is that for most people,
link |
caffeine can make it obviously a little harder
link |
Caffeine can make it harder to stay asleep.
link |
But let's say that you are one of those individuals
link |
and I think you are, and you can say,
link |
look, I can have three or four espressos with dinner
link |
and I fall asleep just fine
link |
and I stay asleep soundly across the night.
link |
So there's no problem.
link |
The downside there is that even if that is true,
link |
the amount of deep sleep that you get will not be as deep.
link |
And so you will actually lose somewhere
link |
between 10 to 30% of your deep sleep
link |
if you drink caffeine in the evening.
link |
So to give you some context,
link |
to drop your deep sleep by let's say 20%,
link |
I'd probably have to age you by 15 years,
link |
or you could do it every night with a cup of coffee.
link |
I think the fourth component
link |
that is perhaps less well understood about coffee
link |
is its timing, and that's why I was saying
link |
the timing and the dose make the poison.
link |
The dose, by the way,
link |
once you get past about three cups of coffee a day,
link |
the health benefits actually start to turn down
link |
in the opposite direction.
link |
So there is a U shape function.
link |
It's sort of the Goldilocks syndrome,
link |
not too little, not too much, just the right amount.
link |
The second component is the timing though.
link |
Caffeine has half life of about five to six hours,
link |
meaning that after five to six hours,
link |
50% of that on average for the average adult
link |
is still in the system,
link |
which means that it has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours.
link |
So in other words, if you have a coffee at noon,
link |
a quarter of that caffeine is still circulating
link |
in your brain at midnight.
link |
So having a cup of coffee at noon,
link |
one could argue is the equivalent
link |
of tucking yourself into bed at midnight,
link |
and before you turn the light out,
link |
you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee.
link |
But that doesn't still answer your question
link |
as to why are you so immune?
link |
So I'm someone who is actually unfortunately
link |
very sensitive to caffeine.
link |
And if I have even two cups of coffee in the morning,
link |
I don't sleep as well that night.
link |
And I find it miserable because I love the smell of coffee.
link |
I love the routine.
link |
I love the ritual.
link |
I think I would love to be invested in it.
link |
It's just terrible for my sleep.
link |
So I switched to decaf.
link |
There is a difference from one individual to the next,
link |
and it's controlled by a set of liver enzymes
link |
called cytochrome P450 enzymes.
link |
And there is a particular gene
link |
that if you have a different sort of version of this gene,
link |
it's called CYP1A2.
link |
That gene will determine the speed
link |
of the clearance of caffeine from your system.
link |
Some people will have a version of that gene
link |
that is very effective and efficient
link |
at clearing that caffeine.
link |
And so their half life could be as short as two hours
link |
rather than five to six hours.
link |
Other people, hands up Matt Walker,
link |
have a version of that gene
link |
that is not very effective at clearing out the caffeine.
link |
And therefore their half life sort of sensitivity
link |
could be somewhere between eight to nine hours.
link |
So we understand that there are individual differences,
link |
but overall, I guess the top line here is drink coffee
link |
and understand that it's not the caffeine,
link |
it's the coffee that's the benefit
link |
and the dose makes the poison.
link |
Is there some aspect to it that it's like a muscle
link |
in terms of all the combination of letters and numbers
link |
that you just said?
link |
Is there some aspect that if I can improve
link |
the quarter life, the half life,
link |
could decrease that number if I just practice?
link |
Like I drink a lot of coffee,
link |
so like habit alters how your body's able
link |
to get rid of the caffeine.
link |
Not how the body is able to get rid of the caffeine,
link |
but it does alter how sensitive the body is to the caffeine.
link |
And it's not at the level of the enzyme
link |
degrading the caffeine.
link |
It's at the level of the receptors
link |
that caffeine will act upon.
link |
Now it turns out that those are called adenosine receptors
link |
and maybe we can speak about what adenosine is
link |
and sleep pressure and all of that good stuff.
link |
But as you start to drink more and more coffee,
link |
the body tries to fight back
link |
and it happens with many different drugs by the way,
link |
and it's called tolerance.
link |
And so one of the ways that your body becomes tolerant
link |
to a drug is that the receptors that the drug is binding to,
link |
these sort of welcome sites, these sort of picture myths,
link |
as it were, that receive the drug,
link |
those start to get taken away from the surface of the cell
link |
and it's what we call receptor internalization.
link |
So the cell starts to think, gee whiz,
link |
there's a lot of stimulation going on, this is too much.
link |
So I'm just going to, when normally I would coat my cell
link |
with let's just say five of these receptors
link |
for argument's sake,
link |
things are going a little bit too ballistic right now.
link |
I'm going to take away at least two of those receptors
link |
and downscale it to just having three of those.
link |
And now you need two cups of coffee to get the same effect
link |
that one cup of coffee got you before.
link |
And that's why then when you go cold turkey on coffee,
link |
all of a sudden the system has equilibrated itself
link |
to expecting X amount of stimulation
link |
and now all of that stimulation is gone.
link |
So it's now got too few receptors
link |
and you have a caffeine withdrawal syndrome.
link |
And that's why, for example, with drugs of abuse,
link |
things like heroin, when people go into abstinence,
link |
as they're sort of moving into their addiction,
link |
they will build up a progressive tolerance to that drug.
link |
So they need to take more of it to get the same high.
link |
But then if they go cold turkey for some period of time,
link |
the system goes back to being more sensitive again.
link |
It starts to repopulate the surface of the cell
link |
with these receptors.
link |
But now when they reuse and they fall off the wagon,
link |
if they go back to the same dose
link |
that they were using before 10 weeks ago
link |
or three months ago, that dose can kill them.
link |
They can have an overdose.
link |
Even though they were using the same amount
link |
at those two different times,
link |
the difference is that it's not the dose of the drug,
link |
it's the sensitivity of the system.
link |
And that's the same thing that we see with caffeine.
link |
In terms of training the muscle, as it were,
link |
the system becomes less sensitive, can calibrate.
link |
Is there a time, the number of hours before bed,
link |
that's a safe bet to most people to recommend
link |
you shouldn't drink caffeine this many hours?
link |
Like, is there an average half life
link |
that you should be aiming at?
link |
Or is this advice kind of impossible
link |
because there's so much variability?
link |
There is huge variability.
link |
And I think everyone themselves to a degree knows it,
link |
although I'll put a caveat on that too
link |
because it's a slightly dangerous point.
link |
So the recommendation for the average adult
link |
and who, where is the average adult in society?
link |
There is no such thing.
link |
But for the average adult,
link |
it would be probably cutting yourself off maybe 10 hours
link |
So assuming a normative bedtime in society,
link |
I would say try to stop drinking caffeine before 2 p.m.
link |
and just keep an eye out.
link |
And if you're struggling with sleep,
link |
dial down the caffeine and see if it makes a difference.
link |
Can I ask you about sleep and learning?
link |
So how does sleep affect learning?
link |
Sleep before learning, sleep after learning,
link |
which are both fascinating kind of dynamics
link |
of the mind's interaction with this extra conscious state.
link |
Yeah, sleep is profoundly and very intimately related
link |
to your memory systems and your informational systems.
link |
The first is you just mentioned is that
link |
sleep before learning will essentially prepare your brain
link |
almost like a dry sponge ready to sort of,
link |
you know, initially soak up new information.
link |
In other words, you need sleep before learning
link |
to effectively imprint information into the brain
link |
to lay down fresh memory traces.
link |
And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain,
link |
and we know we've studied these memory circuits,
link |
will, you know, they essentially become waterlogged
link |
as it were for the sponge analogy,
link |
and you can't absorb the information as effectively.
link |
So you need sleep before learning,
link |
but you also need sleep unfortunately after learning too,
link |
to then take those freshly minted memories
link |
and effectively hit the save button on them,
link |
but it's nowhere near as quick as a digital system.
link |
It takes hours because it's a physical biological change
link |
that happens at the level of brain cells.
link |
But sleep after learning will cement and solidify
link |
that new memory into the neural architecture of the brain,
link |
therefore making it less likely to be forgotten.
link |
So, you know, I often think of sleep in that way as,
link |
it's almost sort of future proofing information.
link |
Well, it means that it gives it a higher degree of assurance
link |
to be remembered in the future
link |
rather than go through the sort of degradation
link |
that we think of as forgetting.
link |
So the brain has in some ways by default,
link |
you know, there is forget,
link |
and actually I would love to,
link |
I was going to say sleep is relevant for memory
link |
in three different ways,
link |
but I'm going to amend that
link |
and say there's four different ways,
link |
which is learning, maintaining, memorizing,
link |
abstraction, assimilation, association, then forgetting,
link |
which the last one sounds oxymoronic
link |
based on the former three, but I'll see if I can explain.
link |
So sleep after learning then sort of, you know,
link |
sets that information like amber in solidification.
link |
The third benefit, however, is that sleep,
link |
we've learned more recently is much more intelligent
link |
than we ever gave it credit for.
link |
Sleep doesn't simply just take individual memories
link |
and strengthen them.
link |
Sleep will then intelligently integrate and cross link
link |
and associate that information together.
link |
And it's almost like informational alchemy.
link |
So that you wake up the next morning
link |
with a revised mind wide web of associations.
link |
And that's probably the reason that, you know,
link |
you've never been told to stay awake on a problem.
link |
And in every language that I've inquired about that phrase
link |
or something very similar seems to exist,
link |
which means to me that this creative associative benefit
link |
of sleep transcends cultural boundaries.
link |
It is a common experience across humanity.
link |
Now I should note that I think the French translation
link |
of that is much closer to you.
link |
I think you sleep with a problem.
link |
Whereas the British, you sleep on a problem.
link |
The French, you sleep with a problem.
link |
I think it says so much about the romantic difference
link |
between the British and the French, but let's not go there.
link |
So such a subtle, but such a fundamental difference.
link |
Sleep with the problem.
link |
That's why I love the French.
link |
So, and we can sort of double click on any one of these
link |
and go into detail, but the fourth,
link |
I became really enchanted by about eight years ago
link |
in our research, which was this idea of forgetting.
link |
And I started to think that forgetting may be the price
link |
that we pay for remembering.
link |
And in that sense, there is an enormous benefit
link |
And you may be thinking, that sounds ridiculous.
link |
I don't want to forget.
link |
In fact, my biggest problem is I keep forgetting things,
link |
but the brain has a, well, we believe,
link |
has a finite storage capacity.
link |
We can't prove it yet, but my suspicion is
link |
that that's probably true.
link |
It doesn't have an infinite storage capacity.
link |
It has constraints.
link |
If that's the case, we can't simply go through life
link |
being constantly informational aggregators
link |
unless we are programmed to say,
link |
we've got a hard drive space of about 85 to 90 years
link |
and we're good and we can do that.
link |
Maybe that's true.
link |
I don't think that's true.
link |
I think forgetting is an incredibly good and useful thing.
link |
So for example, it's not beneficial
link |
from an evolutionary perspective for me to remember
link |
where I parked my car three years ago.
link |
So it's important that I can remember today's parking spot,
link |
but I don't want to have the junk kind of DNA
link |
from a memory perspective of where I parked my car
link |
Now, I actually have in some ways a problem
link |
with forgetting, and again, I'm not trying
link |
to sort of be laudatory, but you know,
link |
I tend not to forget too many things.
link |
And I don't think that that's a good thing.
link |
And there's a wonderful neurologist, Luria,
link |
who wrote a book called The Mind of the Mnemonicist.
link |
And it was a brilliant book,
link |
both because it was written exquisitely,
link |
but he was studying these sort of memory savants
link |
who basically could remember everything that he gave them.
link |
And he tried to find a chink in their armor.
link |
And the first half of the book is essentially about him
link |
seeing how far he can push them before they fail.
link |
And he never found that place.
link |
He could never find a place where they stopped remembering.
link |
And then in his brilliance,
link |
he turned the question on its head.
