Why do we sleep and dream? (featuring Dr. Gina Poe)

26:15They're cud. So that's a really good question. And I think that it's still controversial, Daniel, because if you define it behaviorally, you would say someone who's sleepwalking isn't sleeping because they're walking. But in fact, we know because we can measure EEG that they are asleep while they're sleepwalking. So it is tricky. But we do also know that the brain, at least, is doing something wildly different, wildly different than when we're awake. We are not processing the outside world. In the slow wave state of sleep, which is one of the two states, our brain activity electrically is periodically active and inactive.

26:57And the frequency is about one hertz. So we have this blip of activity and then a lot of silence. And this silence is something you never see during wakefulness. And then a little blip of activity and then a lot of silence. And so consciousness is probably completely severed during those periods of time when the brain is completely inactive. And those little blips of activity, 100 milliseconds long or so, are probably too short to be called consciousness and certainly too short to write memories into any long-term stores. So that's probably why we consider ourselves unconscious. During REM sleep, it's an entirely different state.

27:38The brain is super active, but that activity is all internally focused. So not focused on what the outside world is, but this inside reality. And that's probably the case of octopuses when they're flashing their camouflage. All right. So that's been a fascinating discussion of meditative mushrooms and napping black widows. When we get back, let's talk more about what's happening while we sleep and what it means to dream.

28:18We'll be right back.

28:38and live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info slash Tampa. NYX, that's K-N-I-X, leak-proof underwear, is made for real life. Because when your day is already full, your underwear shouldn't be something you have to think about. NYX gives you reliable leak-proof protection that fits seamlessly into your routine. For periods, for light bladder leaks, for workouts, for everyday freshness, NYX leak-proof underwear comes in a range of absorbencies, from light to ultra. So if you need a little backup or all-day protection, there's a pair for you. Unlike bulky protection, NYX feels barely there with soft fabrics, moisture-wicking layers, and anti-odor technology that keeps you feeling fresh and confident.

29:22Wear them to work, running errands, traveling, even overnight. Plus, they're machine washable, so you can wear them again and again. Find your perfect level of protection at knix.com and get 15 % off with code FLOW15. That's KNIX.com CodeFLOW15 That's Knicks.com Ice Cube's Big 3 season is heating up The most competitive basketball league on earth is on CBS this Sunday The two best teams go head-to-head as Coach Nancy Lieberman and Greg Monroe's Dallas Power take on the one-seed Chicago Triplets led by Coach Dr. J and Captain Montrez Harrell Then Coach Gary Payton and the Boston Ball Hogs battle Nasir Kaur and the Detroit Amps in a must-win game for Boston The game played the way you love Watch live Sunday, August 9th on CBS at 1 p.m.

30:07Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart. This is Becca and Tanya from Scrubbing In with Becca Tilly and Tanya Rad. Becca, can I ask you a question? How do I convince myself I need something before I buy it? Oh, so we're doing that today. Well, I'll be shopping online and suddenly I'm like, well, technically this counts as self-care. You're definitely not alone there. That's why Klarna stands out. It's about smarter tools that help you feel more confident with your money. Klarna brings payments, cashback, and money management together in one place with flexible ways to pay.

30:43It helps you make smarter money moves without the stress. That's the goal, right? Having tools that make your money work with you. Download the Klarna app today or visit Klarna.com to learn more. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license. It's NMLS number 1353190. Klarna balance account required to be eligible for cashback points. Limitations, terms, and conditions apply.

31:19All right. So I remember hearing that something like dolphins and birds sleep with half of their brain at a time, which sounds great because then you can be awake. But anyway, so my question is, is that actually happening? And what does that look like? And what are the bonuses or drawbacks of that technique? Right. Well, if you're a dolphin, the bonus is that you can continue to breathe all night long while you're sleeping. Solid. So the half of your brain that's awake keeps the dolphin swimming at the surface and able to breathe all night long. They switch sides. So one half of the brain is sleeping for a while and then the other half of the brain sleeps for the rest of the time and just switch back and forth.

