Hibernation: The Ultimate Suspended Animation!

The idea behind hibernation itself is that you have to cut the costs. You have to spiral down, like like a business that test of 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 you know, 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 is wonderful. But I remember listening to the Dave Ramsey Show at this point and he was always advising people and 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 eat rice and beans and cancel cable. And that

is kind of what hibernation is about our version at least. 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 lethal. Well, and I've actually read before to 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 and 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 family use of board games. Maybe that's only 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 how you think like Siberia would would well know when they're well no, no, 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 the sit 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 cancel the class. All that. If you can actually achieve good old sleep, it's the best in a cozy, warm cloud, right, So the idea of like, oh, this winter sucks, I would be nice if I could just sleep through it 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 and metabolism is down. Everything is taken down to the level to where sleep is 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 spirrels, 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 blooded 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 enter in a place where they'll stay reasonably warm. It's not always a situation of something surviving

at 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 torpor state.

It'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 is little as two point five percent of its usual level of chipmunk's heart rates flows to five beats per

minute from the usual two hundreds. Like you said, breathing rate drops by fift a dred percent, which is just crazy. So you know you have a reptiles out there, they go 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 andsomnia 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 cry from the oh I'm going to have a long winter 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 rising 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. And again we've got our Arctic ground squirrels and they live entirely off a stored body fat as long as in 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. Inners 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 thermostat. Right. Let's say you're cutting energy consumption during the winter. You're only willing to let the house get so cold because if you know, if it gets colder than this set point, it's going to start getting uncomfortable. Uh and and and you'd rather 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 it's 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. Oh I was wondering that, Yes, yeah, yeah, well, no fecal matter is produced because nothing's passing through the dieg just 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 the bathroom. I mean, that would be a good feature. I wish I could just I mean, you know, do you actually try to like, let me just try and focus and 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 form bones by keeping their calcium levels calibrated in

their blood levels. And researchers believe that it's the secretion of a hormone called paraphormorn 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 blood bears. Like, why in the world would they be actually forming new bone while they are hibernating

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 hope or state on a daily basis, which is always amazing. Hummingbirds for example, Like hummingbirds are

are huge energy users. We discussed before. I think just just how much energy a hummingbird uses, and and that's whine 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 per second. Yeah, it's crazy. It's in same because I have to 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. 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 idea onto this and say, could could be 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. It takes a long time to get anywhere. With our current understanding of how physics work and how a 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 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 but then also do we have the energy required in 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 nowhere, and you need to get them to a quality medical facility, and it's going to be a day's journey or more. I 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 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 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 and what can we do to mitigate that? Yeah, and at the crops of this is our metabolic right, right, our basil metabolic right, which is pretty standard in humans. We don't have these tip offs and our circadian rhythms to say, hey, guess what.

We're taking it down to the studs today. Go in your cave. Um, we're pretty regular when it comes there as basil metabolic rate unless you're like a super yogi, right, and you can you can tinker with it a bit. You could, you know, decent parlor tricks and opportun you were dead for eighteen hours or something when in fact you were not, but you had again taken down your breathing and your heart rate. Okay, so beyond a yogi,

what are we thinking about here? Well, they're basically looking at ways to either use temperature or chemicals to force a hibernative state on human beings. And we are certainly not there yet, but 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 hibernating animals, tinker with them either with

temperature or chemicals, and force a hibernative state. Biologists 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 how the hibernate They point out that artic 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, that's what it is. That's what's

going on. So they buys 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, yeah, not to arouse them sexually.

So in this 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 purchase up, but to know that it works that specifically, and in these experiments they were able to activate a denazine receptors in sufficient enough manner to induce this hibernative state in these Arctic ground squirrels during the hibernation season. A 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're able to induce hibernation. And it's actually rather 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. 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 blood 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 reversed this process. They reintroduced the blood and then applied to gentle electric shock

and the dogs were raised from the dead. Yeah, there was a similar experiment that was conducted by surgeon at the Messacuset General Hospital in Boston, Like I'm in the name of Hassan Alam, and he tested the technique about two hundred times on pigs with a success rate, and it basically involved putting the animal under draining out some blood. In this case, he'd used cuts and major veins to stimulate the multiple gunshot wounds, so 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 is a state of shock, dr Alam would drain the blood store it before pumping this chilled organ preservation fluid into its system. Than the animal's temperature falls to about tend to be celsius until it enters this state of profound hypothermia, and then later they are 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 speaking about apthermia, 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 the 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 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 arranty even try to mess with our metabolic rate in this way.

But he just kept picking up the problem, picking at 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 ding ning 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 thin again and put it in the cold environment because he thinks that there's something key to this cool environment that happened with the skier. And indeed, then Mike started stopped moving, appeared 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 and going to poor profusion of kidney or liver, you have damage

that suffered. So in two 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 is fullified and extending the their lives possibly you know, so you know, if you were in an emergency situation, you're being transported, you might be able to be put under in this suspended animation and not have any ill

effects to your tissue. Well, that one of the take comes 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 pot. Right. But but but like the idea that it wouldn't just be Sigorny Weaver in sexy underwear, it would be Sigourney Weaver in a sosomniatic state, uncomfortably semi conscious for this long stretch of time, you know, or or the possibility that you would have to take Siggorny 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 talking about Sigorny where you're talking about the Riley character and not Gus. That's I don't don't, don't don't ring bullets of pony with your eyes. Yeah, 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 tibernation that are far more in a centur realistic but certainly Nightmarrick.

For instance, Dan Abnett had a novel called Zenoes. It was forty k novels he did that there was a situation in that where he describes a 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, uh, 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. And 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 without the aid of a physician, you're you're kind of boned. So so that that that comes to mind.

Another title that comes to mind is the Worthing Saga over the Worthy Chronicle by Orson Scott Card, the author of Indur'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 this state of artificial hibernation by the use of this drug called stomach As it turns out, though 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 Fano Mendor's game and haven't explored other orson Scott card books, I highly recommend the Worthing sorry, 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 just grabbed 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 hundred 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, animate me for five years. That's fine. Cool. Well, hey, we're on board with that. Yeah, I'm on board with it. Well, how about the rest of you. If you have any cool examples of induced human hibernation from science fiction that you would like to point out right in, let me know about it and I'll bring it up on the podcast. Or if you have just general thoughts about the hibernation in general in animals and how it might affect human life.

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