Fw:Thinking Catches Some Zs

she could be a sleep emailer. But this is kind of leading into the fact that we're going to talk about the future of sleep, so it was actually on topic for once. I'm hoping that in the future we can just phase out sleep entirely. It's just a waste of time. I'm one of those people who, I mean, like I I enjoy getting rest when I've been working hard and I'm very tired, but you know, it would

be great to just have more time in the day. Well, you know, there there are I've seen people say that if you were able to adopt a an ideal sleeping schedule as an ideals in this is the least amount of time that you could theoretically spend sleeping that you would essentially have the equivalent waking hours to get eleven more years of life if you started in your early twenties. Yeah. I wonder if that's one of those things being propagated

by these weird sleep pattern enthusiasts on the internet. Yeah, we'll get to that and talk about what those weird sleep patterns are and uh, the implications of them. Yeah. Well, okay, so if we're going to talk about the future of sleep hacking sleep, how sleep patterns can change over time, first we should talk about sleep itself, because it's kind of a weird and mysterious topic in science, and in fact, there's still a lot we do not know about the

sleep cycle that weird. It is weird to think that this is something that we all do. You know, we all do it regularly, whether or not you get good sleep or not, you still, I assume are going to sleep or I don't know how you're listening to this podcast. Um So from a survival perspective, it first seems kind of weird because I mean, I can't imagine how it would confer an evolutionary advantage to lay down and expose yourself to predators for eight hours or however long. Well,

let's let's think about this for a second. So there are a lot of different theories about what happens when we're asleep, and we'll get into those. But one thing I might suggest as a reason why we need to have this this time to sleep is just purely and this this is just a hypothesis here. There's no necessarily science to back this up, but purely from an energy perspective, right, it requires energy for us to be awake. We're active,

we we consume energy. That's why we have to eat throughout the day in order to maintain that level of energy, or else we are no longer capable of being active and alert. If we were active and alert all the time, we would require to eat more frequently. And because we're not evolved to be able to do something like, I don't know, navigate pitch black darkness without falling over ourselves and hurting ourselves, uh being able to gather food or hunt food at night, we we can't. It's harder for

us to do that. So it may be that it's evolutionary beneficial for us to go ahead and well shut down during the time of day when we can't really be effective. It's just cut your losses. It's a calculated risk to say, like, you're not going to be doing much useful at night anyway, and you're gonna be burning all these calories. That's the hypothesis. And keep in mind that when we're talking about evolution, evolution happens over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, right, because you

could argue, well, today we've got artificial lights. You know, the difference between night and day is not as great. But it's not like we could evolve past what we have already established in the relatively short amount of time. Like if you're looking on a geological scale, it's a blink of an eye since we've had any kind of artificial light source. Uh. Well, we we can't evolve that

fast as a whole species. But it might be interesting that some certain individuals of the human race have a certain mutation that helps them in this environment where we have artificial light and can do things useful at night. But first, and we'll talk about that later. Also, Uh, first, let's back up and talk about other animals. Do do all animals sleep? No? No, mammals, birds, and reptiles sleep all right, So they're the higher vertebrates. You can think

of it that way. So when you're looking at the animal king too, the higher vertebrates all sleep like more complex brains. Yeah, yeah, that would be part of it. More complex nervous systems would probably be a better way of putting it. But yes, uh, if you look at fish and amphibians, most of those have some means of shutting down some of their awareness, but there's still not asleep.

They're still awake, but they're kind of it's like they go to impulse power instead of warp speed, right, So they're able to power down a little bit and and recuperate, but they don't go to sleep. Sleep insects may not sleep at all, but they just have periods of activity versus inactivity, whether it's day or night or whatever. It depends on the insect, but they don't go to sleep.

