Brain Surgeon REVEALS the NEUROSCIENCE of Dreams & What They TRULY Mean! | Dr. Rahul Jandial

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:12Let's equip people with what is happening in the dreaming brain. Yes. And then what different dreams mean. So then they have a playbook at the end. Okay, so you've got all the dream patterns, right? So we've got what we dream. You're looking at what people have cataloged to make sense of why we dream. That's your essential question that we get to. and then there's this thing like the dreaming brain and the waking brain. And I believe these big ideas are applicable to everybody like getting groceries, frustrated, why am I stressed out, why am I overreacting, like all the things for living a better waking life, you can't separate them from that third of your life you spend sleeping and potentially dreaming.

0:55right so i go way way back to try to understand this and to make sense of it for myself and and i think you'll find there's there's science and there's stories but there's synthesis so first thing is all life is governed by the rotation of the planet like whether it's like those hot springs deep in the ocean and there's some bacteria there or a venus fly trap that opens and closes or the moon and the tides or sleep, right? Like this is governed because that was the foundation on which life arose, right? And when you look at that, what I would say is the material, the living material on planet Earth follows that, whether it's the tide or the plankton or fish or, you know, all migration, but also the material in our brain.

1:45Really? Like there's nothing in our skull that if you pieced it out, there's no special ingredient. Like from Krypton or something. Everything in nature is also everything inside our skull in these brains, right? That's connected differently, it's functioning differently. But that was like the first thing that really tripped me out. I was like, we too follow the laws, fundamental laws of Earth's rotation. These circadian rhythms you're hearing about and cycles. the waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24-hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this plan. Interesting. That's the first thing.

2:22I love this topic, by the way. There are like people who go into caves for like six months. It's still on a cycle. Like it's not based just on dark blackout shades or not. Like the tissue in our bodies, the cells, we're following this Earth's rotation. Okay. So if we say that there's the waking brain and the sleeping brain, And every 24 hours, it does its things. Two-third waking, one-third sleeping. And that happens for the most part, you know, for how long you live. Now, a surgeon in training, I might skip a few nights. So maybe I've had 500 or 1 ,000 nights. But overwhelmingly, I follow this cycle too.

3:00And in that cycle, we have to ask ourselves, what's going on in the dreaming brain? And right away, I'll tell you, it's so important there's something called sleep pressure. You could defy a lot of things, but you go a day without sleeping, there's something building inside you saying sleep, sleep, sleep. You'll fall asleep in a dangerous spot. You'll fall asleep standing up sometimes. You'll fall asleep even though you haven't eaten. There's something fundamental called sleep pressure that makes us follow that rhythm, right? Your body will force you to sleep eventually. Well, I would say your brain.

3:34Your brain just shuts off. It builds a pressure. You can startle people and they'll wake up. But at some point, there's this pressure that's bringing you down to sleep. Really? You see that? I think torture techniques were based off of that. We saw that. Nobody could stay up a third night in the hospital. They tried to get us to a long time ago, the battle day. Really? Yeah, but second night you could do. Third night. So there's a sleep pressure that the brain generates. Not the body. We can put hearts from one to another, livers from one to another, lungs from one to another. they all follow that person's brain's order.

4:08So really what we're talking about is the brain is saying, I need to sleep. The brain is saying, I need to sleep. The brain is saying, okay, there's some threat going on, or you've got some demands, you're running an ultra marathon, you're a surgeon on call, I can go a day, but I need to sleep. So that's the first thing in this discussion is, why do we need to sleep? Now I'm going to be bold here, this is a conversation. I think we sleep because we must dream. Now, let me just set that up for you. What happens when you go without sleep? You have surges in REM and dreaming sleep right away. First thing you do when you've gone a day without sleep, if you put that person in a brain scan, but there's exquisite ways of checking it, is that the first thing they do is they dream wildly.

4:52Right? So that's an interesting thing to me. The longer we go in our night of restful sleep, the more you're dreaming on the tail end. right so maybe mental clarity if we take that phrase comes from having that longer night's sleep well what happens in that fifth sixth and seventh hour you're dreaming so when i start to see these patterns i wonder one the brain not the body needs to sleep and then what is the brain doing in sleep i just checked this out man it's doing something that if you put electrodes on the surface of our scalps and we all fall asleep at night during the day the waves the measurements are you know sort of wavy there's different ones that you depending on how you're engaging at night there are some sharp 90 minute patterns that stuff is designed that's built in really yeah so that's not new we don't have that when we're awake no during the like if something startles us the electricity will be different if we if we meditate the electricity will be different during during waking at night you're on you're on something program then that's not new louis that's the stuff that i've we i've known for 20 years and sleep people know for 40 years what i'm trying to do is give you an explanation a synthesis that's not random that's not a glitch seven billion brains on a 24-hour cycle sleep pressure you've got to lie down you've got to sleep the brain is saying you got to sleep and when it's sleeping is doing this 90 crisp cycles REM sleep you've seen the the charts they're like they look like Lego they look like the top of a Tetris thing or a Lego thing that is something fundamental that's happening in my opinion we must sleep but I think what's the most important part of sleep is the dreaming

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7:43Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show.