March 26, 2014 • 44 mins
What is the future of sleep? Sleep is an important biological function - but could we engineer a way to eliminate it?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking
the podcast and the looks at the future, and says, hey,
Mr Sayman, bring me a dream. I'm Jonathan Strickling and
(00:20):
I'm Joe McCormick. And Lauren is not asleep. She's actually
feeling under the weather, so she's not here. She might
be asleep. I mean, if she's feeling under the weather,
I hope she's asleep. She just emailed me, so I mean,
she could be a sleep emailer. But this is kind
of leading into the fact that we're going to talk
about the future of sleep, so it was actually on
topic for once. I'm hoping that in the future we
(00:45):
can just phase out sleep entirely. It's just a waste
of time. I'm one of those people who, I mean,
like I I enjoy getting rest when I've been working
hard and I'm very tired, but you know, it would
be great to just have more time in the day. Well,
you know, there there are I've seen people say that
if you were able to adopt a an ideal sleeping
(01:07):
schedule as an ideals in this is the least amount
of time that you could theoretically spend sleeping that you
would essentially have the equivalent waking hours to get eleven
more years of life if you started in your early twenties. Yeah.
I wonder if that's one of those things being propagated
by these weird sleep pattern enthusiasts on the internet. Yeah,
(01:29):
we'll get to that and talk about what those weird
sleep patterns are and uh, the implications of them. Yeah. Well, okay,
so if we're going to talk about the future of
sleep hacking sleep, how sleep patterns can change over time,
first we should talk about sleep itself, because it's kind
of a weird and mysterious topic in science, and in fact,
(01:50):
there's still a lot we do not know about the
sleep cycle that weird. It is weird to think that
this is something that we all do. You know, we
all do it regularly, whether or not you get good
sleep or not, you still, I assume are going to
sleep or I don't know how you're listening to this podcast.
(02:10):
Um So from a survival perspective, it first seems kind
of weird because I mean, I can't imagine how it
would confer an evolutionary advantage to lay down and expose
yourself to predators for eight hours or however long. Well,
let's let's think about this for a second. So there
(02:31):
are a lot of different theories about what happens when
we're asleep, and we'll get into those. But one thing
I might suggest as a reason why we need to
have this this time to sleep is just purely and
this this is just a hypothesis here. There's no necessarily
science to back this up, but purely from an energy perspective, right,
it requires energy for us to be awake. We're active,
(02:54):
we we consume energy. That's why we have to eat
throughout the day in order to maintain that level of energy,
or else we are no longer capable of being active
and alert. If we were active and alert all the time,
we would require to eat more frequently. And because we're
not evolved to be able to do something like, I
(03:14):
don't know, navigate pitch black darkness without falling over ourselves
and hurting ourselves, uh being able to gather food or
hunt food at night, we we can't. It's harder for
us to do that. So it may be that it's
evolutionary beneficial for us to go ahead and well shut
down during the time of day when we can't really
(03:34):
be effective. It's just cut your losses. It's a calculated
risk to say, like, you're not going to be doing
much useful at night anyway, and you're gonna be burning
all these calories. That's the hypothesis. And keep in mind
that when we're talking about evolution, evolution happens over the
course of hundreds of thousands of years, right, because you
(03:55):
could argue, well, today we've got artificial lights. You know,
the difference between night and day is not as great.
But it's not like we could evolve past what we
have already established in the relatively short amount of time.
Like if you're looking on a geological scale, it's a
blink of an eye since we've had any kind of
artificial light source. Uh. Well, we we can't evolve that
(04:19):
fast as a whole species. But it might be interesting
that some certain individuals of the human race have a
certain mutation that helps them in this environment where we
have artificial light and can do things useful at night.
But first, and we'll talk about that later. Also, Uh, first,
let's back up and talk about other animals. Do do
all animals sleep? No? No, mammals, birds, and reptiles sleep
(04:43):
all right, So they're the higher vertebrates. You can think
of it that way. So when you're looking at the
animal king too, the higher vertebrates all sleep like more
complex brains. Yeah, yeah, that would be part of it.
More complex nervous systems would probably be a better way
of putting it. But yes, uh, if you look at
fish and amphibians, most of those have some means of
(05:04):
shutting down some of their awareness, but there's still not asleep.
They're still awake, but they're kind of it's like they
go to impulse power instead of warp speed, right, So
they're able to power down a little bit and and recuperate,
but they don't go to sleep. Sleep insects may not
sleep at all, but they just have periods of activity
(05:25):
versus inactivity, whether it's day or night or whatever. It
depends on the insect, but they don't go to sleep.
The other thing that's interesting this related to this is dreaming,
and we'll talk a lot about dreaming in this episode
as well. But reptiles do not dream, they don't, birds
dream a little bit, and all mammals dream. And this
is based off of various scientific studies where the scientists
(05:48):
were monitoring brainwave activity during sleep cycles for these various
types of animals. So the next time you see like
an alligator and you're wondering, what's that alligator dreaming of
the answer is nothing at all, because alligators don't dream. Wow,
not even delicious raw chicken. Nope, Nope, they just they
to them. The world just goes away for a while
(06:09):
and then it comes back. Uh so yeah, so you
know that that's the basics. But then we get into
some other you know, this raises some other questions, like,
all right, so these larger, the more developed vertebrates all
all sleep and and most of them dream to some
extent um. Why is this happening? Why why do your
(06:32):
bidies even need to sleep in the first place? Um?
Do we grow while we sleep? Well, as when we're children,
we do. Yeah, because when your kid and you are sleeping,
your body releases growth hormone, and so it's very important
in those phases. It doesn't release during your wake cycle,
So when you're awake, you know, this growth hormone doesn't
(06:54):
get secreted, but when you go to sleep it does.
Also very important for immune system. If you were to
suffer sleep deprivation, for long enough, your immune system would
start to really suffer. As a result, you end up
kind of secreting again these chemicals in your body that
help maintain your immune system. So sleep is very important
(07:16):
there too. Um And you know, also there are other
hypotheses out there that are again are are There may
be a lot of truth to them, there may be
very little truth, and maybe that all of them are true,
but things like that's when our body repairs itself. So
if you were to suffer injury, then when you're sleeping,
your body can really get onto the job of fixing
(07:37):
tissue and getting you know, shedding dead cells, that kind
of stuff. I know, there are a lot of different
hypotheses about what's going on in the brain during sleep,
like or they're sort of necessary internal brain maintenance tasks
that has been only when you're asleep. That's a big one,
the idea that you know, there are a lot of
different theories about what's going on when you're dreaming, and
(07:59):
that whether or not dreaming is part of your brain
trying to make sense of the information that you've gathered
since you were last asleep. So it's kind of like
you know, the filing of at the end of the
day sort of that kind of thing, or that it's
just kind of getting rid of nonsense information. There are
a lot of different hypotheses out there, but there are
some things we can definitively point at. One is that
(08:21):
when you go to sleep, your breathing rate slows down,
your heart rate slows down, uh, and your brain begins
to generate different types of brain waves. So these waves,
you know, they have oscillation frequencies, right, are electrically measurable. Yeah,
if you put if you put in a uh, you know,
you put sensors on the on the skull and you're
(08:41):
reading those brain waves just like you've probably seen in
some television shows or movies. You could actually monitor the
brain activity and normal wakeful activity. You have alpha waves
that are generated when you're kind of you know, in
a relaxed, chilled out state. Beta way waves are generated
when you're really alert. So those are the two that
(09:03):
are the most frequent in your in your wakeful moments.
When you go to sleep, you start to generate uh,
different brain waves, the delta waves and the theta waves. Um.
So these are slower, they have slower or lower frequencies,
I should say, And the slower pattern kind of indicates
(09:24):
how deep asleep you're in, and the slower the pattern,
the deeper the sleep. So it's harder to wake someone
up when they're having uh delta wave activity. And these
are variable based on your sort of your sleep cycle,
right that you go through different stages of sleep exactly. Yeah,
it's it's your activity does change. There are times when
the activity starts to spike, like an r e M
(09:46):
sleep that's rabbid eye movement sleep. This is when we're
talking about dreaming. So if you've ever been awakened while
you were in R e M sleep, then you probably
have at least some recollection of what your dream was.
It's a lot harder to member for most people what
they dreamed or didn't dream if they wake up and
non r E M sleep, it's just because the activity
(10:08):
is removed from when they actually wake up. Um. And
most people have between three to five sessions of R
E M sleep per night, tends to be about a
quarter of a typical good night's sleep. So you get
about R E M sleep and non r E M sleep.
(10:28):
You know it's again this also appears to be pretty important.
It's one of those things that if you don't get
that r E M sleep, that's considered like you can
start suffering sleep deprivation. So you could, you know, catch
little naps here and there. But if you're not getting
r EM sleep, you're not getting that RESTful sleep. You
don't you don't feel rested. That's the hard stuff. Yeah,
(10:48):
it's it's what's really good. It's the stuff when you
when you wake up after a really good night's sleep
and you feel refreshed, it's because you had that R
E M sleep. So it's not just because you were
inactive and RESTful, it's because this has been going on. Okay,
so this is really useful. What happens to the body
when we don't get enough sleep? And I can speak
from experience on this one. Yeah, it's uh, it's no fun.
