Science of Sleep

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But first,

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Speaker 5 Enjoy a Coca-Cola for a pause that

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Speaker 1 Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox.
And welcome to the podcast version of The Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it.

Speaker 3 Hello, and welcome to The Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 And I'm Robert Ince. And I should say that we try to be proactive with this show and make shows that react to our audiences' scientific questions, such as, why does Saturn have rings?

Speaker 1 What is consciousness? And I had a lovely dream about Brian Cox last night. What does it mean?

Speaker 1 Annoyingly, because of lazy science, we don't have answers to the first two questions. Therefore, tonight's show is about what it means to have a lovely dream about Brian Cox.

Speaker 1 Well, it's also about sleep, but sleep and having lovely dreams about Brian Cox.

Speaker 3 Why do animals need sleep? What are the ramifications of not sleeping? How can we improve our sleep? And what is the purpose of dreaming?

Speaker 1 For instance, this is the sound of Brian's dreams.

Speaker 3 And this is the sound of Robin's dreams.

Speaker 1 I don't sleep much. So,

Speaker 1 in fact, one of the main reasons we're doing the show is because I do actually have insomnia a lot of the time.

Speaker 1 And though I didn't until I started working with Brian, which makes me believe that Brian is actually stealing my sleep to keep his boyish, replicant good looks.

Speaker 3 Tomatoes, in our exploration of sleep, dreams, and circadian rhythms, we are joined by a panel of the wise, and they are.

Speaker 3 Russell Foster, I'm Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. And my worst night of sleep is very recent.
I was was in Denver, Colorado, a week ago, and I was jet lagged.

Speaker 3 And the next morning, I had to speak to 3,500 delegates at the sleep meeting. And I had the most appalling night's sleep for years.

Speaker 6 Richard Weissman, professor of psychology at University of Hertfordshire. I'm a psychologist.
And my worst night's sleep was when I was developing a smartphone sleep app, and I was beta testing it.

Speaker 6 The programming was off, and so the alarm went off at 4 a.m., 5 a.m. and 6 a.m.,

Speaker 6 which was delightful.

Speaker 7 My name's Katie Brand. I am a a comedian and writer.
And my worst night of sleep was my 19-hour labour,

Speaker 7 followed by my second worst night of sleep, which was spent just staring at the cock going, it's a baby.

Speaker 3 And this is our panel.

Speaker 3 So, Russell, the first question must be: why do we sleep?

Speaker 3 I think the scientific community has been a bit naughty about that one, because you read these endless papers of the reason we sleep, and there is no single overarching explanation for sleep.

Speaker 3 What happens during this period of immobility is a whole mass of stuff.

Speaker 3 So there's memory consolidation, there's the processing of information, there's the clearance of toxins, there's the rebuilding of metabolic pathways.

Speaker 3 You name it, so much of the important stuff that makes us function during the daytime is going on whilst we're asleep.

Speaker 3 So there's multiple reasons why we sleep and what's going on in the brain during this period of physical inactivity. So sort of of housekeeping.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 That's it. There's a bunch of essential housekeeping functions.

Speaker 3 And during evolution, what's happened is that those essential sort of housekeeping functions have been allocated to the appropriate phase of the rest activity cycle. And that's what we call sleep.

Speaker 1 Why do you say the scientific community has been a bit naughty about this?

Speaker 3 Well, you know, you read endless papers, and I will not name any, but saying the reason for sleep is memory consolidation or the clearance of toxins from the brain. And I think

Speaker 3 we should be a little bit more flexible about the broader understanding of sleep.

Speaker 1 So, something like one of the ones that I've commonly read was the advantage of avoiding predators for that period of time.

Speaker 3 I mean, it could well be that if you're an animal that's been adapted to run around during the day, then your ability to function at night, in terms of sensory processing, all the other things, will be hugely impaired.

Speaker 3 So, it makes sense to get out of the way.

Speaker 3 And so, it could well be to avoid predation as part of this sort of general platform of critical stuff that's going on.

Speaker 3 That suggests that there may be the primary, you say that the initial evolutionary reasons, you say that maybe animals just it makes sense to go and sleep at night.

Speaker 3 And then other things have been sort of shuffled in by evolution afterwards. And then they reinforce.

Speaker 3 So those essential functions like memory consolidation would feed back and say, yeah, there's a really good reason why you need that period of immobility so that you can process information without being overloaded by all the new stuff coming in.

Speaker 1 So, Richard, what is the

Speaker 1 human being, what's the sleep cycle now? What stages do we go through?

Speaker 6 Well, again, we're not 100% certain. The generally accepted sleep cycle is we start off in what's called light sleep, which is you have a nap in the afternoon, that feels a lot like light sleep.

Speaker 6 Then we move down into deep sleep, and if you were to wake up from deep sleep, you really wouldn't feel very well.

Speaker 6 I've quite a long way, you might vomit over the person you're sleeping next to, and then they wouldn't feel very well.

Speaker 6 No, no, so we have light sleep, we have deep sleep, then you come up from there into almost wakefulness, and you have the first dream of the night. And that dream will last around about five minutes.