link |
He said, not what is the benefit of constantly remembering,
link |
but instead, what is the detriment to never forgetting?
link |
And when you start to realize his descriptions
link |
of those individuals, it's probably a life
link |
that you would not want.
link |
But it's fascinating both from a human perspective,
link |
but also AI perspective.
link |
There's a big challenge in the machine learning community
link |
of how to build systems that are able to remember
link |
for prolonged periods of time, lifelong continuous learning.
link |
So where you build up information over time.
link |
So memory is one of the biggest open problems
link |
in AI and machine learning.
link |
But at the same time,
link |
the right way to formulate memory is actually forgetting
link |
because you have to be exceptionally selective
link |
at which kind of stuff you remember.
link |
And that's where the step of assimilation,
link |
integration that you're referring to is really important.
link |
I mean, we forget most of the things.
link |
And the question is exactly the cost of forgetting
link |
at the very edge of stuff that could be important
link |
or could not be, how do we remember or not those things?
link |
Like for example, doing a podcast,
link |
I've become cognizant of one feature of my forgetting
link |
that's been problematic, which is I forget names
link |
and titles of books and so on.
link |
So when I read, I remember ideas.
link |
I remember quotes, I remember statements
link |
and like that's the space in which I'm thinking.
link |
But when you communicate to others,
link |
you have to say this person in this book said that.
link |
So it's the same thing with like Andrew Huberman
link |
is masterful at this.
link |
This is important academia,
link |
remembering the authors of a paper
link |
and the title of the paper as part of remembering the idea.
link |
And I've been feeling the cost of not being able
link |
to naturally remember those things.
link |
And so that's something I need to sort of work on,
link |
but that's an example.
link |
Are you good with faces?
link |
Yes, very good at faces.
link |
But not good with names.
link |
So I am exactly like you.
link |
And there is an understanding of that in the brain too.
link |
We understand that there is partitioning of those
link |
in terms of the territory of the brain
link |
that takes care of faces and facts and places
link |
and that they can be separate.
link |
So I will never forget a face,
link |
but as I said, I usually forget very little,
link |
but for some reason, names are a struggle.
link |
I think in some ways,
link |
because I'm probably just a slightly anxious person.
link |
So when you first meet someone,
link |
which is usually the time when a name is introduced,
link |
you were saying you were sort of anxious maybe
link |
about sort of sitting down with me,
link |
but I find that a little bit activating.
link |
And so it's not as though there's anything wrong
link |
It's just the emotional state I'm in
link |
when I'm first meeting someone.
link |
It's a little bit perturbing,
link |
but I will never forget the face.
link |
I completely relate to that
link |
because I almost don't hear people's names
link |
when they tell me because I'm so anxious.
link |
But I think there's certain quirks of social interaction
link |
that show that you care about the person,
link |
that you remember that person,
link |
that they matter to you,
link |
that they had an impact on you.
link |
And one of the ways to show that
link |
is you remember their name.
link |
But that's a quirk to me
link |
because a lot of people I meet have a deep impact on me,
link |
but I can't communicate that unless I know their name,
link |
unless I know some of the details
link |
that we humans seem to use to communicate
link |
that we remember each other.
link |
What I remember well is the feeling we shared,
link |
is the experience we shared.
link |
What I don't remember well is the detailed labels
link |
of those experiences.
link |
And I need to certainly work on that.
link |
I think it's just allowing yourself to be innate
link |
and who you are is also a beautiful thing too.
link |
I'm not suggesting it's not important
link |
to try and better oneself.
link |
But I also sometimes worry about the misery
link |
that that puts us in.
link |
But like you, I do struggle with name,
link |
but I know the first time when we met in the lobby,
link |
I know exactly what you look like.
link |
I know that you were wearing headphones.
link |
I know the shape and the size of those headphones.
link |
You didn't have your black jacket on.
link |
I know exactly what the weave of your shirt looked like
link |
and what your shoes look like.
link |
And I knew exactly the height of your,
link |
the end of your pants from the top of your shoes.
link |
And so those things I don't forget.
link |
And I can remember when people,
link |
I met people two years ago and I'll say,
link |
oh yes, we met there.
link |
And I remember you had those fantastic boots on.
link |
I thought they were pretty great pair of boots.
link |
And they're like, how do you,
link |
I didn't even remember what I was wearing that day.
link |
Yeah, I'm the exact same way,
link |
but you can't, until we have Neuralink
link |
or something like that,
link |
we can't communicate that you remember all those things.
link |
I know, that's what I wanted.
link |
So you have to be able to use tricks
link |
of human communication for that.
link |
But so that, I mean, that's the,
link |
it's ultimately is a trick of like,
link |
which to remember, which to forget.
link |
And the forgetting is so, it's so fascinating to say this.
link |
I mean, it seems to be deeply connected
link |
to that assimilation process.
link |
So forgetting, you try to fit all the new stuff
link |
into this big web of the old stuff
link |
and the things that don't fit, you throw out.
link |
I think the assimilation,
link |
the way I've been thinking about it with sleep
link |
and it's particularly sort of dream sleep
link |
that we think can help with this assimilation
link |
is that during wake,
link |
we have one version of associative processing.
link |
And what I mean by that
link |
is we see the most obvious connections.
link |
So I think of wakefulness as a Google search gone right.
link |
Whereas I see dream sleep as doing something very different.
link |
I think dream sleep is a little bit
link |
like group therapy for memories
link |
that everyone gets a name badge
link |
and sleep gathers in all of the individual pieces
link |
of the day and it sort of starts to get you
link |
to forces you, in fact, to speak to the people,
link |
not at the front of the room
link |
that you think you've got the most obvious connection with,
link |
but to speak with the people all the way
link |
at the back of the room that at first you think,
link |
I've got no idea what's going on in the room.
link |
You think I've got no obvious connection with them at all.
link |
But once you get chatting with them,
link |
you learn that you do have a very distant,
link |
non obvious connection,
link |
but it's still a connection on the same.
link |
And it's almost as though you're doing a Google search
link |
where I input Lex Friedman
link |
and it doesn't take me to the first page of your home site.
link |
It takes me to page 20,
link |
which is about some like field hockey game in Utah.
link |
It turns out that there actually is a link.
link |
If I look at it, it's a distant, non obvious one.
link |
And to me, I find that exciting
link |
because when you fuse things together
link |
that shouldn't normally go together,
link |
but when they do, they cause marked advances
link |
in evolutionary fitness.
link |
It sounds like the biological basis of creativity.
link |
And that's exactly what I think dream sleep
link |
and the algorithm of dream sleep is designed to do.
link |
It's not a Boolean like system where you have
link |
the sort of assumptions of true and false.
link |
Maybe it's more fuzzy logic system.
link |
And I think REM sleep is a perfect environment
link |
within which we do, it's almost like memory pinball.
link |
You get the information that you've learned during the day
link |
and then you pull the lever back
link |
and you shoot it up into the attic of your brain,
link |
this cortex filled with all
link |
of your past historical knowledge.
link |
And you start to bounce it around
link |
and see where one of those things lights up
link |
and you build a new connection there
link |
and you build another one there too.
link |
You're developing schemas.
link |
And so in that way, I think you could argue,
link |
we dream, therefore we are.
link |
Yeah, so in terms of this line between learning
link |
and thinking through a new thing
link |
that seems to be deeply connected,
link |
there's this legendary engineer named Jim Keller
link |
who keeps yelling at me about this.
link |
He says it's very effective.
link |
He likes to, for difficult problems before bed,
link |
think about that difficult problem.
link |
We're not talking about like drama at work
link |
or all that kind of stuff.
link |
No, like a scientific for him engineering problem.
link |
He likes to like intensely think about it
link |
to prime his mind before sleep and then go to sleep.
link |
And then he finds that the next day,
link |
he's able to think much clearer
link |
and there's new ideas that come,
link |
but also just, I guess it's more well integrated.
link |
And sometimes during the process of like,
link |
he's able to like wake up and like see new insights.
link |
If he's deeply sort of aggressively thinking through a problem.
link |
And there's many scientific demonstrations of this.
link |
The Mendeleev with the periodic table of elements,
link |
he was trying for months to understand.
link |
I mean, talk about an ecumenical problem
link |
of epic proportions.
link |
Here's your question today.
link |
You have to understand how all of the known elements
link |
in the universe fit together in a logical way.
link |
Good luck, take care.
link |
It was non trivial at the time.
link |
And he would try and try, he was so obsessed with it.
link |
He created playing cards
link |
with all of the different elements on.
link |
And then he would go on these long train journeys
link |
around Europe and he would just sort of deal these cards
link |
in front of them and he would shuffle them,
link |
shuffling and shuffling.
link |
And he would just try to see
link |
if he could find what the answer was.
link |
And then, so the story goes,
link |
he fell asleep and he had a dream.
link |
And in that dream,
link |
all of these elements started to dance and play around
link |
and they snapped into a logical grid,
link |
atomic weights, et cetera, et cetera.
link |
And it wasn't his waking brain
link |
that solved the problem.
link |
It was his sleeping brain
link |
that solved the impenetrable problem
link |
that his waking brain could not.
link |
And there's been count,
link |
even in the arts and in music,
link |
some wonderful dreams,
link |
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley's epic Gothic novel
link |
came to her in a dream at Lord Byron's home.
link |
And then we've got,
link |
Yesterday, the song came to him in a dream.
link |
He was filming, gosh, what was the movie?
link |
I don't recall it.
link |
I should be shocked because I'm from Liverpool myself.
link |
And, but he was on Wimpole Street in London and filming.
link |
And he came up with that song,
link |
the melody in his sleep,
link |
not to be outdone by the Beatles.
link |
And by the way, Let It Be
link |
also came from a dream that McCartney had.
link |
People usually give it religious overtones.
link |
Mother Mary comes to me speaking words of wisdom,
link |
If you've ever asked who Mother Mary is,
link |
it's not the biblical content.
link |
It's Mary McCartney.
link |
And she came to him in a dream and gifted him the song.
link |
But the best story I've heard
link |
is not to be outdone by the Beatles.
link |
The Stones, Keith Richards,
link |
who I think once was suggested it.
link |
It was a comedian who was saying that
link |
in an interview with Rolling Stone,
link |
Keith Richards suggested or inferred
link |
that young kids should not do drugs.
link |
And they said, well, look,
link |
young kids can't do drugs
link |
because you've done all of the drugs.
link |
And I always thought that,
link |
but Keith Richards described he would always go to bed
link |
with his guitar and a tape recorder.
link |
And then probably who would have a whole set
link |
of other things in the bed with him.
link |
And who knows how many other people, but anyway.
link |
And then he said in his autobiography,
link |
and I'm paraphrasing here,
link |
but one morning I woke up and I realized
link |
that the tape had recorded all the way to the end.
link |
So I rewound the tape and I hit play.
link |
And there in some kind of ghostly form
link |
were the opening chords to Satisfaction,
link |
the most famous successful Rolling Stone song
link |
Followed by then 43 minutes of snoring.
link |
That riff came to him.
link |
One of the most famous riffs in all of rock and roll
link |
came to him by way of a dream inspired insight.
link |
So I think there is too many of those anecdotes.
link |
And we've now got the side,
link |
I don't rely on anecdotes as science.
link |
We've now done the studies in the laboratory
link |
and we can reliably demonstrate
link |
that sleep inspires creativity,
link |
inspires problem solving capacity.
link |
Well, the interesting thing is,
link |
is it possible to some of the ideas that you talk about
link |
to turn them into a protocol
link |
that could be practiced rigorously?
link |
So what Jim Keller espouses is saying,
link |
not just the fact that sleep helps you
link |
increase the creativity,
link |
but turn it into a process.
link |
Like literally, like don't do it accidentally.
link |
Like an athlete does certain things
link |
to optimize their performance.
link |
They have a training routine.
link |
They have a regimen of like cycling and sprints
link |
and long distance stuff.
