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Hey, I'm Lutth of Nasser. This is Radiolab. This week I'm re-upping an episode from 2007, which is like very early days of our show about a fundamental mystery that now like almost 20 years later is still just as fundamental and just as mysterious as it was then. It is a fundamental mystery that takes up about a third of your life and actually probably more considering how much
you crave it when you can't get it, but then paradoxically put it off when you can. Anyway, I'm not going to say anymore because I don't want to step on the original episode intro, which is just adorable. So here you are, drift off with our Emeritus hosts, Jaden Robert. Hey, wait, you're listening to Radiolab from WNYC. WNYC. Maybe sleeping. Well, it's pretty much everything sleeps as far as we know. All mammals do it. All birds.
And the fish reptiles insects scorpions everything has been studied has something that looks like sleep. It's a mystery. Most things we sort of know what they are for and also how they work, but sleep is really in your face. I mean, everybody does it.
You do it from the cradle to the grave. You can't help doing it because if you try to stay awake, you know, at some point it's irrepressible. And we don't know why. That's a shameful state of affairs. How can you be a scientist at the 21st century and not know the answer to that? There you go. Okay. That's a pretty good way to begin.
Was shame. Yeah. Today on Radiolab, we're going to try to correct this shameful state of affairs when it comes to the subject of sleep. We'll talk with people who can help us understand what it's for. Why we do it. And what happens when we don't? I'm Robert Kroich. I'm Chad Abumran. Stay with us. For centuries, people thought that sleep was kind of the opposite of being awake. It's reasonable. One would think.
Sure. Because during the day, you're doing all these things, you're having all these thoughts and feelings at night. You just lie there. Very, very still. In fact, like sometimes a bomb could go off and you wouldn't wake up. I can hardly wake up even in the fire. No, I'm a really heavy sleeper. I mean, very heavy, heavy sleeper. When all you've got are your eyes to go on sleep can seem like being like.
Like being off. Yeah, like, off-ness. Right. Or worse. Well, both Shakespeare and Servantes referred to sleep as death. That's Dr. Carlos Shank. He wrote a great book about sleep called Paradox Lost. We go to bed every night. We die every night. And then we wake up in the morning and we're alive again. And that was a prevailing theory for centuries.
For Dr. Shank, the awakening to just how wrong Shakespeare and Servantes were about sleep came one day while he was sitting in a class from its school. This is back in 1972. He had an emeritus professor who actually was a Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Eccles, John Coru Eccles. Here's what happened. This esteemed lecture of walks in the class pops a cassette into the tape deck hits play and out comes this sound. Well, the sound was. Before. Wait a second, let me get it right. Oh, here we go.
And multiply this by 100. This, the professor announced, is the sound of a cat's brain while asleep. My god. Shink almost fell out of the seat. This is the brain during sleep, making these really rapid, high-pitched, multiple sounds. That just blew us away. It wasn't just clearly while that cat was curled up on this little kitty basket. It's brain. It was very, very alive. Much more than anyone expected. And this is still a weird revelation. Like, take my cat, Sammy. Sammy.
Alright, just to sound like cat, Sammy sleeping. To think that while Sammy is sitting on my lap totally out, there's a circus happening in his brain. What's going on in there? If you can imagine back in the 70s, this was a paradigm shift. People were suddenly like, oh my god. We're going to figure out anything about sleep. We have to ask the brain. And then this is the room where we do all of our surgeries. And luckily, that's easily done. If you're willing to get your hands dirty.
Okay, so the first step is you have to make an assesion on top of the animal's head. When you've done that, we drill holes through the animal's skeleton. And then you insert your electrode, your stomachs. Then you've done it. And that's simply it. A little window into their brain. You could see right there on the screen. Because the brain is so... Wait, are you out of your mind? Did you just put a hole into a kitten's head? No, this was my cat's. Come on. So what was it we were doing there?
We just heard it was a mock surgery to an iguana, actually. Even an iguana, it's not a nice thing to do. Look, look, look. The animal was not harmed. Within 20 minutes of coming out of the anesthetic, the animal is moving around. It's eating, it's climbing, and it's basking. It might seem like a rather invasive procedure, but in actuality, it's not too bad at all. Yeah. And that by the way is John Leskew. He's a graduate student at the ecology department. At Indiana State University.
Which is where we are. John gave our reporter Kara Older. He's a great student. A tour of the lab. These are big boys here, and they all have nice hats. Shooter of the iguanas. These guys are a little frightening to me. They're pretty huge. They're like four feet long head to tail. Oh, I didn't know that. I mean, they look like baby alligators. Like that one, huh? And John measures their brain waves at night to see what happens in their head as they sleep.
In a way, it's a continuation of that cat experiment that Dr. Shank just told us about. Except what they're looking for is much more peculiar than it could ever happen in a cat. Or an ass. What is that? Let me put it to you as a puzzle. Okay, forget iguanas. Dolphins. Right? Dolphins. Yep. How is it that a dolphin in the ocean, or even say the dolphins that you might find at six flags in New Jersey? They have two. Cody is our 10-year-old Atlantic bottle most often.