Speaker 6 So you have light sleep, deep sleep, up into what's called REM or dream state, roughly. I mean, not all dreaming is in REM and so on, but roughly speaking.
And that's the sleep cycle.

Speaker 6 It lasts about 90 minutes. You go through it again and again, with the periods of dreaming getting longer and longer.

Speaker 6 And so the last dream before you wake up is around about 45 minutes, 30, 45 minutes long, something like that.

Speaker 1 Can you explain why some people are mourning people? It disgusts me.

Speaker 6 I could explain that, but I wouldn't want to because one of the experts on that topic is sitting opposite me.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 3 there's two reasons for morningness and eveningness, and it really does exist. One is genetics.
There's a genetic predisposition to be a morning person or an evening person, but also development.

Speaker 3 From about the age of 10, there's a tendency to get up later and later and later. Boys get later and later and later and peak at around about 21 and a half.

Speaker 3 Women peak at around about 19, and then we start to get earlier and earlier and earlier. And by the time we're 55, 60, we're getting up and going to bed at about the age of when we were 10.

Speaker 3 So there's probably a major hormonal influence

Speaker 3 influencing sleep timing. But on average, there's about a two-hour difference in somebody in their late teens,

Speaker 3 they want to go to bed two hours later, than somebody in their late 50s, early 60s. But that's tied to the

Speaker 3 only stimulus is light, presumably.

Speaker 3 Yeah, light will lock on this internal clock to

Speaker 3 the external world. And certainly, if you get morning light, then it can advance the clock and make you get up a bit earlier.

Speaker 7 Yeah, I went to a wedding once, right up in northern Sweden around this time of year, and everyone was there for about four or five days.

Speaker 7 And everybody went completely nuts because it never got dark, and people were eating their dinner at midnight. No one had any idea what time to have meals.

Speaker 7 I mean it was sort of it was it was really odd because I thought well we're all grown-ups. We all roughly know we can all read our watches.

Speaker 7 We'll just do it when the watch says it, not when the sun or the moon says it. But everyone, even me, we all just went completely berserk.

Speaker 3 I mean in shift work for example, you know 20 years on the night shift you do not adapt to the demands of working at night because the body clock is locked onto the light-dark cycle.

Speaker 3 And so you know on the on the journey home you're exposed to light and that provides the key.

Speaker 3 Now, if you take night-shift workers, you hide them from natural light during the day and increase the amount of light in the workplace, they will shift, just like you can get over jet lag.

Speaker 3 But that's, of course, not practical.

Speaker 6 What reason, sorry, I was going to say, in terms of being an owl and a lark, so owls obviously go to bed late and wake up late, and larks the opposite.

Speaker 6 There's some psychological work suggesting that is linked to personality traits. And so, owls tend to be a little bit more intelligent.
I'm an owl, tend to be

Speaker 6 a little bit more intelligent, certainly certainly more creative,

Speaker 6 more gullible about personality traits which are positive towards themselves,

Speaker 6 and also more likely to be psychopaths. So

Speaker 6 it's an interesting art to be put into the mix there.

Speaker 1 Katie, I was thinking, talking about that kind of morning-evening thing and whether it's genetic or not, I never, even though I get up at 7:30 every morning, I'd go to bed very, very late, and I think I must go to bed earlier, and then it just gets.

Speaker 1 And I presume that was merely due to the inevitability of death and the finite nature of existence. Yeah.
What do you think as a religious scholar?

Speaker 7 Ah, good. Yes, as your resident theologian.

Speaker 7 It's just, yeah, fear of judgment, Robin, is what's keeping you up at night.

Speaker 5 What kind of person?

Speaker 7 Worries do keep us up at night, don't they? And they are

Speaker 7 that sort of sense of obsessive anxiety at night.

Speaker 7 Why does that thing that I don't understand is why is it that you can be exhausted all day, but as soon as you lie down to go to sleep at night, everything that's been worrying you all day suddenly comes into your mind and you're unable to sleep for another four four hours.

Speaker 7 It just seems that seems evolutionarily ridiculous.

Speaker 1 Have you ever been an insomniac?

Speaker 7 Myself? Yeah. Only when I was a teenager.
I'm not, not as an adult. I'm all right.
I'm quite alright as an adult. I'm sort of like, I'm sort of like a toddler again.
I don't quite know why.

Speaker 7 I think I'm just in deep denial.

Speaker 7 Like I just refuse to address any of the horrific problems that I am encountering in day-to-day life. So I'll just go to sleep and hope they're not there when I wake up.

Speaker 3 Maybe, Richard, I mean, maybe do you have an answer for that? I mean, why is it that you get this?

Speaker 3 Because Because everybody probably has this from time to time, where you just you're absolutely totally tired and you cannot go to sleep for a while.

Speaker 6 Well, we all have worries and concerns, and during the day, we're pretty good at pushing those outside of our kind of conscious awareness. And also, there's other stuff going on, so we're distracted.