32:00Interestingly, the one neurochemical that seems to be changing when the consciousness side changes is acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter that goes all over the brain from one area of the brainstem. And it's considered to be the searchlight of consciousness. So when you're thinking about walking upstairs, acetylcholine goes to the motor areas that are responsible for your feet walking upstairs. And when you're thinking about doing math, acetylcholine goes to the math areas of your brain and away from the walking upstairs. If you're walking upstairs and doing math at the same time, of course, acetylcholine is in both places.

32:41And you're probably going to fall. Anyway, so for dolphins, fur seals that are out hunting for long periods of time and not accessing land for several weeks, they can also sleep unihemispherically. Whales sleep unihemispherically. And it's true, the side that's asleep that doesn't have the acetylcholine has the big slow waves of unconsciousness. And the side that's awake looks like awake and the eye is open on that side and all of that. So actually, so we control our brains. This is a little confusing. Our left side of our brain controls the right side of our body. So if the left side of the brain is awake, the right eye is open and watching the world around them and vice versa.

33:28But so REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, the one that I talked about where you have atonia, seems to occur only very briefly in these animals that are unihemispherically sleeping. So there is something different about REM sleep. that really requires atonia. And maybe that's why it's only 15 seconds long in the dolphin. And we haven't recorded the EEG, the electroencephalogram from dolphins or whales. It's a little more difficult. There's a lot of fat to help them float between their skin and their brain. And no one has attempted it. But we do have another state of sleep in whales, at least.

34:09And I don't know if it's been observed in dolphins. it would be interesting to see but where they're not just floating at the surface and breathing and sleeping one hemisphere at a time but they're actually below the surface in instead of a horizontal position and a vertical position either head down or head up and usually what they do is they start with head down and then as the waves and tides you know move their atonic bodies they eventually sort of go to the head up position and so they have a lot of fat in the head. That's the one that's the more neutral position. And they will do that for 20 minutes at a time.

34:45And that's where their body is completely also atonic. And then they swim to the surface and breathe and wake up and breathe again. But I'm not sure I follow the basic idea of why some animals do this and some don't. You said, you know, dolphins need to keep swimming and breathing, but we also need to keep breathing while we're asleep. Why don't we do this as well? Right, because, well, we can breathe while we're asleep without having to swim. You know, we just, you know. So also dolphins and whales breathe voluntarily. So it actually requires a voluntary sort of waking brain to breathe, whereas we breathe involuntarily.

35:27When we go unconscious, if we were holding our breath before we went unconscious, we will start breathing again. And whales and dolphins have ancestors that were land animals, right? Which probably slept more like us. How do you think that evolution happened? How do you evolve this kind of thing? Right? I don't know. It's incredible. You know, the differences between species is really a beautiful and amazing thing. So you mentioned that seals, when they go off on long foraging trips, can do unihemispheric sleep. Do they alternate between unihemispheric sleep and then everything? Yes. Like the whole brain going?

36:01Oh, wow. They can do both? Yeah. When they're on land, they do whole brain sleep. Wow. Yeah. And there's an elephant seal that isn't found to do unihemispheric sleep, either on land or at sea. And so that was used to argue that maybe sleep isn't necessary because they would be out there foraging for a couple of weeks and they're not sleeping for those couple of weeks and then they go back to land and they don't have homeostatic rebound like they had been sleep deprived for a couple of weeks. So it was thought that maybe these are animals that don't need to sleep and maybe sleep isn't necessary or at least not always homeostatically regulated.

36:40But a few years ago, someone at UC Santa Cruz outfitted these elephant seals with headcaps so they could record from their brains while they're out there swimming. And they found that, in fact, these headcaps also had GPS. They found that they actually do sleep while they're out there foraging. and what they do is they take a deep breath, you know, lots of deep breaths. They swim down, down, down to a depth beneath where sharks and killer whales would predate them and where if they fall asleep and when they fall asleep, they start sinking instead of floating back up. And so what they do is they go into slow wave sleep and they have these beautiful slow waves and they're just kind of coasting down as they go into slow wave sleep.

37:28And then when they go into REM sleep with the atonia, whatever body position they're in, if it's less than perfectly straight, which always is going to be less than perfectly straight, they'll start spiraling. The fin that's down will make them spiral. So they will spiral down and down and down until they hit the ocean floor or until about seven or eight minutes have passed and they start, you know, the oxygen need starts making them decide that they need to wake up. And so they wake up and start swimming up to the surface. Wow. And even when they're swimming to the surface, they can hold their breath for a long time.