link |
In the same way, thinking about your job
link |
as an idea generator in the engineering space
link |
is like, this is good for my performance.
link |
So like for an hour before bed,
link |
think through a problem like every night
link |
and then use sleep to work through that problem.
link |
I mean, he's the first person that I heard
link |
like of the people I really respect that do like what I do,
link |
which is like programming engineering type work,
link |
like using sleep, not accidentally, but with a purpose,
link |
That's just basically the difference between,
link |
as you said, a passive approach to it
link |
versus an active deterministic
link |
or hope for a deterministic approach to it.
link |
In other words, that you are actually trying to harness
link |
the power of sleep in a deliberate way
link |
rather than an unthoughtful way.
link |
I still think that mother nature through it,
link |
the 3.6 million years of evolution
link |
has probably got it mostly figured out
link |
in terms of what information should be uploaded at night
link |
and worked through.
link |
I think her algorithm is probably pretty good at this stage.
link |
It's not to suggest though,
link |
that we can't try to tweak it and nudge it.
link |
It's a very light hand on the tiller is what he's doing.
link |
I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
link |
Just like, for example, for me,
link |
fasting has improved my ability to focus deeply
link |
and productivity significantly.
link |
And in that same way,
link |
it's possible that playing with these ideas
link |
of thinking before bed or some hours before bed
link |
or some playing with different protocols
link |
will have a significant leap
link |
over what mother nature naturally does.
link |
So if you let your body do what it naturally does,
link |
you may not achieve the same level of performance
link |
because mother nature has not designed us
link |
to think deeply about chip design
link |
or programming artificial intelligence systems.
link |
Well, she's gifted us the architecture
link |
and the capacity to do that.
link |
What we do with that is what life's experience dictates.
link |
She gives us the blueprint to do many.
link |
Well, if I were to sort of introspect
link |
and self analyze what mother nature wants me to do,
link |
I think given my current lifestyle
link |
that I have food in the fridge
link |
and a bed to sleep on,
link |
I think what mother nature wants me to do is to be lazy.
link |
And so I think I'm actually resisting mother nature
link |
because so many of my needs are satisfied.
link |
And so I have to resist some of the natural forces
link |
of the body and the mind
link |
when I do some of the things I do.
link |
So there's that dance,
link |
like I've been thinking about doing a startup
link |
and that's obviously going against everything
link |
that my body and mind are telling me to do
link |
because it's going to be basically suffering.
link |
But the only reason I want...
link |
As you know, it will be over.
link |
Yes, but nevertheless,
link |
there's some kind of inner drive that wants me to do it.
link |
And then you start to ask a question,
link |
well, how do you optimize the things you can't optimize
link |
like sleep, like diet,
link |
like the people that you surround yourself with
link |
in order to maximize happiness and performance
link |
and all those kinds of things without also over optimizing.
link |
And that's such an interesting idea from a engineer.
link |
So as you may know,
link |
you don't often get those kinds of ideas from engineers.
link |
Engineers usually just don't read books about sleeping.
link |
They're usually like the...
link |
They're not the healthiest of people.
link |
I think that's changing over time,
link |
especially with Silicon Valley,
link |
especially with the tech sector.
link |
People are starting to understand what's a healthy lifestyle,
link |
but usually they're kind of on the insane side,
link |
especially programmers.
link |
But it's nice to hear somebody like that use sleep
link |
and use some of the things that you talk about
link |
strategically on purpose.
link |
When I get to that idea of not just trying to use
link |
what Mother Nature gave,
link |
but seeing if you can do something more or different,
link |
in a conservative mindset,
link |
I would then pose the question at what cost?
link |
Because when you do something perhaps
link |
that deviates from the typical pre programmed,
link |
you know, Mother Nature's program,
link |
I suspect it usually comes at the cost of something else.
link |
So maybe he is able to direct and focus
link |
his sleeping cognition on those particular topics
link |
that will gain him better problematic resolution
link |
the next day when he wakes up.
link |
The question is though,
link |
at what cost of the other things that didn't make it
link |
onto the menu of the finger buffet of sleep that night?
link |
And is it that you don't process
link |
the emotional difficulties or events,
link |
and therefore you are less emotionally resolved the next day,
link |
but you are more problem resolved the following day.
link |
And so I always try to think,
link |
and I truly don't want to sound puritanical
link |
either about sleep,
link |
and I think I've come off that way many a times,
link |
especially when I started out in the public.
link |
The tone of the book, in some ways,
link |
I look back and think, could I have been a little softer?
link |
And the reason was I was that way back in
link |
when I started writing the book,
link |
which was probably something like 2014 or 15,
link |
sleep was the neglected stepsister
link |
in the health conversation of the day.
link |
And I was just so sad to see the amount of suffering
link |
and disease and sickness that was caused
link |
by insufficient sleep.
link |
And for years before I'd been doing public speaking,
link |
and I'd tell people about the great things
link |
that happen when you get sleep.
link |
People would say, that's fascinating.
link |
And then they would go back and keep doing the same thing
link |
about not sleeping enough.
link |
And then I realized you can't really speak
link |
about the good things that happen.
link |
It's like the news, what bleeds leads.
link |
And if you speak about the alarmingly bad things
link |
that happen, people tend to have a behavioral change.
link |
And so the book as a consequence,
link |
I think probably came out a little bit on the strong side
link |
of trying to convince people.
link |
Well, you were trying to help a lot of people
link |
and that's a powerful way to help a lot of people.
link |
I was genuinely trying to help people,
link |
but certainly for some people for whom sleep
link |
does not come easy, then it was probably
link |
a tricky book to read too.
link |
And I think I feel more sensitive to those people now
link |
and empathetically connected to them.
link |
So I think the, again, the point was simply
link |
that I don't mean to sound too puritanical in all of this.
link |
And the same way with caffeine and coffee.
link |
I am just a scientist and I am not here to tell anyone
link |
how to live their life.
link |
That is not my job at all.
link |
And life is to be lived to a degree
link |
and life is to be lived if you want to do a startup.
link |
All I want to do is empower people
link |
with the understanding of the science of sleep.
link |
And then you can make an informed choice
link |
as to how you want to live your life.
link |
And I offer no judgment on how anyone
link |
wishes to live their life.
link |
I just want to try and see if the information
link |
that I have about sleep would alternatively change
link |
how you would think about your life decisions.
link |
And if it doesn't, no problem.
link |
And if it does, I hope it's been of use.
link |
Well, maybe this is me trying
link |
to justify my lifestyle to you.
link |
But Dr. Seuss said, you know you're in love
link |
when you can't fall asleep because reality
link |
is finally better than your dreams.
link |
I love that quote too.
link |
My sleeping schedule is complicated
link |
and it has to do primarily with the fact
link |
that I love basically everything that I do.
link |
And that love takes a form that may not appear
link |
to be love from the external observer perspective.
link |
Cause it's often includes struggle.
link |
It often includes something that looks like stress
link |
even though it's not stress.
link |
It's like this excitement, it's this turmoil
link |
and chaos of passion, of struggling with a problem
link |
of being sad and down to the point even depressed
link |
of how difficult the problem is, the disappointment
link |
that the last few weeks and months have been a failure
link |
and self doubt, all that mix.
link |
And a part of that is sometimes staying up all night
link |
working on a thing I'm really passionate about.
link |
And that means sleep schedules that are just like,
link |
you know, sometimes sleeping during the day,
link |
sometimes very often sleeping very little
link |
but taking naps that are like an hour, two hours and so on.
link |
That kind of weird chaos.
link |
And now I'll also try to give myself back up.
link |
I was trying to like research yesterday
link |
is anybody else productive, wild like this?
link |
And there's of course a lot of anecdotal evidence
link |
and some of it could be just narratives
link |
that people have told to the public
link |
when in reality they sleep way more.
link |
But there's a bunch of people that are famous
link |
for not sleeping much.
link |
So on the topic of naps, I read this a long time ago
link |
and I checked this, Churchill was big on big naps.
link |
And is actually just reading more
link |
about Winston Churchill's sleep schedule
link |
is very much like mine.
link |
So I basically wanna give myself the opportunity
link |
to at night to stay up all night if I want to.
link |
And a good nap is a big part of that in the late evening.
link |
Like I'll often, this destroys social life completely
link |
but I'll often take a nap in the late afternoon
link |
or the evening and that sets me
link |
if I want to stay up all night.
link |
And things like that, that I read that Nikola Tesla
link |
slept only two hours a night, Edison the same three hours
link |
but he actually did the polyphasic sleep
link |
like where it's just a bunch of naps.
link |
What can you say about this madness of love
link |
and passion of loving everything you do
link |
and the chaos of sleep that might result in?
link |
I love the Seuss quote and I've had that experience too.
link |
Like you, I adore what I do.
link |
If someone gave you enough money
link |
to live the rest of your life,
link |
got a roof above my head, rice and beans on the table
link |
and they said, you don't have to work anymore.
link |
I would do nothing different.
link |
I would do exactly, this sounds a little crass
link |
and I hope it doesn't sound this way
link |
but being a scientist is not what I do, it's who I am.
link |
And when that's the case, sleep, working out,
link |
showering and eating are the things that I do
link |
in between my love affair with sleep.
link |
I fell for sleep like a blind roofer.
link |
And it was a love affair that started 20 years ago
link |
and I remain utterly besotted today.
link |
It's the most beguiling thing in the world to me.
link |
And I could easily and I have, it's kept me up at night.
link |
When my mind is fizzing with experimental ideas
link |
or I think I've got a new hypothesis or theory,
link |
I will struggle with sleep.
link |
I really will, it doesn't come easy to me
link |
because my mind is just so on fire with those ideas.
link |
So I understand the struggle,
link |
but I couldn't advocate from a scientific perspective,
link |
the schedule because the science just doesn't,
link |
I would feel as though I'm doing you a disservice
link |
to say it's okay, that won't come with some blast radius,
link |
some health consequences.
link |
You can add Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan
link |
Both of them were very proud chest beaters
link |
of how little sleep that they get.
link |
Thatcher said four hours, Reagan something similar.
link |
And I, knowing the links that we now know
link |
between sleep and Alzheimer's disease,
link |
I've often wondered whether it was coincidental then
link |
that both of them died of the terrible disease of Alzheimer's
link |
meaning, maybe it doesn't get you by way of
link |
being popped out of the gene pool in a car accident
link |
because you had a microsleep at the wheel at age 32,
link |
or it doesn't get you at 42 with heart attack
link |
or even 52 with cancer or a stroke,
link |
maybe it gets you in your seventies.
link |
I think the elastic band of sleep deprivation
link |
can stretch only so far before it snaps
link |
and it ultimately seems to snap.
link |
Nicola Tesla, I think he died of a coronary thrombosis,
link |
And there was a wonderful study done out of Harvard
link |
where they took a group of people who had no signs
link |
of cardiovascular disease.
link |
And what they found is that when they track them
link |
for years afterwards, they were completely healthy
link |
Those people who are getting less than six hours of sleep
link |
ended up having a 300% increased risk
link |
of developing calcification of the coronary artery,
link |
which is the major sort of corridor of life for your heart.
link |
When someone says, he died of a massive coronary,
link |
it's because of a blockade of the coronary artery.
link |
And Tesla passed away from a coronary thrombosis.
link |
We also know that insufficient sleep
link |
is linked to numerous mental health issues.
link |
We know that Churchill had a wicked battle with depression.
link |
Gosh, my goodness, he used to call it black dog
link |
that would come and visit him.
link |
And I think many of his paintings,
link |
he was exquisite painter,
link |
but some of them would depict his darkness
link |
with depression as well.
link |
Edison is interesting.
link |
People have argued that he would short sleep
link |
and he didn't put much value in sleep.
link |
Whether or not that's true, we don't know,
link |
but he was a habitual napper.