The other thing that's interesting this related to this is dreaming, and we'll talk a lot about dreaming in this episode as well. But reptiles do not dream, they don't, birds dream a little bit, and all mammals dream. And this is based off of various scientific studies where the scientists were monitoring brainwave activity during sleep cycles for these various types of animals. So the next time you see like an alligator and you're wondering, what's that alligator dreaming of

the answer is nothing at all, because alligators don't dream. Wow, not even delicious raw chicken. Nope, Nope, they just they to them. The world just goes away for a while and then it comes back. Uh so yeah, so you know that that's the basics. But then we get into some other you know, this raises some other questions, like, all right, so these larger, the more developed vertebrates all all sleep and and most of them dream to some extent um. Why is this happening? Why why do your

bidies even need to sleep in the first place? Um? Do we grow while we sleep? Well, as when we're children, we do. Yeah, because when your kid and you are sleeping, your body releases growth hormone, and so it's very important in those phases. It doesn't release during your wake cycle, So when you're awake, you know, this growth hormone doesn't get secreted, but when you go to sleep it does.

Also very important for immune system. If you were to suffer sleep deprivation, for long enough, your immune system would start to really suffer. As a result, you end up kind of secreting again these chemicals in your body that help maintain your immune system. So sleep is very important there too. Um And you know, also there are other hypotheses out there that are again are are There may be a lot of truth to them, there may be very little truth, and maybe that all of them are true,

but things like that's when our body repairs itself. So if you were to suffer injury, then when you're sleeping, your body can really get onto the job of fixing tissue and getting you know, shedding dead cells, that kind of stuff. I know, there are a lot of different hypotheses about what's going on in the brain during sleep, like or they're sort of necessary internal brain maintenance tasks

that has been only when you're asleep. That's a big one, the idea that you know, there are a lot of different theories about what's going on when you're dreaming, and that whether or not dreaming is part of your brain trying to make sense of the information that you've gathered since you were last asleep. So it's kind of like you know, the filing of at the end of the day sort of that kind of thing, or that it's

just kind of getting rid of nonsense information. There are a lot of different hypotheses out there, but there are some things we can definitively point at. One is that when you go to sleep, your breathing rate slows down, your heart rate slows down, uh, and your brain begins to generate different types of brain waves. So these waves,

you know, they have oscillation frequencies, right, are electrically measurable. Yeah, if you put if you put in a uh, you know, you put sensors on the on the skull and you're reading those brain waves just like you've probably seen in some television shows or movies. You could actually monitor the brain activity and normal wakeful activity. You have alpha waves that are generated when you're kind of you know, in a relaxed, chilled out state. Beta way waves are generated

when you're really alert. So those are the two that are the most frequent in your in your wakeful moments. When you go to sleep, you start to generate uh, different brain waves, the delta waves and the theta waves. Um. So these are slower, they have slower or lower frequencies, I should say, And the slower pattern kind of indicates how deep asleep you're in, and the slower the pattern, the deeper the sleep. So it's harder to wake someone

up when they're having uh delta wave activity. And these are variable based on your sort of your sleep cycle, right that you go through different stages of sleep exactly. Yeah, it's it's your activity does change. There are times when the activity starts to spike, like an r e M sleep that's rabbid eye movement sleep. This is when we're talking about dreaming. So if you've ever been awakened while you were in R e M sleep, then you probably have at least some recollection of what your dream was.

It's a lot harder to member for most people what they dreamed or didn't dream if they wake up and non r E M sleep, it's just because the activity is removed from when they actually wake up. Um. And most people have between three to five sessions of R E M sleep per night, tends to be about a quarter of a typical good night's sleep. So you get about R E M sleep and non r E M sleep. You know it's again this also appears to be pretty important.

It's one of those things that if you don't get that r E M sleep, that's considered like you can start suffering sleep deprivation. So you could, you know, catch little naps here and there. But if you're not getting r EM sleep, you're not getting that RESTful sleep. You don't you don't feel rested. That's the hard stuff. Yeah, it's it's what's really good. It's the stuff when you when you wake up after a really good night's sleep and you feel refreshed, it's because you had that R

