Hibernation: The Ultimate Suspended Animation

of our favorite topics, hibernation and suspended animation. Now, whether this is the Winter of your discontent and you'd like to look into the possibility of human hibernation, or you're planning on entering into a state of torpor for future travel to Mars, this is your podcast episode. Hope you enjoy. Julie, we are both warm blooded creatures, and as we know, warm warm bloodedness comes with a certain price. It's a

high level of energy consumption. So what do we what do we do if we don't have energy to consume to feed our body? Well take it down, yeah? Or or will we die? That's all possibility. The idea behind hibernation itself is that you have to cut the cost. You have to spiral down, like like a business that tested the lay off a bunch of people and close

one of its stores to survive a recession. Or the example that always comes to my mind when I was younger and I was living in Tennessee, I found myself in a car a lot and I would often listen to I think the guy's name was Dave Ramsey, who is this kind of like local locally here in Atlanta, we have Clark Howard, who's like the the economic guru that tells you how to get out of credit and how to fine tune your financial situation. He's wonderful, by

the way. Yeah, yeah, he is Clark how It's wonderful. But I remember listening to the Dave Ramsey Show at this point, and he was always advising people on how to get out of credit card debt. And he would say, all right, you're just gonna eat rice and beans for a year, so you can do. You can eat rice and beans and cancel cable. And that is kind of

what hibernation is about. Are personally, Yeah, it's it's about cutting down that the energy consumption, cutting down the level of life that is being lived by the organism so that it can survive conditions that would otherwise be legal. Well, and I've actually read before too that there are certain places in the world before the advent of electricity and so on technology that say you were in Siberia, winter comes and a family of five probably will have a

sort of hibernation period. Of course, they're going to have food available to them that they've stalked away, but there's not a lot of reason to go outside for months. And it always reminds me of the Charlie and Chocolate Factory movie where you see the family, the entire family in the bed because you know, they're all trying to keep warm it's winter, they're trying to conserve resources. So

this idea of hibernation, at least in humans. Yes, we we don't completely close down our heartbeat, or I'm sure those people didn't back in the day in Siberia, but there's a version of it in which we have tried to batten down the hatches when it comes to energy consumption. It sounds like it's a great opportunity for board games and families of board games. Maybe that's why they have far better board games in Europe and all the great board games come out of Europe. I don't know, I

don't know. I mean, you would think like Siberia would would well no when they're well no, no, but but literally, let's talk about these animals who do it right, who do it straight up right. One of the most important things to realize is that hypernation is not sleep. In fact, according to zoo physiologist Brian Barnes, it's kind of the

opposite of sleep. He argues that instead of a blissful slumber, because let's face it, sleep is pretty much the best, right if you can, if you can actually achieve it and you don't have any issues getting there, you're not plagued by nightmares in which dogs all your face then, or you're you're back in college and you didn't know you had an exam. You thought you'd canceled the class all that. If you can actually achieve good old sleep, it's the best. It's like being in Nisconsin, a cozy,

warm cloud, right. So the idea of like this winter sucks, be nice if I could just sleep through and wake up when it's warm or whole. I really don't want to travel all the way across country. It wouldn't it be great if I could just go to sleep and wake up and be there. But Barnes argues that it's not like this so hibernating squirrels, for example, would be stuck in something that would be more like months of insomnia, so it would feel like long stretches, he says, of

icy stupor punctuated by short, costly naps. Like. The idea here is that their energy level is down, their metabolism is down. Everything is taken down to the level to where sleep isn't even possible. They have to power things up a bit to actually sleep. They have to start turning on the lights in the abandoned wings of the hotel just to get to that level where that the

animal can rest well, isn't there. I believe I read something to you about um after bears come out of hibernation that there's a very long period where they have a sort of sleep hangover, and they it's almost like sleep deprivation, same thing, right, like, you're not you're not necessarily having a nice, big, cozy sleep. You're kind of coming out of the fog and re entering yet another fog.

