I'll get a team. It's Harps and Melissa and it is the prof. It is as I record as we start right now, it's three minutes past seven Tuesday night. Spent a big day and I mean listening to the prof wax lyrical with another smart bloke and Melissa. I was just wondering after listening to him whether or not at seven three in the PM, my cognitive function is somewhat less than seven o three in the am. What do you think? What do you think? You spoke to
me earlier and you're speaking to me late. Am I dumber?
I do not think that is the case. But I was intrigued before. And this goes to show what you've been learning and doing over the last few years in that your first thought is to turn to studying it. So you did say maybe you should do an IQ test in the morning, in an IQ test in the evening, and see.
Well, I know we don't hold a great deal of kind of you know, value in IQ tests. You know they have a place, I guess. But firstly, Professor russ All Foster, welcome to the You Project, sir.
Thank you, Craig. Really delighted to join you.
I feel like you're a little bit too sophisticated and smart for us. But we'll just hang in there.
Do you think, no, No, it's just a thin veneer. You can pietrate that ven I don't worry.
You can't. You can't bullshit A bullshit A good sir. Now, if I took a typically, if I took an IQ test at seven am and seven pm, would I be slightly dumber? Or does it depend on a few other variables? Or would I be about the same.
It depends on many variables. I mean, Craig, are you a morning type or an evening tape?
Oh, that's a good question. I'm probably Melissa. What do you I reckon? I'm probably more mourning, but I'm like, I'm okay. But when I'm not okay, I hit the wall, like like after I get off this. So at seven o five now I reckon. By eight point thirty, I'll be sliding into a coma.
Well. On average, adults peak cognitive performance, you know, our ability to process information and do mathematical tasks and all the rest of it, on average is between eleven am and twelve noon, and then it drops slowly throughout the afternoon to get to a really low point at around about four o'clock in the morning, four five o'clock in the morning. Now that will shift left or right depending whether you're a morning person or an evening person, but
it's worth bearing in mind. Drew Dawson from Australia did a wonderful study comparing cognitive abilities at four o'clock in the morning and how bad you are at performing those tasks with the impact of alcohol. And he showed in this famous study that our ability to process information at four o'clock in the morning is worse than if we
consume sufficient alcohol to make us legally drunk. So I mean you know, to your listeners, you know, if you happen to be driving at four five o'clock in the morning, your ability to drive that car is worse than if you consumed sufficient alcohol to make you legally drunk. It's that's the level of impairment the morning. It really is remarkable.
And also, listeners, if you're driving at four am and your ship faced double that because which is the case, you clearly.
Know, my listeners, doc, that's really bad.
But also like what other things that we wouldn't think of, so obviously sleep, you know, the time of day driving, as you said at four am, is going to be analogous to you know, having alcohol in our system. But also dehydration impacts cognitive like significant dehydration impacts cognition.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and brain glucose levels. I mean, if you if you're really running on empty, then then memory formation and just processing information becomes really much worse. But you know, it's a bit like it's a bit like not getting enough sleep. I mean, it's really incredible if you think about it. Poor sleep will produce fluctuation, fluctuations in mood. The tired brain actually remembers negative experiences but forgets the positive ones, So our whole worldview is changed.
If you have a tired brain, you're more irritable, you show greater levels of anxiety. You've got lots of empathy, so picking up those social signals from your friend's, family, colleagues is reduced, and you know you can't interact as well. You much more inclined if you've if you're tired, to use stimulants and fueling the day with lots and lots of coffee and then in the evening thinking, goodness, I've
got to get to sleep. What am I going to do, and then you start taking loads of alcohol or sedatives, which in fact disrupts some of the important things going on in the brain when we sleep. So yeah, there's a lack of sleep. Is not just the sort of the inconvenience of feeling tired at an inappropriate time. It has big impacts upon our ability to process information. And that's just just the short term stuff. We can get onto the long term stuff later on.
I was amazed too. I should have known this, but I didn't know this, So I'm going to be honest. I was amazed to find out recently that the brain uses about twenty percent of our daily calorie expenditure and what is at one point two to one point four kilos or something.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So you know, I suppose maybe no great surprise on the top of our head is the most complicated structure in the no universe, So using twenty percent of our calories isn't that bad. But yeah, you're quite right. And of course, you know, if you're in cold conditions, loss of heat from the head, because of course the blood flow to the breed could be quite serious.
The other day I went on the other day was probably a month ago I went to the gym to lift stuff because I'm massive. I'm just kidding. And I went to the gym and outside the gym, on an aFrame proft was a sign that said excuses don't burn Making excuses doesn't burn calories. And I thought, that's actually not true, because it's a cognitive process. You've got to come up with some bullshit. So I went inside and told them, actually, making excuses does burn calories, so you might need a new message.
And the more creative of the excuses, the more calories were burnt. I mean, certainly, that's what I find with my students. They come up with amazingly creative excuses.
That's funny, big calorie burning excuses, you could call those. So I guess when we get onto the sleep more in a minute, but I guess so even people thinking about you know, the brain runs on glucose, right, so people who go I'm going to go paleo, their brain must almost be non functional for the first week or so until they start to adapt.
Right. Well, I'm not sure about that. I mean, it depends if they're eating their protein. I mean, you know, if it isn't just a lot of meat and they're cooking that meat, they're releasing all of those calories, and of course what the body does, the energy currency of the brain is glucose, So no matter whether you're eating carbs, protein, fats, it's all converted into the basic currency of glucose. So yeah, it might take a few days, I guess, to adapt,
but I think we'd adapt pretty quickly. I mean, one of the most extraordinary things you're talking about the brain is that the invention of fire, which allowed us to cook meat for the first time, which released so much more energy because you know, half the digestion, as it were, was done because the fire sort of cooked it and sort of made it easier to digest, is associated with a big leap in brain size. And so the invention of fire and cooking our meat has been associated with
increasing brain size. And so you see a quite sharp rise in brain size in the fossil record on the basis of the size of the cranium where the brain sits in the skull.