E M sleep. So it's not just because you were inactive and RESTful, it's because this has been going on. Okay, so this is really useful. What happens to the body when we don't get enough sleep? And I can speak from experience on this one. Yeah, it's uh, it's no fun. I went through a lot of years in my life when I was not getting a whole lot of sleep. Um, it's more recent in my life that I've started getting better sleep. Yeah. Yeah, I just in you know, college,

grad school. I don't know why. I was just one of those people. So how many all nighters have you done? Oh? Uncountable? Yeah, I I've only done a few. I am one of those people who I realize what my severe limitations are if I don't have enough sleep, because they affect me. Really, I mean, it's just it's obvious if I haven't had enough sleep. Have you ever had hallucinations? I have, I

have to have not not. These aren't like lucid crazy hallucinations like I'm seeing a monster climbing out of the floor. It's more like I remember things like after going like you know, days in a row with almost no real sleep of any kind, seeing feeling like I had seen something move in my peripheral vision and I turned to look and there'd be nothing there for me. It was a point where I could no longer read text because

it would look like it was melting to me. Um. Yeah, I got to a point where I would try and read something and then I would start to nod off immediately. Um. I've also I've also got into the point where I started talking without realizing what I was saying. Yeah, there's a great story about a friend of mine driving me home from the airport after a trip where I got no sleep. Really, and apparently I had some entertaining, absurd,

surreal things to say. I had no connection to anything connected to reality at all, and that was because I had sleep deprivation. So I mean, if you're talking about going like a like a day without sleep or a day without enough sleep, you're talking about things like maybe not being able to focus as as much upon a

task as you normally would are. It's pretty standard for people to report after just one bad night's sleep that they lose focus and they have decreased competence at standard tasks, right or that, And also that things irritate them a little more easily than it might otherwise, that that their their thresholds for being irritated as lower. Um And but there are some serious effects that can happen, Like those hallucinations are pretty bad, but I mean there's some even

worse effects that can happen. You can actually die from lack of sleep. In fact, you know, this is one of those wonderful tests that sciences has shown us, which uh, you know, it's it's one of the things that it's important to know. It's upsetting to think of the actual circumstances.

But scientists would keep rats awake and watch to see what happened with the rats um and the you know, it got to a point where rats that had been forced to stay awake for several days in a row would begin to die and uh, you know, like we said, like they're going to sleep that has what means of helping regulate your immune system. So there are definite health

risks to not getting enough sleep. Uh yeah, And it's a pretty widespread phenomenon that people don't get enough sleep in the United States, at least the CDC that they estimated that forty point six million American workers, which is about thirty percent of all the people on the job, are sleep deprived. That's terrible. Yeah, yeah, I see, here's talking about a Singapore management university said that workers were wasting time, more time than uh than your average worker

if they got less sleep. Yeah. This is from a from a Wall Street General report on sleep deprivation. It's a huge problem, and it's estimated to account for billions

of dollars of lost productivity in the American workforce. So just I mean just written zoning out, you know, people not being as efficient at tasks that they do every day, right right, having to redo something perhaps, or or just taking extra time to be able to do something that normally you'd be able to accomplish in half the time whatever, Like there are measurable effects, right, So getting sleep is important to you. It's important for your health, it's important

for just being the kind of person you want to be. Um. But it's also important on a large scale in in your society, Like it's important if you are a government, you actually you want to make sure people are getting enough sleep because it has large scale implications. That's that's definitely true. So one of the things I saw that you wanted to talk about was the kinds of sleep

patterns we see in nature. Yeah. Um, keeping all the things that we just talked about in mind that sleep deprivation is a really serious problem with serious health effects and serious effects to productivity and and all those kinds of things. It's still would be great if we could maybe get more time, if we could find a way to sleep less totally still healthy. That you're just as healthy, just as happy, with no negative effects to your to

your body, your brain, and your and your quality of life. Um. And so the first thing I wondered about is, well, is the way we sleep now, the way most Westerners sleep now, So one long chunk of sleep at night that is supposed to be around eight hours or so is that normal? Is that normal to the species? So? Yes and no. So first of all, there there are two main types of sleep patterns that you find in the animal world. Monophasic, which is this idea of having

a big, one chunk. Yeah, and then there's polyphasic, which is where you divide this up over multiple like sleep sessions throughout a particular cycle. Yeah. And a lot of these polyphasic that's actually going to be by phasic, meaning you sleep twice. Yeah. By phasic, you would, you could argue, is sort of outside of polyphasic polyphasic. I think of as a what my dog does, right right. I am a fairly recent dog owner, and I've been noticing these

these dog behavior patterns. My new puppy will sleep for an hour and then get up and come look at me and wag is sweet little tail, and then go lie down and sleep for another hour and repeat. You know. Yeah, yeah, it's it's very typical with canines. And then you have other animals you have like cats that will sleep for hours and hours and hours and then they'll be active. Um.