Speaker 6 You lay down in a dark room and you're physically tired, and you haven't got those distractions, and you haven't got maybe the mental energy, as it were, to sort of push them away, and they start to come and and then feed on themselves.

Speaker 6 Now you start not to sleep, so you get even more anxious, and so the whole thing feeds on itself.

Speaker 6 So it is an issue, and there are things that I mean, if you, for example, deal with those anxieties in all sorts of ways, you actually sleep better.

Speaker 6 Well, there's a very strong relationship between being a very anxious person, having worries and concerns, and the quality of your sleep.

Speaker 3 Russell, in your talk that I saw, your TED talk, you also suggested there's research that says that actually poor sleep, where's the causal relationship? Is the point?

Speaker 3 Because poor sleep can also lead you to poorer mental health. As Richard said, the other way around, if you're very worried, then you can't sleep.

Speaker 3 Where's the cause of that? So, there's a very interesting relationship that's emerging between mental illness, mental health problems, and sleep disruption.

Speaker 3 And part of it seems to be that there are neural circuits within the brain that overlap.

Speaker 3 Those circuits that give rise to normal mental health and normal sleep probably share neurotransmitter pathways.

Speaker 3 So, if you have a defect in a neurotransmitter pathway that predisposes you to mental health, you're almost certainly going to have an impact upon sleep. So, there's the overlap bit.

Speaker 3 Then, of course, the sleep disruption could exacerbate the mental illness, and then the mental illness could exacerbate the sleep disruption.

Speaker 3 And in fact, a colleague of mine, Dan Freeman, has been able to partially consolidate sleep in patients with schizophrenia and reduce the levels of delusional paranoia by 50%.

Speaker 3 So there's a very interesting set of interactions, which are only really just beginning to understand. I mean, Craeplin, the father of psychology, was talking about

Speaker 3 disruptive sleep in schizophrenia in the 1880s, but it's been dismissed as the antipsychotics or the fact of a lack of a job.

Speaker 3 In fact, there's probably a really interesting root in neuroscience for the problem. So there's a bit of a genetic

Speaker 3 genetic marker that makes you predisposed.

Speaker 3 Well, what's fascinating is to test the hypothesis of an overlap, we've taken genes that were originally associated with human schizophrenia,

Speaker 3 mutated those in the mouse, and seen that the mouse sleepwake patterns have been severely disrupted. So empirical evidence for that sort of genetic overlap.
Yeah.

Speaker 7 Can sleep disruption,

Speaker 7 repeated sleep disruption in children or young people, can that go on to cause mental health issues later in life, like depression or things like that?

Speaker 3 It's a really interesting issue. What we're finding in high-risk versus low-risk children, young adults

Speaker 3 who are at high risk of developing bipolar, for example, versus low-risk, the high-risk individuals have already developed an abnormality in their sleep prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar.

Speaker 3 So, there is, again, I think, uh,

Speaker 3 what would you do? What would happen, for example, if you if you could consolidate sleep in kids at high risk of bipolar? Would you pull back from you know developing full-blown bipolar?

Speaker 3 Would you delay onset? Would you knock the brain into a different developmental trajectory? We don't know, because it's such a new era of research.

Speaker 1 So, Katie, you were

Speaker 1 you've recently become a parent, not that long ago. I haven't talked about that.

Speaker 1 Just that bit where you have disrupted sleep, that moment where you think that you're also you'll never eat any hot food again.

Speaker 1 The warmest thing you'll eat will have fallen out of your baby's mouth.

Speaker 5 I'm going to say forget fallen out of my own breast.

Speaker 1 But how do you, I don't know if you experienced disrupted sleep or not.

Speaker 3 I wondered how whether you felt that that had affected you, how that affected your mental state.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, no.

Speaker 7 At one point, I was just crawling around the house crying

Speaker 7 because I needed to have some sleep. But I go crazy when I don't have enough sleep.
Definitely, it has a huge impact on just

Speaker 7 the impact of two or three nights of very badly disrupted sleep in a row can have a massive impact on my general outlook, my positivity, optimism. Everything's a catastrophe.

Speaker 7 I can't cope with anything. Everything makes me sit down and have a cry on the kitchen floor.

Speaker 7 And yeah, obviously, I mean, we'll all have experienced it in terms of new being a new parent, especially if you are breastfeeding or so on, you know, you're literally trying to sleep every hour, every two hours.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 I mean, I always believed in the impact of a lack of sleep, but when I was young, I survived on very little sleep and I didn't really need it.

Speaker 7 But now I need a lot, and I just noticed that I mean, I would be deranged within a week if I didn't have sort of better.

Speaker 3 Do we know, Richard, what enough sleep is?

Speaker 6 It really varies. So, so you know, there's a sort of normal distribution.
Some people are naturally short sleepers.

Speaker 6 You had Margaret Thatcher who could sleep on, uh, survive allegedly on four hours' sleep. That's

Speaker 5 entirely sane.

Speaker 6 Yeah, yes, that's what I'm gonna say.

Speaker 5 Balance.

Speaker 6 Yeah, she's a great advert for short sleep. I know.