38:06So even when they're swimming to the surface, they could have little naps and then swim some more. And yeah, it's super cool. So really sleep has been found in every animal and in every animal, if you look closely enough, seems to have these two stages of sleep. So both stages. And both stages are independently regulated. So both stages seem to be important. So wait, when one hemisphere is asleep, I assume that they're less good at doing, like they can't have social interactions or anything like that. They're just watching out for predators and trying to breathe. Is that right? Yes, I think so.

38:41Yeah, we don't see social behaviors, which would take the whole body. I suppose they could flat one fin waving. hey guys taking a nap okay right and it makes sense to me that predators might sleep like they eat very calorie rich food they don't need to move around they're conserving energy but prey it seems to me like a huge disadvantage to ever go to sleep that's right um does that mean that it must be fundamentally important that you can't escape it there's no evolutionary path away from I think that's what it means. Yes. So I would love to see sleep in the pond organism that can survive in space and radiation.

39:22Tardigrades? Tardigrades. I would love somebody to do a sleep and tardigrade study because they survive so well despite all of these different assaults on them. they have amazing abilities to rebuild broken double-stranded breaks in their DNA which seems to be also one of the functions for sleep is to rebuild double-stranded breaks in our DNA. So another animal that seems to be really good at repairing their DNA is the naked mole rat which are really ugly or cute whatever you think. it's a personality test actually whether you like the naked mole rat it is it is so there are some studies done in san diego and then some more studies done in russia that of sleep in the naked mole rat and they seem to sleep so much more than the rest of us and the naked mole rat unlike other rats which live about two years the naked mole rat can live 35 five years.

40:30And when they die, it's usually from accidents or injuries or something like that. So why do they live so much longer? Well, they have this superior ability to repair their double stranded breaks in DNA. And their REM sleep is about 50 % of their sleep, which as for us, it's about 25 % on a good day. For rats and mice, it's more like 12, 15%. But with naked mole rats, It's 50%. And that's as much REM sleep as we get as babies. Wow. So when we are learning so much from our environment, and actually, I want to give you another factoid, which is learning requires double-stranded breaks in our DNA.

41:15So every time we learn, we're breaking our DNA in order to do that. What? Yes, I know. Why? I've never heard that before. Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why. but sleep helps repair that. And so what are naked mole rats doing? Babies are learning, of course, a ton, right? And they have about 50 % REM when they're born. So why are naked mole rats having so much REM all through their lives? Are they learning a lot? There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they're so much smarter than anybody else. They're writing the great American novel, of course. Maybe writing a great American novel, but only they can read.

41:58So you have a lot of questions about sleep and all these creatures and in humans. Tell us a little bit about how we've learned these things. Like what experiments have you done? How do we know these things? Yeah. Other than torturing jellyfish. Right. Watching, right? Watching just anybody can be a scientist, as you know. You just need to observe the world around you. ask questions and try and answer them by perturbing that universe and seeing what happens. So we know sleep is homeostatically regulated, even in ourselves, because when we get less of it one night, we are sleepier the next day. Our drive to sleep is higher.

42:39But yes, there have been some key experiments throughout history. For example, the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep was probably not the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep, but rather the first report of rapid environment sleep that other people could read. And that was an observation made by, at the University of Chicago, by a research scientist who was actually the trainee of another researcher who was studying sleep. Yes, had EEG electrodes on people's brains. And this trainee said, hey, there seems to be this second state where eyes are moving and there's a bit of twitching and respiration changes.

43:22And the principal investigator, the PI didn't believe it. You know, like, yeah, it's just a little bit of wakefulness or something else. Sleep is just one thing. And we thought at that time it was a disconnect from the world and it was saving energy, which doesn't appear to be very true, actually. So this trainee hooked up the son of the PI all night long. And this was a young kid, I think 10 years old or younger, who has more REM sleep and is very thoroughly asleep. Kids, boy, it's hard to disturb them. It's hard to wake them up out of sleep. And so he showed the record to the PI, this is your son.