So those that's the difference between monophasic and polyphasic. And then you can have depending upon the type of animal. If it's you know, nocturnal, then it's sleeping during the day. It may have a it may be monophasic, but it's sleep session is in the daytime, not in the nighttime. Yeah, I've um heard examples of people saying that in history people didn't necessarily always sleep just one chunk. Well, yeah, by PHAs is something that is fairly common, and it's

still common in some parts of the world. By phasic is this idea to Italy and they close all the shops Spain as well. Spain is also does this Yeah, um, yeah, no, it's the the whole siesta idea. So by phasic means that you're dividing up your sleep into two sessions, but they're not equal, right, You've got one longer session, which is the one at night. Tends to be between five and seven hours for most of the these these implementations.

Sometimes it could be you know, five to eight hours something like that, and then you take a second session of sleep around the sixth hour of your day whenever that day starts. Your day is dependent upon when you wake up then when you get up, so it's not like it's always going to be at this X hour, it's gonna be six hours after you've awakened, and then you take another sleep that could be anywhere from a half hour to an hour and a half long nap, and then you're awake and alert for the rest of

the day. And in fact, great apes tend to be by phasic, so humans tend to be by phasic. But most of us work in the Western world, are working in environments where taking a nap in the middle of a day is discouraged, not not something you can typically do. And if you think about humans, are not when we're when we're babies, we're polyphasic. We're we're we're not, you know, uh, monophasic or by phasic. When we're babies were polyphasic, but we gradually kind of move into a by phasic phase.

That's where you have the kid who will sleep through the night but also take a nap in the afternoon. Uh. And then eventually society pressures us into being monophasic, even though all of us know that are on two pm. It would be awesome if we could just lay down and go to sleep and no one judged us, or at least by all of us, I mean me so um so naturally speaking, but for most people, keeping in mind that this is you know, this is a blanket statement,

and there are all aways exceptions to rules. Most people would do best with monophasic or biphasic sleep on their own. But that doesn't mean that people haven't tried two come up with some alternatives. Yeah, so I want to transition to talking about hacking sleep. Can we do it? Can you give yourself more waking hours without hurting your level of energy when you are awake, or your alertness, or your competence at tasks or your health. Can you can you get just as good a quality of life with

less time in bed? Well, there's some famous historical figures who have been um the the the idea of getting very little sleep or or this whole polyphasic approach where you're taking naps throughout the day, uh, seems to have been attributed to them, but most of them are the questionable questionable. Yeah, the Leonardo da Vinci is a big that's the big example. So he's the one everybody talks about.

He's a you know, great Italian polly, math of the Renaissance, um painter, inventor of everything, basically at least on paper, right, I didn't necessarily build everything, but he sure did invent a lot of stuff. Yeah, but he is famous for supposedly taking advantage of polyphasic sleep, so he would take a number of naps throughout the day instead of one long chunk, and it would total to much less time than the average person spent sleeping in their in their

chunks at night. Um. But that he would function perfectly well with this. I have had a hard time confirming this, and I'm very suspicious that it's an urban legend. I'm pretty sure it is. Uh. The the next one you have on our list is actually a little bit more of a credible, uh example in a way. Yeah, so Buckminster Fuller Bucky tell us about him, Jonathan Well, Bucky was supposedly getting by on just taking half hour naps.

According to Dr Wozniac. Dr Piotr Wozniak, who's a biologist who has written extensively on the subjects of polyphasic sleep and and monophasic sleep by phasic sleep as well, UM suggest that perhaps this was a reputation that was not fully accurate, that it was more that Fuller would take naps whenever he could, but would also grab like a decent six hours sleep whenever the opportunity arose. It's just that sometimes the schedule would not allow it. I guess

it's hard to prove something like this. Yeah, So beyond Da Vinci and Bucky, we have a few other names that are sometimes associated with this idea of polyphasic sleep, and they are there's some pretty pretty impressive names. If only there were evidence to support the fact that they were actually polyphasic sleepers. Uh, Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla.