His buddy, Avalon, is 12 years old. And that's our trainer, Megan Tutera, of your Mitra, is holding the mic. Anyhow, here's the puzzle. We ask Megan about this. How is it that her two dolphins, Cody and Avalon, can successfully sleep given the inherent challenges of being a dolphin? I don't know what even out of the challenges of a dolphin. Well, they have significant challenges, my friend. First, they've got a breath. They're not, they're conscious breathers. They're not unconscious breathers.
So they have to think about breathing. Making matters worse, dolphins are not fish. So they have to breathe air, which means they have to constantly, consciously come up to the surface to breathe air every few minutes. So you can imagine what would happen if they decided to go unconscious for a while. They would drown. Right. And yet they do manage to sleep. A lot. How long? Eight hours a day. Like us? Yeah, eight hours. But how? That's the puzzle. What happens is they do what we call logging.
It's when they rest on the surface of the water. You know, in a log float, found a river. It just floats. That's exactly what they look like, and they rest half their brain at a time. Half their brain is asleep at a time. That is a nature solution to cut the dolphin brain in half. You mean literally? Literally in half. So that one half can snooze while the other half keeps the dolphin swimming and surfacing. Just enough to breathe. From the outside, you can't really tell what's happening.
It just looks like the dolphin is sort of awake, but a little out of it. It's almost like the state of when you're falling asleep, but if something happened, you'd wake right up. So they're in that state all the time. This sort of guy can be characterized as groggy. That's Steve Lima. He runs in one of the labs back in Indiana. They're sort of awake and they're sort of asleep, but it's just a way of staying awake enough.
And again, it's easy to miss, but if you look inside that groggy dolphin's brain, what the brain waves are doing? It's exquisitely obvious. It's clear as they. That's six-year-old can figure it out. And half the brain has these beautiful slow waves, like a sign curve. And the other one's just dragging it. You know, just jagging all over the place. Wow, that is amazing. And yeah, it's called a unihemospheric sleep.
That's what the guys at Indiana State are really interested in because, and here's the next surprise. It seems to go way beyond dolphins. Oh yeah, aquatic mammals like whales, seals, and sea lions. John says that all the marine mammals that have been studied seem to do it too. Recently, walruses, they're all found to engage in unihemospheric sleep as well. And now, the Indiana team, led by a... Okay. By this guy. I'm Charles Amlanter, chair of the Department of Ecology and Organismal Biology.
They have found this weird split brain behavior in creatures of the air. Let me just back up a little bit and describe this experiment. Charlie and his student had been at the park one day and they noticed something. We observed that ducks... Ducks. Sometimes we'll get together into groups. Like on a log. Four ducks will get together in snooze in a neat little line. And the birds that were sitting in the middle of that line tended to be sleeping with both eyes closed.
The birds that were sitting on the outside of that row tended to look a little bit more wary. The inevitable question? What's going on here? Led to a very simple experiment. We put four birds in a row. Four malered ducks this time in the lab. And they watched them sleep. The two birds in the center of this row, slept with both eyes closed. The birds on the out at outer edges, both left and right, slept with one eye closed and one eye opened. One more time. It's just like in that song.
Do you know that Metallica song? I missed it. I missed it. I knew they were all botanists. It's true. You know, no one knows this, but that song is really about adaptive sleeping behavior in ducks. The outer eye, the eye that was faced away from the group, the eye that was facing towards where potential predators might come from. And the bird that was sitting on the outside of the row tended to look a little bit more wary.
The bird that was sitting on the outside of the row tended to look a little bit more towards where potential predators might come from. That stayed open. At this point, Charlie had a pretty good idea of what was going on because he knew that inside bird brains, each eye is attached to the opposite hemisphere. The left eye is attached to the right hemisphere. The right eye is attached to the left hemisphere.
So his team implanted some electrodes to measure what the duck brains were doing and voila. Like the dolphins, the ducks, too, were sleeping one half of their brain at a time. The bird could simultaneously sleep and be awake. Not only that, here's the cool part. After a few hours, what happened was that the birds that were on the outer edge then would rotate, stand up, turn around, 180 degrees, and then sit back down.
And the other eye would then get some sleep and consequently the opposite hemisphere would get some sleep. When we saw that, we said, oh yeah, this is... That's good. Good because right there in the ducks was a perfect illustration of what these guys think it's all about. You got to sleep for whatever reason. But sleep is danger. Danger. Danger. That's the headline. For dolphins, the main danger is drowning. Danger. You know? For ducks. Get to eat them. Exactly. Ducks have to sleep.
But how can they? When lurking in the darkness or foxes, and wolves and a hundred other eaters of ducks, do you like snakes? I don't know. That really. What? I don't dislike snakes. He's a good man. He's a good man. In another nifty experiment, John took the resident snake, Monty. This is... Monty. Right. Big snake. He is what about a four foot long python? And at night, you're so cute. Yeah. John brought Monty the python into the room where his iguanas sleep. And he terrifies that really?
Well, I mean, Monty was in a cage, so he couldn't really hurt the iguanas. But as soon as that snake appeared, all the lizards popped one eye. I bet they did. And they trained that open eye right on Monty the snake. But a big snake in the room, and they'll watch it. With one eye. Oh, night. That's Steve Lima again. They don't like these snakes. That's for sure. And then you move the snake from the room the next day, and they're still looking for it the next night or two.