Speaker 7 I've never understood why people hold her up as the model for lack of sleep.

Speaker 5 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 Absolutely baffling.

Speaker 7 Mussolini could get through on three hours sleep.

Speaker 5 No, he couldn't.

Speaker 6 So you have naturally short sleepers, you have naturally long sleepers. In general, the sort of eight hours is seen as the sort of adult marker in terms of where that normal distribution lies.

Speaker 3 And does it matter where you have it? As Katie said, that you could get two hours, two hours, two hours, two hours. Does it have to be continuous to be...

Speaker 6 It's better if it is. So it's not the sort of thing where you go, I'll get four hours at night and then I'll sleep four hours during the afternoon.

Speaker 6 That four hour sleep in the afternoon, first of all, it will disrupt the evening sleep, and second, it won't be such a good quality as the night's sleep.

Speaker 6 So you're much better off trying to get it pretty much in one single block, except for that 20-minute period when the circadian rhythm naturally drops in the early afternoon, when you really should be taking a nap if that's what your body is telling you to do.

Speaker 3 Oh, I might just disagree slightly on that one.

Speaker 3 You have to be slightly careful with napping because a nap in the middle of the afternoon, particularly for most of us, is maybe not such a good thing.

Speaker 3 What it it represents is that the sleep pressure has billed up faster than the clock can sort of counteract that,

Speaker 3 and so you have that mid-afternoon dip. Now, a 20-minute nap can be sort of okay, it makes the second half of the day sort of a little bit easier.

Speaker 3 Anything more than that, and you go to deeper sleep, and then recovery from that is completely counterproductive.

Speaker 3 The big problem about napping is that it pushes back the sleep pressure, delays sleep onset at night, so you go to bed later, the alarm clock drives you out of bed at the same time, so you've had shortened sleep.

Speaker 3 You wake with less efficient sleep, and therefore you're more likely to need a nap the next day. So it's best avoided unless you really need it.

Speaker 1 This is a proper radio four feud, isn't it?

Speaker 1 These people on there, they really did not agree on the benefit of napping.

Speaker 5 I think you should nap. No napping for floor four.

Speaker 5 No one agreed on the napping by the end of it.

Speaker 6 I think we did agree. I think the key is nap.
It's a 20-minute 15-20-minute nap. What you should not be doing is sleeping for an hour in the middle of the day.
That's bad news. So

Speaker 6 I think we did agree.

Speaker 5 I think for 15 years.

Speaker 1 Could you then argue for the long nap? Because at the moment, we haven't got enough antagonism for this.

Speaker 1 We really want this to be pick of the week.

Speaker 7 I'm a huge advocate of the long nap.

Speaker 7 Getting up and going back to bed an hour later, I like, and then sleeping until four o'clock in the afternoon. I don't think we've even started to cover drinking at lunchtime,

Speaker 5 which I think is a really key thing that we're all missing now.

Speaker 3 So the idea that 20 minutes might be okay, but if you go into deep sleep, it's worse. So, when you wake up from the different phases of sleep,

Speaker 3 does that have a very large effect on how long it takes you to recover, how your body clock may recover to that? Is it diff if you're woken up by your alarm?

Speaker 3 So, you're dreaming, or you're in deep sleep, or you're

Speaker 5 the interesting point.

Speaker 6 If you're woken up by your alarm, your body is telling you you need to sleep, and some outside force is telling you to wake up. So, actually, really, you shouldn't be woken up by your alarm.

Speaker 6 You should be waking up normally because your body's saying actually you've had enough sleep now now it's time to wake up. So if you are relying on your alarm that's not good news.

Speaker 6 The other problem as you say with alarms is that if it wakes you up out of dream state for example you're very close to waking state.

Speaker 6 It's not going to make you feel up too upset and you're going to remember that you dream and so on. Even light sleep is like waking up from a nap.
Deep sleep you're not going to feel great.

Speaker 6 And so the sleep cycle really does impact on the sort of waking time because even the quality of the last dream you have before you wake up, if it's a very very positive dream and you remember it, you get out of bed in a good mood.

Speaker 6 If it's not so good, you get out of bed in a bad mood. So, sleep is not separate to the daytime.
The two are intertwined.

Speaker 6 And what's happened in the last sort of 20, 30 years is we've been pushing the night into a smaller and smaller segment of time, and we've been valuing the daytime.

Speaker 6 And I think we really do need to celebrate the night and go, hold on a second, there's a reason why almost every animal sleeps. It really matters to us.

Speaker 7 No, I was just wondering whether, broadly speaking, in an ideal world without work and alarm clocks and

Speaker 7 things like that,

Speaker 7 should we be trying to force a schedule on our sleep patterns, or really should we just sleep whenever the mood takes us?

Speaker 3 Going back to Richard's point, I think how much sleep do we need? And I think we have to be really sensitive to our own individual demands.

Speaker 3 So if you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, you're not getting enough sleep.

Speaker 3 If you sustain the waking day with lots of caffeinated drinks and nicotine and cigarettes and things, then chances are you're not getting enough sleep at night.