And it cost energy to come out of that. The ground squirrels, for example, they undergo cyclical rewarmings during this hibernation process, and it costs more than the squirrels stored body fat to do that, of course, worth noting, even though we're talking mostly about warm blooded animals, and indeed we are warm blooded animals. Hibernation also occurs in reptiles, cold blood creatures, where it's called brumation. It differs from

the mammalian hibernation because reptiles, again are cold blooded. They can't control their own body temperature, so they need to spend the winter in a place where they'll stay reasonably warm. It's not always a situation of something surviving cold temperatures. There's also something called estivation, and this is where an animal enters a hibernation like state during the summer, often in situations where there's less available water and moisture. Yeah right,

because conditions become really hot and dry. So that's in addition to maybe your food supply dwindling in that area as well. But for the most part, hibernation, and as we understand it is considered a torporse state. That's basically an umbrella term to describe all the various types of temperature and metabolism reducing functions that are involved in hibernation. Yep,

that's right. So think about torpor in terms of oxygen consumption, which can fall as low as one percent of resting metabolic rate, and core body temperatures to near or below freezing temperatures. Heart rate drops who as little as two point five percent of its usual level of Chipmunk's heart rate flows to five beats per minute from the usual two hundreds. Like you said, breathing rate drops by fifty to a hundred percent, which is just crazy. So you know,

you have reptiles out there that goes hibernation period without breathing. Yeah, and then in many cases we're also talking to about, consciousness is greatly diminished. So even though this for instances squirrel is in this weird and insomnia state, uh, it doesn't mean it's just completely conscious either, so which I don't think necessarily sweetens the deal. It's kind of this uncomfortable semi conscious state, which is a far from the oh I'm going to have a long winner snap and

wake up. Yeah. Yeah, I mean it does kind of feel like, oh man, I am trapped in this body and I don't get any of the great benefits here. Of course, you know we're from fising a little bit here. Another thing that's happening is the body fat, which we know is packed with energy, is burned off to provide energy that an animal needs to maintain levels of body functions,

and this can be really efficient. Then again, we've got our Arctic ground squirrels and they live entirely off a stored body fat for as long as it nine months. So you have glands in the body that are altering the amounts of hormones that are released to control just about every physiological aspect of hibernation. And and when a mammal warm blooded animal inters hibernation, it's essentially becoming like

a cold blooded animal. It cranks down the temperature, but it has a set point in mind, and you can think of this like a setting on your thermostatic Right, let's say you're cutting energy consumption during the winter. You're only willing to the house gets so cold because if you know, if it gets colder than this set point, it's going to start getting uncomfortable and and you'd rather not not live that way. So in this case, there's a set point because if things get much lower, the

creature may not be able to live. So the set point will be there and is things that get colder if it starts to drop below that set point, then the energy will crank up. It will use some of those fat reserves to keep it at a tolerable level. Right, So each animal has its own little thermostat essentially. And you're probably wondering what about defecation. I was wondering that, yes, yeah, yeah, well, no fecal matter is produced because nothing is passing through

the digest Shut that wing of the operation down. That's right, talking too much money, using too much energy. We haven't got it. Shut it down. No pooping, no pooping. But the body is always producing urea, which we know is a waste by product of urine and hibernating animals, bodies are able to recycle the urea. Whoa, So that's that's pretty cool, right, because yeah, I mean have you ever like in the middle of nights, man, I really don't want to get up and get at bath room, and

that would be a good feature. I wish I could just I mean, you know, we do you actually try either, Like, let me just try and focus and recycle my urine. I do idea trying to lucid dream it. Bears don't urinate at all in the winter, but they break the urea down into amino acids. And even though they don't drink any water, they don't get dehydrated either. They're able to extract enough water from their own body fat to stay hydrated. And here's another really cool thing. This is

specific to black bears. They have a unique feature and that they actually continue to reform bones by keeping their calcium levels calibrated in their blood levels. And researchers believe that it's the secretion of a hormone called a paraphor morn and that's the reason why the calcium is recycled. And there are a bunch of clinical trials in which they are using the human version of that hormone and

giving it to patients with osteoporosis. So that's that's something that they're trying to crack there with those black bears, Like whine the world would they be actually for ring new bone while they are hibernating. They're not ating or anything, right, right, I mean think about ourselves. I think if we've ever been waylaid by something and you're in the hospital for two weeks with a cast on, your body loses bone