So they keep one eye, you know, trained on that door for a few more? About two or three days. They go back to regularly. So what does this all mean? Well, think about this. Okay, all the sea mammals, they do it. Right. Well, at least the ones that have been studied, all the flying creatures, they do it. The reptiles seem to do it too. Who does that leave? I mean, who's left not sleeping with half a brain on, and the other half a brain on? And I can't believe it. Well, I can't believe it.
Yeah. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to have a little bit of the rest of my brain. So I'm going to end up with a little bit of the rest of my brain. So I'm going to have a small, little bit of the rest of my brain. So I want to go back to the first, little bit of the rest of my brain. The reptiles seem to do it too. Who does that leave? I mean, who's left not sleeping with half a brain on and the other half a brain off? Yeah. Um... Us! Really? We may be the strange ones.
Well, it is sort of strange in that terrestrial mammals can't do it. Terrestrial mammals just for some reason have lost the ability to do this. Not all mammals, though, John. The terrestrial mammals, the ones that live on land. Uh. And here's this theory. Sometime, long ago, our scaly ancestor wandered up on the land and thought, I think I'll dig a hole. Yeah, I'm gonna dig a hole. And the hole is dark. And it was safe.
And for the first time, millions of years of evolution that little creature closed both eyes. Ah... And so we lost it. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Totally speculative theory, of course. But the basic idea, though, is if you are protected and safe, you can afford to close both eyes, conk out completely. Oh. And that simple idea of safety, that explains, well, these guys think almost everything. Where you sleep, how you sleep, how long you sleep. It all boils down to two words. Predation risk. Predation risk.
Predation risk. Which is really just a fancy way of saying. Generally speaking, just your risk of being killed. Your risk of being eaten now. What does this have to do with us? Here we are, top of the food chain in our warm beds. Nice warm bed. Locked door. A locked door. Covers. Maybe a nice neighborhood. A good police force. Looking after you at nighttime. And you live in a country that has a very secure living environment.
You would think that this whole predation risk idea has nothing to do with us. Well, well, there's a few studies that have looked at, say, sleep patterns where people are sleeping in novel environments. What's a novel environment, what does it mean? Well, like a hotel. Oh. That first night at a hotel, why is it no one could sleep well? That first night at a hotel.
On your first night of sleeping in a hotel room, you generally have less REM sleep and less deep, slow-wave sleep relative to sleeping in your house. I suffer from that myself. I don't sleep well in hotel rooms, especially with just one night per place or something. I sleep in a hotel room. There are some folks that actually hypothesize that there are certain predator relays in the brain. Danger. Danger. And that these circuits remain active at all times. Danger. Danger.
Now, what if that's true that we all have buried deep in our reptile brain, a sort of predator alert system? Perhaps in some of us. It's a little too sensitive. Okay, we're in the sleep lab at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorder Center, a mission control we call it. We're viewing the typical sleep terror episode. This little girl who is five years old would engage in these sleep terror episodes every single night. That's Dr. Carlos Shank who we heard from before.
We're in Minnesota now at the Hanepin County Sleep Center, where he works. We're standing in front of a grainy black and white video of a little girl in her PJs. Screaming. It's all looking fine. Dr. Shank discovered an odd category of sleep disorders called parasomnius, which is why we came to talk to him, parra means around, somnium means sleep, around sleep. This might be the human analog to the ducks. People whose brains never quite shut off completely during sleep.
Well, this guy is interesting. He has seizures. No, no, no, he doesn't. Wait a second. He showed us tape after tape. We're viewing a man who we are very affectionately called Santa Claus. On the screen, large guys thrashes back and forth. His legs are moving. He's going back and forth with his sides of his back. And then suddenly he starts to... Oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. Is this real? Yeah, this guy's in and out of sleep. He has no idea what he's doing.
One of the interesting things, Dr. Shank noticed when he first began to diagnose parasomnius in the early 80s, is that while they were in that kind of liminal space around sleep, a huge percentage of the patients would have these visceral dreams of being attacked. The common theme is a menace, is posed from nowhere, coming out of nowhere. It's an immediate threat that you just can't ignore. Let's put it that way. You have to either fight it or run away from it. The dreams can be very violent.
This is Martin Sibel, age 88. He's another of Dr. Shank's patients. I remember someone coming up the stairway. In Martin's case, the attackers never had a face. Sometimes it was a bear. And I was going to fight with him. He'd yell at him, get out of here! That's Martin's wife, Gertrude. Scram! He was always trying to protect me. Yeah, I would have black and blue breezes on my arms and hands because I was hitting the headboard.
Not infrequently, the man is dreaming in bed with his wife that he is fighting to defend her from an attacker when, in fact, he's beating her up. One night I was sleeping and all of a sudden he's got his hands tightly around my throat. I'm petrified. Quit, Martin! You're dreaming! You're hurting me! She says, Martin, you're dreaming! Gertrude and Martin Sibel are still married, believe it or not, after 57 years, though she did force him to sell his guns. He has never been happy about that.