(11:10):
I went through a lot of years in my life
when I was not getting a whole lot of sleep. Um,
it's more recent in my life that I've started getting
better sleep. Yeah. Yeah, I just in you know, college,
grad school. I don't know why. I was just one
of those people. So how many all nighters have you done? Oh? Uncountable? Yeah,
(11:31):
I I've only done a few. I am one of
those people who I realize what my severe limitations are
if I don't have enough sleep, because they affect me. Really,
I mean, it's just it's obvious if I haven't had
enough sleep. Have you ever had hallucinations? I have, I
have to have not not. These aren't like lucid crazy
(11:51):
hallucinations like I'm seeing a monster climbing out of the floor.
It's more like I remember things like after going like
you know, days in a row with almost no real
sleep of any kind, seeing feeling like I had seen
something move in my peripheral vision and I turned to
look and there'd be nothing there for me. It was
(12:11):
a point where I could no longer read text because
it would look like it was melting to me. Um. Yeah,
I got to a point where I would try and
read something and then I would start to nod off immediately. Um.
I've also I've also got into the point where I
started talking without realizing what I was saying. Yeah, there's
a great story about a friend of mine driving me
home from the airport after a trip where I got
(12:33):
no sleep. Really, and apparently I had some entertaining, absurd,
surreal things to say. I had no connection to anything
connected to reality at all, and that was because I
had sleep deprivation. So I mean, if you're talking about
going like a like a day without sleep or a
day without enough sleep, you're talking about things like maybe
(12:55):
not being able to focus as as much upon a
task as you normally would are. It's pretty standard for
people to report after just one bad night's sleep that
they lose focus and they have decreased competence at standard tasks,
right or that, And also that things irritate them a
little more easily than it might otherwise, that that their
(13:17):
their thresholds for being irritated as lower. Um And but
there are some serious effects that can happen, Like those
hallucinations are pretty bad, but I mean there's some even
worse effects that can happen. You can actually die from
lack of sleep. In fact, you know, this is one
of those wonderful tests that sciences has shown us, which uh,
you know, it's it's one of the things that it's
(13:38):
important to know. It's upsetting to think of the actual circumstances.
But scientists would keep rats awake and watch to see
what happened with the rats um and the you know,
it got to a point where rats that had been
forced to stay awake for several days in a row
would begin to die and uh, you know, like we said,
(14:00):
like they're going to sleep that has what means of
helping regulate your immune system. So there are definite health
risks to not getting enough sleep. Uh yeah, And it's
a pretty widespread phenomenon that people don't get enough sleep
in the United States, at least the CDC that they
(14:20):
estimated that forty point six million American workers, which is
about thirty percent of all the people on the job,
are sleep deprived. That's terrible. Yeah, yeah, I see, here's
talking about a Singapore management university said that workers were
wasting time, more time than uh than your average worker
(14:43):
if they got less sleep. Yeah. This is from a
from a Wall Street General report on sleep deprivation. It's
a huge problem, and it's estimated to account for billions
of dollars of lost productivity in the American workforce. So
just I mean just written zoning out, you know, people
not being as efficient at tasks that they do every day,
(15:06):
right right, having to redo something perhaps, or or just
taking extra time to be able to do something that
normally you'd be able to accomplish in half the time whatever,
Like there are measurable effects, right, So getting sleep is
important to you. It's important for your health, it's important
for just being the kind of person you want to be. Um.
(15:26):
But it's also important on a large scale in in
your society, Like it's important if you are a government,
you actually you want to make sure people are getting
enough sleep because it has large scale implications. That's that's
definitely true. So one of the things I saw that
you wanted to talk about was the kinds of sleep
patterns we see in nature. Yeah. Um, keeping all the
(15:48):
things that we just talked about in mind that sleep
deprivation is a really serious problem with serious health effects
and serious effects to productivity and and all those kinds
of things. It's still would be great if we could
maybe get more time, if we could find a way
to sleep less totally still healthy. That you're just as healthy,
(16:11):
just as happy, with no negative effects to your to
your body, your brain, and your and your quality of life. Um.
And so the first thing I wondered about is, well,
is the way we sleep now, the way most Westerners
sleep now, So one long chunk of sleep at night
that is supposed to be around eight hours or so
(16:34):
is that normal? Is that normal to the species? So?
Yes and no. So first of all, there there are
two main types of sleep patterns that you find in
the animal world. Monophasic, which is this idea of having
a big, one chunk. Yeah, and then there's polyphasic, which
is where you divide this up over multiple like sleep
(16:55):
sessions throughout a particular cycle. Yeah. And a lot of
these polyphasic that's actually going to be by phasic, meaning
you sleep twice. Yeah. By phasic, you would, you could argue,
is sort of outside of polyphasic polyphasic. I think of
as a what my dog does, right right. I am
a fairly recent dog owner, and I've been noticing these
these dog behavior patterns. My new puppy will sleep for
(17:20):
an hour and then get up and come look at
me and wag is sweet little tail, and then go
lie down and sleep for another hour and repeat. You know. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's very typical with canines. And then you have
other animals you have like cats that will sleep for
hours and hours and hours and then they'll be active. Um.
So those that's the difference between monophasic and polyphasic. And
(17:41):
then you can have depending upon the type of animal.
If it's you know, nocturnal, then it's sleeping during the day.
It may have a it may be monophasic, but it's
sleep session is in the daytime, not in the nighttime. Yeah,
I've um heard examples of people saying that in history
people didn't necessarily always sleep just one chunk. Well, yeah,
(18:02):
by PHAs is something that is fairly common, and it's
still common in some parts of the world. By phasic
is this idea to Italy and they close all the
shops Spain as well. Spain is also does this Yeah, um, yeah, no,
it's the the whole siesta idea. So by phasic means
that you're dividing up your sleep into two sessions, but
(18:23):
they're not equal, right, You've got one longer session, which
is the one at night. Tends to be between five
and seven hours for most of the these these implementations.
Sometimes it could be you know, five to eight hours
something like that, and then you take a second session
of sleep around the sixth hour of your day whenever
that day starts. Your day is dependent upon when you
(18:43):
wake up then when you get up, so it's not
like it's always going to be at this X hour,
it's gonna be six hours after you've awakened, and then
you take another sleep that could be anywhere from a
half hour to an hour and a half long nap,
and then you're awake and alert for the rest of
the day. And in fact, great apes tend to be
(19:03):
by phasic, so humans tend to be by phasic. But
most of us work in the Western world, are working
in environments where taking a nap in the middle of
a day is discouraged, not not something you can typically do.
And if you think about humans, are not when we're
when we're babies, we're polyphasic. We're we're we're not, you know, uh,
(19:27):
monophasic or by phasic. When we're babies were polyphasic, but
we gradually kind of move into a by phasic phase.
That's where you have the kid who will sleep through
the night but also take a nap in the afternoon. Uh.
And then eventually society pressures us into being monophasic, even
though all of us know that are on two pm.
It would be awesome if we could just lay down
and go to sleep and no one judged us, or
(19:48):
at least by all of us, I mean me so
um so naturally speaking, but for most people, keeping in
mind that this is you know, this is a blanket statement,
and there are all aways exceptions to rules. Most people
would do best with monophasic or biphasic sleep on their own.
But that doesn't mean that people haven't tried two come
(20:11):
up with some alternatives. Yeah, so I want to transition
to talking about hacking sleep. Can we do it? Can
you give yourself more waking hours without hurting your level
of energy when you are awake, or your alertness, or
your competence at tasks or your health. Can you can
you get just as good a quality of life with
(20:33):
less time in bed? Well, there's some famous historical figures
who have been um the the the idea of getting
very little sleep or or this whole polyphasic approach where
you're taking naps throughout the day, uh, seems to have
been attributed to them, but most of them are the
(20:53):
questionable questionable. Yeah, the Leonardo da Vinci is a big
that's the big example. So he's the one everybody talks about.
He's a you know, great Italian polly, math of the Renaissance,
um painter, inventor of everything, basically at least on paper, right,
I didn't necessarily build everything, but he sure did invent
(21:14):
a lot of stuff. Yeah, but he is famous for
supposedly taking advantage of polyphasic sleep, so he would take
a number of naps throughout the day instead of one
long chunk, and it would total to much less time
than the average person spent sleeping in their in their
chunks at night. Um. But that he would function perfectly
(21:36):
well with this. I have had a hard time confirming this,
and I'm very suspicious that it's an urban legend. I'm
pretty sure it is. Uh. The the next one you
have on our list is actually a little bit more
of a credible, uh example in a way. Yeah, so
Buckminster Fuller Bucky tell us about him, Jonathan Well, Bucky
(21:59):
was supposedly getting by on just taking half hour naps.
According to Dr Wozniac. Dr Piotr Wozniak, who's a biologist
who has written extensively on the subjects of polyphasic sleep
and and monophasic sleep by phasic sleep as well, UM
suggest that perhaps this was a reputation that was not
(22:20):
fully accurate, that it was more that Fuller would take
naps whenever he could, but would also grab like a
decent six hours sleep whenever the opportunity arose. It's just
that sometimes the schedule would not allow it. I guess
it's hard to prove something like this. Yeah, So beyond
Da Vinci and Bucky, we have a few other names
(22:41):
that are sometimes associated with this idea of polyphasic sleep,
and they are there's some pretty pretty impressive names. If
only there were evidence to support the fact that they
were actually polyphasic sleepers. Uh, Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla.