Any idea as to the mechanism behind and that duck.
No, I mean, I guess you know, as we evolved and we became sort of bipedal running around on two legs and that freed up our hands and our arms to use tools. Of course, we could become more sophisticated. We were faster on two feet, so we became more flexible, and we could then capture meat for the first time rather than just scavenge. And then of course by cooking that we released all of those incredible calories, and that may be one of the really important steps in human evolution.
But Crane, I'm talking about evolution, not sleeping Cicadian rhythms. So now I have a comfort zone here.
Yeah, I know that's what I'm doing. I'm just trying to stretch it because I've heard you on other shows. You get a little comfy, You're a little familiar with the subject matter. I just want you to keep learning and evolving. Profits You're welcome. So now lifetime your body clock and its essential roles in good health and sleep. When did you write this?
During lockdown? So I was I wrote a few articles for one of the newspapers in the UK, and a bunch of people said, oh, you should write a book, and I thought, well, you know, I'm never going to have time. And then COVID hit and so I thought, well, I'm never going to have you know, this this opportunity. So I used the time constructively and so really enjoyed it. And I worked with Penguin and it's interesting, I've written previous books, but what they allowed me to do was
was they said, we want to hear your voice. And of course, as a scientist, that's exactly what you suppress. You know, you don't have anecdotes, you don't have the stories. And they said, no, no, that's great, and I sort of threw a few in and they said more of that, and so the feedback I got was make it as
accessible as possible. So each of the chapters starts with a sort of a little story about whether it's Einstein and Salvador Daly and their cognitive abilities and their sleep more, whether it's you know, the chapter on metabolism introduces the sugar trade and slavery. Yeah, so it was fun to go outside with my comfort zone. So yeah, it was a lockdown project.
I love that. You know. It's like, we've had a lot of academics on the show, and I'm a shudo academic. I'm more a pro academic, but that it's like, and I mean this in a loving and caring way, because my proper Well, this is my proper job these days, but also my other half of my proper job is corporate speaking. And you know, you've got to obviously, whatever idea or message or piece of data or truth or insight you want to share, it needs to be consumer
friendly listener friendly. And there are not how do I say this about getting in trouble, there's not a huge percentage of academics that can stand in front of a non academic audience and create connection. And I'm not pissing in your pocket. That's an Australian term, prof But you're very good at it. That you're very good, and so you know that ability to go. This is the model that I use with would be speakers or even academics. I say, all right, what's the thing that you want
to tell them? What's the idea? What's the piece of information? You know what? Firstly, what's that? Now? Secondly how do you share that in a story? And then thirdly why does this matter? And lastly how do we apply it or how do we integrate it into our operating system? And when I tell them that, they're like, oh, I go, so what do you want to talk about? Subjective reality? Cool? Well, tell them, give them an example, a practical example, or
whatever it is. And it just because all the knowledge is there, it's just finding the language of the audience or the reader.
Yeah, yeah, but you have to understand most of us are trained from the word go to suppress all of that. You know, we write in a very formal way and a formal language, and so maybe it's very kind of your say, so, perhaps I'm just a little bit disinhibited, and so I feel as though I can indulge that other other dimension of my personality.
Well, you can step out of one world. And it's the opposite for me because I've written seven books and none of them are academic, right, They're just all, you know, conversational. I've also published with Penguin like you, but now I'm writing academic papers and it's a steep learner. I need to ring you up. It's a steep learning curve. Anyway, let's get into the topic at hands. I've got some
really specific questions. I'm going to start with a question that I literally have only asked one other time in nine hundred and seventy five episodes, and it was yesterday, and I'm going to ask it again. Today, Why are we so crap at sleeping?
Well, it's an interesting question. So if we think about the way we've viewed sleep, if we go back to the nineteen eighties, not getting sleep was a badge of honor. People used to come into work and see, I've I've done another or nightem people say, oh, yeah, fantastic, and yeah, well done, you know, pat on the back. And it was part of the fact that we didn't understand the value of sleep. We didn't appreciate that whilst asleep we consolidate memory and it's not just laying down the facts.
I think the most awesome thing is that when we're asleep, we're actually asking questions of ourselves. We're processing information. A night of sleep has been shown scientifically to allow us to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems. So from the nineteen eighties we've kind of learnt that sleep is really important. So by the turn of the century people are thinking, yeah, you know, maybe I should start
to pay a bit more attention about sleep. And then in the last twenty years and particularly the last five years, we've become incredibly anxious about our sleep, you know, and there's actually a condition called sleep anxiety, where people are so anxious they can't get to sleep and if they wake up, they can't get back to sleep. And I think that's been driven by several factors. APPS which are
really bad at at telling us what our sleep is. So, for example, they're okay for telling us roughly when we went to sleep, roughly when we got up, and how many times you work up at night, But when they start telling you, oh, you had a good night's sleep or you didn't get enough for m sleep, that's just nonsense. But people get really anxious about it. Oh yeah, and we're also the sergeant majors asleep are screaming you must
get eight hours. Well, that's also complete nonsense. The healthy the healthy range for sleep in adults is between six hours and ten to eleven APPS. And the key thing for all of us is that we define the sleep that we need and then adopt behaviors that defend that sleep, and you know, stop being frightened of sleep, embrace the sleep that we get. Sleep is very different between individuals,
and of course it changes as we age. I mean, so many you know, people in there sort of post retirements will say, oh God, I wish I had the sleep that I had when I was sort of in my twenties. Well, it's going to change. And I know lots of elderly people who say, oh, no, it's fantastic, best sleep I've ever had. I don't have to worry about the kids, I don't have to worry about getting out for work, I don't have to worry about anything. And certain family members make it very clear that we're
not to call before eleven o'clock in the morning. And I think that's it. You know, you adopt the sleep that works best for you. I mean. The serious point is, of course, that we've never taken sleep seriously up until very recently, because it's not part of a medical curriculum. In a five year training, a medic may get one
or two lectures on sleep. And of course, you know, if you're a general practitioner, it's been estimated that thirty percent of the questions you're asked, thirty percent of the health issues are either directly or indirectly related to sleep. And the problem is, of course, what's the response, Well, here's a sleeping tablet, and that that is often not the best way forward. We've got to ap sort of
measures which and they're very simple. I mean, the thing is the great thing about this whole area is there's a whole bunch of stuff we can do to make ours sleep better. It's not you know, so many people think, oh, you get the seat that you get. That's not true. I mean, clearly it's guided by our genes and our behavior and all the rest of it. But we can also modify that behavior.
Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting. As you said, eight hours sleep and you know, eight glasses of water a day, and how tall are you and how much do youigh? Oh, you should have twenty eight hundred and forty three calories a day. I'm like, well, what if one day I'm chopping down trees and running up mountains and the next day I'm writing my book and sitting for fourteen hours
at might what about then? You know, it's like it just these kind of dogmatic, arbitrary numbers that get wheeled out that people use as rather than a very vague guideline, perhaps they use as some kind of gospel that needs to be followed despite all the variability of their behavior and their lifestyle and the weather and calories in and out. Like it's so it's so I would. I would posit professor that not only do sleep requirements Do you like that, Melissa? I did, thank you.
I'm looking at looking up as we speak. What does it mean, Molnissa, Yeah, don't be ridiculous.
You know what it means. You know what it means. I would posit Professor. I'm going to say it again, Comma, that not only do sleep requirements vary from person to person, but would they not vary from us day to day a little bit depending on what we've done in the day. Like if I have a massive day of energy expenditure and I'm physically working hard all day, would I need the same amount of sleep as a normal day or.
It's pretty much. It is fairly similar, even even after vigorous exercise. But you're right, it is very dynamic, and the key thing is not to get anxious about it. If pre lockdown, I gave a talk and somebody came up to him and said, I don't get eight hours of sleep every night. Am I going to die?
Ah?
I said, well, well, I said, yeah, you're going to die. But it may have nothing to do with the fact that you're not getting eight hours of sleep. I mean, you know this is the kind of anxiety that we're finding at the moment rather than you know, embracing the sleep that we get.
You know, what you should have done when they said am I going to die? You should have said yes and then just finished there and as they walked away dejectedly, you should have gone.
But not from that, Craig, that would have been mean as well.
You know, all right, I've got some specific questions, and some of these are very fundamental, but bear with me. What's a circadian rhythm? Or talk to us about you know, the different rhythms or body clocks, like what does what does that mean?
Yeah, a Cicadian rhythm you can think of as an internal biological day. It really is one of the great I think advance is in science of biological science over the past twenty years of actually understanding that we have
an internal clock. In fact, we have a master clock within the brain, which is about fifty thousand cells called the supra chismatic nuclei or the SCN, which is this master Then it's coordinating essentially billions of individual clocks in the cells of the body, which you're organized of course in the organ systems. So we've got this whole hierarchy of time, and what's it for. Well, what it does is fine tune our biology to the very varied and
complicated demands of rest and activity. So if you think about consciousness versus sleep, it's a completely different physiological state, and that's all underpinned by changes driven by this internal clock. So if you know that in three hours time you're going to be up, walking around and active, then in anticipation of that, blood glucose levels rise, blood pressure rises, metabolum metabolism starts to increase, cortisols starts to go up. So but the time we actually wake up, we have
a body that is physiologically prepared for activity. And in the same way, at the end of the day we start to change our physiology in preparation for sleep. So there's a drop in core body temperature, and indeed that small dropping core body temperature is associated with going to sleep. If you block that dropping core body temperature, it's more
difficult to get off to sleep. So we've got this internal time structure which is fine tuning everything that we do to the varied and complicated demands of the twenty four hour revolution of the Earth and the light dark cycle. And we know at a fundamental level what makes us tick. So a bunch of genes have been identified which are turned on. They then make proteins. Those proteins then interact go into the nucleus of the cell and then turn off.
Those genes are those clock chins, and then those proteins are degraded, and so the clock genes can then turn on once again. So you have this twenty four hour cycle of protein production and then degradation, and that's fundamentally the nature of the biological clock. It truly is an awesome process. And I think you know, in the past
twenty twenty five years. I've been in a business really in this area in biological time for almost forty years, but it's over the past twenty years where we've seen this extraordinary revolution. And of course in twenty seventeen, the Nobel Prize was given to russ bash Hall and Young who identified in flies, not humans, not even in mice, but how this clock ticks in flies one of the
great I think achievements of sort of biological endeavor. And I was privileged enough when I worked in the States to work to know these guys, and they are extraordinary. I talk about a bit of eyebat in the book.
No Pressure, but I expect a Nobel prize from you and the five to ten. So if you can lift your game a little bit.
It won't be in clocks. But the thing that we've been doing has been trying to understand how those internal clocks are set to the external world. So there's no good having this sort of ability to anticipate and fine tune unless the internal day and the external day are aligned. Classic mismatches jetlag. We actually get over jetlag primarily as a result of exposure to the environmental light dark cycle. And what we discovered is that, of course you need
the eyes. If you have no eyes, the clock keeps on ticking. And we work on individuals who've lost their eyes, so they're completely blind and they essentially have unremitting jet lack for the rest of their lives. But we're working on that. But what we discovered is that the eye is not using the cells which we use for vision, the visual cells, the rods and the colors, but there's a third there's a third light sensor within the eye, so you can be visually blind if you've still got
these other light sensors. Within the eye, you can regulate the clock. So the eye is this It's just amazing. The eye is this organ of space vision, but it's also the organ of time because of the way it sets the internal clock to the external world. And so this is a big chunk of what we're doing. I mean, you know, if you think about it, we've discovered a
completely new light sensing system within the eye. And certainly when we proposed this in the nineties and around about the turn of the century, I remember I was at a seminar and said, you know, these data are consistent with the discovery of a new receptor system within the eye, and somebody at the back of the auditorium stood up and looked at me and just shouted bullshit and then
walked out. I mean, the idea that we have been studying the eye for one hundred and fifty years and then missed an entire light sensing system was so insulting to this community that, you know, it was a tough decade.