Well, they were quite valuable. So you're suggesting that all these people, Amidagwanas, Amidaks, Amidolphins all have a portion of their brain which is weary in the night. That's what I'm hinting at. I don't want to go any stronger than hint at, but there seems to be something in us that's always watching out, always weary. Bottom line here, though, is that sleep for all creatures is a dangerous thing and a few unfortunate people are still awake to that fact.
That's right, before we go to break, I just want to thank Anne Heperman for her excellent reporting in Minnesota and also before her Kara Oler and to remind you to stay with us because we're going to turn her attention shortly from danger to deprivation. Radio Lab will continue in a moment. Radio Lab is supported by Dell. This year Dell Technologies Back to School event is delivering impressive tech with an inspiring purpose.
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Today our topic on radio lab is sleep. It is something that all of us do. We can't help but do it. It's dangerous to do. It's so good. And it's universal. Think about it. Sleep is dangerous. Sleep could have been circumvented in some way. Natural selection probably would have found a way to do it. Let's Steve Lima again from Indiana State University. It would be such a great idea to not sleep. Don't I know it. But there are times when you just can't sleep.
Maybe you're one of the 35 million Americans. I am who has chronic insomnia. You just can't sleep. You don't know why it just doesn't happen. Or maybe you do it to yourself. And you pull all nighters for school or you have to drive long distances. Or, and here's what we want to turn our attention to next. Maybe it is done to you. That's the case with producer Hannah Palin. She kept this audio diary of her own experiment with sleep deprivation. She has an 18 month old son.
It's $250 for the record. Today was my first day back at work. We were discussing budgets. I just, I just, I couldn't even articulate. What it was that I was seeing on the computer screen and try to communicate that to the curator that I worked for. The words didn't come. I don't know. I don't know me. Instead of saying, well, Nikolad, I believe that that choice was made because, no, no. All that came out was like, honey buckets. I mean, nothing. Nothing would come out.
There's just no brain cells really. Tart. I almost had a sleep there. So anyway, that was my first day back at work. Dominic, well, not sleep. I don't know why. I'm trying to get him to sleep and kind of at my woods end. This just sucks. Totally sucks. Here's the funny thing. Everybody has a theory and I was talking to my sister-in-law tonight in her theory is that he's not getting enough milk because milk has some agent in it that would help them sleep and he doesn't like milk. It's true.
Other people say, oh, if he just would exercise them, if he just gets fresh air and exercise, he'll sleep all night. If he just let him cry, he would sleep all night. If he just would do whatever it is we're not doing, he would sleep all night. And there's this feeling like, there's a feeling like I am doing it all wrong. And I'm a failure as a parent. I don't know how to do this. Come here, sweetie. Come on, come on, come on, come on.
So anyway, I needed to record just one thing really quickly and that is that yesterday and today I've been struck by the past. I'm struck by these waves of satisfaction and delight with being alive in this amazing landscape with beautiful. With a funny kid. With beautiful mountains and water and I don't know, maybe it's just getting a little more sleep in the last couple of days. But I suddenly feel like, wow, I'm so lucky. Okay, I've got to take my kid to play now. Here we go.
Do you know the muffin man? The muffin man. Okay, that whole I'm loving life. Yeah, that's all gone now. And it's pretty much because Dominic won't take a nap. Well, he came home from the beach, which I thought would wear him out. And we sat down and read some stories, which were some reason.
And I realized that an element to the sleep deprivation, that an element to this whole thing is that I get angry from having my own needs subverted to the needs of this little tiny person, which when you're not sleep deprived is not a big deal. I tired. I don't want to wish a minute of Dominic's childhood away, because it's so precious to me. But damn, I am looking forward to that moment when I'm able to say, honey, I have to go to sleep and he does it. I'm tired. No, not tired.
Just chill me out. Close your eyes, Buck. Close your eyes. There's my personal take on what it's like to be sleepy. Good night. And to crave sleep as much as you crave water or breath. I crave it. Thanks to Hannah Palin and her son Dominic and her husband Steve. I know. Poor Hannah. But there is a science question looking in the background, which is when Hannah was so tired, why does she feel that way? Because she hasn't been sleeping. What makes her the essence of tiredness? Lack of sleep.
Hello. I'm not tired. What is happening to her? If you were away down in her cells, could you see something tired like going on? That's a good question. I'm glad you think so because I know a guy who has a theory about this. Did you see Tiger? Yes, I know. He's the best. He's the guy. He's the best. I mean, the guy. He's the only one. This is Dr. Galen Pak. In addition to being a rabid golf fan, he's also a rabid. Can you be a rabid biologist? Sure. He's the best at the epencilvania.
He's been looking at sleep down at the cellular level. And one thing that he's found over and over and over and over. And that's been shown in mouse, it's been shown in rat, it's been shown in fruit fly. Is that inside certain cells in all those different animals, when they're sleep deprived? Eventually, what happens is you don't get proteins properly folded. Excuse me. Proteins properly folded. Uh-huh. The phenomenon called the unfolded protein response. What unrest does that mean?