So the rivals of the Sleep Wars right after the the current Wars, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson have all been listed as being polyphasic sleepers, even though there's not really evidence to support that now. Thomas Jefferson was the first one I heard, because I actually had a friend in high school who was enthusiastic about the idea of you know what's commonly called on the internet

sometimes the ubermench sleep schedule. Uh, this idea that oh, well, you know, it's only because we're we're just not evolved enough that we are still sticking to this old kind of sleep. If you're really with it. If you know what's up, you'll take four fifteen minute naps a day, or more like half hours. It's more like six half hour because it's he's usually it'll it adds up to three hours sleep for twenty four hour period. Well, they're there are different, uh incarnations are There are a lot

of different versions of this. But I had a friend in high school who I remember talking about this. I obviously I don't know if he actually did it. He was at least interested in the idea for a while, and I remember him talking about trying to do it, but he stopped talking about it after a while, which makes me wonder if it didn't work, As I think in a lot of cases, these people who talk about it end up stopping talking about it because there doesn't work.

There's yeah, I'll tell I'll talk more about that in a second too. I've got a friend, his name is Eric Sandean. I'm calling him out only because we talked about this on a a different podcast that I do occasionally. A friend of mine who decided he wanted to try this polyphasic sleep thing. And when he told me about it, I said, Eric, you are a crazy person. But he was determined to try it, and I think he might have attempted it for a day before deciding that that

is probably not the best way of doing this. Well, I don't want to make it sound too crazy or anything. I mean, like my friend in high school who tried this, and he was a smart, capable guy. And a lot of the people you see talking about showing enthusiasm at least for this plan online, they don't seem like complete nuts. But I'm I'm skeptical that it would actually work. Let

me explain what's what's supposed to happen here. According to polyphasic sleep, the idea is that you can get three hours total sleep per twenty four hour period and have the rest of the time dedicated to waking hours where you can actually do whatever you want video games for five hours, or you know, or you're inventing curing cancer

for five hours. Although people who try polyphasic sleep appear to have difficulty uh concentrating on any effort that requires learning or have yeah, like like they can do certain things really well, but anything that requires lots of mental processes, particularly learning learning new information, becomes really difficult. But the idea is that you you split up your polyphasic sleep.

You've got these short snap sessions. They're spread throughout the day, so you get you get six breaks essentially, so and those six breaks you sleep half an hour each. And this is one implementation of this approach. Um. And the idea is that at first your body and your brain are like, what is going on? I can't you know? I need to go into R E M sleep so that you don't go crazy, and you don't your health

doesn't fall apart. So you train your brain. Yeah. The idea is that after you get through the initial resistance of your brain saying this is wrong, you should go to sleep now. Um that after a couple of days, your brain says, fine, if you're gonna be this way, then I'll go ahead and go into R M sleep as soon as you go to sleep. Well, here's the deal. When you when you suffer sleep deprivation for a long time, it is true that you will go into R E

M sleep faster when you do go to sleep. Then you would if you were getting regular night's sleep all that time. So Joe, if you if you went and you were having eight hours sleep for like three weeks, you go into R M sleep eventually after you fall asleep, you would get there. But if you stayed up for three days and then you went to sleep, you would hit r M sleep earlier than you would have been during that nice long stretch of of plenty of sleep

each night. So the idea is that if you were able to engineer this and plan it out so that you have this half hour break, you would go into ari M sleep nearly instantly as soon as you drift off, and that that would be enough for it to sustain you for the next several hours until you had your next break, which would then sustain you until the next break, etcetera, etcetera. Uh, here's the thing. Um. The experts I was looking at, including Dr Piotr Wozniak, suggest that this is a terrible idea,

that that it is uh not likely to work. That you know, while the basics are kind of sort of based on truth, they're not themselves true. That being able to go right into ari M sleep does not necessarily mean you're getting all the benefits you would with sleep, including and probably most importantly, that immune system boost that

you need. If we don't know everything about sleep yet, which we certainly don't, it seems premature to assume that if you're just getting that that one of those four stages of sleep, that's going to be fine, right, And we don't if we don't know exactly what all those other stages do. Yeah, he he looked into it quite