Speaker 3 And then what those stimulants will do, particularly caffeine, which can have a half-life of you know five, nine hours, is that you then need to

Speaker 3 sort of reverse that at night. And so, then there's a tendency to take alcohol and sleeping tablets.
And they are sedatives, they're not biological mimics of sleep.

Speaker 3 And so, they will actually interfere with some of the important things going on in the brain whilst we sleep.

Speaker 7 So, should you force yourself to go to bed earlier?

Speaker 3 No, you shouldn't force yourself, you should just try and have a wind in thinking, right? I need, let's say, eight hours. So,

Speaker 3 at least half half an hour, maybe even 60 minutes before you want to go to bed, your desired bedtime, you're winding down. You're minimizing light exposure.

Speaker 3 You're doing the sorts of things that relax you. You're turning off the telly.
You're turning off the email. All of those sorts of things.

Speaker 7 Did you have really furious rows with strangers on Twitter?

Speaker 5 That's bad.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 never do those emails late at night.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 But I think I saw somewhere you'd said that also one of the things that we all do that is counterproductive is then walk into a very bright bathroom to clean our teeth. Absolutely.

Speaker 3 Absolutely, the last thing we do. You know, we stand in the most brightly lit room in the house, looking into an illuminated mirror.

Speaker 3 And of course, light, in addition to locking the body clock onto the external world, has an acute effect on alertness. Bright light makes us more alert.

Speaker 3 And so, what that increase in alertness will do is delay sleep onset, delay sleep. So, it's good to minimize.

Speaker 3 Clean your teeth in the dark.

Speaker 3 I've had this fantasy that somebody should devise a sort of a bathroom mirror with sort of low red-enriched light at night, and then in the morning, bright blue-enriched light.

Speaker 3 So you get your photon shower to set the clock in the morning.

Speaker 7 I think you have just invented it.

Speaker 7 Why don't you make it and make a lot of money?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 5 There you are.

Speaker 1 What are you doing here?

Speaker 5 Go!

Speaker 5 Don't cut that out of the edit. It's not a copyright speaker.
No one's saying anything.

Speaker 1 I like the fact you're making people believe you clean your own teeth.

Speaker 1 They get sent into the BBC teeth cleaner, don't they?

Speaker 1 So, I was gonna, you've written a book also about insomnia as well and trouble with sleeping.

Speaker 1 Just before we move on, there's one thing I wanted to talk about, which was why do you think so many people, apart from what has been mentioned already, what are the other problems which, when I, when I've done shows and I've mentioned insomnia, the number of people in the audience who say I experience insomnia as well, and it is such a ridiculous thing.

Speaker 1 It's been mentioned before, this idea of you're exhausted all day and then you go to sleep, and another part of your brain just kind of goes, ha ha, think you're gonna to sleep? I don't think so.

Speaker 1 And then my brain used to sing me Serge Gainsborg songs over and over again to keep me awake. That's entirely true.
Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. So

Speaker 1 what is causing that?

Speaker 5 Well,

Speaker 5 how much time and money do you have?

Speaker 6 Yes. Well, in your particular instance, God knows.

Speaker 5 But

Speaker 5 so,

Speaker 6 why are people in stomachs? For many different reasons. And part of it is worries and concerns, which are then going over to the night time.

Speaker 6 Part of it is, as we're saying, we don't value the night, and so you go into this bright bathroom and you're seeing stimulating material before you go to bed.

Speaker 6 Part of it is when you're in bed, you don't know what you need to do in order to fall asleep and manage your sleep.

Speaker 6 So, for example, there's a technique called paradoxical sleep, which is that if you are struggling to get to sleep, you try and stay awake. You have to keep your eyes open.

Speaker 6 You can blink, but you have to keep your eyes open and keep yourself awake. That's very tiring to do, and you end up falling asleep.
Now, that's not a well-known technique.

Speaker 6 there's a fair amount of evidence for it.

Speaker 6 If you wake up during the night, lots of people lay in bed getting more and more anxious about the fact they're awake, they start to associate their bed with being awake.

Speaker 6 If you get out of bed for about sort of 15 minutes or so, do something in low light, such as a colouring book or a jigsaw or something like that, then get back into bed, then again, that all helps.

Speaker 6 So, I think we just don't understand and we don't value sleep and the night, and we just need to educate people about how to sleep and how important sleep is.

Speaker 3 Is there anything to the, I suppose, culturally, culturally, historically, dreams have been given terrific significance.

Speaker 3 So, beyond what we know about the processes and sorting of information or whatever they are, is there anything to this Freudian idea, I suppose, of your dreams? Can you interpret them?

Speaker 3 Can you read them? Can they tell you something about yourself, your mental state?

Speaker 6 Well, there are two questions in there. One is, are they meaningful? I think they are.
The other question is, is it Freudian?

Speaker 6 And of course, to Freud, everything is about repressed sexual thoughts and aggression. You put them into the unconscious and they bubble up.
And a lot of his ideas are completely antestical.

Speaker 5 But, so

Speaker 7 no one tells him.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 6 Freud's idea, Neil wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, which is one of the dullest books ever.