Is that a good thing or a bad thing? You're asking why do you need proteins to properly fold? Yeah, I guess that's what I'm asking. Well, you're made of proteins. Proteins are the essence of you. So if your proteins are misshapen, if they're not folded properly? They don't fold the proteins properly. They don't have the right three-dimensional structure. And as a result, they start accumulating inside the cell. And then these different unfolded proteins can aggregate together and form clumps.
Clumps. Clumps. Clumps. And say the cell and essentially clog up. And it's really quite toxic to cells. Clumpiness equals tiredness, it would be his formula. Remember when Hannah was so exhausted? Yeah. This just sucks. Well, because she hasn't slept much. Really so? Inside her cells, lots of these valuable little proteins have not folded properly. That, he thinks, is the consequence of not having enough sleep.
So maybe what's going on is the cells can't do their business quite as well and things start to break down. And that adds up across the whole of your body to a feeling of... But when she gets to sleep, remember when she's so happy? Yeah. Suddenly feel like, wow. Because of the sleep. I'm so lucky. A group of cleaner uppers have gone through her cells, removed the toxic and misshapen proteins so that in effect, sleep is the best house made you've ever had in the hotel of you.
And this idea, the idea of sleep as a cleaner upper, might even explain one of the most basic things about us as humans. How we learn. That's the notion of Dr. Julio Tano. Testing, testing, testing. My producer, Ellen Horn and I went to visit him at his offices in Madison, Wisconsin. What are we expecting? What does he look like? Well, you don't know what you're saying. A football player. A football player. But like a quarterback or a tight end, not like a... No, like a linebacker.
So big but not overwhelming. Yes. How do you even know that? No, website. See, but I was totally wrong. You're not really wrong. Now to be fair, he is a very attractive guy, he has sandy blonde hair and glasses. And he's actually more the sensitive guy intellectual than a linebacker. Introduce yourself. I'm Dr. Julio Tano. I'm a professor of psychiatry here at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. But when he comes to the subject of sleep, which is his specialty, he takes sleep very seriously.
What got you in sleep? The sleep is the annihilation of consciousness. So it's a terrible time in which everything disappears. The universe and yourself with it. I think if people didn't sleep and didn't have the unconscious of sleep, they possibly wouldn't even realize that consciousness is an enormous gift. So being awake then is wonderful, but it's what happens when you're asleep, he says, that's what allows you to make very important connections in your life.
And he noticed this first when he was connecting with... I believe it was a guitar. It's playing music. I used to play, for instance, I play classical guitar. I'm sure many people who play musical instruments know that. You may train and train and train on a piece during the day, and you get better for sure, but you're never perfect. And then you sleep over it the next day, you wake up, you play it again and now it's smooth and you know it flow as beautiful. How happened to you?
It happened to me, it happened to lots of people. That happened all the time. I discovered that sometimes if I worked on a piece and put it away, went to bed and cut some rust, I had it better learned than if I stayed up on like cramming. Yeah. I've been at Lakeley. There's one story and I haven't thought about this for a long time, but well first of all Rob and I play in a band together. The band has helped the sisterhood of convoluted thinkers. And we switch instruments like a lot.
She's usually the bass player. I was going to play drums. Because she had to learn how to play drums. So we rented a cabin. We went somewhere to rehearse and at night she was really just practicing and practicing and trying to get this rhythm. This one particular beat, I worked on it a lot. I just keep going and going. I remember playing that one thing again and again. Stop! And I finally just gave up and went to sleep.
And the next morning I got up and went straight to the kit and I just played it immediately. The butt hit the stool and she was going. You could just do it. I thought it was magic. You could just learn stuff in your sleep. So in the middle of the night, somehow the things that your fingers did repeatedly and the notes that you were using to propel your fingers, all those things somehow got into, got better learned. So you learned overnight or you? What does that have to do with?
You remember better in the morning? What happens is that the next day you're a bit better off. What happens during the night to make you better off, this is up for contention. To know what his contention is, that sleep helps you remember by forgetting. Oh, I don't know what that means. Let me explain to you what he's what he's saying. He says there's a limited amount of space in your brain. The real estate in the brain is a limited amount. It makes sense. It's a small little guy up there.
And yet every experience you have during the day is going to take away some space. He uses up a little of what you got. When you are awake, inevitably you learn whether you want it or not. You are going round, talking to me, having breakfast. I just have a medium coffee. Going to work, then yack it on the phone with you with your friends, talking to your mom, very different from the friends, then going home, taking a bath, I get it again.
Everything you do during the day, every thought you think no matter how small, it all causes your brain to form new connections. This conversation, as we're having it, is reshaping my brain. Yeah. A little pathways are forming that weren't there before I sat down. Exactly. Whether we recognize it or not, lots of things are going to change your brain by the end of the waking day.
So if in the middle of the afternoon you sit down with your guitar and you practice the guitar intently, those two hours you're also making connection. And because you're concentrating, maybe you're making more connections than usual. These are guitar connections. And all those synaptic connections made during the day. Why? I'll just have a meeting call on the other. On the other. On the other. By the time you're ready for sleep at the end of the day, up in your head. Hello. It's a shun.