link |
You're right, during the day,
link |
I've got some great pictures of him on his inventor's bench
link |
And in fact, I believe he set up nap carts around his house
link |
But what we also know, a study, again,
link |
coming out of Harvard just a couple of months ago,
link |
demonstrated very clearly that polyphasic sleep
link |
is associated with worse physical outcomes,
link |
worse cognitive outcomes,
link |
and especially worse mood outcomes.
link |
So from that sense,
link |
sleeping like a baby is not perfect for adults.
link |
So there's a fascinating dance here
link |
of the mean and the extreme,
link |
like the average and the high performers.
link |
this gets to like the meaning of life kind of discussion,
link |
but let's go that way.
link |
And also happiness.
link |
So when studying sleep and when studying anything
link |
like diet and exercise,
link |
I think you have to really get a lot more data
link |
about individuals to make
link |
conclusive statement.
link |
That's when people talk about like,
link |
is meat, red meat good for you or bad for you, right?
link |
It's just so often correlated with other life decisions
link |
when you choose to eat meat or not.
link |
My sense is that whatever life decisions you make,
link |
if they reduce stress and lead to happiness,
link |
that's also going to be a big boost
link |
that needs to be integrated
link |
into the plots in the science, right?
link |
So I'll give you an example of somebody
link |
who is unarguably seen as unhealthy.
link |
My friend, Mr. David Goggins.
link |
So he's clearly, obviously,
link |
almost on purpose destroying his body.
link |
He's destroying his body and to say
link |
that he's doing the wrong thing or the unhealthy thing
link |
feels like, feels wrong.
link |
But I'm not sure exactly in which way he feels wrong.
link |
One of the things I'm bothered by,
link |
and again, I apologize for the therapy sessions,
link |
a framework of this,
link |
but I'm bothered by the fact that a lot of people
link |
tell me or David that they're doing things wrong.
link |
A lot of people in my life, when they see me not sleep,
link |
they'll tell me to sleep more.
link |
Now they're correct, but one fundamental aspect
link |
that I'd like to complain about is not enough people,
link |
almost nobody, especially people that care for me,
link |
will come to me and say,
link |
you have a dream, work harder.
link |
It's like the healthy thing should be a component
link |
of a life well lived, but not everything.
link |
And I don't know what to do with that
link |
because you certainly don't want to espouse.
link |
And just like you said, when you were working in your book,
link |
there is a belief, sleep was a secondary citizen
link |
in the full spectrum of what's a healthy life.
link |
But at the same time, I'm bothered by in Silicon Valley
link |
and all these kinds of work environments
link |
that I get to work with, with engineers,
link |
is there's to me too much focus on work life balance.
link |
And what that usually starts meaning is like,
link |
yeah, yeah, of course, it's good to have a social life,
link |
it's good to have a family,
link |
it's good to eat well and sleep well,
link |
but we should also discover our passion.
link |
We should also give ourselves a chance
link |
to work our ass off towards a dream
link |
and make mistakes and take big risks
link |
that in the short term seem to sacrifice health.
link |
And I think to come back to how you started
link |
about David Goggins, who I've never met,
link |
but who I admire incredibly
link |
and have an immense reverence for the man.
link |
You said two things,
link |
is it wrong to do those things to yourself?
link |
And is it unhealthy to do those things to yourself?
link |
I disagree with the former and I agree with the latter.
link |
So from a health biological medicine perspective,
link |
sleeping in the way that you've described
link |
or that other people may be sleeping
link |
in terms of insufficient amounts,
link |
now to your point too about into individual differences,
link |
usually when I see a bar graph and a mean,
link |
I usually say, show me your variance.
link |
I want to see your variance.
link |
In other words, show me the distribution of that effect.
link |
How many people were below the mean?
link |
How many, is it all tightly clustered around this one thing?
link |
So it's a very robust effect
link |
or was this huge fan of effect where for some people
link |
there was no effect at all and other people
link |
there was a whopping effect and everything in between.
link |
So I don't discount into individual variability,
link |
but, and I will come back to those two points about,
link |
is it wrong and is it unhealthy in just a second?
link |
When it comes to sleep,
link |
we have found huge amounts of into individual differences
link |
in your response to a lack of sleep.
link |
But one of the fascinating things,
link |
so let's say that I take you
link |
and we're going to measure your attention,
link |
your emotion, your mood, your blood pressure,
link |
your blood sugar glucose regulation,
link |
your autonomic nervous system
link |
and your different gene expression.
link |
Let's say I'm just going to measure a whole kaleidoscope
link |
of different outcomes, brain and body.
link |
And I find that on our measure of cognition
link |
on your attentional ability to focus,
link |
you are very resilient.
link |
You just don't show any impairment at all
link |
even after being awake for 36 hours straight.
link |
Does that mean that you are resilient
link |
in all of those other domains as well?
link |
The answer is no, you're not.
link |
So you can be resilient in one,
link |
but very vulnerable in another.
link |
And we've not found anyone who isn't at least vulnerable
link |
in one of those domains,
link |
meaning that it's somewhat safe to say that
link |
not getting sufficient sleep will lead
link |
to some kind of impairment in any one given individual.
link |
It may not be the same impairment,
link |
but it's likely to be an impairment.
link |
But to come back to the question,
link |
I think it's wrong to tell anyone
link |
that it's wrong to do what they're doing,
link |
even if they are compromising their sleep,
link |
even if they're compromising their mental health.
link |
As long as they're not hurting anyone else,
link |
then I think the answer is
link |
that's that person's choice.
link |
Yeah, but that's that person's life.
link |
I'd like to push back further.
link |
So see, the way you kind of said it,
link |
yes, you're absolutely right.
link |
But I would like to say a stronger statement,
link |
which is you should let go of that judgment
link |
of somebody is wrong
link |
and allow yourself to be inspired
link |
by the great heights they have reached.
link |
So take yourself out of the seat of being a judger
link |
of what is healthy or not,
link |
and appreciate the greatness of a particular human.
link |
You watch the Olympics,
link |
the kind of things that some athletes do
link |
to reach the very heights.
link |
The Olympics are taking years off of their life.
link |
They suffer depression after the Olympics often.
link |
The physiology is disastrous.
link |
Everything, their personal life,
link |
there's their psychology, their physiology,
link |
everything, it's a giant mess.
link |
So the question is about life.
link |
Healthy now means longevity,
link |
quality of life over a prolonged period of time,
link |
optimum performance over a prolonged period of time.
link |
But to me, beauty is reaching great heights.
link |
And there's a dance there
link |
that sometimes reaching great heights
link |
requires sacrifice of health
link |
and not like a calculation
link |
where you sat down on a sheet of paper
link |
and say, I'm going to take seven years off my life
link |
for an Olympic gold medal.
link |
No, it requires more chaotic journey
link |
that doesn't do that kind of calculus.
link |
And I just want to kind of speak to the,
link |
in the culture that struggles of what is healthy and not,
link |
we want to be able to speak to what is healthy
link |
and at the same time be inspired by the great heights
link |
that humans reach no matter how healthy
link |
or unhealthy they live.
link |
Yeah, I agree with that.
link |
I think if that's a flag you're hoisting,
link |
I will definitely salute it because it really depends,
link |
what are you trying to optimize for in your life?
link |
I think the only danger potentially with that mindset
link |
is that if you look at many of the studies
link |
of old age and end of life,
link |
most people say I never look back on my life
link |
and wish I worked harder.
link |
I wish instead I'd spent more time with family, friends
link |
and engaged in that aspect.
link |
Now I'm not saying though, coming back to your point,
link |
that that is the standard rubric for everyone.
link |
I don't believe it is too.
link |
And there are many things that you and I
link |
are both benefiting from today,
link |
even in the field of medicine,
link |
where people have sacrificed their own longevity
link |
for the quest of solving a particular medical problem.
link |
And they died quicker because of their commitment,
link |
because they wished to try and solve that problem
link |
in their pursuit of greatness scientifically.
link |
And I now benefit.
link |
Am I grateful that they did that?
link |
Incredibly grateful.
link |
You know, a simpler demonstration is this.
link |
If tonight at 4 a.m. in the morning,
link |
I have a ruptured appendix, I have an appendicitis,
link |
I am incredibly grateful that there is an emergency team
link |
that will take me to the hospital at 4 a.m. in the morning.
link |
They are awake, they're not sleeping and they save my life.
link |
And that's part of what their life's mission and quest is.
link |
And they saved another's life by, in some ways,
link |
shaving a little of their own off.
link |
So I don't take, I have no umbrage
link |
with that mentality at all.
link |
I think you just have to be very clear
link |
about what you're optimizing for.
link |
And my worry is that most people fall into the rat race
link |
and they never actually ask the question,
link |
why am I doing this?
link |
If you're just working nine to five or,
link |
and you allow that nine to five to stretch
link |
into much longer, but it's nevertheless a job
link |
that's kind of like wears you down.
link |
Another thing is when it is like, you're,
link |
it's a dream, it's a life mission.
link |
And for that, I think as long as you know what it is
link |
that you could be doing to yourself
link |
and you are comfortable and A okay with that,
link |
I have no problem with that at all.
link |
Again, as I said, as a scientist, I cannot, should not,
link |
and will not tell anyone what they should do with their life.
link |
All I want you to be able to do is say, okay,
link |
now I understand more about the,
link |
previously these would be known unknowns
link |
and these were the unknown unknowns.
link |
And now I am slightly more cognizant.
link |
I have more knowns than I had before
link |
regarding my sleep and my health,
link |
knowing that information,
link |
do I still choose to make this decision?
link |
And if that's what I offered,
link |
then I think I've done my job.
link |
That's all I want to offer is just added information
link |
into the decision algorithm.
link |
And what you end up choosing as an output of that algorithm
link |
has nothing to do with me.
link |
It's not my business and I will never judge anyone for it.
link |
And as I said, I'm immensely grateful for people
link |
who have sacrificed much in their lives
link |
to give me what I have.
link |
So you're saying as long as the sacrifice sort of grounded
link |
in knowledge of what the sacrifice is,
link |
that sleep is important, all those kinds of things.
link |
And that you're comfortable with it.
link |
That is, it is your conscious choice
link |
rather than feeling as though you're trapped
link |
or that you are just, you haven't thought about it.
link |
And you start that job at age 32
link |
and then you wake up the next morning and you're 65
link |
and you think, where did my life go?
link |
That to me, I would feel, I would want to hug you.
link |
And I would say, I'm just, and I'm not saying,
link |
I don't want to sound belittling here at all.
link |
I would just not wish that for you.
link |
I would wish that you could have thought about
link |
what it was that you're doing and not have that regret.
link |
Yeah, so I guess I'm, this is for you, the listener.
link |
I'm coming out of the closet here a little bit.
link |
The fact that I enjoy the madness I live in.
link |
So please do not criticize me, embrace me.
link |
I understand the sacrifices I'm making.
link |
I enjoy sleeping on the floor
link |
when I'm passionate programming all night
link |
and just pass out on the carpet.
link |
Okay, so it's, but it's definitely something I think about
link |
that there's a balance, a strike where.
link |
I just want you to have as much of it though.
link |
See, quality of life is important.
link |
I should have said,
link |
I want you to have as much high quality life.
link |
And if high quality of life means
link |
I spend five decades on this planet,
link |
but yet in that time, I am thrilled every day.
link |
I'm turned on every day by what I do.
link |
And I reveled in this thing called my life's work.
link |
I think that that is a 50 year journey
link |
of absolute delight and fulfillment that you should take.
link |
I think about my death all the time.
link |
I meditate on death.
link |
I'm okay to die today.
link |
So to me, longevity is not a significant goal.
link |
I'm so happy to be alive.
link |
I don't even think it would suck to die today.
link |
I'm as afraid of it today as I will be in 50 years.
link |
I don't wanna die as much today as I will in 50 years.
link |
There's of course all these experiences
link |
I would like to have, but everything's already amazing.
link |
It's like that Lego movie.
link |
So to me, I just wanna keep doing this.