a bit. He actually even conducted interviews with people. He said that in every case he was looking at, people who adopted this approach gave up on it after a short while because it just because their health was failing. They were not they were not feeling great. Some of them were having difficulty being able to concentrate on tasks for very long. Uh. He says. You know, there are plenty of YouTube videos out there where if you watch the people who are talking about you're just thinking, man,

this person needs a good night's sleep. I mean, it's just it's there. It looks rough. And he also talked about how a lot of them would end up coming down with colds or the flu because their immune systems were compromised. They couldn't fight off these diseases that otherwise, if they had had healthy sleep, they may have been

able to. You know, you can't necessarily say there's a direct role there, but there's enough of a correlation to make you you know, concerned and according to his studies, and you know, he's written a couple of different articles that are available online that are really helpful and go into this in detail. Um, it's just that you know, people are generally monophasic or by phasic. Um that you know,

we tend to to work best under that. And in fact, a lot of the names we mentioned, like uh, like Edison, are really bi phasic and not polyphasic. That they would get, you know, a few hours sleep at night if you being like between five and seven, and then they would take they would rest in the afternoon. Um and uh. And so most of those names, that's exactly what we from those that we know what their sleep patterns were like,

that's what they did. So it wasn't so much this whole you know, take a nap and then work for hours and then take a nap. It was more get a night's sleep and then take a nap in the afternoon, which again just like to point out again I think we should all be doing. And if they would just put cuts into the office, I would be happy to do it. I'd have no trouble sleeping in my chair.

If that just didn't annoy everyone and make me look unprofessional. Yeah, so, I mean trying to hack your sleep this way is probably not a great idea. Okay, well, let's transition to another solution. Okay, is it possible that drugs could give us more hours in the day without harming our health? Well, i'd say until you said that second part. Yeah, so the first part is definitely true. Yes, you can use drugs to stay awake longer, um, and lots of people do.

In fact, lots of us use caffeine to do this. Yeah, I recently gave it up, but yes, I was heavily dependent upon it until recently. Good on you, because it turns out so some of the most familiar stimulants you'll know about, like caffeine, amphetamines, they're actually you pretty effective at giving you the ability to stay awake. What's happen to wake you up? It's it's releasing neurotransmitters that either they either promote wakefulness or they inhibit the neurotransmitters that

would uh, that would cause you to be sleepy. So in some cases, it's you know, just pricking you up by by adding a boost to the chemicals in your brain that keep you awake, and in some it's just keeping the ones that would put you to sleep at may. Yeah, definitely does not make health sense at all to rely on amphetamines. That's not going to get you anywhere. And uh, and it really does help to not rely too much

on caffeine either. Yeah. In fact, I was reading recently about how caffeine has been linked not not a not a proven correlation here or you know, not a causation thing, but has been linked two increases in things like cardiovascular diseases, and that uh that you know, limiting caffeine is good,

like if you you can have some caffeine. In fact, there's some health benefits to a little caffeine in your diet, but you don't tend to want to consume too much of it after say two PM or so, because it can actually interfere with your sleep cycles even so much that you know, let's say that you have some caffeine six hours before you go to sleep, and you think

you've got a great night's sleep. Sleep studies have shown that people who had caffeine as late as that, like, within that six hour time frame, we're still having interrupted sleep cycles. And that it was. You know that, that's how how far caffeine can stretch, its effects can stretch.

So just one of those things that you know, if you can, if you can kind of uh have a if you really rely on caffeine, if you can have your main caffeine boost and not I'm not talking about going crazy and getting like a forty eight ounce coffee at a coffee shop, but I have your main caffeine boost in the morning to get you going in awake and then to sort of wean yourself off as the

day goes on. So you might switch to a lower caffine to drink a little bit later in the day, and then by the time you get around two o'clock, you're you're cutting out the caffeine for the rest of the day. That seems to be a pretty good plan for being able to get a good night's sleep without being h have without having caffeine's effects interrupted. Yeah, and then there of course uh less familiar drugs that might

actually be better than your old school uh stimulants. One of them that's gotten a lot of talk is the drug modaffanel, which I've heard has fewer side effects than a lot of these other ones do. Yeah. And of course we are not here advocating that you take drugs, so we're just talking about this in theory. Um, you can find people online who are hyping this drug and saying, oh, I you know, I'm getting so much work done and

I don't have on all these bad side effects. I again really want to stress do not use drugs for awfully will use. I mean, people should speak to their doctors about whatever drugs they're going to use and be honest about the reason for which they want to use them. And I think, you know, if you're using it so that you don't have you don't lose so much time sleeping, that's going to catch up to you eventually anyway, for these other reasons that we've listed in this in this episode. Uh.