Speaker 6 If you're trying to get to sleep, it's quite a good book to read, second only to his book on jokes, which is really quite something.

Speaker 6 So I don't think there's anything Freuding. I don't think all of our dreams have a sort of latent sexual meaning.

Speaker 6 However, there's some evidence that what we're doing is working through our concerns and worries, and the dreams reflect those concerns and worries.

Speaker 6 And so, in a sense, you can gain some insight into your own worries and concerns and to those of your friends by looking at your dreams.

Speaker 3 And only reflect them? Or is there any evidence that they're part of your process of dealing with them, coming up with solutions to them?

Speaker 6 So, there's many instances where musicians and playwrights and others have woken up with a complete tune or

Speaker 6 play in their minds, and the theory is they're kind of working on the problem during the night.

Speaker 6 And there's some evidence that if you write down whatever you're you're trying to, the problem you're trying to solve before you go to bed, in the morning increases the chances of waking up with a solution, which suggests there's quite a lot going on, and it may be that that's to do with dreaming.

Speaker 6 The other piece of data is that dreams start off the first dream of the night, and we all dream about five times, the first dream very negatively and the first dream very negative in terms of emotional tone and then they become more positive as the the night goes on which is another piece of evidence that maybe we're working through our problems in the dreams but dreaming very important

Speaker 7 Katie are you the kind of person who enjoys the company of or is indeed one of those people who goes I had the funniest dream last night or not do you do you like sharing your dreams I love sharing my dreams everyone loves sharing their own dreams I hate hearing about other people's dreams because other people's dreams are literally the most boring thing on earth.

Speaker 7 But my dreams are fascinating and I'm more than happy to share them

Speaker 7 to whoever will listen. So you're ideal, really.
I mean, I'm happy to buy dinner later if I could just tell you about my dreams for three hours.

Speaker 5 That's not going to happen. But

Speaker 3 I have to say, I have a slightly less romantic view of dreams. And the first point would be that if they were so biologically important, then we'd remember more of them.

Speaker 3 And I just feel it's the brain, it's an artifact of the brain trying to make sense of its world.

Speaker 3 So the analogy would be: you've got all this information coming in during the day, you don't have time to process it because you've got to make an immediate response to the world in which you're in.

Speaker 3 So it's like bits of a jigsaw puzzle that are parked. And then those bits of a jigsaw puzzle, when you're asleep, they're trying to be slotted into a half-made jigsaw puzzle.

Speaker 3 Now, sometimes it fits, and you've come up with an innovative solution to a complex problem.

Speaker 3 But sometimes you're forcing that bit of the jigsaw puzzle into some weird place, and you get these bizarre and strange associations.

Speaker 3 So I have to say, I don't feel quite so romantically inclined towards dreams.

Speaker 3 So you think that they're an artifact about model building, basically?

Speaker 3 But when you remove some of the stimulus, yeah, yeah. And of course, that's critical because there's so much information coming in.

Speaker 3 The brain can't deal with the processing as well as the receiving, as particularly effectively. That's why sleep is so critically important.

Speaker 3 Are you suggesting that the sleep itself is primarily biological in function and and the the conscious artefacts that happen, things like dreams are really a side effect.

Speaker 3 It's really it's mechanical in a sense. In a sense, yeah, I think that's right.

Speaker 1 Isn't that the whole of being human? Yes. The rest of it's we're mainly biological, and then there's a little bit on the top of us going, I'm in charge, and we're not at all.

Speaker 5 It's a disaster.

Speaker 3 You're right, I suppose. I'm drawing this.
I'm being a bit of a duelist. I'm not trying to be.
I don't want to do that. But I'm just wondering whether...

Speaker 3 I love it when you get philosophical.

Speaker 5 No, whether sleep.

Speaker 3 I'm not being Carthesian about this. But the idea that sleep is really the things that are going on,

Speaker 3 the body patching things up, it's a necessary part.

Speaker 3 And it's remarkable how we

Speaker 3 intuitively in the pre-industrial era embrace sleep. If you think of so much of Shakespeare, the honey-heavy dew of slumber, you know, sleep, sleep, nature's soft nurse,

Speaker 3 how have I frightened thee? All this amazing stuff.

Speaker 3 And yet, with the invention of the light bulb and the invasion of the night, sleep has been this first victim. And because we can occupy the night, sleep we d we've marginalized sleep.

Speaker 3 And talking about sleepiness, how much sleep do you need? It's really quite dangerous. Many people who said, Oh, I only need a few hours of sleep.

Speaker 3 The tired brain is so incapacitated, it doesn't perceive how incapacitated it is. So it does really stupid and unreflective things without realizing it.

Speaker 3 And that's why lack of sleep is so very dangerous.

Speaker 3 It's nothing to do with your stuff then. It's entirely mechanical.
And all this stuff, thought, business,

Speaker 3 side effect.

Speaker 6 No.

Speaker 6 So clearly, sleep and dreaming is biological, of course, but I would argue there's also psychological

Speaker 6 functions involved in that. And if you take dreaming, often dreams are meaningful to people.
They're not random in that sense.