link |
And there's of course things that could affect,
link |
like you mentioned, dementia and these deterioration
link |
of the mind or the body that can significantly affect
link |
the quality of life.
link |
And so you want to do.
link |
As long as you're aware of that,
link |
and that's the price you pay for the entry
link |
into this magical kingdom that you are experiencing,
link |
which is a lovely thing.
link |
I feel privileged too.
link |
I can't believe the life that I live.
link |
And just like you, I think about mortality a great deal.
link |
I think a lot about death, but I don't worry about death.
link |
I probably, with the exception of the potential pain
link |
that comes before it, that some people,
link |
many people can suffer, that maybe concerns me.
link |
But I actually think about mortality as a tool,
link |
I use it as a lens through which I can then retrospect.
link |
And by placing myself at the point of future mortality,
link |
I can then use it as a retrospective lens
link |
to focus and ask the following question.
link |
Is there anything I feel I would regret
link |
and therefore change in the life that I currently have now?
link |
That's the way I meditate and use mortality as a question,
link |
is to try and course correct and focus my life.
link |
I worry not about dying,
link |
but I like to think about death
link |
as a way to prioritize my life.
link |
If that makes sense, I don't know if that makes sense.
link |
No, it makes total sense to decide
link |
how do you want to live today
link |
so that in the future you do not regret
link |
the way you've lived today.
link |
Right, and to place yourself in the future
link |
at your point of mortality is one way to, I think,
link |
as an exercise to retrospectively look back
link |
and not lose out on informed choices
link |
that you could otherwise lose out on
link |
if you weren't thinking about mortality.
link |
Yeah, it clarifies your thinking.
link |
So I mentioned I sleep on the floor,
link |
take naps and power naps, and it's just kind of madness.
link |
Is there weirdnesses to your own sleep schedule
link |
as a scientist that does incredible work,
link |
has a lot of things going on,
link |
has to lead research, has to write research,
link |
has to be a science communicator,
link |
also have a social life, all those kinds of things.
link |
Is there certain patterns to your own sleep
link |
that you regret or you participate in
link |
that you find you enjoy?
link |
Is there some personal stuff,
link |
quirks or things you're proud of
link |
that you do in terms of your sleep schedule?
link |
The funny thing about being a sleep researcher
link |
is that it doesn't make you immune
link |
to the ravages of difficult nights of sleep,
link |
and I have battled my own periods of insomnia in my life too.
link |
And I think I've been fortunate in ways
link |
because I know how sleep works
link |
and I know how to combat insomnia.
link |
I know how to get it under control
link |
because insomnia in many ways is a condition
link |
where all of a sudden your sleep controls you
link |
rather than you control your sleep.
link |
Wow, yeah, that's a beautiful way to put it, yeah.
link |
And I know when I'm starting to lose control
link |
and it's starting to take control,
link |
and I understand how to regain,
link |
but it doesn't happen overnight.
link |
It takes a long time.
link |
So you've struggled with insomnia in your life?
link |
I have, not all of my life.
link |
I would say I've probably had three or four
link |
really severe bouts, and all of them usually triggered
link |
by emotional circumstances, by stress.
link |
Stress that's connected to actual events in life
link |
or stress that's unexplainable?
link |
Well, externally triggered.
link |
Yeah, it's sort of what we would call reactive stress.
link |
And so that's sort of point number one
link |
about the idiosyncrasies.
link |
The point number two is that when you are having
link |
a difficult night of sleep, as a sleep researcher,
link |
you basically have become the Woody Allen neurotic
link |
of the sleep world.
link |
Because at that moment, I'm trying to fall asleep
link |
and I'm not, and I'm starting to think,
link |
okay, my dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex
link |
is not shutting down.
link |
My noradrenaline is not ramping down.
link |
My sympathetic nervous system
link |
is not giving way to my parasympathetic.
link |
At that point, you are dead in the water
link |
for the next two hours and nothing is bringing you back.
link |
So there is some irony in that too.
link |
I would say for myself though,
link |
if there is something I'm not proud of,
link |
it has been at times railing against my chronotype.
link |
So your chronotype is essentially,
link |
are you a morning type, evening type
link |
or somewhere in between?
link |
And there were times because society
link |
is desperately biased towards the morning types.
link |
This notion of the early bird catches the worm.
link |
Maybe that's true, but I'll also tell you
link |
that the second mouse gets the cheese.
link |
Yeah, so I think one of the issues around,
link |
firstly, people don't really understand chronotype
link |
because I'll have some people
link |
when I'm sort of out in the public,
link |
they'll say, look, I struggle with terrible insomnia.
link |
And I'll ask them, is it problems falling asleep
link |
or staying asleep?
link |
And they'll say, falling asleep.
link |
And then I'll say, look, if you are on a desert island
link |
with nothing to wake up for, no responsibilities,
link |
what time would you normally go to bed
link |
and what time would you wake up?
link |
And they would say, I'd probably like to go to bed
link |
about midnight and wake up maybe eight in the morning.
link |
And then I'd say, so what time do you now go to bed?
link |
And they'd say, well, I've got to be up for work early.
link |
So I get into bed at 10.
link |
I say, well, you don't have insomnia.
link |
You have a mismatch between your biological chronotype
link |
and your current sleep schedule.
link |
And when you align those two,
link |
and I was fighting that for some time too,
link |
I'm probably mostly right in the middle.
link |
I am desperately vanilla, unfortunately,
link |
in many aspects of life, but this included,
link |
I'm neither a strong morning type
link |
nor a strong evening type.
link |
So ideally I'd probably like to go to bed around 11,
link |
10.30, 11, probably somewhere between 10.30, 11,
link |
and wake up, I naturally wake up usually most days
link |
before my alarm at 7.04, and it's 7.04
link |
because why not be idiosyncratic
link |
in terms of setting an alarm?
link |
That's kind of awesome.
link |
I've never heard about that.
link |
I'm gonna start doing that now,
link |
setting alarms like a little bit off the...
link |
I'm never quite sure why we all...
link |
It's a celebration of uniqueness.
link |
Yeah, and I am quite the odd snowflake in that sense too.
link |
So I would usually then try to force myself
link |
because I had that same mentality
link |
that if I wasn't up at 6.30 and in the gym by seven
link |
that there was something wrong with me.
link |
And I quickly abandoned that.
link |
But if I look back, if there was a shameful act
link |
that I have around my sleep,
link |
I think it would be that for some years
link |
until I really started to get more detailed into sleep.
link |
And now I have no shame in telling people
link |
that I will probably usually wake up around 6.45 naturally,
link |
sometimes seven when people are looking at me thinking,
link |
you're a sloth, you're lazy.
link |
And I don't finish my daily workout
link |
until I'm not working until probably nine o clock
link |
in the morning thinking, what are you doing?
link |
Now I will work late into the day.
link |
If I could, I would work 16 hours.
link |
It's my passion just like yours.
link |
So I don't feel shame around that,
link |
but I have changed my mentality around that.
link |
It's complicated because I'm probably happiest
link |
going to bed, if I'm being honest, like at 5 a.m.
link |
You're just an extreme evening type.
link |
But the problem is it's not that I'm ashamed for it.
link |
I actually kind of enjoy it because I get to sleep
link |
through all the nonsense of like the morning.
link |
Isn't that a beautiful thing?
link |
Like people are busy with their emails
link |
and I just am happy as a cow.
link |
And I wake up after all the drama has been resolved.
link |
And cows are happy and the drama has been resolved.
link |
But in society you do, especially,
link |
I mean this is what I think about is
link |
when you work on a larger team,
link |
especially with companies, you are,
link |
everybody's awake at the same time.
link |
So that's definitely been a struggle
link |
to try to figure out, just like you said,
link |
how to balance that, how to fit into society
link |
and yet be optimal for your chronotype, you said.
link |
Yeah, you have to sleep in synchrony with it and harmony.
link |
Because normally what we know is that if you fight biology,
link |
you'll normally lose.
link |
And the way you know you've lost is through disease
link |
You said you suffered through several bouts of insomnia.
link |
Is there, aside from embracing your chronotype,
link |
is there advice you can give how to overcome insomnia
link |
from your own experience?
link |
Right now the best method that we have
link |
is something called cognitive behavioral therapy
link |
for insomnia or CBTI for short.
link |
And you work with, for people who don't know what it is,
link |
you work with a therapist for maybe six weeks
link |
and you can do it online, by the way,
link |
I recommend probably jumping online, it's just the easiest.
link |
And it will change your beliefs, your habits,
link |
your behaviors and your general stress
link |
around this thing called sleep.
link |
And it is just as effective as sleeping pills
link |
in the short term.
link |
But what's great is that unlike sleeping pills,
link |
when you stop working with your therapist,
link |
those benefits last for years later.
link |
Whereas when you stop your sleeping pills,
link |
you typically have what's called rebound insomnia,
link |
where your sleep not only goes back to being
link |
as bad as it was before, it's usually even worse.
link |
For me, I think I found a number of things effective.
link |
The first is that I had to really address
link |
what was stressful and try to come up with
link |
some degree of meaningful rationality around it.
link |
Because I think one of the things that happens,
link |
there's something very, talking about conscious states,
link |
to come all the way back to, gosh, I don't know,
link |
I feel like we've only been chatting for like 20 minutes,
link |
but you're gonna tell me it's been a while.
link |
Yeah, it's been a while.
link |
Okay, I'm desperately, I feel terribly sorry.
link |
But let's come back to conscious states,
link |
which is where we started.
link |
There is something very strange about the night
link |
that thoughts and anxieties are not the same
link |
as they are in the waking day.
link |
They are worse, they are bigger.
link |
And I at least find that I am far
link |
more likely to catastrophize and ruminate
link |
at night about things that when I wake up the next day
link |
in the broad light of day,
link |
I think it's nowhere near that bad, man.
link |
What were you doing?
link |
It's not that bad at all.
link |
So to gain firstly, some rational understanding
link |
of my emotional state that's causing that insomnia
link |
The second thing was to keep regularity,
link |
just going to bed at the same time waking up.
link |
And here's an unconventional piece of sleep advice.
link |
After a bad night of sleep, do nothing.
link |
Don't wake up any later, don't go to bed any earlier,
link |
don't nap during the day,
link |
and don't drink any more coffee than you would otherwise.
link |
Because if you end up sleeping later into the morning,
link |
you're then not going to be tired
link |
at your normal time at night.
link |
So then you're gonna get into bed thinking,
link |
well, I had a terrible night of sleep last night.
link |
And yes, I slept in this morning to try and compensate,
link |
but I'm still gonna get to bed at my normal time.
link |
But now you get into bed and you haven't been awake
link |
for as long as you normally would.
link |
So you're not as sleepy as you normally would be.
link |
And so now you sit there lying in bed
link |
and it's another bad night.
link |
And the same thing is, if you go to bed any earlier,
link |
so don't wake up any later, wake up at the same time,
link |
don't go to bed any earlier,
link |
because then you're just probably your chronotype,
link |
your biological rhythm doesn't want you to be asleep.
link |
And you think, well, it's a terrible night,
link |
I'm gonna get into bed at 9 p.m.
link |
rather than my standard 10,
link |
I'm just gonna be lying in bed awake for that hour.
link |
Naps will take our double edged sword,
link |
they can have wonderful benefits.
link |
And we've done lots of studies on naps
link |
for both the brain and the body.
link |
But they are a double edged sword in the sense that
link |
napping will just take the edge off your sleepiness.
link |
It's a little bit like a valve on a pressure cooker.
link |
When you nap during the day,
link |
you can take some of that healthy sleepiness
link |
that you've been building up during the day.
link |
And for some people, not all people,
link |
but for some people that can then make it harder
link |
for them to fall asleep at night
link |
and then stay asleep soundly across the night.
link |
So the advice would be,
link |
if you're struggling with sleep at night,
link |
don't nap during the day.
link |
But if you are not struggling with sleep,
link |
and you can nap regularly, naps are just fine.