Well, academics, we know academics are very open minded.
Yeah, well, yes, it's a it's a real it's very complicated because you know, being conservative with a with a small C is good because you know, want a whole bunch of nonsense, you know, keep on changing, so they're very resistant to change. And what we had to do, and the scientific approach is you just carry on doing better and better experiments to overwhelm the skeptics with the data set that you know makes it completely incontrovertible.
So even if someone is blind as in they can't see, they can't make out, they can't read, they can't make out, they can't define things, but they they can open their eyelids and sense light or dark, then their internal clocks will function as normal.
Yeah, we studied two individuals, one in one in the UK, one in the States, and the subject I know best. She said she had no conscious light detection at all, right, and so but we we asked it to to perform a test when the lights are on or off. And we said, look, we're going to force you to give us an answer to tell us if the lights are on or off. And she said, no point in doing this because I can't see. I absolutely have no light detection. When we forced her to make a decision, she got
it right every time, and that is really cool. And what it shows is, of course these receptors are not only regulating the clock, and we've discovered that they're regulating part of our pupil constriction, they're regulating sleep, but they're also providing an unconscious awareness of light. And you know, we're just finding out really what all the roles of this receptor is new receptor in the eye doing so, for example, it looks as though they're important in alertness.
So you know, the brighter the light, the more alert we are, and it's probably via these receptors. So yeah, it's a new and unexplored receptor system which we're appealing. We're trying to understand, feeling back information on it.
How did that lady respond prof when she realized she could detect light and dark?
She was really quite shocked and surprised because of course she'd been told and she you know, had adapted to
the fact that she has no light detection. She is completely by and it raises a really important issue, of course, because there has been a tendency in ophthalmology departments, and I'm head of the Nuffold Laboratory of Ophthalmology in Oxford and that you know, when I talk to my clinical colleagues, I think, God, we never really thought of that before, and so if eyes are very badly damaged, there's a tendency to say, well, do you know that you can't see,
you've lost your vision. There are going to be a source of infection you can't see to look after them. It will be much simpler if we remove them, but a proesthetic in and then you know, it'll be easy for everybody. And of course in the process they've already lost a sense of space, but inadvertently you could take away their sense of time. And so you know, I've been working very closely with my clinical colleagues to try and find out, you know, how severe particular eye diseases are,
and what's their impact. Obviously on vision, that's their job, but mine is to assess, you know, what's their impact on their cicadian regulation and their sleepwake regulation, because if that's still intact, then those eyes have to be saved at all costs. Otherwise, as I said, you'll have unremitting jet lag for the rest of your life. And when you talk to individuals who lost their eyes, it's really poignant. I mean, we work with blind veterans UK and these
are extremely robust individuals. You know, they're dealing with this traumatic loss of their eyes. And you know, I remember chatting to one chat and he said, well, do you know I'm determined. I know I cut the lawn on a Friday, and so he woke up and he went downstead and he worked out a way of getting this the moa out of the shed and how it was going to work and all the rest of it. And he was cutting the lawn and his wife came down and said, it's three o'clock in the morning. Disturbing. You're
disturbing the navy. And you know what they say is, look, I feel constantly tricked by my body clock. And that's the problem because it's ticking, it's drifting through time, but it's not aligned with the external world. And so, you know, a lot of the work that we're doing at the moment is on the basis of our understanding of how those new receptors are regulating the masterclock in the brain. Can we fool the clock that it's seen light by mimicking that pathway with drugs? And it's we're at a
really exciting stage. We've done all the mousework. We've now got a drug that can fool the clock that it's seen light and we're now going into In fact, our first in human trials took place in Melbourne over Lockdown, and we're now ready to do the full blown clinical trials. I mean, if I can end my career by giving back a sense of time to people who have radical eye disease, I'll die happy. Man.
Yeah, that's bloody brilliant, Melissa. Can I ask you a question? If ten out of ten is I'm a brilliant sleeper, I have no problem, I sleep great, and one is extremely troubled sleeping. What number are you typically?
We have spoken about this before, and I'm not talented at many things, but sleeping would have to be up there.
That's something I could actually do pretty well.
So probably seven or eight in general, I would say.
Now, okay, So I want to ask you something. Melissa works a long day. She starts early and works late, and spends most of her days correct me if I get any of this wrong in a chair looking. She goes to the gym every day. She's active, but spends a lot of time looking at screens as do I now, and obviously has fluoro lights over her head most of her life. If we put her in the bush in some alternate reality, and she had no fluorescent lights and
no TV, no computer, no iPhone. We took her out of modernity and we put her in wherever what would and so she had to get up when the sun came up and go to bed or do whatever when the sun went down. What would happen to her body clocks?
Well, those experiments have actually been done not by us, but by a chap called ken Wright in Colorado, and he monitored the sleepwaate timing of a bunch of students in their normal environment, you know, basically what Melissa was doing. And then he took them out camping to the Rocky Mountains for a week. And what was extraordinary is that their whole body clock advanced in time. When they were
tuned into the natural light dark cycle. They ended up, on average getting up two hours earlier and going to bed two hours earlier than when they were experiencing artificial light in their home environment. So it's very likely that Melissa would probably get up a bed earlier and go to bed earlier.
What's the relationship or what's the comparison between the clock on the wall hanging in the kitchen and our biological clock is it how close they related?