Speaker 6 But it's amazing how complicated all of this is and all going on outside of consciousness, of course.

Speaker 6 So if you take, say, dreaming, you can influence someone's dream by playing in music very quietly when they're in dream state.

Speaker 6 And so, the classic one is, say, the alarm clock goes off and you hear it as church bells or something like that in dream state.

Speaker 6 And some of the research we've done has involved increasing or making more positive the emotional tone of the dream by playing in certain like nature sounds. It makes people have more pleasant dreams.

Speaker 6 And as part of that research, we had to collect a lot of dreams. So, people wake up in the morning and sending in their dreams.

Speaker 5 And what I hadn't realized is

Speaker 7 People send them in in jars.

Speaker 6 Yeah, they were small jars that arrived, and we kept them in the lab. Yes, exactly.

Speaker 5 But what I hadn't realized that we don't do that.

Speaker 6 But what I hadn't realized is that some dreams, and this isn't true of mine, but sundreams, like soap operas, they carry on from night to night.

Speaker 6 And so we had one woman who had met George Clooney in boots when she'd gone in to buy some aspirin. And

Speaker 6 she'd fallen in love and the two of them started dating. And in her dreams, I I should say.

Speaker 6 And then, night after night, they were going on this very long-term sort of affair that they were having.

Speaker 6 So it was quite fascinating to sort of realise that other people's dreams often carried on from one night to the next.

Speaker 7 It's funny you say that, because ever since I started doing this show, I've been tormented by a nightmare of being attacked by a giant zombie strawberry.

Speaker 5 And

Speaker 7 I don't know if it's dead or alive.

Speaker 5 The strawberry's dream, Russell.

Speaker 5 The strawberry's dream? No.

Speaker 5 Actually, it's a good question.

Speaker 3 Did do other animals, is there any evidence that other animals do?

Speaker 3 So it's likely that

Speaker 3 everything with a sizable cortex, so mammals and birds, have some sort of dream experiences. They certainly have rapid eye movement sleep, which is when dreaming occurs.

Speaker 3 Whether they have the same sort of representation of dreams that we have, we simply can't know.

Speaker 7 But when dogs kind of run in

Speaker 3 the breasts.

Speaker 3 And in fact, it's really interesting because when we're in REM sleep and when we're dreaming most vividly, in fact, the brain is paralyzing the rest of the body.

Speaker 3 And so we're actually not able to act out our dreams. There's a condition called REM behavioural disorder where that paralysis doesn't occur.

Speaker 3 And so people have acted out their dreams, they've murdered their partners, they've done obscene things.

Speaker 3 And if they've gone to trial, it's a perfectly legitimate defence.

Speaker 1 So that,

Speaker 5 I mean, this is true.

Speaker 1 That's a gleeful response, isn't it?

Speaker 5 Who knew how many of our audience were unhappy?

Speaker 6 And the other side of the sleep paralysis that Russ was talking about there is because you're paralyzed, as I was saying, when you're dreaming, if you drift into waking state and you're still paralyzed, you can have sleep paralysis, which is that you think, well, I can't move.

Speaker 6 There must be something holding me down. And if some of that dream imagery comes across as well, that something is then interpreted within whatever cultural beliefs you have.

Speaker 6 So for some people, it's aliens, for some people, it's an old hag and so on.

Speaker 6 Sometimes it's their partner. And so

Speaker 6 what's interesting is it gives rise to these really strange phenomenon, which then we start to understand once we understand a little bit more about the biology.

Speaker 3 Yes, that goes to the point I was making, because here's the brain trying to make sense of its world. There's a perfectly sensible explanation.

Speaker 3 The paralysis, you know, is out of sync with when you've woken up, and therefore the brain is saying, you know, well, this must be an old hag sitting on my chest or whatever. But clearly it isn't.

Speaker 3 So here's a good example of an artefact which is again the brain trying to make sense of it. And it's extremely common because

Speaker 3 this is the usual explanation for alien abduction stories.

Speaker 6 Absolutely. Around about a quarter of the population have experienced sleep paralysis, and it's just that the paralysis being out of phase with the sleep essentially.

Speaker 3 And the other thing about dreams is so many people after 9-11, for example, said, I predicted this.

Speaker 3 And so many people think that dreams are genuinely predictive.

Speaker 3 But if you look across the billions of people who are sleeping every night and the billions of dreams, some people will probably dream of an airplane going into a into a into a tower. So

Speaker 3 there's no evidence at all that dreams can be predictive of ghastly events. It would violate special and general relativity.
Indeed.

Speaker 5 And you would not like that.

Speaker 3 Which again I think supports the argument that these are artifacts.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 final question because we have run out of time, which is

Speaker 1 what are, from all of your perspectives, the best way for those people who are having problems sleeping or being abducted by aliens in a reasonably regular basis, what are the best solutions that you have come across?

Speaker 3 Well, lock the doors, if you get in abduction.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but if they're working working in a kind of multi-dimensional model that allows them to get through the doors, you idiot. No, they're rubbish.