So the rivals of the Sleep Wars right after the
the current Wars, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
(23:06):
have all been listed as being polyphasic sleepers, even though
there's not really evidence to support that now. Thomas Jefferson
was the first one I heard, because I actually had
a friend in high school who was enthusiastic about the
idea of you know what's commonly called on the internet
sometimes the ubermench sleep schedule. Uh, this idea that oh, well,
(23:28):
you know, it's only because we're we're just not evolved
enough that we are still sticking to this old kind
of sleep. If you're really with it. If you know
what's up, you'll take four fifteen minute naps a day,
or more like half hours. It's more like six half
hour because it's he's usually it'll it adds up to
three hours sleep for twenty four hour period. Well, they're
(23:51):
there are different, uh incarnations are There are a lot
of different versions of this. But I had a friend
in high school who I remember talking about this. I
obviously I don't know if he actually did it. He
was at least interested in the idea for a while,
and I remember him talking about trying to do it,
but he stopped talking about it after a while, which
(24:12):
makes me wonder if it didn't work, As I think
in a lot of cases, these people who talk about
it end up stopping talking about it because there doesn't work.
There's yeah, I'll tell I'll talk more about that in
a second too. I've got a friend, his name is
Eric Sandean. I'm calling him out only because we talked
about this on a a different podcast that I do occasionally.
(24:32):
A friend of mine who decided he wanted to try
this polyphasic sleep thing. And when he told me about it,
I said, Eric, you are a crazy person. But he
was determined to try it, and I think he might
have attempted it for a day before deciding that that
is probably not the best way of doing this. Well,
I don't want to make it sound too crazy or anything.
I mean, like my friend in high school who tried this,
(24:53):
and he was a smart, capable guy. And a lot
of the people you see talking about showing enthusiasm at
least for this plan online, they don't seem like complete nuts.
But I'm I'm skeptical that it would actually work. Let
me explain what's what's supposed to happen here. According to
polyphasic sleep, the idea is that you can get three
(25:14):
hours total sleep per twenty four hour period and have
the rest of the time dedicated to waking hours where
you can actually do whatever you want video games for
five hours, or you know, or you're inventing curing cancer
for five hours. Although people who try polyphasic sleep appear
to have difficulty uh concentrating on any effort that requires
(25:34):
learning or have yeah, like like they can do certain
things really well, but anything that requires lots of mental processes,
particularly learning learning new information, becomes really difficult. But the
idea is that you you split up your polyphasic sleep.
You've got these short snap sessions. They're spread throughout the day,
(25:55):
so you get you get six breaks essentially, so and
those six breaks you sleep half an hour each. And
this is one implementation of this approach. Um. And the
idea is that at first your body and your brain
are like, what is going on? I can't you know?
I need to go into R E M sleep so
that you don't go crazy, and you don't your health
(26:16):
doesn't fall apart. So you train your brain. Yeah. The
idea is that after you get through the initial resistance
of your brain saying this is wrong, you should go
to sleep now. Um that after a couple of days,
your brain says, fine, if you're gonna be this way,
then I'll go ahead and go into R M sleep
as soon as you go to sleep. Well, here's the deal.
(26:36):
When you when you suffer sleep deprivation for a long time,
it is true that you will go into R E
M sleep faster when you do go to sleep. Then
you would if you were getting regular night's sleep all
that time. So Joe, if you if you went and
you were having eight hours sleep for like three weeks,
you go into R M sleep eventually after you fall asleep,
(26:57):
you would get there. But if you stayed up for
three days and then you went to sleep, you would
hit r M sleep earlier than you would have been
during that nice long stretch of of plenty of sleep
each night. So the idea is that if you were
able to engineer this and plan it out so that
you have this half hour break, you would go into
ari M sleep nearly instantly as soon as you drift off,
(27:20):
and that that would be enough for it to sustain
you for the next several hours until you had your
next break, which would then sustain you until the next break, etcetera, etcetera. Uh,
here's the thing. Um. The experts I was looking at,
including Dr Piotr Wozniak, suggest that this is a terrible idea,
that that it is uh not likely to work. That
(27:42):
you know, while the basics are kind of sort of
based on truth, they're not themselves true. That being able
to go right into ari M sleep does not necessarily
mean you're getting all the benefits you would with sleep,
including and probably most importantly, that immune system boost that
you need. If we don't know everything about sleep yet,
which we certainly don't, it seems premature to assume that
(28:05):
if you're just getting that that one of those four
stages of sleep, that's going to be fine, right, And
we don't if we don't know exactly what all those
other stages do. Yeah, he he looked into it quite
a bit. He actually even conducted interviews with people. He
said that in every case he was looking at, people
who adopted this approach gave up on it after a
(28:25):
short while because it just because their health was failing.
They were not they were not feeling great. Some of
them were having difficulty being able to concentrate on tasks
for very long. Uh. He says. You know, there are
plenty of YouTube videos out there where if you watch
the people who are talking about you're just thinking, man,
this person needs a good night's sleep. I mean, it's
just it's there. It looks rough. And he also talked
(28:47):
about how a lot of them would end up coming
down with colds or the flu because their immune systems
were compromised. They couldn't fight off these diseases that otherwise,
if they had had healthy sleep, they may have been
able to. You know, you can't necessarily say there's a
direct role there, but there's enough of a correlation to
make you you know, concerned and according to his studies,
(29:09):
and you know, he's written a couple of different articles
that are available online that are really helpful and go
into this in detail. Um, it's just that you know,
people are generally monophasic or by phasic. Um that you know,
we tend to to work best under that. And in fact,
a lot of the names we mentioned, like uh, like Edison,
(29:29):
are really bi phasic and not polyphasic. That they would get,
you know, a few hours sleep at night if you
being like between five and seven, and then they would
take they would rest in the afternoon. Um and uh.
And so most of those names, that's exactly what we
from those that we know what their sleep patterns were like,
that's what they did. So it wasn't so much this
(29:51):
whole you know, take a nap and then work for
hours and then take a nap. It was more get
a night's sleep and then take a nap in the afternoon,
which again just like to point out again I think
we should all be doing. And if they would just
put cuts into the office, I would be happy to
do it. I'd have no trouble sleeping in my chair.
(30:12):
If that just didn't annoy everyone and make me look unprofessional. Yeah, so,
I mean trying to hack your sleep this way is
probably not a great idea. Okay, well, let's transition to
another solution. Okay, is it possible that drugs could give
us more hours in the day without harming our health? Well,
(30:32):
i'd say until you said that second part. Yeah, so
the first part is definitely true. Yes, you can use
drugs to stay awake longer, um, and lots of people do.
In fact, lots of us use caffeine to do this. Yeah,
I recently gave it up, but yes, I was heavily
dependent upon it until recently. Good on you, because it
(30:53):
turns out so some of the most familiar stimulants you'll
know about, like caffeine, amphetamines, they're actually you pretty effective
at giving you the ability to stay awake. What's happen
to wake you up? It's it's releasing neurotransmitters that either
they either promote wakefulness or they inhibit the neurotransmitters that
(31:13):
would uh, that would cause you to be sleepy. So
in some cases, it's you know, just pricking you up
by by adding a boost to the chemicals in your
brain that keep you awake, and in some it's just
keeping the ones that would put you to sleep at may. Yeah,
definitely does not make health sense at all to rely
on amphetamines. That's not going to get you anywhere. And uh,
(31:36):
and it really does help to not rely too much
on caffeine either. Yeah. In fact, I was reading recently
about how caffeine has been linked not not a not
a proven correlation here or you know, not a causation thing,
but has been linked two increases in things like cardiovascular diseases,
and that uh that you know, limiting caffeine is good,
(32:00):
like if you you can have some caffeine. In fact,
there's some health benefits to a little caffeine in your diet,
but you don't tend to want to consume too much
of it after say two PM or so, because it
can actually interfere with your sleep cycles even so much
that you know, let's say that you have some caffeine
six hours before you go to sleep, and you think
(32:21):
you've got a great night's sleep. Sleep studies have shown
that people who had caffeine as late as that, like,
within that six hour time frame, we're still having interrupted
sleep cycles. And that it was. You know that, that's
how how far caffeine can stretch, its effects can stretch.
So just one of those things that you know, if
you can, if you can kind of uh have a
(32:43):
if you really rely on caffeine, if you can have
your main caffeine boost and not I'm not talking about
going crazy and getting like a forty eight ounce coffee
at a coffee shop, but I have your main caffeine
boost in the morning to get you going in awake
and then to sort of wean yourself off as the
day goes on. So you might switch to a lower
caffine to drink a little bit later in the day,
(33:04):
and then by the time you get around two o'clock,
you're you're cutting out the caffeine for the rest of
the day. That seems to be a pretty good plan
for being able to get a good night's sleep without
being h have without having caffeine's effects interrupted. Yeah, and
then there of course uh less familiar drugs that might
actually be better than your old school uh stimulants. One
(33:29):
of them that's gotten a lot of talk is the
drug modaffanel, which I've heard has fewer side effects than
a lot of these other ones do. Yeah. And of
course we are not here advocating that you take drugs,
so we're just talking about this in theory. Um, you
can find people online who are hyping this drug and saying, oh,
I you know, I'm getting so much work done and
(33:51):
I don't have on all these bad side effects. I
again really want to stress do not use drugs for
awfully will use. I mean, people should speak to their
doctors about whatever drugs they're going to use and be
honest about the reason for which they want to use them.