link |
And we can play around with optimal durations
link |
depending on what you want.
link |
Just try not to nap too late into the day
link |
because napping late into the day
link |
is like snacking before your main meal.
link |
It just takes the edge off your sleep hunger as it were.
link |
But that would be, so that's my unconventional
link |
second piece of advice regarding insomnia.
link |
The third is meditation.
link |
I found meditation to be incredibly powerful.
link |
I started reading about meditation
link |
as I was researching that aspect of the book many years ago.
link |
And as a hard nose scientist,
link |
I thought this sounds very woo woo.
link |
This is sort of, we all hold hands and sing come by hour
link |
and everything's going to be fine with sleep.
link |
I read the data and it was compelling.
link |
I couldn't ignore it.
link |
And I started meditating and that was six years ago
link |
and I haven't stopped.
link |
And I find meditation before bed incredibly powerful.
link |
The meditation app companies were perplexed at this at first.
link |
They want people to meditate during the day.
link |
But when they looked at their usage statistics,
link |
they found that they would have people
link |
in the morning meditating.
link |
And then there's a huge number of people
link |
using the meditation app in the evening.
link |
What they were doing was self medicating their insomnia.
link |
And they finally, rather than railing against it,
link |
they started to see it as a cash cow, rightly so.
link |
So I found meditation to be helpful.
link |
Having a wind down routine
link |
is the other thing that's critical for me.
link |
I can't just go from,
link |
because when my mind is switched on
link |
and I think you may be like this too,
link |
if I get into bed, that Rolodex of thoughts
link |
and information and excitement and anxiety and worry
link |
is just whirling away.
link |
And it's not gonna be a good night for me.
link |
So I have to find a wind down routine.
link |
And that makes sense when you realize what sleep is like.
link |
Sleep is not like a light switch.
link |
Sleep is much more like trying to land a plane.
link |
You know, it takes time to descend down
link |
onto the terra firma that we call sound sleep at night.
link |
And we have this for kids.
link |
You know, I don't have children,
link |
but you know, a lot of parents will say,
link |
you know, we have to have the bedroom,
link |
sorry, the bedtime routine.
link |
You know, you bathe the kid, you put them in bed,
link |
you read them a story.
link |
You have to go through this routine,
link |
this wind down routine for them.
link |
And then they fall asleep wonderfully.
link |
Why do we abandon that?
link |
As adults, we need that same wind down routine.
link |
So that's been the other thing
link |
that's been very helpful to me.
link |
So don't do anything different.
link |
If you have a bad night of sleep,
link |
keep doing the same thing.
link |
Manage your anxiety, understand it, rationalize it.
link |
Then meditation, and then finally having
link |
some kind of disengagement wind down routine.
link |
Those are the four things that have been very helpful to me.
link |
So the regularities really do a lot of work against insomnia.
link |
is it possible to have a healthy sleep life
link |
without the regularities?
link |
I say that because I'm all over the place
link |
and I've gotten good at being all over the place.
link |
So I'll often, like what happens,
link |
I'll go stretches of time.
link |
There'll be sometimes a month where I,
link |
my days are like, this is embarrassing to admit,
link |
just you and I here, just you and I.
link |
It's like 28 hours or 30 hour days.
link |
Like I'll just go all the way around
link |
comfortably and happily, I love it.
link |
And then there'll be a nap.
link |
I mean, if you like add up the hours
link |
when I'm just like sleeping as much as I want,
link |
it'd probably be like six hour average per 24 hours.
link |
Like that kind of, so it works out nicely,
link |
maybe even seven hours, I don't know.
link |
But that it's obviously irregular
link |
and there's chaos in the whole thing.
link |
Like sometimes it's shorter sleep,
link |
sometimes it's longer.
link |
Is that totally not a good thing, do you think?
link |
The best evidence that we have to speak to this question
link |
is people who are doing rotating shifts.
link |
And unfortunately the news is not good.
link |
They usually have a higher instance of many diseases
link |
such as depression, diabetes, cardiovascular disease,
link |
And again, that's just me communicating the data
link |
that we have and I'm not telling you
link |
that you should do anything different.
link |
The other thing is that there's nothing in your biology
link |
that suggests that that's how your body was designed
link |
It is a system that loves habit.
link |
You know, if your circadian clock in your brain,
link |
it's called the suprachiasmatic nucleus,
link |
sits in the middle of your brain, had a personality trait,
link |
it would be a creature of habit.
link |
That's how your biology is designed to work
link |
is through very archetypal prototypical expected cycles.
link |
And when we do something different to that,
link |
then you start to see some of the pressure stress fractures
link |
But again, to your point, if that's something
link |
that you don't mind, you know, adopting and understanding
link |
and then I think you should keep doing
link |
what you're doing.
link |
Yeah, it's complicated.
link |
Of course you have to be a student of your own body
link |
One of the reasons I want to have kids
link |
is kids enforce a stricter schedule.
link |
I think I definitely feel that I'm not living
link |
the sort of data wise, scientifically speaking,
link |
And me just living the way I want to live day to day
link |
is perhaps not the optimal way.
link |
And there's certain things that I've seen
link |
very successful people that I know in my life
link |
when they get, when they have kids,
link |
they actually, the productivity goes up,
link |
they get their shit together.
link |
There's a lot of aspects that, yeah, the regularity.
link |
I mean, that creatures a habit.
link |
That's the thing that's power.
link |
And then you start to optimally use the hours
link |
that you have in the day.
link |
Let me ask you about that.
link |
Well, actually, I just have one quick point on that too.
link |
You know, we often think about sleep as a cost,
link |
but instead I think of sleep as an investment.
link |
And the reason is because your effectiveness
link |
and your efficiency when you're well slept
link |
typically exceeds that when you're not.
link |
And to me, it's the idea of if I'm going to boil
link |
a pot of water, why would I boil it on medium
link |
when I could boil it in half the time on high?
link |
And I sometimes worry that when I speak
link |
to Fortune 500 companies and they're of this mentality
link |
of longer hours, getting people to rise and grind,
link |
the first point is that after about 20 hours of being awake,
link |
a human being is as cognitively as impaired
link |
as they would be if they were legally drunk.
link |
And the reason I bring that point up
link |
is because I don't know any company or CEO
link |
who would say, I've got this great team,
link |
they're drunk all the time.
link |
But we often lord the airport warrior
link |
who's flown through three different time zones
link |
in the past two days, is on email at 2 a.m.
link |
and then is in the office at six.
link |
And I think there is some aspect, not in all people,
link |
but there is sort of some aspect
link |
of that slight sleep machismo.
link |
And that's not what you are very different.
link |
You are driven by a purity of passion
link |
and a very authentic, incredibly genuine goal
link |
of wanting to do something remarkable with your life.
link |
That's not the issue I think I'm speaking about.
link |
It's just simply that I think
link |
maybe this notion of wanting to be awake for longer
link |
to try and get more done can sometimes be at odds
link |
with the fact that you can actually get so much more done
link |
if you're well slept.
link |
And it's this trade off.
link |
I actually admire people that take the big risk
link |
and work hard, whether that means staying up late at night,
link |
all those kinds of things,
link |
but it cannot be in the framework,
link |
in the context like what Edison said,
link |
which is sleep feels like a waste of time.
link |
So if you're not sleeping
link |
because you think sleep is stupid, that's totally wrong.
link |
But if you're not sleeping
link |
because you're deeply passionate about something,
link |
that to me, it's a gray area, of course,
link |
but that to me is much more admirable.
link |
And everything you're espousing is saying
link |
whatever the hell you're doing,
link |
you better be aware that sleep,
link |
long term and short term is really good for you.
link |
So if you're not sleeping, you're sacrificing,
link |
just make sure you're sacrificing for the right thing.
link |
I see vodka and getting drunk the same way.
link |
I know it's not good for me.
link |
I know I'm not gonna feel good days after.
link |
I know it's gonna decrease my performance.
link |
And there's nothing positive about it,
link |
except it introduces chaos in my life
link |
that introduces beautiful experiences
link |
that I would not otherwise have.
link |
It creates this turmoil of social interaction
link |
that ultimately makes me happy
link |
that I've experienced them in the moment
link |
and later the stories, you get to meet new people.
link |
It's like alcohol in this society
link |
is an incredible facilitator of that.
link |
So that's a good example of not sleeping
link |
and drinking way too much vodka.
link |
Again, it's this notion of life is to be lived to a degree.
link |
But if you do have children,
link |
I think one of the other things
link |
that then maybe comes into the picture
link |
is the fact that now there are other people
link |
that you have to live for than yourself.
link |
Yeah, but come on, like once they're old enough,
link |
like if you can't defend for yourself,
link |
you're too weak, get stronger.
link |
It's gonna be that kind of fatherhood.
link |
I got it, I'm understanding so much more
link |
about Lex Freeman than I did before.
link |
That's why you have to have for me,
link |
that would be my wife would be probably softer.
link |
It's good cop, bad cop, because I think I'm.
link |
But of course, actually, because I don't have kids,
link |
I've seen some tough dudes when they have kids
link |
become like the softies.
link |
They become like, they do everything for their kids.
link |
It's become like, it's totally transforms their life.
link |
I mean, Joe Rogan is an example of that.
link |
I just seen so many tough guys completely become changed
link |
by having kids, which is fascinating to watch
link |
because it just shows you how meaningful having kids is
link |
for a lot of people.
link |
Although I would say having chatted with Joe for some time,
link |
I think he is a delightful,
link |
sweetheart, independent of children.
link |
I think, don't get me wrong,
link |
I don't wanna be in a ring with him.
link |
He would face me five ways till Tuesday,
link |
but I think he's a desperately sweet man
link |
and a very, very smart individual.
link |
Yeah, I mean, but he talks about the compassion he's gained
link |
from realizing just watching kids grow up
link |
that we were all kids at some point,
link |
you get a new perspective.
link |
I think just like me, I still get this with him.
link |
He's super competitive and there's a certain way
link |
You're striving to do great things
link |
and you're competitive against others
link |
and that intensity of that aggression,
link |
that can lack compassion sometimes and empathy.
link |
And when you have children, you get a sense like,
link |
oh, everybody was a child at some point,
link |
everybody was a kid.
link |
And you see that whole development process.
link |
It can definitely enrich,
link |
expand your ability to be empathetic.
link |
Let me ask about diet.
link |
So what's the connection between diet and sleep?
link |
So I do intermittent fasting,
link |
sometimes only one meal a day, sometimes no meals a day.
link |
Is there a good science on the interaction
link |
between fasting and sleep?
link |
We have some data, I would prefer more,
link |
but we have data both on time restricted eating
link |
and then we have some data on fasting to a degree.
link |
On time restricted eating,
link |
I think that it has some benefits,
link |
although the human replication studies
link |
have actually not borne out
link |
quite the same health benefit extent
link |
that the animal studies have.
link |
There've been some disappointing studies,
link |
one here close to where we are right now at UCSF recently.
link |
So I think time restricted eating can be a good thing
link |
and there are many benefits of time restricted eating.
link |
Is sleep one of them?
link |
No, it doesn't seem to be
link |
because there are probably at the time
link |
that we're recording this,
link |
three pretty decent studies that I'm aware of.
link |
Two out of the three were in obese individuals,
link |
one out of the three were in healthy weight individuals.
link |
And what they found is that time restricted eating
link |
in all three of those studies
link |
didn't have any advantageous benefit to sleep.
link |
It didn't necessarily harm sleep,
link |
but it didn't seem to improve it.
link |
When it comes to fasting though,
link |
which is a different state,
link |
we don't have too many studies,
link |
experimental studies with longterm fasting.
link |
The best data that we have
link |
is probably from religious practices
link |
and probably the most data we have is during Ramadan
link |
where people will fast for 29 to 30 days
link |
from sunrise to sunset.
link |
And under those conditions,
link |
there are probably five distinct changes that we've seen.