Unruly miss. And that is where we think sleep kicks in. Well, I'm going to guess here, but I think you think that sleep is a garbage detail? It comes in says, OK, you're done, you're done, you're done. It's actually even simpler than that. According to Tinoe, there's not really a janitor who comes in and decides, OK, you have to leave, you get to stay. Nothing like that. Instead, he says what happens?
We think that doing sleep waves of electrical activity, kind of like a late evening bath, wash over your head. They start at the back of your head and then move to the front. These waves are called slow oscillations. Over the course of the night, 1,000 times a night, those waves wash through all the experiences of your day, all the little synaptic connections that you make all day long. And every one of those connections, all of that gets just a little bit softer.
They get weaker, progressively gracefully they get weaker. Even he says the things you want to hold on to, like the guitar. Wait a second, wait a second. You were the one who said you learned how to play the instrument in the afternoon, you went to sleep and you played the instrument better in the morning. Why would you wake up the next morning playing better? You should play more weekly with less confidence and less memory. Because after all, you've just given the whole place a bath.
It's all relative, sir. What he means by relative is this, that mess of new connections in your head. Some of those connections are softer. Some of those connections were louder. The random things you ordered for lunch, they're softer. But the guitar, because you spend so much time thinking about guitar technique, you spend so much energy on it, that's louder. So we're just measuring connections here. Now imagine that sleep is a big volume knob.
So listen to what happens when you lower the volume on the whole day. Lower. And lower. And lower. Now you hear how the softer stuff just falls away, you can't hear it anymore. But the guitar, while it's getting softer, too, because it was so loud to begin with, now it stands out a bit more clearly. No? Yeah. The signal, the signal that have survived reasonably well, are heard better because the background has become more silent.
And so your ability to play the guitar better the next morning is not because you've learned skills overnight that you didn't have before, is because all the other stuff taken up your brain has gone down in volume and you're left with, relatively speaking, a better guitar fingering technique. And you put your finger on it. So Mr. Channoni feels that sleep is a little bit like wind and rain, like the process of erosion.
But the end of the day, or rather at the beginning of the morning, the things left standing are the things you need to know. Radio Lab is supported by Dell. This year Dell Technologies Back to School event is delivering impressive tech with an inspiring purpose. And how Dell is helping computer aid whose work is helping equip solar community hubs with tech and AI literacy skills to empower remote displaced or disconnected communities around the world.
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That's rocketmoney.com slash WNYC. Kamala Harris' current office at the White House is just a few miles away from where she spent some formative political years. Howard University is one of America's most well-known historically black colleges and could soon become the first HBCU to produce a US president. On Chi-Rite, stroll the yard with me as we walk through Harris' time and howard and consider how it shaped her as a candidate on the next notes from America.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts. This is Radio Lab. I'm Chad. And today's program is about sleep. As in the kind of sleeper you pertence to dream. Exactly. Do you know that story about the Benzine Molecule? No. Speaking of dreams. Well, here in a Benzine Molecule? 1865. German chemist is trying to figure out the shape of this molecule Benzine.
He knows that has a certain amount of one kind of atom and a certain amount of another, but he can't figure out how they all link up and he's tortured by this problem. Ghost sleep has a dream of a snake biting its tail, wakes up, bolts right up and says, it's a rain. It's a rain. Do you believe that? I want to. Well, yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong. I hate it when people tell me that dreams hate it. I want to stab my eye with a fork, frankly, when people tell me that dreams. I don't know why.
I'm never going to tell you about my dreams again. Right. Good. But you know, you're not alone because for a long time, scientists have avoided studying dreams because they think they're so random and meaningless and unstudiable. Right. But we did meet a guy. I'm Bob Stickold, STICK, G-O-L-D. I'm an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, who found an interesting way to ask the question, why do we dream? Simple question. Very hard answer.
Robert Stickold was one of the first modern scientists to take dreams seriously. And for him, it actually began kind of my accident. I had been up in Vermont with my family. We had gone and climbed Camelshump, one of the higher, easy-to-climb mountains in Vermont. We'd gone at eight in the morning. We were back at two in the afternoon. And for that whole day, he'd been up climbing on the rocks, gripping them with his hands, really climbing. Later that night, I lie down, I close my eyes.
I can feel the rocks under my hands. And I start all up and I say, well, that's really bizarre. It wasn't like I was thinking about it. I was there. I could feel the rock. I'd been off the mountain for eight hours. Nothing like that had happened. I lied down a bit for three minutes, starting to go to sleep. And boom, it's there. And I tried again, and I fell asleep. Two hours later, I wake up. I have to go to the bathroom, go to the bathroom, I come back. And I say, that was way cool.
I have to try that again. And I cannot get it back. What happened in those two hours? To those memories that they won't intrude anymore? And then I started talking to friends and they said, oh, try canoeing. Or someone else says, try, huh? Try water rafting if you want to get that. And someone else says, oh, hello, take organic chemistry. And you go to bed at night. And all you see are these bloody molecules rotating in front of your eyes. Those daytime activities are affecting your dreams.
And that got them thinking. What exactly is the connection between what you do during the day and what you dream at night? What are the rules of that? He figured, all right, well, this replay is kind of interesting. Maybe I'll test it. But how? If I get some subjects together, what could I have them do during the day that would reliably end up in their dreams? But you can't have them all go for a hike. Mm-hmm. And I'm probably not going to get permission to take them white water rafting.