And I think, you know, if you're using it so
that you don't have you don't lose so much time sleeping,
(34:12):
that's going to catch up to you eventually anyway, for
these other reasons that we've listed in this in this episode. Uh.
And then we've got something here called short sleepers. So
is this for people who are four foot tall or less? No,
this is actually the fact that some people really do
require less sleep. Oh, so this is an idea of like,
(34:32):
there are some people out there who who eight hours
would be too much sleep for them. They might just
need four or five. Yeah. I've seen different estimates for
how common this is in the general population. I've seen
estimates as small as um one in a thousand people,
up to one percent of the population, or even up
to five percent of the population. So I don't really
(34:55):
know how common this is, um but it does seem
that it actually this. There are some people, and they're
very rare, but they can get by on less than
six hours of sleep at night without any trouble. This
doesn't give them negative health effects. They don't lose any
of their competency. It's just how they are. It doesn't
(35:15):
seem to be that you can train your body for this.
It appears to be a genetic condition. Um So. One
study I want to talk about though, that's really interesting
and how this might bear on the future of reducing
our need for sleep. It's a study led by Dr
Ying Huifu of the University of California, San Francisco, and
(35:35):
she was part of a team that discovered a gene
variant that regulates the length of sleep. Um So. Food's
team discovered that there's this particular mutation in a gene
called h d e C two. Yeah, that's one of
your favorites. But so this gene variant, this mutation was
(35:59):
correlated with human subjects who averaged about six point to
five hours of sleep every night, while relatives of those
subjects who did not carry the mutation slept more than
eight hours um. And it's important to note that this
mutation may not be present in all or even most
short sleepers. It was just correlated in this particular instance,
(36:20):
and so there may be tons of other genes that
create short sleepers. Yeah, we've talked in the past about
how complicated genetics are, like it's it's you know, saying
that this one gene is responsible for this one and
only one thing is being overly simplistic in most cases, right.
But then what Dr Fust team discovered that was very
interesting was when they started studying transgenic mice. So mice
(36:45):
have an equivalent gene to the human gene I was
talking about. Instead of h D e C two, it's
m d e C two. I don't know, but I
would hazard to guess. Um. So, when the mice were
given a substitute h D e C two gene in
place of that, with the same mutation that these two
test subjects had who were short sleepers, the mice stayed
(37:08):
awake longer than normal mice. Well, to be fair, they
may have been wondering why they kept getting injected with
human genes. That might have been and they might have.
You think I'd lose a lot of sleep if you're
injecting me with mice genes. I definitely like what is
going on? But well you would just you would be
kept awake eating cheese all night. I'm okay with that, Okay,
(37:28):
all right? Uh So, the cool thing about this is
that it's possible that what we learned about short sleepers
actually could help somebody else become like them. Obviously that's
not knowledge that's available to us today, but this kind
of experiment with the mice shows, oh, you know, it
might be possible to to introduce genes like this, or
(37:50):
to at least learn enough about how genes regulate human
sleeping patterns that we could make changes that would allow
people to have more free time with no adverse health effects.
Um And in fact, Dr Feu of this study that
I was talking about, she was quoted in a Wall
Street Journal article where she was saying, my long term
goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate
(38:12):
the sleep pathways without damaging our health. Yeah, that's uh,
I mean, it would be really interesting to see that
come to pass. Because again, like we've been telling you
this whole time, I mean, I understand people who want
to be able to do more stuff. I mean, I
certainly feel by the time I go to bed at
the end of the day that I didn't accomplish nearly
as much as I had hoped, just because there's too
(38:35):
much to do and not enough time to do it.
In So, the idea of being able to shave off
a few hours from this activity that I need to
do in order for me not to you know, have
my immune system breakdown or or suffer mental effects, to
be able to control that a little bit more is
it's certainly attractive. I love the idea of it, um,
(38:55):
you know I, and I like the idea of going
about it in a scientific manner that it uh is
not likely to lead to me feeling worse than I
did when I, you know, I started off. But uh,
you know, I'm curious, would you are you still of
the mindset where man, I I wish I could get
rid of some of the sleep. Oh, I mean, certainly,
(39:16):
if if I could do it without negative health effects,
If I if I could that that's the whole thing.
I mean, a lot of these things are like, oh,
here's a trick, but then we have a lot of
doubts like oh, well, yes, you can use drugs to
stay up, but they don't actually like improve your quality
of life. They're going to make you sick and hurt you.
You you can do this sleep schedule where you're awake
(39:39):
for longer, but it seems to just be leading to
sleep deprivation and people denying it um at least as
far as we can tell. Maybe maybe somebody's getting by
on polyphasic sleep, who knows. And then there are these
short sleepers out there who a lot of people probably
think they are, but they're not. They're just kind of
like multitaskers. Yeah, because I think that they are supertaskers,
but it turns out they're not. Yeah, all right, I'll
(40:00):
tell you right now. I know I'm not a short
sleeper and I know I'm not a super test here
I have to agree on both counts. Though I wish
I were a short sleeper. I mean, that would be
great to have more time every day like that. Yeah,
I could see where Uh, you know, there's some things
I would love to be able to do that I
have put off because I just know that I don't
(40:21):
have the time for it, so it would be nice
to have a little extra time. Uh. And, in much
more modest news of improving the future of sleep, there
is this other idea of having something like a sleep
cycle alarm. If you heard about this, Yeah, is this
the thing where it kind of monitors how you're doing
when you're sleeping and wakes you up at the opportune time. Yeah,
(40:42):
And and that actually appeals to me a lot, because
I I hate getting up in the morning, you know,
you know, Yeah, morning times can be great, but getting
out of bed can be a real drag. Well a
lot of times. The trouble there is that you are
waking up your alarm clock is going off at a
time when it is really not the best time in
(41:03):
your sleeping cycle. It's completely it's completely external and disconnected
from what's going on inside you. Yeah. Um, So the
thinking behind an alarm clock like this is that it
monitors your sleep cycles and that it can tell oh, okay,
now is the best time to wake him up? Right,
(41:24):
You're coming out of one of those those deeper sleep troughs.
And then this would make it easier and less jarring.
To get you up at this time, because, like I
was saying earlier, like you know, when you've got those
very slow patterns going on in your brain, it's harder
to wake you up, and that would make you probably
feel more disoriented and grouchy. I'm a morning person, but
(41:46):
I hate alarms too. I mean, I would much prefer
to have one that as long as it was getting
me up at around the right time each day. I mean,
I'm I don't need it to be exactly on the
dot every single day in a row. I would love
to a Yeah. And so obviously I don't know exactly
how well this particular model works, but if it could
(42:07):
work as well as they claim, then I mean, that's
a cool invention. If I can get one that will
just gently pat my head and say they're there, it's
all going to be okay, and then you know, just
kind of gently leads me down the stairs and cooks
me breakfast. Mr. There you go. Yeah, get on that
to turn these pages. Oh I'm waking up now paper. Yeah,
(42:33):
I'm gonna go read. Uh yeah, No, that really does
sound appealing to me. I like the idea of you know,
because again we're not talking necessarily about um cutting down
on the number of hours you're sleeping, but rather uh,
you know, finding the best way to wake up so
that you're you are the most effective you can be
for as long as you're awake, because I mean, there's
(42:53):
that time like if you if your alarm goes off
when you are in deep sleep. You know, I'm sure
most of us don't aren't as productive or you know,
proactive or however you want to put it for those
first few moments because we're battling the fact that we
we want to still be asleep. So this would allow
us to kind of transition more effectively into that wakeful state.
(43:15):
So I think that would be great. Um. Anyway, that
kind of wraps up our discussion about the future of sleep.
I don't think we'll be genetically engineering it completely out
of our systems anytime soon. Maybe when the Singularity comes
and we become robots, we won't need to sleep anymore.
But until that time, make sure you get your sleep.
You know, if you if you can sneak in a nap,
(43:39):
I highly recommend it. Yeah, if you can sleep in
a nap at my work, that's weird because I don't
think any of my coworkers listen to this podcast, and
so would just be a strange person to sleep in
the office. But hey, if you can pull it off,
that's kind of exciting. Um, don't try and pull it off.
People I don't I don't want to be responsible for
(43:59):
can just be email I got fired because you I
thought you're supposed to help me. I don't want to
get the angry email from our site director saying you're
gonna get fired because of the people. That's what I
don't want. But what I do want is for our
listeners to write in let's know what you think? You
know what, what do you think about the future of
sleep or what other topics would you like us to
talk about. Let us know. You can send us an
(44:21):
email or addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com,
or drops a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.