link |
None of them seem to be particularly good for sleep.
link |
The first is that the amount of melatonin
link |
that you release, and melatonin is a hormone.
link |
It's often called the hormone of darkness
link |
or the vampire hormone,
link |
not because it makes you look longingly
link |
at people's necklines,
link |
but it's just because it comes out at night.
link |
Melatonin signals to your brain and your body
link |
that it's dark, it's nighttime, and it's time to sleep.
link |
Those individuals,
link |
when they were undergoing that regimen of fasting,
link |
the amount of melatonin that was released
link |
and when it was released,
link |
the amount of melatonin decreased
link |
and when it was released came later.
link |
That was the first thing.
link |
The second thing was that they ended up finding it harder
link |
to fall asleep as quickly as they normally would otherwise.
link |
The third thing was that the total amount of sleep
link |
that they were getting decreased.
link |
The fourth fascinating thing
link |
was that a wake promoting chemical
link |
called orexin increased.
link |
And this is why a lot of people will say,
link |
when I'm fasting, it feels like I can stay awake for longer
link |
and I'm more alert, I'm more active.
link |
And I'll come back from an evolutionary perspective
link |
why we understand that to be the case.
link |
And then the fourth factor is that fasting
link |
didn't decrease the amount of deep sleep
link |
that seemed to be unaffected.
link |
It did, however, decrease the amount
link |
of REM sleep or dream sleep.
link |
And we know that REM sleep dreaming
link |
is essential for emotional first aid, mental health,
link |
it's critical for memory, creativity.
link |
It's also critical for several hormone functions.
link |
It's when there's direct correlations
link |
between testosterone release peaks
link |
just before you go into REM sleep and during REM sleep too.
link |
So REM sleep is critical.
link |
But so those are the five changes that we've seen.
link |
None of them seem to be that advantageous for sleep.
link |
But the fourth point that I mentioned,
link |
which was orexin, which is this wake promoting chemical
link |
and a good demonstration or a very sad demonstration
link |
of its power is when it becomes very deficient in the brain
link |
and it leads to a condition called narcolepsy
link |
where you're just unpredictable with your sleep.
link |
So orexin when it's in high concentrations
link |
keeps you awake when you lose it.
link |
It can put you very much into a state of narcolepsy
link |
where you're sleeping a lot of the time
link |
in unpredictable sleep.
link |
Why on earth when you are fasting
link |
would the brain release awake promoting chemical?
link |
And our answer is right now is the following.
link |
One of the few times that I mentioned before
link |
that we see animals undergoing insufficient sleep
link |
or prolonged sleep deprivation
link |
is under conditions of starvation.
link |
And that is an extreme evolutionary pressure.
link |
And at that point, the brain will forgo some.
link |
It won't forgo all, but it will forgo some of its sleep.
link |
And the reason is so that it can stay awake for longer
link |
because the sign of starvation is saying to the brain,
link |
you can't find food in your normal foraging perimeter,
link |
you need to stay awake for longer
link |
so you can travel outside of your perimeter
link |
for a further distance
link |
and maybe you will find food and save the organism.
link |
So in other words, when we fast,
link |
it's giving our brain this evolutionary signal
link |
that you are under conditions of starvation.
link |
So the brain responds by saying, oh my goodness,
link |
I need to release the chemical
link |
that helps the organism stay awake for longer
link |
So that they can forage for more food.
link |
Now, of course, your brain from an evolutionary perspective
link |
doesn't know about this thing called Safeway
link |
that you could easily go to and break the fast.
link |
But that's how we understand fasting.
link |
And I think my dear friend, Peter Attia
link |
has done a lot of work in this area too.
link |
I think fasting and David Sinclair's brilliant work,
link |
goodness me, what an individual too.
link |
The work is pretty clear there
link |
that time restricted eating and fasting
link |
have wonderful health benefits.
link |
Fasting creates this thing called hormesis,
link |
just like exercise and low level stress
link |
and sauna, heat, shock.
link |
And hormesis is a biological process
link |
I think as David Sinclair has once said,
link |
in simple layman's terms is,
link |
what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
link |
And I think there is certainly good data
link |
that fasting and time restricted eating has many benefits.
link |
Is sleep one of them?
link |
It doesn't seem to be, it doesn't seem to enhance sleep.
link |
But it's interesting to understand its effects on sleep.
link |
I've fasted, it's a study of NF2.
link |
I once fasted 72 hours and another time 48 hours.
link |
And I found that I got much less sleep
link |
and it was very restful though.
link |
I hesitate to say this, but this is how I felt,
link |
which is I needed less sleep.
link |
I wonder if my brain is deceiving me
link |
because it feels like I'm getting
link |
a whole extra amount of focus for free.
link |
And I wonder if there's longterm impacts of that.
link |
Because if I fast 24 hours,
link |
get the same amount of calories, one meal a day,
link |
there's a little bit of discomfort.
link |
Like just maybe your body gets a little bit colder.
link |
Maybe there's just, I mean, hunger.
link |
But the amount of focus is crazy.
link |
And so I wonder, it's like,
link |
I'm a little suspicious of that.
link |
I feel like I'm getting something for free.
link |
I'm the same way with sweetener,
link |
like a Splendor or something.
link |
It's like, it's gotta be really bad for you, right?
link |
Because why is it so tasty, right?
link |
And I think, yeah, as we said before with biology,
link |
if there's a gain, there's often a cost too.
link |
But we at least understand the biological basis
link |
of what you're describing.
link |
It's not that you actually don't need less sleep.
link |
It's that this chemical is present
link |
that forces you more awake.
link |
And so subjectively you feel as though
link |
I don't need as much sleep because I'm wide awake.
link |
And those two things are quite different.
link |
It's not as though your sleep need has decreased.
link |
It's that your brain has hit the overdrive switch,
link |
the overboost switch to say, we need to keep you awake
link |
because food is in short supply.
link |
So you mentioned during sleep, there's a simulation,
link |
all those kinds of things for learning purposes,
link |
but there's also these, you mentioned the five ways
link |
in which we become psychotic in dreams.
link |
What do you think dreams are about?
link |
Why do you think we dream?
link |
What place do we go to when we dream?
link |
And why are they useful?
link |
Not just the assimilation aspect,
link |
but just like all the crazy visuals that we get with dreams.
link |
Is there something you can speak to that's actually useful?
link |
Like why we have such fun experiences in that dream world?
link |
So one of the camps in the sleep field
link |
is that dreams are meaningless,
link |
that they are an epiphenomenal byproduct
link |
of this thing called REM sleep from which dreams come from
link |
as a physiological state.
link |
So the analogy would be, let's think of a light bulb,
link |
that the reason that you create the apparatus
link |
of a light bulb is to produce this thing called light
link |
in the same way that we've evolved
link |
to this thing called REM sleep
link |
to serve whatever functions REM sleep serves.
link |
But it turns out that when you create light in that way,
link |
you also produce something called heat.
link |
It was never the reason that you designed the light bulb,
link |
it's just what happens when you create light in that way.
link |
And the belief so too was that dreaming
link |
was essentially the heat of the light bulb.
link |
That REM sleep is critical,
link |
but when you have REM sleep with a complex brain like ours,
link |
you also produce this conscious epiphenomenon called dreaming.
link |
I don't believe that for a second.
link |
And from a simple perspective is that I suspect
link |
that dreaming is more metabolically costly
link |
as a conscious experience than not dreaming.
link |
So you could still have REM sleep,
link |
but absent the conscious experience of dreaming
link |
was probably less metabolically costly.
link |
And whenever mother nature burns the energy unit
link |
called ATP, which is the most valuable thing,
link |
there's usually a reason for it.
link |
So if it's more energetically demanding,
link |
then I suspect that there is a function to it.
link |
And we've now since discovered that dreams have a function.
link |
The first, as we mentioned, creativity.
link |
The second is that dreams provide a form
link |
of overnight therapy.
link |
Dreaming is a form of emotional first aid.
link |
And it's during dream sleep at night
link |
that we take these difficult, painful experiences
link |
that we've had during the day, sometimes traumatic,
link |
and dream sleep acts almost like a nocturnal soothing balm.
link |
And it sort of just takes the sharp edges
link |
off those difficult, painful experiences
link |
so that you come back the next day
link |
and you feel better about them.
link |
And so I think in that sense, dreaming,
link |
it's not time that heals all wounds.
link |
It's time during dream sleep
link |
that provides emotional convalescence.
link |
So dreaming is almost a form of emotional windscreen wipers.
link |
And I think, and by the way, it's not just that you dream.
link |
It's what you dream about that also matters.
link |
So for example, scientists have done studies
link |
with learning and memory
link |
where they have people learn a virtual maze.
link |
And what they discovered was that those people
link |
who then dreamed, but dreamed of the maze
link |
were the only ones who, when they woke up,
link |
ended up being better at navigating the maze.
link |
Whereas those people who dreamed,
link |
but didn't dream about the maze itself,
link |
they were no better at navigating the maze.
link |
So it's not just that you,
link |
it's not sort of necessary, but not sufficient.
link |
It's necessary that you dream,
link |
but it's not sufficient to produce the benefit.
link |
You have to be dreaming about certain things itself.
link |
And the same is true for mental health.
link |
What we've discovered is that people
link |
who are going through a very difficult experience,
link |
a trauma, for example, a very painful divorce,
link |
those people who are dreaming, but dreaming
link |
of that difficult event itself,
link |
they go on to gain resolution
link |
to their clinical depression one year later.
link |
Whereas people who were dreaming just as much,
link |
but not dreaming about the trauma itself,
link |
did not go on to gain as much clinical resolution
link |
to their depression.
link |
So it's, I think to me, those are the lines of evidence
link |
that tell me dreaming is not epiphenomenal.
link |
And it's not just about the act of dreaming,
link |
it's about the content of the dreams,
link |
not just the fact of a dream itself.
link |
It's, first of all, it's fascinating.
link |
It makes a lot of sense,
link |
but then immediately takes my mind to,
link |
from an engineering perspective,
link |
how that could be useful in, for example, AI systems of,
link |
if you think about dreaming as an important part
link |
about learning and cognition and filtering previous memories
link |
of what's important, integrating them.
link |
You know, maybe you can correct me,
link |
but I see dreaming as a kind of simulation of worlds
link |
that are not constrained by physics.
link |
So like you get a chance to take some of your memories,
link |
some of your thoughts, some of your anxieties,
link |
and play with them, like construct virtual worlds
link |
and see how it evolves.
link |
Like to play with those worlds
link |
in a safe environment of your mind, safe in quotes,
link |
because you could probably get into a lot of trouble
link |
with the places your mind will go.
link |
But this definitely is applied in much cruder ways
link |
in artificial intelligence.
link |
So one context in which this is applied
link |
is the process called self play,
link |
which is a reinforcement learning
link |
where agents play against itself or versions of itself.
link |
And it's all simulated of trying different versions
link |
of themselves and playing against each other
link |
to see what ends up being a good.
link |
The ultimate goal is to learn a function
link |
that represents what is good and what is not good
link |
in terms of how you should act in the world.
link |
You create a set of decision weights based on experience,
link |
and you constantly update those weights
link |
based on ongoing learning.
link |
But the experience is artificially created
link |
versus actual real data.
link |
So it's a crude approximation of what dreams are,
link |
which is you're hallucinating a lot of things
link |
to see which things are actually.
link |
No, I think it's been a theory that's been put forward,
link |
which is that dreaming is a virtual reality test space
link |
that is largely consequence free.
link |
What an incredible gift to give a conscious mind
link |
to each and every night.
link |
Now the conscious mind, the human mind
link |
is very good at constructing dreams
link |
that are nevertheless useful for you.
link |
Like they're wild and crazy,
link |
but they're such that they are still grounded in reality
link |
to a degree where anything you learn in dreams
link |
might be useful in reality.
link |
This is a very difficult thing to do
link |
because it requires a lot of intelligence,
link |
it requires consciousness.