in calcium. So yeah, just from that little bit of atrophy, you have other species that basically enter this toper state on a daily basis, which is always amazing. Hummingbirds, for example, like hummingbirds are are huge energy users. Who discussed before, I think just just how much energy a hummingbird uses, and that's why flapping wings are really not that that economic of a system. But nature cannot make a propeller, so it's stuck with flapping wings. Yeah, the heartbeats, but

it's per seconds. Yeah, it's crazy. It's in saying because they have the use an immense amount of energy, and if they can't get the energy they need on a daily basis, they will just shut it down every day for a little bit. So they'll shut things down like temperature will drop in a hummingbird on a regular basis, just to maintain Think of it as a business as

an energy consumption has become more of an issue. You have various buildings that will say on weekends only have a certain portion of the office that is air conditioned, and if you're coming into work on the weekends, you need to relocate to a certain portion of the building every day. Even it's saying all right, well during this time, we're gonna have to shut it down a little because we cannot maintain the energy costs involved in keeping this

level of consumption up minute to minute. But that is an incredible ability to have. And you know is joking saying that we're morphizing this, but we can't help it. To project our own ideas onto this and say could could we actually harness this for ourselves? And we're gonna take a quick break and when we get back, we'll talk about this possibility of humans hibernating. All right, we're back, So human hibernation. There are two huge areas where we

could use this. One, of course, is space travel, because space is huge, takes a long time to get anywhere. With our current understanding of how physics work and how space propulsion can work, they're very shortcuts in mind. But for the most part, we're looking at long travels, travels in most cases that are longer than the span of human lifetime. So is there a way to suspend animation?

Is there a way to shut things down and preserve human life across these vast distances, Because again, it's not only a situation of like, oh, I don't want to sit there and play take that toes for you know, the length of a journey. Again, hopefully they would have some quality European board games aboard that space ship. But uh, but then also, do we have the energy required and the resources to keep people engaged in an everyday level of activity in life over the course of a long voyage.

Cheaper better to turn them into low energy cargo for that duration. The other huge area, of course is healthcare. All right, so we have somebody who has a disease that cannot yet be cured or an injury that needs to be addressed. Say someone's injured out in the middle of no Are and you need to get them to a quality medical facility, and it's going to be a

day's journey or more. You need to put them in a hibernated state, and potentially you could take this low energy cargo move it to the facility where they can actually treat the injury and take care of things there. Another example is, say someone suffered oxygen starvation to the brain through a stroke or heart attack. They could actually be put into the suspended animation and lower their oxygen

to man and prevent brain damage. Right time is of the essence and in these situations, so if you could shut things down and sort of contain the situation just long enough to get in there and do something about it, and that would be huge. So it's one of those things where one of the ideas is very far reaching and super future of mankind and our most cosmic visions, and the other is every day people having strokes every

day and then what could we do to mitigate that? Yeah, and at the crux of this is our metabolic right, right, our basimonomolic right, which is pretty standard in humans. We don't have these tip offs in our circadian rhythms to say, hey, guess what, we're taking it down to the steps today, go in your cave. Um. We're pretty regular when it comes serve as a basal metabolic rate unless you're like a super yogi, right, and you can you can tinker

with it a bit. You could do some parlor tricks and opportun you're dead for eighteen hours or something would in fact you were not, but you had again taken down your breathing and your heart rate. Okay, so beyond the Yogi, what are we thinking about here? Well, they're basically looking at ways to either use temperature or chemicals to force a hybernative state on human beings and we are certainly not there yet but that but a number

of experiments have been conducted. Mostly these are involving animals, and we're looking at ways, all right, can we take animals, either hibernating animals or non hybernating animals, tinker with them either with temperature or chemicals and force a Hybernative State biologist at the Institute of Arctic Biology and Fairbanks, Alaska are particularly interested in this. They do a lot of

inquiries into how Arctic ground squirrels behave and hibernate. They point out that Arctic ground squirrels, like us, like all animals, produce a molecule called a denazine which slows nerve cell activities. So when a squirrel begins to hibernate, even when you or I feel drowsy, right, that's what it is. That's what's going on. So they devised a number of experiments where they took non hibernating Arctic ground squirrels and they gave them a substance that stimulated a denazine receptors in