Two expensive. So what could he do? That's a follow for a year. And I was moaning to some of my students about how I can't think of how to do this. And someone says, Tetris, and somebody else says, absolutely. And I'm saying, what? What? I say, well, don't you play Tetris? And I say, yes. But when you start playing Tetris, turns out when you start playing Tetris. And you go to bed at night, you lie down in bed. And you see Tetris pieces falling down in front of your eyes. Sure? You knew that?
Absolutely. You guys both know that? Oh, yeah. I got a cover of Science Magazine for the first published paper I'm dreaming in 40 years because I discovered that and everybody already knew it. It was that simple. He got a bunch of people, put them in a room, had them play Tetris. After that night, they woke up and 60% of them were dreaming of Tetris. 60%. How do you know that? I mean, just from their report? They reported as they're falling asleep, we're monitoring them electrophysiologically.
And as they start to drift off to sleep, please report now. This Tetris observation was a pretty good start in terms of getting at that question. Why do we dream? Why do we dream? How does it work? If, as a next step, instead of having the people report their own dreams, wake in the month and do that whole thing, what if instead you could cut the person out of the equation entirely and go right to the source? To the dream directly. Matt Wilson.
I'm a researcher here at MIT and I'm a neuroscientist studying learning and memory. That's what Matt Wilson does. It takes us to the dream lab. So when we first come in, what we see is this bank of monitors. 13 monitors all in a row. Each monitor displaying, ongoing activity in the brain. With little panels, each panel showing these. It's like the Kennedy Space Center, really. All the monitors have data just flashing all over them. Graphs and squiggly lines and numbers.
It's not immediately clear where all this information is coming from. But if you peek around the back, you'll see that all the computer wires go to one box, which then connects to a cable, which then goes up to the ceiling, over to a wall, and down into the head, into the head of one tiny rat. There he is. He's just kind of hanging out in his own little basket. So you're just resting? Is that the little guy himself? Yeah, that's the guy.
He looks pretty normal, except for this cable coming out of his skull. And the cable is basically a microphone or a bunch of them, which Matt uses to ease drop on the brain cells inside the rat's head as they chit-chat. And this is what that sounds like. You can hear this kind of snap crackle pop sound. These are individual cells that are firing. Right there. One of those. And what is that kind of whooshing sound? I can tell this animal's sitting resting quietly.
Basically, he says this while he has his back to the animal. He is so fluent with the Morris code language of the rat's brain cells. He doesn't even have to actually look at the animal to know what he's doing. He can just instantly decode all of that snapping. Kind of like that guy in the matrix, the ball guy. I don't even see the code. All I see is bon, brunette, red head. Just by listening, Matt knows when the animal is sitting. He knows when it is sleeping.
He knows when it's running around in a maze. And can tell which direction it's running. Just happened that as we were studying these patterns while the animal ran around, after the experiments, the animals would get tired. They would go to sleep. I would be there in the room, but I would continue to listen to the activity. Notice how it's gotten silent? Yeah. And I began to notice that when the animals were asleep, the brain cells weren't just firing randomly.
In fact, when the animals were going to REM sleep, so now he isn't going into REM right now, the pattern of activity could be here. Notice that it's not these ruches anymore. It sounded very much like the pattern that the animal had just been running through. In fact, if you weren't watching the animal, you would think, oh, the animal has gotten up and is running around again, but then you turn and you look, and you see the animal is asleep.
He checked the data, and it wasn't simply that the rat was running around in its mind while its body was asleep. It seemed to be running a specific route. The same route, in fact, that they had run earlier in the day. Are sequence same orders, same everything? Yes. It was rerunning its maze. Step for step. So then he asked the next question. Are they seeing the things that they saw while they were awake? We can actually look into these questions as a rat.
The answer is, we see evidence of replay and basically all of the parts of the brain that we have looked in. They see the maze that they ran through, the very same maze. Yes, they see the maze. So that is dreaming, in a sense. Well, how do we define dreaming? So it sounds like dreaming to me. I don't know. But the question remains, why would the rat or any creature do this? And so Matt came up with a simple next experiment. He decided to give the rat two mazes.
What would that do to its dreams of the night or whatever you want to call them? If they run on maze number one and then on maze number two, we see them running maze one and maze two together in a way that they did not experience when they were awake. So it's like a remix. Exactly. So the answer makes it into... It's part of maze one and part of maze two. It turns out that when the rat had more than one maze in its memory, it began to invent completely new mazes.
This gives us the thought that sleep is this unique opportunity to basically run through events, to put them together in ways that may not have occurred while the animals were awake. And that's what learning really is learning is about synthesis, about taking things that were apparently unrelated and figuring out the connection, figuring out the rules, the hidden rules, the undiscovered rules that will allow us to create something new.
I think dreaming is a time when we try out possibilities that in waking we might not feel or worth trying. And when it really works, it can be profoundly important. If Robert St. Gold is right, then how does this solving the problem thing? How does it work? How does the brain decide what to put into a dream and what to leave out of a dream? One of the interesting things about dreams is that people don't have dreams where they're word processing, where they're surfing the net.