Well, it's so we talked about the importance of light in these new receptors and light intensity. How much light you need is important, but also when you get it. So morning light makes you get up earlier, it advances the clock. Dust light delays the clock makes you get
up later. We did a study all actually with students all over the world, Western Australia, Melbourne, Auckland, Oxford, Munich and Groningen in the Netherlands, and we found that the later the chronotype, the later the body clock type, the less morning light people got eye that would make them get up earlier, but they got lots of evening light
which would make them get up later. So whilst our genetics and our will influence when we get up and go to bed are really critical and often forgotten about, is when we see light. So if you're a real late type and you've got to get up earlier, then you can set the alarm and then force yourself out of bed. And in Australia, of course you've got bright light. It's all fine, so you get outside, you get your
bright morning light. In the northern Hemisphere in the winter you probably need a light box and that will advance the clock, shift it forward, and then make it easier to get up. And that, of course, behave yourself is self reinforcing. You get up earlier, you get the morning light, and you start to get up earlier. So when we're all agricultural workers, we got sort of symmetrical exposure to morning and dusk light, and we sort of more or
less stayed on que. Now, because of industrialization we live most of our lives inside. That's become distorted. But we can regain that timing by you set as I say, setting a long clock and then exposing ourselves to natural light. It's really really important to do that. Interestingly, we need a lot of light, and I guess we'll come onto this, Craig, because there's been a lot of stuff in the literature about and in the media, Oh, if you look at a screen before you go to bed, you're gonna shift
your body clock. Well, actually the evidence for that is really poor. We need bright light for a long duration. So there was a study from the States which got people to look at a kindle for four hours on its brightest intensity for four hours immediately built before bedtime, on five consecutive nights that delayed sleep on set just statistically by ten minutes, so it's a really minor effect. So yeah, I think we need to be quite careful. Clearly, the brighter the light before we go to bed, the
more chance we're going to delay the clock. But under normal circumstances, and particularly if we're seeing bright morning light, its internal light is not going to have a huge impact upon us. Certainly, screens and all the rest of it. The big problem with iPhones and smartphones and stuff is that we're doing social media, we're doing our emails, and it's all that stuff that's increasing alertness and then delaying sleep on set. So it is good not to use
them before we go to bed. Not so much the light issue, but it's because of the alerting effect it's having on the brain.
That's so interesting and so contrary to what we've been told. All Right, I've got a million more questions and we don't have I don't know how long you have, but oh my god, how good is Emilissa? I know, amazing, I know, I know, I'm excited. All right, tell me about why you and Andrew Huberman, I'm sure you know
who he is. Yeah, Professor Andrew Huberman, and you both kind of bang on about the importance of bang on in a nice way about the importance of early morning light, why we need it, and why it's good for us. One of them, it would tell us about that.
We've touched on it briefly, but for about ninety percent of us, the human body clock is a little bit longer than twenty four hours, so under constant conditions, we get up later and later and later each day. So what we need to do to stay on track is to get that morning light exposure, to advance the clock, to nudge just forward in time so that that slightly longer clock is forced to be exactly twenty four hours. And that's why morning light is so important. And you
know it's a no brainer. The data are absolutely clear, and and you know that's something that we can actually take possession of our light exposure parenthetically, which I think is absolutely fascinating. There was a study a few years ago saying that dog owners got better sleep for non dog owners, and I've always wondered whether it's because, of course, it's not so much the companionship, although it may be it's the fact you have to get up and take
your dog out outside. First thing in the morning, you get your phone tom shower, which then gives you that morning light that keeps the clock on queue.
That's hilarious. There's been other research done on longevity and pet owners. They seem to live a year or two longer. Melita will live till she's two hundred because she loves animals. When I was thinking about talking to you, and I was just I think I was making a cup of tea, and I was thinking about sleep in general, of which
I know very little about the science. But it dawned on me that knowing the bit that I do about what inadequate, consistently inadequate sleep can do to a brain and a person and moods and mental health and all of that, it's a little wonder that they used, and have used sadly, sleep deprivation as a form of torture in the Wars.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And in some sense we're using sleep as a form of torture today. I mean that's perhaps a bit exaggerated, but you know, it's worth bearing in mind. Who in society is not getting the sleep that they need. Well, it's poor people who are forced to work night shift work, and you know, we did a study in the UK a few years ago and we were looking at kids and we ask them, does anybody share your sleeping space? Thinking, you know, do you share your bedroom with any What
we didn't ask is do you have a bed? And as a result of you know, these studies, we discovered that these kids, many of them, didn't have a bed. They were sleeping on the family sofa and so, you know, so they get screwed up sleep. They go to school, they're tired, they can't fully appreciate, you know, education. So without sleep, you know, you're on that track of being marginalized because of your educational attainment, and therefore you're on
this still track. And I think that that in a sense, poverty and low as socioeconomic groups are aligned with poor sleep, and it's something that we haven't done anything about. And we've got to prioritize this because we're then sort of marginalizing a whole group of individuals, and this is wrong in my view.
Do you think that I don't know the way that we live now, modernity and technology and the fact that we've got everything at our fingertips all the time, including bright light twenty four hours a day, if we want. It has that kind of disconnected us a little bit from our biology. You know that internal I call it biological sat nav. You know that that biological guidance system that we've all got but we seem not to pay attention to yet.
No, you're completely right, and we have a sense divorced. You know. It's humans. We are such an incredibly arrogant species and it's been part of our success. But also you know, we've also created problems for ourselves. We think we can do whatever we want at what a time we choose, ignoring the fact that we are part of a biological evolution which is timestamped, literally timestamped our entire biology, and we can't do whatever we like whenever we choose.