And then we've got something here called short sleepers. So is this for people who are four foot tall or less? No, this is actually the fact that some people really do require less sleep. Oh, so this is an idea of like, there are some people out there who who eight hours would be too much sleep for them. They might just need four or five. Yeah. I've seen different estimates for

how common this is in the general population. I've seen estimates as small as um one in a thousand people, up to one percent of the population, or even up to five percent of the population. So I don't really know how common this is, um but it does seem that it actually this. There are some people, and they're very rare, but they can get by on less than six hours of sleep at night without any trouble. This doesn't give them negative health effects. They don't lose any

of their competency. It's just how they are. It doesn't seem to be that you can train your body for this. It appears to be a genetic condition. Um So. One study I want to talk about though, that's really interesting and how this might bear on the future of reducing our need for sleep. It's a study led by Dr Ying Huifu of the University of California, San Francisco, and she was part of a team that discovered a gene

variant that regulates the length of sleep. Um So. Food's team discovered that there's this particular mutation in a gene called h d e C two. Yeah, that's one of your favorites. But so this gene variant, this mutation was correlated with human subjects who averaged about six point to five hours of sleep every night, while relatives of those subjects who did not carry the mutation slept more than eight hours um. And it's important to note that this mutation may not be present in all or even most

short sleepers. It was just correlated in this particular instance, and so there may be tons of other genes that create short sleepers. Yeah, we've talked in the past about how complicated genetics are, like it's it's you know, saying that this one gene is responsible for this one and only one thing is being overly simplistic in most cases, right. But then what Dr Fust team discovered that was very

interesting was when they started studying transgenic mice. So mice have an equivalent gene to the human gene I was talking about. Instead of h D e C two, it's m d e C two. I don't know, but I would hazard to guess. Um. So, when the mice were given a substitute h D e C two gene in place of that, with the same mutation that these two test subjects had who were short sleepers, the mice stayed

awake longer than normal mice. Well, to be fair, they may have been wondering why they kept getting injected with human genes. That might have been and they might have. You think I'd lose a lot of sleep if you're injecting me with mice genes. I definitely like what is going on? But well you would just you would be kept awake eating cheese all night. I'm okay with that, Okay, all right? Uh So, the cool thing about this is that it's possible that what we learned about short sleepers

actually could help somebody else become like them. Obviously that's not knowledge that's available to us today, but this kind of experiment with the mice shows, oh, you know, it might be possible to to introduce genes like this, or to at least learn enough about how genes regulate human sleeping patterns that we could make changes that would allow people to have more free time with no adverse health effects.

Um And in fact, Dr Feu of this study that I was talking about, she was quoted in a Wall Street Journal article where she was saying, my long term goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate the sleep pathways without damaging our health. Yeah, that's uh, I mean, it would be really interesting to see that come to pass. Because again, like we've been telling you this whole time, I mean, I understand people who want

to be able to do more stuff. I mean, I certainly feel by the time I go to bed at the end of the day that I didn't accomplish nearly as much as I had hoped, just because there's too much to do and not enough time to do it. In So, the idea of being able to shave off a few hours from this activity that I need to do in order for me not to you know, have my immune system breakdown or or suffer mental effects, to be able to control that a little bit more is

it's certainly attractive. I love the idea of it, um, you know I, and I like the idea of going about it in a scientific manner that it uh is not likely to lead to me feeling worse than I did when I, you know, I started off. But uh, you know, I'm curious, would you are you still of the mindset where man, I I wish I could get rid of some of the sleep. Oh, I mean, certainly, if if I could do it without negative health effects, If I if I could that that's the whole thing.