We're at all three of those with the handle f
W thinking, and we'll talk to you again really soon,
Pleasant Dreams. For more on this topic and the future
of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you
(44:54):
by Toyota. Let's go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there everyone, and welcome to Forward Thinking
the podcast and the looks at the future, and says, hey,
Mr Sayman, bring me a dream. I'm Jonathan Strickling and
(00:20):
I'm Joe McCormick. And Lauren is not asleep. She's actually
feeling under the weather, so she's not here. She might
be asleep. I mean, if she's feeling under the weather,
I hope she's asleep. She just emailed me, so I mean,
she could be a sleep emailer. But this is kind
of leading into the fact that we're going to talk
about the future of sleep, so it was actually on
topic for once. I'm hoping that in the future we
(00:45):
can just phase out sleep entirely. It's just a waste
of time. I'm one of those people who, I mean,
like I I enjoy getting rest when I've been working
hard and I'm very tired, but you know, it would
be great to just have more time in the day. Well,
you know, there there are I've seen people say that
if you were able to adopt a an ideal sleeping
(01:07):
schedule as an ideals in this is the least amount
of time that you could theoretically spend sleeping that you
would essentially have the equivalent waking hours to get eleven
more years of life if you started in your early twenties. Yeah.
I wonder if that's one of those things being propagated
by these weird sleep pattern enthusiasts on the internet. Yeah,
(01:29):
we'll get to that and talk about what those weird
sleep patterns are and uh, the implications of them. Yeah. Well, okay,
so if we're going to talk about the future of
sleep hacking sleep, how sleep patterns can change over time,
first we should talk about sleep itself, because it's kind
of a weird and mysterious topic in science, and in fact,
(01:50):
there's still a lot we do not know about the
sleep cycle that weird. It is weird to think that
this is something that we all do. You know, we
all do it regularly, whether or not you get good
sleep or not, you still, I assume are going to
sleep or I don't know how you're listening to this podcast.
(02:10):
Um So from a survival perspective, it first seems kind
of weird because I mean, I can't imagine how it
would confer an evolutionary advantage to lay down and expose
yourself to predators for eight hours or however long. Well,
let's let's think about this for a second. So there
(02:31):
are a lot of different theories about what happens when
we're asleep, and we'll get into those. But one thing
I might suggest as a reason why we need to
have this this time to sleep is just purely and
this this is just a hypothesis here. There's no necessarily
science to back this up, but purely from an energy perspective, right,
it requires energy for us to be awake. We're active,
(02:54):
we we consume energy. That's why we have to eat
throughout the day in order to maintain that level of energy,
or else we are no longer capable of being active
and alert. If we were active and alert all the time,
we would require to eat more frequently. And because we're
not evolved to be able to do something like, I
(03:14):
don't know, navigate pitch black darkness without falling over ourselves
and hurting ourselves, uh being able to gather food or
hunt food at night, we we can't. It's harder for
us to do that. So it may be that it's
evolutionary beneficial for us to go ahead and well shut
down during the time of day when we can't really
(03:34):
be effective. It's just cut your losses. It's a calculated
risk to say, like, you're not going to be doing
much useful at night anyway, and you're gonna be burning
all these calories. That's the hypothesis. And keep in mind
that when we're talking about evolution, evolution happens over the
course of hundreds of thousands of years, right, because you
(03:55):
could argue, well, today we've got artificial lights. You know,
the difference between night and day is not as great.
But it's not like we could evolve past what we
have already established in the relatively short amount of time.
Like if you're looking on a geological scale, it's a
blink of an eye since we've had any kind of
artificial light source. Uh. Well, we we can't evolve that
(04:19):
fast as a whole species. But it might be interesting
that some certain individuals of the human race have a
certain mutation that helps them in this environment where we
have artificial light and can do things useful at night.
But first, and we'll talk about that later. Also, Uh, first,
let's back up and talk about other animals. Do do
all animals sleep? No? No, mammals, birds, and reptiles sleep
(04:43):
all right, So they're the higher vertebrates. You can think
of it that way. So when you're looking at the
animal king too, the higher vertebrates all sleep like more
complex brains. Yeah, yeah, that would be part of it.
More complex nervous systems would probably be a better way
of putting it. But yes, uh, if you look at
fish and amphibians, most of those have some means of
(05:04):
shutting down some of their awareness, but there's still not asleep.
They're still awake, but they're kind of it's like they
go to impulse power instead of warp speed, right, So
they're able to power down a little bit and and recuperate,
but they don't go to sleep. Sleep insects may not
sleep at all, but they just have periods of activity
(05:25):
versus inactivity, whether it's day or night or whatever. It
depends on the insect, but they don't go to sleep.
The other thing that's interesting this related to this is dreaming,
and we'll talk a lot about dreaming in this episode
as well. But reptiles do not dream, they don't, birds
dream a little bit, and all mammals dream. And this
is based off of various scientific studies where the scientists
(05:48):
were monitoring brainwave activity during sleep cycles for these various
types of animals. So the next time you see like
an alligator and you're wondering, what's that alligator dreaming of
the answer is nothing at all, because alligators don't dream. Wow,
not even delicious raw chicken. Nope, Nope, they just they
to them. The world just goes away for a while
(06:09):
and then it comes back. Uh so yeah, so you
know that that's the basics. But then we get into
some other you know, this raises some other questions, like,
all right, so these larger, the more developed vertebrates all
all sleep and and most of them dream to some
extent um. Why is this happening? Why why do your
(06:32):
bidies even need to sleep in the first place? Um?
Do we grow while we sleep? Well, as when we're children,
we do. Yeah, because when your kid and you are sleeping,
your body releases growth hormone, and so it's very important
in those phases. It doesn't release during your wake cycle,
So when you're awake, you know, this growth hormone doesn't
(06:54):
get secreted, but when you go to sleep it does.
Also very important for immune system. If you were to
suffer sleep deprivation, for long enough, your immune system would
start to really suffer. As a result, you end up
kind of secreting again these chemicals in your body that
help maintain your immune system. So sleep is very important
(07:16):
there too. Um And you know, also there are other
hypotheses out there that are again are are There may
be a lot of truth to them, there may be
very little truth, and maybe that all of them are true,
but things like that's when our body repairs itself. So
if you were to suffer injury, then when you're sleeping,
your body can really get onto the job of fixing
(07:37):
tissue and getting you know, shedding dead cells, that kind
of stuff. I know, there are a lot of different
hypotheses about what's going on in the brain during sleep,
like or they're sort of necessary internal brain maintenance tasks
that has been only when you're asleep. That's a big one,
the idea that you know, there are a lot of
different theories about what's going on when you're dreaming, and
(07:59):
that whether or not dreaming is part of your brain
trying to make sense of the information that you've gathered
since you were last asleep. So it's kind of like
you know, the filing of at the end of the
day sort of that kind of thing, or that it's
just kind of getting rid of nonsense information. There are
a lot of different hypotheses out there, but there are
some things we can definitively point at. One is that
(08:21):
when you go to sleep, your breathing rate slows down,
your heart rate slows down, uh, and your brain begins
to generate different types of brain waves. So these waves,
you know, they have oscillation frequencies, right, are electrically measurable. Yeah,
if you put if you put in a uh, you know,
you put sensors on the on the skull and you're
(08:41):
reading those brain waves just like you've probably seen in
some television shows or movies. You could actually monitor the
brain activity and normal wakeful activity. You have alpha waves
that are generated when you're kind of you know, in
a relaxed, chilled out state. Beta way waves are generated
when you're really alert. So those are the two that
(09:03):
are the most frequent in your in your wakeful moments.
When you go to sleep, you start to generate uh,
different brain waves, the delta waves and the theta waves. Um.
So these are slower, they have slower or lower frequencies,
I should say, And the slower pattern kind of indicates
(09:24):
how deep asleep you're in, and the slower the pattern,
the deeper the sleep. So it's harder to wake someone
up when they're having uh delta wave activity. And these
are variable based on your sort of your sleep cycle,
right that you go through different stages of sleep exactly. Yeah,
it's it's your activity does change. There are times when
the activity starts to spike, like an r e M
(09:46):
sleep that's rabbid eye movement sleep. This is when we're
talking about dreaming. So if you've ever been awakened while
you were in R e M sleep, then you probably
have at least some recollection of what your dream was.
It's a lot harder to member for most people what
they dreamed or didn't dream if they wake up and
non r E M sleep, it's just because the activity
(10:08):
is removed from when they actually wake up. Um. And
most people have between three to five sessions of R
E M sleep per night, tends to be about a
quarter of a typical good night's sleep. So you get
about R E M sleep and non r E M sleep.
(10:28):
You know it's again this also appears to be pretty important.
It's one of those things that if you don't get
that r E M sleep, that's considered like you can
start suffering sleep deprivation. So you could, you know, catch
little naps here and there. But if you're not getting
r EM sleep, you're not getting that RESTful sleep. You
don't you don't feel rested. That's the hard stuff. Yeah,
(10:48):
it's it's what's really good. It's the stuff when you
when you wake up after a really good night's sleep
and you feel refreshed, it's because you had that R
E M sleep. So it's not just because you were
inactive and RESTful, it's because this has been going on. Okay,
so this is really useful. What happens to the body
when we don't get enough sleep? And I can speak
from experience on this one. Yeah, it's uh, it's no fun.