the brain. And then they also gave a substance similar to caffeine to arouse other squirrels. And I mean to rouse them from there, not to yeah, not to arouse them sexually. So in the same way that a denazine is involved in that drowsy feeling you're getting, we're also counteracting it when we run for that cup of coffee or that discussing energy. That's right, I mean that splits the binding point, right. It basically says, I guess what you're not going to bind here, I'm caffeine. I'm waking

this person back up, which I thought was fascinating. I mean, we know, obviously, we know that caffeine perks us up, but to know that it works that specifically, and these experiments, they were able to activate a denizine receptors in sufficient enough manner to induce this hibernative state in these Arctic ground squirrels during our hibernation season. The small experiment in some senses, you know, they're not certainly it's not the same as say, oh, we put a human into hibernative state.

In this case, we took the ground squirrel and we were able to induce hibernation. And it's actually read a big I mean, it's one of the steps that could conceivably lead us to being able to create this effect. In humans. Right. Another really good example is I keep thinking of it as pet cemetery. I have to say the zombie dogs. Yes, this is from the Safar Center

for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh. They put dogs in a state of suspended animation by flushing out their bodies of blood, taking out their bood and replacing it with forty five degree fahrenheit saline solution that contained oxygen and glucose. The dogs went into cardiac arrest and they clinically died right after three hours. The team withdrew the solution so they were verse this process. They reintroduced the blood and then applied to gentle electric shock and

while the dogs were raised from the dead. Yeah, there was a similar experiment that was conducted by surgeon at the Messagusetts General Hospital in Boston, Like I'm in the name of Hassan Alam, and he tested the technique about two times on pigs with a success rate, and it basically involved putting the animal under draining out some blood.

In this case, he used cuts and major veins to stimulate the multiple gunshot wounds, so he was he was trying to create the situation of fatal or life threatening injury. And then as the pig rapidly loses about half its blood and there's a state of shock, Dr Alam would drain the blood store it before pumping this chilled organ preservation fluid into its system. Then the animal's temperature falls to about kindegrees celsius until it injures this state of

profound hypothermia. And then later they were able to put the blood back in and restore the pig to life. Yeah, and again it's not about terrorizing dogs and pigs. It's about trying to create these trauma situations that might happen in a hospital and giving doctors an alternative in terms of trying to extend the life period and be able to take out all the tools in the arsenal to help that person. And it speaking about thermia, it just made me think about cell biologist Mark Roth. He has

a great ted talk about this about suspended animation. He may be the furthest along I think in trauma medicine in terms of looking at ways that we can play with hibernation. He was inspired by a skier in Norway who was trapped in an icy waterfall for two hours before she was extracted. She had no heartbeat, and she was thought to be frozen dead. Seven hours later, still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life and she went on to be the head and radiologist at

that hospital. Later on. Roth was always amazed by this, and he wondered, if there's some agent in our bodies that we make ourselves, that we might be able to regulate our own metabolic rate. Okay, So he was like, is there some sort of flexibility here that we don't know about that the skier unwittingly tapped into. And normally you would say this would be a fool's erranty even try to mess with our metabolic rate in this way, but he just kept picking up the problem, picking up

the problem. And he was watching like Nova or something one night and they were talking about hydrogen sulfide and he had that kind of dinging moment where he's like, yes, that's the thing in our body that we actually do produce, albeit in small amounts. And he started to think, could it cause oxygen to not bind like a kind of game of musical chairs, leading to uh to not consume that oxygen and then by reducing our demand for oxygen.