link |
This has been effectively recently being used
link |
in a self supervised learning for computer vision
link |
with the process of what's called data augmentation.
link |
That's a very crude version of dreams,
link |
which is you take data and you mess with it
link |
and you start to learn how a picture of a cat
link |
truly represents a cat by messing with it in different ways.
link |
Now the crude methods currently are cropping, rotating,
link |
distorting, all that kind of stuff.
link |
But you can imagine much more complicated
link |
generative processes that start hallucinating different cats
link |
in order for you to understand deeply of what it means
link |
for something to look like a cat.
link |
What is the prototype of a archetype of a cat?
link |
Yeah, the archetype.
link |
I mean, that's a very difficult process for computer vision
link |
to go from what are the pixels
link |
that are usually associated with a cat
link |
to like, what is a cat in the visual space?
link |
In the three dimensional visual spaces projected on an image,
link |
on a two dimensional image, what is a cat?
link |
Those are like fundamentally philosophical questions
link |
that we humans don't know the answer to,
link |
like linguistically.
link |
But when we look at a picture of a cat and a dog,
link |
we can usually tell pretty damn well what's the difference.
link |
And I don't know what that is because you can't reduce that
link |
to pointy ears or non pointy ears,
link |
furry or not furry, something about the eyes.
link |
It's been a long standing issue in cognitive science,
link |
cognitive neuroscience too,
link |
is how does the brain create an archetype?
link |
How does it create schemas that have general applicability,
link |
but yet still obtain specificity?
link |
That's a very difficult challenge.
link |
I mean, we can do it, we do it.
link |
It's rather bloody amazing.
link |
And it seems like part of the toolbox
link |
is this controlled hallucination, which is dreams.
link |
Well, it's a relaxing of the rigid constraints.
link |
I often think of dreaming as,
link |
it's from an information processing standpoint,
link |
the prison guards are away
link |
and the prisoners are running a mock in a delightful way.
link |
And part of the reason is because when you go
link |
into dream sleep, the rational part of your brain
link |
called the prefrontal cortex, which is the part,
link |
it's like the CEO of the brain.
link |
It's very good at making high level, rational,
link |
top down decisions and controlled actions.
link |
That part of the brain is shut down during REM sleep.
link |
But then emotional centers, memory centers,
link |
visual centers, motoric centers,
link |
all of those centers actually become more active.
link |
In fact, some of them are more active
link |
than when we're awake in the dream state.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
So your brain from a neural architecture perspective
link |
is radically different.
link |
Its network feature is not the same as wakefulness.
link |
And I think this is an immensely beneficial thing
link |
that we have at least two different rational
link |
and irrational conscious states
link |
that we do information processing in.
link |
The rational, the veritical,
link |
the page one of the Google search is wakefulness.
link |
The more irrational, illogical, hyper associative
link |
Google page 20 is the REM sleep.
link |
Both I think are critical, both are necessary.
link |
That's fascinating.
link |
And again, fascinating to see how that could be integrated
link |
in the machines to help them learn better
link |
and to reason better.
link |
And in some ways we also know it
link |
from a chemical perspective too.
link |
When you go into dream sleep,
link |
it is a neurochemical cocktail like no other
link |
that we see at the rest of the 24 hour state.
link |
There is a chemical called noradrenaline
link |
or norepinephrine in the brain.
link |
And you know of its sister chemical
link |
in the body called adrenaline.
link |
But upstairs in the brain, noradrenaline
link |
is very good at creating a very hyper focused,
link |
attentive, narrow, it's sort of very convergent way
link |
of thinking to a point, sharp focus, that's the only thing.
link |
The spotlight of consciousness is very narrow.
link |
That's noradrenaline.
link |
When you remove noradrenaline,
link |
then you go from a high SNR, a high signal to noise ratio
link |
where it's just you and I in this moment,
link |
I don't even know what's going on elsewhere.
link |
I am with you, noradrenaline is present.
link |
But when you go into REM sleep,
link |
it is the only time during the 24 hour period
link |
where your brain is devoid of any noradrenaline,
link |
it is completely shut off.
link |
And so the signal to noise ratio is very different.
link |
It's almost as though we're injecting
link |
a greater amount of noise into the neural architecture
link |
of the brain during dream sleep,
link |
as if it's chemically brute forced
link |
into this relaxed associative memory processing state.
link |
And then from an anatomical perspective,
link |
just as I described, the prefrontal cortex goes down
link |
and other regions light up.
link |
So it is a state that seems to be very,
link |
I mean, if you were to show me a brain scan of REM sleep
link |
and tell me that it's not REM sleep,
link |
just say, look, based on the pattern of this brain activity,
link |
what would you say is going on in this person's mind?
link |
I would say, well, they're probably not rational.
link |
They're probably not having logical thought
link |
because their prefrontal cortex is down.
link |
They're probably feeling very emotional
link |
because their amygdala is active,
link |
which is an emotional center of the brain.
link |
They're definitely going to be thinking visually
link |
because the back of the brain is lit up, the visual cortex.
link |
It's probably going to be filled with past experience
link |
and autobiographical memories
link |
because their memory centers are lighting up.
link |
And there's probably going to be movement
link |
because their motor cortex is very active.
link |
That to me sounds very much like a dream.
link |
And that's exactly what we see in brain scanners
link |
when we've put people inside of them.
link |
One of the things I notice sleep affects
link |
is my ability to see the beauty in the world.
link |
So what do you think is the connection
link |
between sleep and your emotional life,
link |
your ability to love other human beings and love life?
link |
Yeah, I think it's very powerful and strong.
link |
So we've done a lot of work in the field
link |
of sleep and emotion and sleep and moods.
link |
And you can separate your emotions into two main buckets,
link |
positive and negative.
link |
And what's interesting is that when you are sleep deprived
link |
and the more hours that you go into being awake
link |
and the fewer hours that you've had to sleep,
link |
your negative mood starts to increase.
link |
And we know which individual types
link |
of emotions are changing.
link |
I've got a wonderful postdoc in my lab
link |
called Etty Ben Simon, who's doing some incredible work
link |
on trying to understand the emotional,
link |
individual emotional tapestry of affective,
link |
meltdown when you're not getting sufficient sleep.
link |
But let's just keep with two dimensions,
link |
positive and negative.
link |
Most people would think, well, it's the negative
link |
that takes the biggest hit when I'm sleep deprived.
link |
By probably in a log order, magnitude larger
link |
is a hit on your positive emotions.
link |
In other words, you stop being sleep deprived
link |
of positive emotions, in other words, you stop gaining
link |
pleasure from normally pleasurable things.
link |
And it's a state that we call anhedonia.
link |
And anhedonia is the state that we often call depression.
link |
So depression to most people's surprise isn't necessarily
link |
that you're always feeling negative emotions.
link |
It's often more about the fact that you lose the pleasure
link |
in the good things in life.
link |
That's what we call anhedonia.
link |
That's what we see in sleep, an insufficient sleep.
link |
And it happens quite quickly.
link |
Yeah, it's kind of fascinating.
link |
I think I do, it's not depression,
link |
but like it's a stroll into that direction,
link |
which is when I'm sleep deprived,
link |
I stop being able to see the meaning in life.
link |
The things that gave me meanings starts to lose meaning.
link |
Like it makes me realize how enjoyable everything is
link |
in my life because when I start to lose it,
link |
when I'm severely sleep deprived,
link |
you start to see how much life sucks when you lose it.
link |
But that said, I'm just cognizant enough
link |
that sleep fixes all of that.
link |
So I use those states for what they're worth.
link |
In fact, I personally like to pay attention to the things
link |
that bother me in doing that time.
link |
Cause they also reveal important information to me.
link |
That's interesting.
link |
I have to use like a Rorschach to, yeah.
link |
I mean, there's, so I find this when I fast combine
link |
with sleep deprivation, I'm clear to see with people,
link |
clear and identifying the things
link |
that are not going right in my life
link |
or people that I'm working with are not doing
link |
as good of a job as they could be doing.
link |
Like people that are negative in my life,
link |
I'm more able to identify them.
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So I don't act on that.
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It's a very bad time to act on those decisions,
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but I'm like recording that information
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because I usually, when I'm well rested and happy,
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I see the beauty in everybody,
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which can get you into trouble.
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So you have to balance those two things.
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But yes, it's fascinating.
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But there's irony there too, which is the fact that,
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you know, when you're well rested and well slept,
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just as you said, you see the beauty in life
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and it sort of enlivens you
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and sort of gives you a quality of life
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that's emotionally very different.
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Yet then we are contrasting that against the need
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for not getting enough sleep
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because of the beautiful things
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that you want to accomplish in life.
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And I don't actually see them as,
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you know, sort of completely counterintuitive
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or paradoxical because I still think that you can strive
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for all of the brilliant things that you are striving for,
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to have the monumental goals,
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the Herculean challenges that you wish to take on and solve.
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They can still enthrall you and excite you
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and stimulate you.
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But because of the insufficient sleep that they can
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or that goal can produce,
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it will shave off the beauty of life
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that you experience in between.
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And again, this is just about the trade off.
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I will say though that,
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and this is not applicable to your circumstance,
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we do know that insufficient sleep
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is very strongly linked to suicide ideation,
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suicide attempts and tragically suicide completion as well.
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And in fact, in 20 years of studying sleep,
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we have not been able to discover
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a single psychiatric condition in which sleep is normal.
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And I think that that is a profound,
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I think it tells us so much about the role of sleep
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as a potential causal agent in psychiatric conditions.
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I also think it's a potential sign
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that we should be using sleep as a tool
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for the prevention of grave mental illness.
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Yeah, it's both a cause and a solution.
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So yeah, I mean, me personally,
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I've gone through a few dark periods quite recently
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and it was almost always sleep is not the cause,
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but sleep is the catalyst from going to a bad time
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to a very bad time.
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And so it's definitely true.
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And it's funny how sleep can just cure all of that.
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There's actually a beautiful quote
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by an American entrepreneur called E. Joseph Kosman,
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who once said that the best bridge
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between despair and hope is a good night's sleep.
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And I spilled quite so much ink and hundreds of pages
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in elegantly trying to say the same thing in my book.
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And he said it in one line and it's beautiful.
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What do you think is,
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we've been talking about how to extend this life,
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how to make it a good life.
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We've been talking about love.
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What do you think is the meaning of this whole ride?
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Why do we wanna make it a good one?
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Do you think there's a meaning?
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Do you think there's a answer to the why?
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For me personally,
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I think the meaning of life is to eat,
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is to sleep, is to fall in love, is to cry,
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Oh, and probably race cars in between.
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Well, there's a whole topic of sex we didn't talk about.
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So that's probably in there.
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Should we do that?
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Maybe if you'll have me back, I would love to do.
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I will go around to.
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Next time we will do another three hours on sex alone.
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It has been over three hours.
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Matt, I'm a big fan of your work.
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I think you're doing really important work.
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Even despite all the things I've been saying
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about the madness of my own sleep schedule,
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I think you're helping millions of people.
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So it's an honor that you spend your valuable time with me
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and I can't wait until your podcast comes out.
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I'm a huge fan of podcasts, I'm a huge fan of you,
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and it's just an honor to know you
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and to get a chance, hopefully in the future,
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to work together with you.
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You're a brilliant man and you're doing amazing things.
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And I feel immensely honored to have met you,
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to now know you, and to start calling you a friend.
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Thank you for what you do for the world
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and for me included.
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Thanks for listening to this conversation with Matt Walker
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and thank you to Stamps.com, Squarespace,
link |
Letter Greens, BetterHelp, and Onnit.
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Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
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And now, let me leave you with some words
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from Nikola Tesla, who we discussed in this podcast
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as sleeping very few hours a night.
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All that was great in the past was ridiculed,
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condemned, combated, and suppressed,
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only to emerge all the more powerfully,
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all the more triumphantly from the struggle.
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Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.