And we've got to embrace this again now having said that we are in a twenty four to seven society, it's no good saying, you know, we're going to stop that, it's not going to stop. But what we've got to do is use the science that we have at the
moment to mitigate some of the problems. And of course those problems are the most acute in night shift workers and so for example of the study from the UK showing that fifty seven percent of junior doctors had either had a crash or a near miss driving home after the night shift. So why the heck are we not providing vigilance devices on the dashboard, you know, either on an app or some other sub clip on which can detect head roll or the fact that car is moving
laterally set off an alarm and wakes you up. Now there's that's load loads of technology that could actually make or difference. It's been estimated that in the States at least between one hundred thousand and three hundred thousand crashes on the freeway are people falling asleep at the wheel in the early hours of the morning. Knowing that night shift workers have greater levels of obesity, diabetes to culinary heart disease, what type of food do we make available
to our night shift workers. Well, it's high fat, it's high sugar, and what we should be providing is rich protein, easy to digest snacks throughout the night. To my knowledge, no employer anywhere is making provision for the appropriate sort of nutrition for those night shift workers. Knowing again that in some sectors the divorce rate is six times higher for night shift workers, compared to day shift workers. What
are we doing about that? Why aren't we providing the education to those workers saying this is the risk that you've got to you know, you've got to be aware of. But also not you, but your family. They need to know that the job is going to make you less empathetic, more irritable, less lovable and reducing a sense of humor. We've got to get education in that area. And finally, I'm sorry I'm granting out, but this is this is easy to do stuff. Knowing that there's people with shortened sleep,
primarily night shift workers. Our frontline staff often have high rates of heart disease, you know, diabetes, to all these cancer as well, Why aren't we doing high frequency health checks to catch these conditions in this sector before they become chronic. So yeah, I would. It would be absurd to say we're going to put the twenty four seven genie back in its bottle. But what we can do is mitigate some of the problems instead of burying our
head on the sand and ignoring it. And that's what we I think all of us need to do up through our governments and hopefully well intentioned employers, towards their employees love it.
All right, A few quick quikies, well, although take your time, I mean, from me, a few quickies. Number one, alarm clocks good bed indifferent.
If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed, you're probably not getting the sleep you need. However, realistically yeah, I mean, many of us need them, but be aware you're probably not getting the sleep need. The big thing about these alarm clocks is that if they're these digital ones with a lighted dial. Now, what happens is that you wake up in the middle of the night,
and that's the norm. Incidentally, the normal human sleeping pattern is to wake up, probably fall back to sleep immediately. And if you don't fall back to sleep immediately, then you'll get back to sleep fairly, fairly quickly. That is the normal pattern of human sleep. Problem is most people don't know that, so they wake up and they think, oh my god, that's it. I'm never going to get back to sleep again. Start doing the email, start drinking coffee.
Whereas if you stay calm, keep the lights low, do something relaxing, you will fall back to sleep again. The problem is people wake up, they see their illuminated dial thing, oh my goodness, I've only got an hour and a half before I've got the alarm goes off. They get all anxious, stressed, and then they can't get back to sleep again. So many people, you know, the important information is when the alarm goes off, not how many hours
or minutes you've got before it goes off. So cover up the dial are those illuminated alarms.
And the irony is that you wake up and then you think I've only got an hour and a half to go, and you get anxious and which you know all of the things that happen with that, and then you don't sleep well. But also the other side of that is when you don't sleep adequately, that increases anxiety through the day.
Yeah, exactly. And in fact most people don't have a sleep problem, they have a stress and an anxiety problem. And so that's why it's really important towards the end of the day to step back and do something relaxing, whether it be it's interesting. I was very rude about
mindfulness when it first surfaced. I sort of had it in the same box as crystal, But actually that was wrong, and I regret my arrogance over that, because in fact it's a great way of it's a relaxation technique and it's one of those things that many people find useful to wind down at the end of the end of the day. And those are the sorts of things we've got to be doing. It's been really difficult during lockdown because, of course the sleeping space has also been in many
cases the office as well. So you've got stuffed in your bedroom all of those detracted you know, those things that will keep you awake, the computer. You know, I just checked my meme as before I go to bed, and all of that stuff. And really what we should be having is the bedroom is this wonderful haven where we can retreat to and embrace. Sleep has this wonderful enhancing behavior. I don't know about Australians, but the Brits are kind of a bit mean where it comes to
bedding and pillows and all that sort of stuff. And you know, for a third of our lives we should indulge in a good rap, not indulge. We should buy a good mattress, good pillows, good douvet, and so make sure that the se sleeping space is optimized. You know, you feel comfortable and it's a wonderful place to be.
All right, that makes sense, you know what you said about I mean, all of it makes sense. But I was just thinking then about stress and anxiety are the problem and likes. It's almost like sleep is the symptom. But if you treat the problem stress and anxiety, then the sleep will take care of itself.
Right, Yeah, absolutely, And we've got to be very careful about distinguishing between sleep, sleepiness, and fatigue. So given the opportunity we can get rid of sleepiness by sleeping more, fatigue is something different. Fatigue is this lethargy, this again sleepiness, But given an extended opportunity to sleep, the fatigue doesn't go away. Classic, of course is long COVID people are
incredibly fatigued even though they're sleeping more. And you've got to distinguish between sleepiness and fatigue because fatigue is usually some indication of an underlying health problem. And see got to see your general practitioner to make sure that there's no there's no sort of illness that you're aware of, that you're unaware of that's causing the fatigue. It's such an important issue.
We spoke broadly before about the relationship between sleep and cognitive function. What about more specifically proft between sleep and dementia. Do we know anything about that?
Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and it's one of those areas that's that's bloomed in the past past ten years or so. Whilst we sleep, there's a thing in the in the brain, in the central nervous system called the glymphatic system. It's like a waste disposal unit, and what it does is get rid of some misfolded proteins and other rubbish. But these misfolded proteins are the beta amyloids, and the beta amorloids have been associated with building up
in the brain and causing dementia and Alzheimer's. And you know, one night of no sleep can you can statistically see an increased in beta amyloid within the cerebral spinal fluid and deposited within the brain. So another really important element of sleep is to get rid of these toxic compounds. However, what this may explain is the fact that poor sleep in the middle years increases your risk for Alzheimer's and
dementia in the later years. So you know it's we are if by not taking our sleep seriously during the middle years and not defending it. We are sort of potentially in not everybody, it's going to be those individuals who are vulnerable are increasing their chances of these appalling,
debilitating conditions later on. Interestingly, the generation coming through I always forget the numbers, whether the XYZ or whatever, but the thirty year olds are actually getting on average twenty to thirty minutes small sleep every night than the forty and fifty year olds. It looks as though the generation coming through are not prepared to put the same old sure and actually indulging, you know, not indulging, but they're actually embracing sleep sensibly. Good on you, youngsters.