(11:10):
I went through a lot of years in my life
when I was not getting a whole lot of sleep. Um,
it's more recent in my life that I've started getting
better sleep. Yeah. Yeah, I just in you know, college,
grad school. I don't know why. I was just one
of those people. So how many all nighters have you done? Oh? Uncountable? Yeah,
(11:31):
I I've only done a few. I am one of
those people who I realize what my severe limitations are
if I don't have enough sleep, because they affect me. Really,
I mean, it's just it's obvious if I haven't had
enough sleep. Have you ever had hallucinations? I have, I
have to have not not. These aren't like lucid crazy
(11:51):
hallucinations like I'm seeing a monster climbing out of the floor.
It's more like I remember things like after going like
you know, days in a row with almost no real
sleep of any kind, seeing feeling like I had seen
something move in my peripheral vision and I turned to
look and there'd be nothing there for me. It was
(12:11):
a point where I could no longer read text because
it would look like it was melting to me. Um. Yeah,
I got to a point where I would try and
read something and then I would start to nod off immediately. Um.
I've also I've also got into the point where I
started talking without realizing what I was saying. Yeah, there's
a great story about a friend of mine driving me
home from the airport after a trip where I got
(12:33):
no sleep. Really, and apparently I had some entertaining, absurd,
surreal things to say. I had no connection to anything
connected to reality at all, and that was because I
had sleep deprivation. So I mean, if you're talking about
going like a like a day without sleep or a
day without enough sleep, you're talking about things like maybe
(12:55):
not being able to focus as as much upon a
task as you normally would are. It's pretty standard for
people to report after just one bad night's sleep that
they lose focus and they have decreased competence at standard tasks,
right or that, And also that things irritate them a
little more easily than it might otherwise, that that their
(13:17):
their thresholds for being irritated as lower. Um And but
there are some serious effects that can happen, Like those
hallucinations are pretty bad, but I mean there's some even
worse effects that can happen. You can actually die from
lack of sleep. In fact, you know, this is one
of those wonderful tests that sciences has shown us, which uh,
you know, it's it's one of the things that it's
(13:38):
important to know. It's upsetting to think of the actual circumstances.
But scientists would keep rats awake and watch to see
what happened with the rats um and the you know,
it got to a point where rats that had been
forced to stay awake for several days in a row
would begin to die and uh, you know, like we said,
(14:00):
like they're going to sleep that has what means of
helping regulate your immune system. So there are definite health
risks to not getting enough sleep. Uh yeah, And it's
a pretty widespread phenomenon that people don't get enough sleep
in the United States, at least the CDC that they
(14:20):
estimated that forty point six million American workers, which is
about thirty percent of all the people on the job,
are sleep deprived. That's terrible. Yeah, yeah, I see, here's
talking about a Singapore management university said that workers were
wasting time, more time than uh than your average worker
(14:43):
if they got less sleep. Yeah. This is from a
from a Wall Street General report on sleep deprivation. It's
a huge problem, and it's estimated to account for billions
of dollars of lost productivity in the American workforce. So
just I mean just written zoning out, you know, people
not being as efficient at tasks that they do every day,
(15:06):
right right, having to redo something perhaps, or or just
taking extra time to be able to do something that
normally you'd be able to accomplish in half the time whatever,
Like there are measurable effects, right, So getting sleep is
important to you. It's important for your health, it's important
for just being the kind of person you want to be. Um.
(15:26):
But it's also important on a large scale in in
your society, Like it's important if you are a government,
you actually you want to make sure people are getting
enough sleep because it has large scale implications. That's that's
definitely true. So one of the things I saw that
you wanted to talk about was the kinds of sleep
patterns we see in nature. Yeah. Um, keeping all the
(15:48):
things that we just talked about in mind that sleep
deprivation is a really serious problem with serious health effects
and serious effects to productivity and and all those kinds
of things. It's still would be great if we could
maybe get more time, if we could find a way
to sleep less totally still healthy. That you're just as healthy,
(16:11):
just as happy, with no negative effects to your to
your body, your brain, and your and your quality of life. Um.
And so the first thing I wondered about is, well,
is the way we sleep now, the way most Westerners
sleep now, So one long chunk of sleep at night
that is supposed to be around eight hours or so
(16:34):
is that normal? Is that normal to the species? So?
Yes and no. So first of all, there there are
two main types of sleep patterns that you find in
the animal world. Monophasic, which is this idea of having
a big, one chunk. Yeah, and then there's polyphasic, which
is where you divide this up over multiple like sleep
(16:55):
sessions throughout a particular cycle. Yeah. And a lot of
these polyphasic that's actually going to be by phasic, meaning
you sleep twice. Yeah. By phasic, you would, you could argue,
is sort of outside of polyphasic polyphasic. I think of
as a what my dog does, right right. I am
a fairly recent dog owner, and I've been noticing these
these dog behavior patterns. My new puppy will sleep for
(17:20):
an hour and then get up and come look at
me and wag is sweet little tail, and then go
lie down and sleep for another hour and repeat. You know. Yeah, yeah,
it's it's very typical with canines. And then you have
other animals you have like cats that will sleep for
hours and hours and hours and then they'll be active. Um.
So those that's the difference between monophasic and polyphasic. And
(17:41):
then you can have depending upon the type of animal.
If it's you know, nocturnal, then it's sleeping during the day.
It may have a it may be monophasic, but it's
sleep session is in the daytime, not in the nighttime. Yeah,
I've um heard examples of people saying that in history
people didn't necessarily always sleep just one chunk. Well, yeah,
(18:02):
by PHAs is something that is fairly common, and it's
still common in some parts of the world. By phasic
is this idea to Italy and they close all the
shops Spain as well. Spain is also does this Yeah, um, yeah, no,
it's the the whole siesta idea. So by phasic means
that you're dividing up your sleep into two sessions, but
(18:23):
they're not equal, right, You've got one longer session, which
is the one at night. Tends to be between five
and seven hours for most of the these these implementations.
Sometimes it could be you know, five to eight hours
something like that, and then you take a second session
of sleep around the sixth hour of your day whenever
that day starts. Your day is dependent upon when you
(18:43):
wake up then when you get up, so it's not
like it's always going to be at this X hour,
it's gonna be six hours after you've awakened, and then
you take another sleep that could be anywhere from a
half hour to an hour and a half long nap,
and then you're awake and alert for the rest of
the day. And in fact, great apes tend to be
(19:03):
by phasic, so humans tend to be by phasic. But
most of us work in the Western world, are working
in environments where taking a nap in the middle of
a day is discouraged, not not something you can typically do.
And if you think about humans, are not when we're
when we're babies, we're polyphasic. We're we're we're not, you know, uh,
(19:27):
monophasic or by phasic. When we're babies were polyphasic, but
we gradually kind of move into a by phasic phase.
That's where you have the kid who will sleep through
the night but also take a nap in the afternoon. Uh.
And then eventually society pressures us into being monophasic, even
though all of us know that are on two pm.
It would be awesome if we could just lay down
and go to sleep and no one judged us, or
(19:48):
at least by all of us, I mean me so
um so naturally speaking, but for most people, keeping in
mind that this is you know, this is a blanket statement,
and there are all aways exceptions to rules. Most people
would do best with monophasic or biphasic sleep on their own.
But that doesn't mean that people haven't tried two come
(20:11):
up with some alternatives. Yeah, so I want to transition
to talking about hacking sleep. Can we do it? Can
you give yourself more waking hours without hurting your level
of energy when you are awake, or your alertness, or
your competence at tasks or your health. Can you can
you get just as good a quality of life with
(20:33):
less time in bed? Well, there's some famous historical figures
who have been um the the the idea of getting
very little sleep or or this whole polyphasic approach where
you're taking naps throughout the day, uh, seems to have
been attributed to them, but most of them are the
(20:53):
questionable questionable. Yeah, the Leonardo da Vinci is a big
that's the big example. So he's the one everybody talks about.
He's a you know, great Italian polly, math of the Renaissance,
um painter, inventor of everything, basically at least on paper, right,
I didn't necessarily build everything, but he sure did invent
(21:14):
a lot of stuff. Yeah, but he is famous for
supposedly taking advantage of polyphasic sleep, so he would take
a number of naps throughout the day instead of one
long chunk, and it would total to much less time
than the average person spent sleeping in their in their
chunks at night. Um. But that he would function perfectly
(21:36):
well with this. I have had a hard time confirming this,
and I'm very suspicious that it's an urban legend. I'm
pretty sure it is. Uh. The the next one you
have on our list is actually a little bit more
of a credible, uh example in a way. Yeah, so
Buckminster Fuller Bucky tell us about him, Jonathan Well, Bucky
(21:59):
was supposedly getting by on just taking half hour naps.
According to Dr Wozniac. Dr Piotr Wozniak, who's a biologist
who has written extensively on the subjects of polyphasic sleep
and and monophasic sleep by phasic sleep as well, UM
suggest that perhaps this was a reputation that was not
(22:20):
fully accurate, that it was more that Fuller would take
naps whenever he could, but would also grab like a
decent six hours sleep whenever the opportunity arose. It's just
that sometimes the schedule would not allow it. I guess
it's hard to prove something like this. Yeah, So beyond
Da Vinci and Bucky, we have a few other names
(22:41):
that are sometimes associated with this idea of polyphasic sleep,
and they are there's some pretty pretty impressive names. If
only there were evidence to support the fact that they
were actually polyphasic sleepers. Uh, Thomas Edison and Nicola Tesla.