44:06Look at these states. And the PI said, wait a minute. And had his son sleep another night and watched him and tried to poke him awake during their REM sleep when he thought that it must have been wakefulness. The son was quite heavily asleep. And realized, okay, maybe there is something to this. Maybe there's a second state of sleep. So it's kind of observations like this. Someone saying, hey, this is weird. This doesn't follow my hypothesis. This isn't what I thought would happen. and then pursuing that thing that's weird to its end to see what the answers are. For humans, you're obviously limited in the experiments you can do.

44:49I want to ask you a weird question. Imagine that we're not limited. I think that's the only kind of question you ask, Daniel. I know, but this one's going to feel a little extra weird. Imagine you weren't limited by any ethical concerns and you only had scientific questions. What experiments would you do to learn more about sleep? You know, slicing brains open, torturing people, sticking things inside them. I don't know. What would you do just from a scientific point of view to learn about sleep? What experiments do you wish you could do? Yeah. I mean, if it weren't for the dangers involved, I would put electrodes in my own brain.

45:23A ton of them. I would put a thousand of them in my own brain. Because one of the things that we have discovered from people with electrodes in their brain, and they put electrodes in their brain because they want to find out where epilepsy is starting so that they can go in and just take out that little section of brain, which is generating epilepsy all over the brain. So when we have looked at 12 of those people who had electrodes already implanted in their brain and we find that, in fact, sleep isn't a whole brain phenomenon. One third of the time, for example, your hippocampus, which is involved in recording memories in the first place and then consolidating those memories to other parts of the brain, your hippocampus can be in an entirely different sleep state than the cortex is.

46:09And it's about a third of the night that it's in an entirely different state. So, for example, your hippocampus can go into rapid eye movement sleep faster and better and longer than the cortex does. It can go to sleep, actually, in the first place, sooner than the rest of the cortex does. So you could be in bed reading a book and about two minutes on average before you actually fall asleep and the book hits your face or whatever it is, your hippocampus is already asleep. It's not going to remember that last page that you read. You can also tell when you're falling asleep, you have to reread the same patches again and again.

46:47What was that? I don't know. What was that? And that's called sleep onset amnesia. and we found in people that your hippocampus can be asleep for 20 whole minutes before the rest of your brain is asleep. So don't have a critical conversation with your bed partner while they're trying to fall asleep because it's possible they will not remember the conversation the next day at all. Oh my gosh, you have just inserted yourself in my marriage. I have a no important conversation after 10 p.m. rule, which is controversial in my marriage. That seems reasonable. I'm almost always asleep by 10 p.m. So Zach would not make much progress anyway.

47:31But now I have a scientific foundation for winning this argument. You do. You do. Thank you, Gina. Yes. And thank you, Science. Yes. All right. Let's hope we helped some other marriages as well. And when we come back, we will talk about dreams.

48:08We'll be right back. career. Saturday, August 22nd, live from Benchmark International Arena. For tickets, visit pfl.info slash Tampa. NYX, that's K-N-I-X, leak-proof underwear, is made for real life. Because when your day is already full, your underwear shouldn't be something you have to think about. NYX gives you reliable leak-proof protection that fits seamlessly into your routine. For periods, for light bladder leaks, for workouts, for everyday freshness. NYX leak-proof underwear comes in a range of absorbencies, from light to ultra. So if you need a little backup or all-day protection, there's a pair for you.

48:50Unlike bulky protection, NYX feels barely there with soft fabrics, moisture-wicking layers, and anti-odor technology that keeps you feeling fresh and confident. Wear them to work, running errands, traveling, even overnight. Plus, they're machine-washable, so you can wear them again and again. Find your perfect level of protection at knix.com and get 15 % off with code FLOW15. That's knix.com, code FLOW15. That's knix.com. Ice Cube's Big 3 season is heating up. The most competitive basketball league on earth is on CBS this Sunday. The two best teams go head-to-head as Coach Nancy Lieberman and Greg Monroe's Dallas Power take on the one-seed Chicago Triplets, led by Coach Dr.