These things that they spend huge amounts of their day doing don't get into their dreams. But somehow Tetris gets in there every time. Right, we die. Why would that be? Well, he has a hunch, which he's actually exploring with a completely different video game. It's a game called Alpine Racer, which we bought out of Arcade. Which he showed us. Took us down the hall to the game room. And there in the corner it stood. Locking me. Oh, wow, it's a full body game. Please step up.
I stepped up to the game. We're trying to lock itself up. It's still warming up. And then I set off down a virtual mountain. Right, I'm going downhill. I'm also a girl. I'm also avoiding the skis. Oh, I'm going to take a nice little turn there. Be careful of the wall. Straight down ahead. And down we go. Oh, no, no, that tree. Right, down. Oh, wow. We're now going to go through the tunnel. This is a, oh, oh, that hurts. As you can hear, this game was really stressful.
Yes. Which is vibrant design. Robert Stichel has the theory that as you go through your day, your brain is constantly keeping track of emotions. That's the thing. Emotional content, like when you run into a virtual tree. For example, your brain is going to flag that stuff. It's going to flag that is important. It says, oh, I need to remember this so I can work on it later. I'm going to put a sticky on this one.
So if it puts a sticky on everything that's hard during the day, then all the brain has to do when it's creating a dream is go and grab stickies. Oh, I thought it. But I thought it nice. Just for the record, you got further than jet on your first try. Wow. Wow. It's like, it's over. You know. Could you say that again? Well, so you have people play Alpine racer for 45 minute bursts throughout the day. What happens next? You wake them up?
You monitor their brain activity and just as they're falling asleep within the first two minutes after they fall asleep, we'll wake them up. Please report now. There's a microphone right next to them in the bed and they just report what was going through their minds. I was just thinking about skiing. Skying. Skying. And we get on the first night up to 40% of all the reports being about skiing. Yeah. And the game that I've been playing Alpine racer. 40%. Almost half of them.
And that's right up there what I would expect to see after trauma, where something has been labeled so intensely that the brain says, okay, it's obvious what's on the agenda for tonight. Sickle thinks he's seeing the outline of the dream-making process here. It starts really simply at the very beginning of sleep right after you fall asleep with the replay. This he suspects is just the brain emptying out at stickies. Things that really intrigued me during the day that they felt during the day.
Yeah. But. What happens if we let the people go to sleep, sleep two hours like I did in that very first time after climbing the mountain, wake them up after two hours of sleep? Because remember, he couldn't get back the memory of the rocks after he'd spent two hours of sleep. That's right. And what he's found is that if you fast forward two hours into the dream, get almost no reports of skiing at all. The replay seems to dissolve into a remix.
We start getting reports like, oh, I jumped I was sliding down a hill. Like I'm going downhill. Just rolling down a hill. Downward. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about a bunch of bananas. Someone else had a dream that they were rushing through a forest with their body incredibly stiff and their legs not moving at all is if they were on a conveyor belt. It's like as the dream goes on, the brain is starting to free associate.
What do I have in my past that has anything to do with mountains, anything to do with crashing or skiing, anything at all that can help me? What do I have in all my memories, in my case from the last 60 years, that fits associatively, thematically? And the result might seem random, it is. But every so often he says, you come up with the right answer. So now we get to your dreams of people discovering the structure of benzene. How difficult was his name? I guess Kekeel.
He was a German guy I talked about earlier who had a dream of a snake eating its tail and realized from that dream that the shape of the benzene molecule is a ring. I don't know if that dream is true, but maybe that is in fact the point of dreaming. It's this time when you shut off the outside, turn inside, take the problems that you've got and start to really work on them, pull them apart, make connections that you wouldn't normally make during the day.
However, have you ever wondered why it would be necessary when solving problems like this to dream so vividly? Are you at all puzzled by the super duper technicolor extraordinarily cinematic quality of some of these things? Because if it were just an everyday brain function to sort of make sense of the world and I would allow you to make new connections, you really wouldn't need quite the movie quality.
So when we talk about dreams, what seems to come into dreams are memories, concepts, relationships, associations that have a strong emotional flavor and I'm guessing from the data need a full blown orchestration to be properly processed and it is. Its technicolor, the colors are overwhelming almost. So if I hear you write what you're saying in Robert's question about why are the dreams so vivid is that I don't know but maybe the vividness helps.
That whole long answer is what a Harvard professor says instead of saying I don't know. Alright, that's all we got for today. If you'd like to learn anything more about what you heard in today's show, please visit RadioLab.org. Hi, I'm Samine and I'm from Oakland, California and here are the staff credits. RadioLab was created by Chad Abomrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts.
David Gable, Maria Pazguteras, Cindy Yenamsambandam, Matt Kilti, Annie McKeown, Alex Nissen, Valentina Powers, Sarah Carey, Sarah Sandbach, Aryan Waff, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middletown. Hi, I'm Erica and Yonkers. Leadership Support for RadioLab Science Programming is provided by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Science Sandbach Science Foundation Initiative and the John Templeton Foundation.
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