So the rivals of the Sleep Wars right after the
the current Wars, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson
(23:06):
have all been listed as being polyphasic sleepers, even though
there's not really evidence to support that now. Thomas Jefferson
was the first one I heard, because I actually had
a friend in high school who was enthusiastic about the
idea of you know what's commonly called on the internet
sometimes the ubermench sleep schedule. Uh, this idea that oh, well,
(23:28):
you know, it's only because we're we're just not evolved
enough that we are still sticking to this old kind
of sleep. If you're really with it. If you know
what's up, you'll take four fifteen minute naps a day,
or more like half hours. It's more like six half
hour because it's he's usually it'll it adds up to
three hours sleep for twenty four hour period. Well, they're
(23:51):
there are different, uh incarnations are There are a lot
of different versions of this. But I had a friend
in high school who I remember talking about this. I
obviously I don't know if he actually did it. He
was at least interested in the idea for a while,
and I remember him talking about trying to do it,
but he stopped talking about it after a while, which
(24:12):
makes me wonder if it didn't work, As I think
in a lot of cases, these people who talk about
it end up stopping talking about it because there doesn't work.
There's yeah, I'll tell I'll talk more about that in
a second too. I've got a friend, his name is
Eric Sandean. I'm calling him out only because we talked
about this on a a different podcast that I do occasionally.
(24:32):
A friend of mine who decided he wanted to try
this polyphasic sleep thing. And when he told me about it,
I said, Eric, you are a crazy person. But he
was determined to try it, and I think he might
have attempted it for a day before deciding that that
is probably not the best way of doing this. Well,
I don't want to make it sound too crazy or anything.
I mean, like my friend in high school who tried this,
(24:53):
and he was a smart, capable guy. And a lot
of the people you see talking about showing enthusiasm at
least for this plan online, they don't seem like complete nuts.
But I'm I'm skeptical that it would actually work. Let
me explain what's what's supposed to happen here. According to
polyphasic sleep, the idea is that you can get three
(25:14):
hours total sleep per twenty four hour period and have
the rest of the time dedicated to waking hours where
you can actually do whatever you want video games for
five hours, or you know, or you're inventing curing cancer
for five hours. Although people who try polyphasic sleep appear
to have difficulty uh concentrating on any effort that requires
(25:34):
learning or have yeah, like like they can do certain
things really well, but anything that requires lots of mental processes,
particularly learning learning new information, becomes really difficult. But the
idea is that you you split up your polyphasic sleep.
You've got these short snap sessions. They're spread throughout the day,
(25:55):
so you get you get six breaks essentially, so and
those six breaks you sleep half an hour each. And
this is one implementation of this approach. Um. And the
idea is that at first your body and your brain
are like, what is going on? I can't you know?
I need to go into R E M sleep so
that you don't go crazy, and you don't your health
(26:16):
doesn't fall apart. So you train your brain. Yeah. The
idea is that after you get through the initial resistance
of your brain saying this is wrong, you should go
to sleep now. Um that after a couple of days,
your brain says, fine, if you're gonna be this way,
then I'll go ahead and go into R M sleep
as soon as you go to sleep. Well, here's the deal.
(26:36):
When you when you suffer sleep deprivation for a long time,
it is true that you will go into R E
M sleep faster when you do go to sleep. Then
you would if you were getting regular night's sleep all
that time. So Joe, if you if you went and
you were having eight hours sleep for like three weeks,
you go into R M sleep eventually after you fall asleep,
(26:57):
you would get there. But if you stayed up for
three days and then you went to sleep, you would
hit r M sleep earlier than you would have been
during that nice long stretch of of plenty of sleep
each night. So the idea is that if you were
able to engineer this and plan it out so that
you have this half hour break, you would go into
ari M sleep nearly instantly as soon as you drift off,
(27:20):
and that that would be enough for it to sustain
you for the next several hours until you had your
next break, which would then sustain you until the next break, etcetera, etcetera. Uh,
here's the thing. Um. The experts I was looking at,
including Dr Piotr Wozniak, suggest that this is a terrible idea,
that that it is uh not likely to work. That
(27:42):
you know, while the basics are kind of sort of
based on truth, they're not themselves true. That being able
to go right into ari M sleep does not necessarily
mean you're getting all the benefits you would with sleep,
including and probably most importantly, that immune system boost that
you need. If we don't know everything about sleep yet,
which we certainly don't, it seems premature to assume that
(28:05):
if you're just getting that that one of those four
stages of sleep, that's going to be fine, right, And
we don't if we don't know exactly what all those
other stages do. Yeah, he he looked into it quite
a bit. He actually even conducted interviews with people. He
said that in every case he was looking at, people
who adopted this approach gave up on it after a
(28:25):
short while because it just because their health was failing.
They were not they were not feeling great. Some of
them were having difficulty being able to concentrate on tasks
for very long. Uh. He says. You know, there are
plenty of YouTube videos out there where if you watch
the people who are talking about you're just thinking, man,
this person needs a good night's sleep. I mean, it's
just it's there. It looks rough. And he also talked
(28:47):
about how a lot of them would end up coming
down with colds or the flu because their immune systems
were compromised. They couldn't fight off these diseases that otherwise,
if they had had healthy sleep, they may have been
able to. You know, you can't necessarily say there's a
direct role there, but there's enough of a correlation to
make you you know, concerned and according to his studies,
(29:09):
and you know, he's written a couple of different articles
that are available online that are really helpful and go
into this in detail. Um, it's just that you know,
people are generally monophasic or by phasic. Um that you know,
we tend to to work best under that. And in fact,
a lot of the names we mentioned, like uh, like Edison,
(29:29):
are really bi phasic and not polyphasic. That they would get,
you know, a few hours sleep at night if you
being like between five and seven, and then they would
take they would rest in the afternoon. Um and uh.
And so most of those names, that's exactly what we
from those that we know what their sleep patterns were like,
that's what they did. So it wasn't so much this
(29:51):
whole you know, take a nap and then work for
hours and then take a nap. It was more get
a night's sleep and then take a nap in the afternoon,
which again just like to point out again I think
we should all be doing. And if they would just
put cuts into the office, I would be happy to
do it. I'd have no trouble sleeping in my chair.
(30:12):
If that just didn't annoy everyone and make me look unprofessional. Yeah, so,
I mean trying to hack your sleep this way is
probably not a great idea. Okay, well, let's transition to
another solution. Okay, is it possible that drugs could give
us more hours in the day without harming our health? Well,
(30:32):
i'd say until you said that second part. Yeah, so
the first part is definitely true. Yes, you can use
drugs to stay awake longer, um, and lots of people do.
In fact, lots of us use caffeine to do this. Yeah,
I recently gave it up, but yes, I was heavily
dependent upon it until recently. Good on you, because it
(30:53):
turns out so some of the most familiar stimulants you'll
know about, like caffeine, amphetamines, they're actually you pretty effective
at giving you the ability to stay awake. What's happen
to wake you up? It's it's releasing neurotransmitters that either
they either promote wakefulness or they inhibit the neurotransmitters that
(31:13):
would uh, that would cause you to be sleepy. So
in some cases, it's you know, just pricking you up
by by adding a boost to the chemicals in your
brain that keep you awake, and in some it's just
keeping the ones that would put you to sleep at may. Yeah,
definitely does not make health sense at all to rely
on amphetamines. That's not going to get you anywhere. And uh,
(31:36):
and it really does help to not rely too much
on caffeine either. Yeah. In fact, I was reading recently
about how caffeine has been linked not not a not
a proven correlation here or you know, not a causation thing,
but has been linked two increases in things like cardiovascular diseases,
and that uh that you know, limiting caffeine is good,
(32:00):
like if you you can have some caffeine. In fact,
there's some health benefits to a little caffeine in your diet,
but you don't tend to want to consume too much
of it after say two PM or so, because it
can actually interfere with your sleep cycles even so much
that you know, let's say that you have some caffeine
six hours before you go to sleep, and you think
(32:21):
you've got a great night's sleep. Sleep studies have shown
that people who had caffeine as late as that, like,
within that six hour time frame, we're still having interrupted
sleep cycles. And that it was. You know that, that's
how how far caffeine can stretch, its effects can stretch.
So just one of those things that you know, if
you can, if you can kind of uh have a
(32:43):
if you really rely on caffeine, if you can have
your main caffeine boost and not I'm not talking about
going crazy and getting like a forty eight ounce coffee
at a coffee shop, but I have your main caffeine
boost in the morning to get you going in awake
and then to sort of wean yourself off as the
day goes on. So you might switch to a lower
caffine to drink a little bit later in the day,
(33:04):
and then by the time you get around two o'clock,
you're you're cutting out the caffeine for the rest of
the day. That seems to be a pretty good plan
for being able to get a good night's sleep without
being h have without having caffeine's effects interrupted. Yeah, and
then there of course uh less familiar drugs that might
actually be better than your old school uh stimulants. One
(33:29):
of them that's gotten a lot of talk is the
drug modaffanel, which I've heard has fewer side effects than
a lot of these other ones do. Yeah. And of
course we are not here advocating that you take drugs,
so we're just talking about this in theory. Um, you
can find people online who are hyping this drug and saying, oh,
I you know, I'm getting so much work done and
(33:51):
I don't have on all these bad side effects. I
again really want to stress do not use drugs for
awfully will use. I mean, people should speak to their
doctors about whatever drugs they're going to use and be
honest about the reason for which they want to use them.