I mean, a lot of these things are like, oh, here's a trick, but then we have a lot of doubts like oh, well, yes, you can use drugs to stay up, but they don't actually like improve your quality of life. They're going to make you sick and hurt you. You you can do this sleep schedule where you're awake for longer, but it seems to just be leading to sleep deprivation and people denying it um at least as far as we can tell. Maybe maybe somebody's getting by

on polyphasic sleep, who knows. And then there are these short sleepers out there who a lot of people probably think they are, but they're not. They're just kind of like multitaskers. Yeah, because I think that they are supertaskers, but it turns out they're not. Yeah, all right, I'll tell you right now. I know I'm not a short sleeper and I know I'm not a super test here I have to agree on both counts. Though I wish I were a short sleeper. I mean, that would be

great to have more time every day like that. Yeah, I could see where Uh, you know, there's some things I would love to be able to do that I have put off because I just know that I don't have the time for it, so it would be nice to have a little extra time. Uh. And, in much more modest news of improving the future of sleep, there is this other idea of having something like a sleep cycle alarm. If you heard about this, Yeah, is this the thing where it kind of monitors how you're doing

when you're sleeping and wakes you up at the opportune time. Yeah, And and that actually appeals to me a lot, because I I hate getting up in the morning, you know, you know, Yeah, morning times can be great, but getting out of bed can be a real drag. Well a lot of times. The trouble there is that you are waking up your alarm clock is going off at a time when it is really not the best time in your sleeping cycle. It's completely it's completely external and disconnected

from what's going on inside you. Yeah. Um, So the thinking behind an alarm clock like this is that it monitors your sleep cycles and that it can tell oh, okay, now is the best time to wake him up? Right, You're coming out of one of those those deeper sleep troughs. And then this would make it easier and less jarring.

To get you up at this time, because, like I was saying earlier, like you know, when you've got those very slow patterns going on in your brain, it's harder to wake you up, and that would make you probably feel more disoriented and grouchy. I'm a morning person, but I hate alarms too. I mean, I would much prefer to have one that as long as it was getting me up at around the right time each day. I mean, I'm I don't need it to be exactly on the dot every single day in a row. I would love

to a Yeah. And so obviously I don't know exactly how well this particular model works, but if it could work as well as they claim, then I mean, that's a cool invention. If I can get one that will just gently pat my head and say they're there, it's all going to be okay, and then you know, just kind of gently leads me down the stairs and cooks me breakfast. Mr. There you go. Yeah, get on that to turn these pages. Oh I'm waking up now paper. Yeah, I'm gonna go read. Uh yeah, No, that really does

sound appealing to me. I like the idea of you know, because again we're not talking necessarily about um cutting down on the number of hours you're sleeping, but rather uh, you know, finding the best way to wake up so that you're you are the most effective you can be for as long as you're awake, because I mean, there's that time like if you if your alarm goes off

when you are in deep sleep. You know, I'm sure most of us don't aren't as productive or you know, proactive or however you want to put it for those first few moments because we're battling the fact that we we want to still be asleep. So this would allow us to kind of transition more effectively into that wakeful state. So I think that would be great. Um. Anyway, that kind of wraps up our discussion about the future of sleep. I don't think we'll be genetically engineering it completely out

of our systems anytime soon. Maybe when the Singularity comes and we become robots, we won't need to sleep anymore. But until that time, make sure you get your sleep. You know, if you if you can sneak in a nap, I highly recommend it. Yeah, if you can sleep in a nap at my work, that's weird because I don't think any of my coworkers listen to this podcast, and so would just be a strange person to sleep in the office. But hey, if you can pull it off,

that's kind of exciting. Um, don't try and pull it off. People I don't I don't want to be responsible for can just be email I got fired because you I thought you're supposed to help me. I don't want to get the angry email from our site director saying you're gonna get fired because of the people. That's what I don't want. But what I do want is for our

listeners to write in let's know what you think? You know what, what do you think about the future of sleep or what other topics would you like us to talk about. Let us know. You can send us an email or addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com, or drops a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus. We're at all three of those with the handle f W thinking, and we'll talk to you again really soon, Pleasant Dreams. For more on this topic and the future

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