So he decides to start administering hydrogen sulfide to mice and then again put it in the cold environment because he thinks that there's something key to this coold environment that happened with the skier. And indeed, then Mike started stopped moving up here to dead, oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold. So this again, this is really important, right because we don't have brains to starve from lack of oxygen. But he says, this is the real kicker, that hydrogen

sulfide is rapidly metabolized. So if you were dosed with us after six hours of d animation, all you would have to do is be put out into room air and warm up, and you would be, in his words, none the worse for wear. So and one model of heart attack animals were given the hydrogen sulfide and they showed a seventy percent reduction and heart damage compared to those who got the standard of care that you and I were to receive if we were to have a heart attack here today. And the same is true for

organ failures. So when you have a loss of function by going to pour profusion of kidney or liver, you have damage that suffered. So in he started human trials, and he says that we're on the path of really understanding this metabolic flexibility, and the not too distant future we could have E m T s actually giving people

this hydrogen sulfide and extending the their lives possibly. You know, you know, if you were in an emergency situation, you're being transported, you might be able to be put under in the suspended animation and not have any ill effects to your tissue. Well, that one of the take homes here for me is that suspended animation induced human hibernation. It may look easy in some of our sci fi visions, many of our sci fi visions where it's just kind of a plot something to move the plot around long

and somehow make vast distances traversible by humans. You know, it's just a matter of Sigourney Weaver putting on your sexiest underwear and climbing into a pod. Right. But but but like the idea that it wouldn't just be Sigurney Weaver in sexy underwear, it would be Sigorney Weaver in a psomniatic state, uncomfortably semi conscious for this long stretch of time, you know, or or the possibility that you would have to take Sigourney Weaver's blood out and put

some sort of saline chill solution in there instead. So it's a it's it's a less attractive scenario when you're talk about Sigourney, where you're talking about the Highley character and not that's I don't don't, don't, don't ring bullets upon me with your eyes. But no, no Ripley in an alien it's it is. It is early in the morning. Now, there have been some other there are just as many sci fi visions of induced hibernation that are far more

than a centuralistic but certainly Nightmarrick. For instance, Dan Abnett had a novel called Zenos. It's forty K novels he did, but there was a situation in that where he describes the planet that during the course of its orbit, it enters a stage where it's just too frigid on the planet for people to live, you know, energy consumption wise in terms of the civilization, but also on a personal level, so most of the population goes into a state of hibernation.

In this book, it opens with this action scene in which a villain has woken everyone up prematurely, and so like thousands of people are dying in their hibernation pots because it's such a medically tinkered state that if you come out of it, about the ave of physician, you're you're kind of boned. So so that that comes to mind.

Another title that comes to mind is the Worthing Saga or the Worthy Chronicle by Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, and this was material that was based on an earlier novel he put out called Hot Sleep, And in this he has this concept of what they call hot sleep because the individuals are traveling across vast distances and to do so, they are put into the state of artificial hibernation by the use of this drug called stomach as it turns out that they call it

hot sleep because the individual actually undergoes this very uncomfortable like heated, sweaty, increased temperature situation. I'm not sure how that would work science wise, but the idea is that the hibernation process is very uncomfortable and lasts for a very long time. So they actually have to wipe your memory before you go into it, store that memory digitally, and then put it back into your head after erasing

the trauma. Of the Hot Sleep experience. If you haven't read those, and certainly if your fanom Inder's game and haven't explored other Orson's goot card books, I highly recommend the Worthing story because he does all sorts of interesting things with the concept of of so much induced hibernation, and you have individuals in society who can afford it, who start using this artificial hibernation technology to leap frog across the centuries, so they can't actually extend human life.

But you're only able to live a certain amount of days, but you can spread those days out through even century long periods of artificial hibernation. Well, that's what Mark Roth is pointing to. He is actually saying that suspended animation is tapping into immortality, which is really interesting. Of course, in the way we've described it here, we're talking about hours, but who knows what the promises in the future for

extending that out for days years. I don't know. And I was actually thinking about Aubrey de Gray again, the bearded one who the bio gerontologists who talks about how the first person to live to be five years has already been born, and that we can basically maintain ourselves like a good vintage car, and we have the technology to do it. If you're going to do that, then hey, maybe you want to take five years out in your five hundred years of living. Hey, go ahead, suspend animation

and animate me for five years. That's fine, all right. I hope this episode gave you a new view of hibernation and the idea of metabolic flexibility, which may be something we will all add to a resumes one day. You never know. If you want to check out the lifeblood of Stuff to Blow your Mind, I'm talking about videos,

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