And I think, you know, if you're using it so
that you don't have you don't lose so much time sleeping,
(34:12):
that's going to catch up to you eventually anyway, for
these other reasons that we've listed in this in this episode. Uh.
And then we've got something here called short sleepers. So
is this for people who are four foot tall or less? No,
this is actually the fact that some people really do
require less sleep. Oh, so this is an idea of like,
(34:32):
there are some people out there who who eight hours
would be too much sleep for them. They might just
need four or five. Yeah. I've seen different estimates for
how common this is in the general population. I've seen
estimates as small as um one in a thousand people,
up to one percent of the population, or even up
to five percent of the population. So I don't really
(34:55):
know how common this is, um but it does seem
that it actually this. There are some people, and they're
very rare, but they can get by on less than
six hours of sleep at night without any trouble. This
doesn't give them negative health effects. They don't lose any
of their competency. It's just how they are. It doesn't
(35:15):
seem to be that you can train your body for this.
It appears to be a genetic condition. Um So. One
study I want to talk about though, that's really interesting
and how this might bear on the future of reducing
our need for sleep. It's a study led by Dr
Ying Huifu of the University of California, San Francisco, and
(35:35):
she was part of a team that discovered a gene
variant that regulates the length of sleep. Um So. Food's
team discovered that there's this particular mutation in a gene
called h d e C two. Yeah, that's one of
your favorites. But so this gene variant, this mutation was
(35:59):
correlated with human subjects who averaged about six point to
five hours of sleep every night, while relatives of those
subjects who did not carry the mutation slept more than
eight hours um. And it's important to note that this
mutation may not be present in all or even most
short sleepers. It was just correlated in this particular instance,
(36:20):
and so there may be tons of other genes that
create short sleepers. Yeah, we've talked in the past about
how complicated genetics are, like it's it's you know, saying
that this one gene is responsible for this one and
only one thing is being overly simplistic in most cases, right.
But then what Dr Fust team discovered that was very
interesting was when they started studying transgenic mice. So mice
(36:45):
have an equivalent gene to the human gene I was
talking about. Instead of h D e C two, it's
m d e C two. I don't know, but I
would hazard to guess. Um. So, when the mice were
given a substitute h D e C two gene in
place of that, with the same mutation that these two
test subjects had who were short sleepers, the mice stayed
(37:08):
awake longer than normal mice. Well, to be fair, they
may have been wondering why they kept getting injected with
human genes. That might have been and they might have.
You think I'd lose a lot of sleep if you're
injecting me with mice genes. I definitely like what is
going on? But well you would just you would be
kept awake eating cheese all night. I'm okay with that, Okay,
(37:28):
all right? Uh So, the cool thing about this is
that it's possible that what we learned about short sleepers
actually could help somebody else become like them. Obviously that's
not knowledge that's available to us today, but this kind
of experiment with the mice shows, oh, you know, it
might be possible to to introduce genes like this, or
(37:50):
to at least learn enough about how genes regulate human
sleeping patterns that we could make changes that would allow
people to have more free time with no adverse health effects.
Um And in fact, Dr Feu of this study that
I was talking about, she was quoted in a Wall
Street Journal article where she was saying, my long term
goal is to someday learn enough so we can manipulate
(38:12):
the sleep pathways without damaging our health. Yeah, that's uh,
I mean, it would be really interesting to see that
come to pass. Because again, like we've been telling you
this whole time, I mean, I understand people who want
to be able to do more stuff. I mean, I
certainly feel by the time I go to bed at
the end of the day that I didn't accomplish nearly
as much as I had hoped, just because there's too
(38:35):
much to do and not enough time to do it.
In So, the idea of being able to shave off
a few hours from this activity that I need to
do in order for me not to you know, have
my immune system breakdown or or suffer mental effects, to
be able to control that a little bit more is
it's certainly attractive. I love the idea of it, um,
(38:55):
you know I, and I like the idea of going
about it in a scientific manner that it uh is
not likely to lead to me feeling worse than I
did when I, you know, I started off. But uh,
you know, I'm curious, would you are you still of
the mindset where man, I I wish I could get
rid of some of the sleep. Oh, I mean, certainly,
(39:16):
if if I could do it without negative health effects,
If I if I could that that's the whole thing.
I mean, a lot of these things are like, oh,
here's a trick, but then we have a lot of
doubts like oh, well, yes, you can use drugs to
stay up, but they don't actually like improve your quality
of life. They're going to make you sick and hurt you.
You you can do this sleep schedule where you're awake
(39:39):
for longer, but it seems to just be leading to
sleep deprivation and people denying it um at least as
far as we can tell. Maybe maybe somebody's getting by
on polyphasic sleep, who knows. And then there are these
short sleepers out there who a lot of people probably
think they are, but they're not. They're just kind of
like multitaskers. Yeah, because I think that they are supertaskers,
but it turns out they're not. Yeah, all right, I'll
(40:00):
tell you right now. I know I'm not a short
sleeper and I know I'm not a super test here
I have to agree on both counts. Though I wish
I were a short sleeper. I mean, that would be
great to have more time every day like that. Yeah,
I could see where Uh, you know, there's some things
I would love to be able to do that I
have put off because I just know that I don't
(40:21):
have the time for it, so it would be nice
to have a little extra time. Uh. And, in much
more modest news of improving the future of sleep, there
is this other idea of having something like a sleep
cycle alarm. If you heard about this, Yeah, is this
the thing where it kind of monitors how you're doing
when you're sleeping and wakes you up at the opportune time. Yeah,
(40:42):
And and that actually appeals to me a lot, because
I I hate getting up in the morning, you know,
you know, Yeah, morning times can be great, but getting
out of bed can be a real drag. Well a
lot of times. The trouble there is that you are
waking up your alarm clock is going off at a
time when it is really not the best time in
(41:03):
your sleeping cycle. It's completely it's completely external and disconnected
from what's going on inside you. Yeah. Um, So the
thinking behind an alarm clock like this is that it
monitors your sleep cycles and that it can tell oh, okay,
now is the best time to wake him up? Right,
(41:24):
You're coming out of one of those those deeper sleep troughs.
And then this would make it easier and less jarring.
To get you up at this time, because, like I
was saying earlier, like you know, when you've got those
very slow patterns going on in your brain, it's harder
to wake you up, and that would make you probably
feel more disoriented and grouchy. I'm a morning person, but
(41:46):
I hate alarms too. I mean, I would much prefer
to have one that as long as it was getting
me up at around the right time each day. I mean,
I'm I don't need it to be exactly on the
dot every single day in a row. I would love
to a Yeah. And so obviously I don't know exactly
how well this particular model works, but if it could
(42:07):
work as well as they claim, then I mean, that's
a cool invention. If I can get one that will
just gently pat my head and say they're there, it's
all going to be okay, and then you know, just
kind of gently leads me down the stairs and cooks
me breakfast. Mr. There you go. Yeah, get on that
to turn these pages. Oh I'm waking up now paper. Yeah,
(42:33):
I'm gonna go read. Uh yeah, No, that really does
sound appealing to me. I like the idea of you know,
because again we're not talking necessarily about um cutting down
on the number of hours you're sleeping, but rather uh,
you know, finding the best way to wake up so
that you're you are the most effective you can be
for as long as you're awake, because I mean, there's
(42:53):
that time like if you if your alarm goes off
when you are in deep sleep. You know, I'm sure
most of us don't aren't as productive or you know,
proactive or however you want to put it for those
first few moments because we're battling the fact that we
we want to still be asleep. So this would allow
us to kind of transition more effectively into that wakeful state.
(43:15):
So I think that would be great. Um. Anyway, that
kind of wraps up our discussion about the future of sleep.
I don't think we'll be genetically engineering it completely out
of our systems anytime soon. Maybe when the Singularity comes
and we become robots, we won't need to sleep anymore.
But until that time, make sure you get your sleep.
You know, if you if you can sneak in a nap,
(43:39):
I highly recommend it. Yeah, if you can sleep in
a nap at my work, that's weird because I don't
think any of my coworkers listen to this podcast, and
so would just be a strange person to sleep in
the office. But hey, if you can pull it off,
that's kind of exciting. Um, don't try and pull it off.
People I don't I don't want to be responsible for
(43:59):
can just be email I got fired because you I
thought you're supposed to help me. I don't want to
get the angry email from our site director saying you're
gonna get fired because of the people. That's what I
don't want. But what I do want is for our
listeners to write in let's know what you think? You
know what, what do you think about the future of
sleep or what other topics would you like us to
talk about. Let us know. You can send us an
(44:21):
email or addresses f W Thinking at discovery dot com,
or drops a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Google Plus.
We're at all three of those with the handle f
W thinking, and we'll talk to you again really soon,
Pleasant Dreams. For more on this topic and the future
of technology, visit forward thinking dot com. Brought to you
(44:54):
by Toyota. Let's go Places
Fw:Thinking News
Hosts And Creators
Jonathan Strickland
Joe McCormick
Lauren Vogelbaum
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