Speaker 3 They're rubbish at opening doors. What would I do?

Speaker 3 So, my tricks would be winding down at least half an hour to an hour before I go to bed.

Speaker 3 Minimizing light exposure. I don't read scientific papers.
I don't do work stuff. I turn off the email and I enjoy reading novels.
And I don't get through many pages and I fall asleep.

Speaker 3 So it's just embracing sleep.

Speaker 3 Katie?

Speaker 7 I would say

Speaker 7 pay outstanding bills, bills, go for a small jog, have a bottle of red wine, and engage in some adult nighttime activity.

Speaker 3 There's that too.

Speaker 1 And if you just had to cut it down to one,

Speaker 3 red wine?

Speaker 5 Yeah, a bottle of red wine.

Speaker 5 Richard?

Speaker 6 I would say

Speaker 6 if it's your worries and concerns keeping you awake, then making a list of those can be helpful before you go to bed.

Speaker 6 Laying there, as I say, occupying your brain with something else. So, you know, coming up with an animal for each letter of the alphabet can help.

Speaker 6 And as I said before, if you wake up in the middle of the night, don't get anxious about it.

Speaker 6 If you're laying there for about 10 minutes or so, get out of bed, do something else, and then get back into bed.

Speaker 6 So, these very sort of simple ideas, these very simple psychological ideas, I think can have a big impact on people.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you very much to the panel.

Speaker 1 We also, before we end the show, we do also have the answers of our audience to a question that we asked them, which is: we asked them, What keeps you awake at night?

Speaker 1 This is always the kind of light bit at the end where we see what you've come up with. And our answers have included heartburn and acid indigestion,

Speaker 1 headaches, and being too warm.

Speaker 5 So,

Speaker 5 which I like.

Speaker 1 I like the fact that when, yeah, I should probably check this so Richard will cover what those issues are. But we also have had worrying about whether my strawberry is dead.

Speaker 3 This is the thought that if I'm asleep, I can't observe myself sleeping, therefore I may or may not be asleep.

Speaker 3 Can that person do?

Speaker 6 It's sad, isn't it?

Speaker 3 It's John Bevan.

Speaker 5 Don't make it personal, aren't you?

Speaker 5 Is he in? Stand up, John Bevan.

Speaker 1 The picture of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson kissing near my tube station.

Speaker 5 Nightmares.

Speaker 3 This is a very similar one. Nightmares of Robin with Brian's hair.

Speaker 5 Oh, yeah, I've seen that image, so that's quite frightening

Speaker 1 not as sad as if it was you because i mean that won't destroy my career on radio but if you had my hair well that's teleover isn't it so

Speaker 1 the constant concern about the cats plotting to take over the world they are only two opposable thumbs away from complete domination

Speaker 3 are the astronauts on the iss watching me

Speaker 5 watching

Speaker 6 Actually, there is a thing called dream suppression, which is you ask someone not to dream about something, they're more like to dream about it.

Speaker 6 So if you say to your partner, whatever you do tonight, don't have a horrible,

Speaker 6 really violent, difficult dream, you can fall asleep with a little smile on your face, knowing it's far more likely.

Speaker 5 So, little hint and tip there.

Speaker 3 What professional bodies are you, a member of?

Speaker 1 What keeps you awake at night? My husband, I wish.

Speaker 5 I'm not going to read that name out.

Speaker 1 The final one is Bad D-Reams.

Speaker 1 As well as three Brian Cox gazing at me through my bedroom window putting on my Brian Cox mask. Hopefully Professor Brian Cox.

Speaker 5 That's from me, that's from Bob.

Speaker 5 That's from Bob.

Speaker 1 So thank you to our panel, Russell Foster, Richard Wiseman, and Katie Brand.

Speaker 1 Next week we are looking at the differences between males and females, which was originally going to be called men are from Mars and Women Are From Venus.

Speaker 1 But Brian took it very literally and started talking about the melting point of women.

Speaker 5 So

Speaker 3 it's very hot on Venus. It's 460 degrees Celsius.
Atmospheric pressure is 90 times atmospheric pressure. I just think it makes no sense.

Speaker 5 Thank you very much for listening.

Speaker 5 We'll be dealing with that next week.

Speaker 1 Thank you and goodbye.

Speaker 5 In the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 5 In the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 3 Till now, nice again.

Speaker 1 That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it.
Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio? Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself.
What do you think?

Speaker 1 It should be more than 15 minutes. Shut up.
It's your fault. You downloaded it.
Anyway, there's other scientific programs also that you can listen to.

Speaker 3 Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alkaseltzer.

Speaker 1 Life Scientific.

Speaker 3 There's that when Brother Fiddy's dad discovered the atomic nucleus.

Speaker 1 That's Inside Science. All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond.

Speaker 3 Richard Hammond's sister.

Speaker 1 Richard Hammond's sister. Thank you very much, Brian.
These are some of the science programmes that you can listen to.

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Speaker 3 Coming to the Orpheum Theater July 14th through August 9th, tickets on sale now at broadwaysf.com.