Yeah, good on you youngsters. Now, I did hear with you chatting with I forget his name, he's British MD. I think do you remember him anyway, It doesn't matter. It was a podcast. He was great, you were great anyway, So clearly he made an.
I never listened to them. It just whatever, I don't know. It just I feel cringe when I hear my own voice on the reader. So I the only when I did a Ted talk. It took me half about two weeks for I have the courage to watch this thing.
I'm with you. I'm with you. I've done about nine hundred and seventy of these and I have not listened to one whole episode. I've listened to bits, but have I sat and listened start finished to me and I haven't. Now I did re coil with a modicum of alarm when I heard you say people who take blood pressure medication and maybe something else need to take it out right. Not in the morning now, thanks to my mum and dad.
Shout out to Ron and Mary. Not because I drink or smoke, because I don't, or not because of any lifestyle behavior, but because of my genetics. I have to take blood pressure medication and forever I've been taking in the morning until tomorrow when I start or tonight. Well I can't take it tonight because they already taken Tell me about that. Why do people with was it just blood pressure or any other medication as well?
Well, it's other medications as well, so aspirin for example, your proton pump inhibitors, your startings, these will all have a time of day effect and it's called chronopharmacology. And it can't and it makes sense, you know, we have this dynamic biology. So no surprise. Different drugs have different
effects different times. Perhaps, you know. One of the early pioneers in this was Bill Hereski from the States, who was looking at anti cancer medications, and he showed that the same cocktail of chema therapy given at two different times resulted in over five years forty five percent survival from ovarian cancer in one group and ten percent ten percent survival in another group. So this is same drug, same concentration, different time, big effects. So cancer is a
really interesting one. Childhood leukemia, for example, an old study showed that late afternoon early evening was much more effective than morning therapy, you know, and I think the fact was something like four point six Those kids having their chemo in the morning were four point six times greater risk than those that have it in the late afternoon early evening. If you invented a drug that changed those odds in that way you're talking about your Nobel price,
you'd be off to Stockholm to get it. We can do that by timing, and so there's been over one hundred drugs with a shown time of day effect. Now, the anti hypertensis that you talk about, the data had a huge impact. So this study suggested that over. I think it was a twenty year period. Taking the drug before you went to bed rather than first thing in
the morning, halved your chances of a stroke or heart attack. Now, what's really important and what is uncontrab what is absolutely shown by every group that studied it, is that there's a fifty percent greater chance of having a stroke between six am and twelve noon, and that's associated with a sharp rise in blood pressure driven by the clock and then activity, you know, to get all those nutrients and
add oxygen to the tissues, but also plateleot stickiness. Blood stickiness is also at its peak at that time in the morning. So why taking a drug before you go to bed has it has a better effect than first thing in the morning when you know when it's the critical time? And of course it's called the pharmokinetics as it were, of the drug. Essentially the time you know you've taken it, the time it's got into the system, the time it's you know, become active, and it's half
life how long it hangs around other critical agents. Now, if you take it in the morning, you're already halfway through that risk zone of stroke, and the drug with the time it gets the full efficacy is actually going to be several hours after the peak of the danger zone. So the argument is you take it and before you go to bed. The drug has a long half life and therefore is around when it intersects with that dangerous
six am to twelve noon window. Now, I should say there's a study that's either just published or about to be published which suggests that that difference is not as as profound as the original study said. So I think it still makes sense if I were taking anti hypertensives, I take them before going to bed than first thing in the morning. One of the interesting ones is aspirin though,
because aspirin is very good at reducing the stickiness. It's a blood thinner and many people take it but it it lasts in the body for a relative short period of time. Only you know, peak concentration is just a few hours. So again, how can taking aspirin before you go to bed be effective in reducing that dangerous six am twelve noon window. Well, the really cool live information is that the platelets which are causing this stickiness are
made at night. When they encounter aspirin, their stickiness is eliminated, so that the drag is around when the new platelets are being made, so by next morning the blood is already less less sticky because the platelets have been effectively turned off. So there's lots of ways in which we're discovering that the timing of drugs is so important vaccination. I think this is a really interesting one. So for the flu vaccine, again, this is a twenty sixteen study.
It showed that morning vaccination in a group of sixty five to seventy year olds was three times more effective than afternoon vaccination in generating an antibody response. And that's for the flu. People are looking at COVID now there's been a few studies. They're not randomized control trials, so it's a bit messy, so we don't really know what's
going on with COVID. But there's a whole range of studies, you know, showing that our immune system is turn up during the day, and then towards the late afternoon, early evening it gets turned down and it is lower at night. And again that makes sense. It's turned up when we're encountering other encountering other people and most likely to encounter bugs. It's turned down when we're less likely to encounter people
and bugs. So you could say, well, why isn't the immune system turned on at full throttle all the time. The problem, of course is autoimmune diseases, so it's probably we don't know the answer, but it's probably showing the circadian timing because it's turned up when it's needed and it's turned down when it's not needed quite so much to avoid the problems of autoimmune responses.
Wow, I've never even i mean other than when they say take you know, take an anti in flame twice a day with food or something right, which is you know, indicative of when to take it. But that am versus PM versus afternoon. I've never even have you considered that, Melissa, not once? No, it's amazing, and like, that's excuse my language, that's fucking profound. Why is everybody not shouting this from the rooftops.