49:33J and Captain Montrez Harrell. Then coach Gary Payton and the Boston Ball Hogs battle Nasir Kaur and the Detroit Amps in a must-win game for Boston. The game played the way you love. Watch Live Sunday, August 9th on CBS at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific. And catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart. This is Becca and Tanya from Scrubbing In with Becca Tilly and Tanya Rad. Becca, can I ask you a question? How do I convince myself I need something before I buy it? Oh, so we're doing that today. Well, I'll be shopping online and suddenly I'm like, well, technically this counts as self-care.

50:08You're definitely not alone there. That's why Klarna stands out. It's about smarter tools that help you feel more confident with your money. Klarna brings payments, cashback and money management together in one place with flexible ways to pay. It helps you make smarter money moves without the stress. That's the goal, right? Having tools that make your money work with you. Download the Klarna app today or visit Klarna.com to learn more. California resident loans made or arranged pursuant to a California finance law license NMLS number 1353190 Klarna balance account required to be eligible for cashback points limitations terms and conditions apply

50:52Okay,

50:57we're back and we are finally going to answer our listeners questions about dreams So, Gina, when do we dream and why do we dream? Tell us about dreams. That's a great question. And we can only study dreams in people because we can only ask people about their dreams. It's a hard one because you can only ask people about their dreams when they're awake. So it's kind of a retrospective study rather than a live study. However, we do dream most when we're in rapid eye movement sleep, when our bodies are actively inhibited from acting out those dreams. So that's a good thing. But how do you know that if you can only ask people about their dreams later?

51:38Yeah, you just wake them up out of different stages of sleep. And when you wake them up out of REM sleep, they're most likely to report having had a dream. And the dream is most likely to be the most bizarre and lengthy. So if you wake them up out of stage two sleep, which is not the deep, slow-wave, unconscious state, but rather the first state you go into when you're asleep and then the state that you go into right before REM sleep, so it's called a transition to REM, there are more dreams, but they are usually very, very brief. Also bizarre, but they're not long stories, usually. They're just short little snippets.

52:17So when we wake people up out of deep, slow asleep, which is hard to do because there's a lot of sleep inertia, and you ask someone what they were dreaming, they'll say, I have no idea. I wasn't dreaming anything. Let me go back to sleep. You know, grunt and turn over. Right? It doesn't mean that definitively people aren't dreaming of the slow asleep. It might just be that they're not remembering it when we wake them up. But do you have any way to know that their reactions or their stories or their retelling of their dreams correlate at all to their real dreams? Yeah, so there is some evidence.

52:50But it's controversial, or it has been controversial, because there was this idea of activation synthesis. So that, in fact, you just have little blips of randomness when you're in REM sleep. And then when you're awake, because we don't like little blips of randomness, we sew them into a story. and that dream isn't actually a story but we've sewn them into the story and there's some a little bit of evidence for that for example if you have an alarm waking you up you will have a dream that can incorporate that alarm not everybody does but you can have a dream that incorporates that alarm that starts before the alarm started ringing like for example in your dream your alarm is a ticking bomb and you have to diffuse it.

53:36But in your dream, you're coming up upon the bomb and then you start hearing the ticking. And so is it that you've retroactively dreamt about the silence before the alarm starts ringing in order to make this a story? Or is it that, you know, we don't know the answer to that. But interestingly, because we can put electrodes in the brains of rats, actually, I want to tell you that it doesn't hurt to have an electrode in your brain. With these people with electrodes in their brain, her epilepsy will not report having any pain. We actually, strangely, don't have sensory structures in our brain to sense what's there.

54:19So rats with electrodes in the brain will not know that they've got electrodes in their brain, and they will sleep wonderfully. They will sleep beautifully. And you can see, because you can control what happens to a rat during the days, you know, a rat's exploring a maze during the day and they're finding food in your maze. They will dream about that maze. They will reactivate the same neurons that are active in a particular order during the day will reactivate in that order during their dream state of rapid eye movement sleep. And you'd say, why would they dream about the same thing that they were doing during the day, well, they have a pretty boring life except for that exciting maze running time.

55:00And so they're much more likely to activate that particular dream. But there are a lot of times in REM sleep where they're not activating that maze. And so what are they dreaming about? We don't know. We'd have to record every minute of their lives in order to see what they're reactivating and what they're dreaming about. But we do know that they do reactivate the maze. And interestingly, they can reactivate the maze in the same order in which they ran it during the day, but they can also do bizarre things that they can't do during the day, like leap from one side to the other day to the next, like we can in our dreams.

55:33We can change scenes, right? We can, you know, suddenly we're in a boat, you know, versus before we were, you know, in a house. So, and rats can do the same thing. So we can't ask them about their dreams, but we can see their brain activity reactivating this reality that they were in the day before. Also, we have this tiny little brainstem area that inhibits our muscles when we're dreaming so that we don't act them out. When that tiny area of the brainstem degenerates, we act out our dreams. That's called REM behavior disorder. And people with that have to actually tie themselves down while they sleep so they don't, you know, hurt themselves because you're completely insensitive to the world around you.

56:15You are totally in your dream world and you could, you know, fall downstairs or walk through plate glass window or beat your bed partner because you're dreaming about an alligator over the side of your canoe. So you can also lesion that tiny little area of the brainstem in a rat and see the rat act out their dreams as well. So they will be cowering as though they're dreaming they're being predated upon. There's somebody's preying on them. They can fight. They can walk around. They can phantom eat. And if I've seen the cats do it, they can, you know, swat at imaginary butterflies and also pounce on imaginary prey.

57:02So, yeah, this is some evidence that all animals seem to dream, including cephalopods, which have this flashing of their camouflage while they're in that state. So we think that's a dream where their body is physically responding as opposed to that's just, okay. Yeah. So what is the origin of dreams? We don't know. But there is another part of the brainstem that only is active during REM sleep, so during this dream state. And it's filled with big excitatory neurons that project all over the brain. and it starts firing when we are in that N2 stage of sleep, which is the state when if you wake someone up, they'll report little short dreams, but not long ones.

57:50And then it fires like crazy when we're in REM sleep. And it might be the origin of the internal origin of dreams. It's right beneath an area of the brain, brainstem called the locus thrullis, which gets all sensory information from the outside world. And that is actively inhibited when we are in REM sleep. But just beneath that is this area that comes on and comes alive when we're in dream state. So it might be the way we feel things and hear things and start speaking and all of that. Because this ceruleus area, it's called subceruleus, projects all over our cortex. And we don't know because we haven't been able to control which areas are active and which are not active in the subsurface to try and control and formulate a dream like an inception of a dream.

58:42We can't do that yet, but maybe someday we will be able to do that. So there are a lot of people who are interested in interpreting dreams and trying to decide what they mean. Is there any hidden meanings in dreams or is it what's the science there? Again, that's really difficult because, again, you can only study in waking people. But there is a reactivation of memories. And if you deprive someone, a person of REM sleep, you will get a much more pedantic mindset. You can't deprive people of REM sleep for very long. That's, again, independently regulated. And if given any nap opportunity, normally REM sleep comes after about 90 minutes or 80 minutes of sleep.

59:28It follows slow-wave sleep because your brain needs to be in the perfect state temperature-wise, etc., in order to go into this dream state of sleep. But if you deprive someone of particularly that dream state of sleep, they will go into REM sleep earlier and earlier and they'll get more and more of it. And in fact, just at sleep onset, they can go into REM sleep. There does seem to be a lot of anecdotal evidence that dreams do relate to things that we're experiencing. And for some people more than others. A lot of people don't remember their dreams at all. So they're not the ones to study for this.

1:00:06But those who can remember their dreams, sometimes, in fact, dreams do seem to relate to the things that you've learned during the day or the week before, the month before. And the bizarreness of dreams seems to allow us to put things together. So we wake up with an aha moment. Not always, but sometimes with an aha moment where we've put things together that we couldn't, you know, our conscious brain just couldn't let us put together. So the study of dreams and creativity does show that people, for example, doing a task that requires a creative insight in order to do it quickly about a third of the people doing this task get the creative insight while they're awake and doing the task in the first place.

1:00:53Two-thirds of people don't see the hidden rule that allows them to take this shortcut. And of those, half of them through sleep wake up and then can do the creative leap. And then one-third seem to never get it, unfortunately. And those that make that creative leap seem to have a lot more activity in this area of the brain that causes sleep spindles, which is related to these sub-serulis area, which causes this activation, this random activation during dreams. Are you saying that people have this idea, solve a problem while they're asleep, and then they wake up and they have the solution? Yeah.