Well, I think that's the really interesting issue. I mean, it's we've we in some cases we need more studies, but in other cases, and I've talked to my friends about this and they say, look, our healthcare services are running as fast as we can to stay where we are. You know, it's the whole red Queen thing. If you then impose an additional layer of complexity on our treatment regimes, which is time. Then we're going to be completely We just don't have the bandwidth, the capacity to deal with it.
And so I spoke to a young trainee medic. I said, okay, you know, we did a three week intensive module and at the end of it we did the debrief and I said, you know, okay, so you guys, you know you've seen the data. Are you signed up to this? Do you think it's important? And they everybody said yes. I said, well, how are we going to introduce it? You know, for the reason that we said the state healthcare systems overwhelmed it's just too much. And this kid
said to me, well, it's obvious. You introduce it in the private healthcare sector, you show its efficacy and that provides the database which will then force the state health systems to take attempt to pay attention to this. So a very pragmatic view, I'm not sure. I mean, I think what we need is education throughout the sector, but both from the patients talking to their doctors and saying, well what time of day should I take this medication? And that will also encourage the doctors to try and
make the time to be aware of this stuff. Part of the problem, of course, is that, as we've touched on, in a five year training a medic may only have two three lectures on sleeping clocks. And so that's why we've adopted within the Sleep in Cicadian Neuroscience Institute here in Oxford, the first, you know, fully online master's degree
in Sleep Medicine. We've got a lot of people in Australia taking it, They're taking it all over the world where healthcare professionals can become aware of this data, the importance of sleep, how to achieve better sleep, what sleeps about, what are Cicadian rims about, and then use this science to advise individuals and deliver better medications.
So when some it comes out and they've got their degree, their master's in sleep health, what are they? Are they a sleep health expert?
What will I guess? Yeah, I guess you could. We haven't been thinking of it in that way. Essentially, we've just tried to sort of compensate for the lack of education in this space. And the people that are signing up to this course are saying, well, cracky, that's making I am now better as a healthcare professional because I know this stuff, and so that's the being the logic,
and I think that's the motivation for most people. I'm not I'm not aware of people setting up after this master's degree a sort of sleep advisors other than within their sort of normal day job. And I think that's that's the exciting thing for us, us because it's providing that the framework for this this education that is lacking across most most medical education programs. It's just one last thing.
It's worth bearing in mind that our drug test so quite rightly, we test our drugs first of all on mice, you know, to make sure that there's nothing really bad going on, and then we go to humans. But of course mice are night active animals and we are day active animals, and so our time biology is completely different.
And there was a study done fairly recently showing that you know, people had gone in research has gone in in the morning given an anti stroke medication to mice who had an induced stroke, and this was given first thing in the morning, and it really improved the outcomes of that induced stroke. So they then took it to humans and they went in gave it to humans first thing in the morning and it had no effect at all.
And so if you think about it, the mice were a beginning of their sleep phase, humans were beginning of their active phase, went back, gave it to mice in the beginning of their active phase. It didn't work. So there's a an argument that we may have sitting on the shelves around the world some incredibly powerful drugs for health which when they were initially screened in mice, were done at the wrong time, and therefore we've missed some
incredible opportunities. There's an argument that, you know, we should go back and test these drugs, retest these drugs at different times and see if there's an important time of day effect.
Oh wow, right. The last question is courtesy of my mother. She's eighty three. Her name's Mary Harper. Mary asks, oh, how I professor, She says. My mum used to say to me, I don't know if this is bullshit, so I need I need. It's bullshit, it's true or it's kind of true. The sleep that we get before midnight is like like an hour before midnight is worth two hours after midnight or something like that, like the sleeper is more valuable or something. Is that bullshit.
I can't answer that, but what I can say is that there may be a basis for it, because, as you know, sleep is divided up into these deep sleep, slow wave sleep, and then sleep, and we have a series of these cycles depending on seventy to ninety minutes throughout the night. Now we have more deeper slow wave sleep during the first half of the night compared to the second half of the night. And it's been argued that deeper sleep is associated with memory consolidation and the
processing of information. So it may not be completely daft, and there is you can think about it having some some relevance. I mean, but the studies haven't really been done right, all right.
Well you're a gun. That's a good thing. You're a gun. The name of the Proft's book is called a Lifetime's written a bunch of Have you written a bunch of books, now, haven't you?
I have? Yes. But this is the first sole author one and the first one which is truly I think, accessible for everybody.
So this is a user friendly book. This is not your academic tomb that's going to blow your head off. It's called Lifetime. Your body clock and its essential roles in good health and sleep, Professor Russell Foster. Where else do you want to steer people, sir, Anything any website, any social media platform, or any anything that you want to point our audience towards.
I mean, clearly, what I'd like to do is read Lifetime and really come away with the fact that there's a lot of really good science that they can use to improve their individual health and happiness. You know, as I sort of say at the end of the book, the stupid and the wise will die. In the end Circadian wise, you know, on average, will live live better, live longer, be healthier, and actually enjoy the company of others and the world and all the opportunities the world
has to offer. So I just think I want people to embrace this area of science and not get frightened of it, and to use it to their best advantage.
Was it liberating? Last question or promise? Was it liberating writing without having to be so bloody particular about referencing everything and bit like, just to be able to tell stories and speak from your own experience and observation. Was it liberating?
Well, there's two parts to that, Craig, Because in fact, every bit of science is referenced, and what was interesting is that Penguin didn't kick back on the fact that there are nine hundred and twenty one references. So the key thing for me was that people could look up the science for themselves, but the text itself was accessible, and as soon as I began to feel comfortable writing in a different way, then it was great. It was
a bit liberating. But for me, it's okay being accessible, but the science has got to be as rigorous as possible, and as I say, all of those scientific facts are referenced within the book.
I'd expect nothing less. We will say goodbye to you officially off air, but for the moment, thanks so much. You're bloody brilliant. We think you're asin Thanks for being part of the You project for an hour.
Well thanks Craig and Melissa. I really enjoyed it.
Thank you sir, Thank you Melissa, Thank you everyone.