1:01:33Or that the sleep has somehow prepared their brain to be able to solve this problem? It seems like they wake up with the solution so that the first time that they're doing it, they've got it. So it is possible to dream up the great American novel. Yes, I think so. All right. There's one famous songwriter who said that when he wakes up, if he doesn't write down the song that he was dreaming about, God will give it to Bob Dylan.

1:02:04That's excellent. So what do we know about the cultural dependence of sleep and dreams? Do people sleep the same way around the world? Do they dream the same way? Do we have the same relationship with dreams around the world? There are cultures that have strong beliefs that these insights that come through dreams come from ancestors. You go to visit your ancestors in your dreams and they give you wisdom. Again, there's no scientific evidence, but there are cultural norms surrounding dreams that are different in different cultures. There's also cultural norms surrounding sleep in general that differ between different cultures.

1:02:42Some cultures don't value sleep at all. It's for the lazy, they believe. And there's nothing good happening except just turning off your brain and resting. And if you're tough, you can do without it. Other cultures have a much more open or receptive view of sleep. And sleep is something they welcome each night. and with open arms because that's a time when lots of things happen, like consulting with your ancestors or whatever it is. There's a really cool study in South America by a researcher who's actually at University of Washington in Seattle. He put sleep trackers on people in a village without any electricity in South America in the Amazon.

1:03:33and another set of sleep trackers on people with bare minimum electricity, like a single light bulb in the ceiling, and then on people living in the city. And he found that all of these cultures, no matter where they were living, sleep less during the full moon or the new moon. So he was tracking them for a full month. And there's a statistical significant difference where people sleep less, either the full moon or the new moon. And so you think it's not light because the new moon, there's no moon and the only light you see is the stars when you're out in the Amazon, if that at all. So it can't be light disturbance.

1:04:16And in fact, the people in the city also, these are college students, they typically spend very little time looking at the moon or thinking about the moon. So, it seems to be the only explanation that they could come up with in this paper is that the gravitational pull is stronger on the Earth during both a new moon and a full moon. And so, maybe there's something to have to do with gravity and sleepiness. Maybe that explains why we sleep worse at high altitudes. I always thought that was the oxygen. Yeah. No, the oxygen definitely does disturb our sleep. Yeah. So, yeah, I don't know. What about people who have different sensations of the world?

1:04:59Do dreams play a different role in folks who, like, have always been blind or always been deaf? Can people see in their dreams if they're blind? No, they do if they're not blind from birth. But if they're blind from birth, no, it's different sensations that are activated in dreams. Daniel, do you want to ask your alien question? Oh, no. Right, so we've asked you about whether sleep is something that's common across Earth creatures. How common do you think it is across the universe when aliens come and visit? Are they going to need to take naps in between our conversations? Or do you think this is something that happens only on Earth?

1:05:35Well, it does happen on Earth. But whether an alien sleep is a good question. It depends on whether aliens need to repair double-stranded DNA. Do they have double-stranded DNA? It depends on whether their energy stores works the same way. That's a great question because there are people who would like to do away with sleep altogether. They think, the ones who think it's a waste of time or who would like sleepiness to not affect people's performance, for example. But we have not found anything on Earth, at least, that can replace sleep itself. And in fact, without sleep, eventually we die. And that eventually is about as long as we take to die without any food.

1:06:18So it's as essential as food for us. so yeah it's quite possible there are aliens who don't need sleep um that have different work differently well when the aliens do arrive i think i hope that they're invertebrates so that you can do all sorts of terrible experiments on them and understand no no no no no i think i think they're coming up with new rules for working on like octopus uh as well because oh yes they're particularly intelligent yes uh yeah it's a little more complicated there are already rules for activist. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much for chatting with us about sleep and dreams.

1:06:55This has been fascinating. And let's go ahead and hear if our listener had her questions answered. Thanks for doing your podcast on this. It was really interesting. Dr. Poe was really interesting. I've never knew that people believe they talk to their ancestors in their dreams. I found that fascinating. Thanks for everything you do. And I look forward to hearing all your future podcasts. Bye bye.

1:07:24Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by iHeartRadio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at questions at danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D &K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Saturday, August 22nd in Tampa.

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