Sleep is crucially important.
And I think we've moved from this attitude,
from it's an indulgence, a waste of time,
almost an illness that needs a cure
to a realization that if you wanna come up
with innovative solutions to complex problems,
then a night of sleep has been clearly demonstrated
to do that for you.
For something as universally important
to human life as sleep,
mysteries surrounding its necessity and utility
have only just been recently uncovered.
Some of our biggest discoveries
were in the 1970s or 1980s.
And so it makes it a really exciting field
because it seems as though we're uncovering new insights
each and every day on the link between our sleep
and our waking success.
Where in the past, a lot of people thought
that it's great to work long hours and get little sleep.
With lack of sleep sometimes leading to 20, 30%
reduced productivity on the next day,
it becomes pretty clear that the smarter choice
often is to sleep an hour longer than an hour less.
And though we now understand
some of how sleep benefits our life and health spans,
some scientists are going further to find out how sleep
and what happens there can be harnessed
to further expand our understanding.
It's easy to memorize things, that makes you smart
if you can spit back a lot of facts.
But if you want be wise, if you really want wisdom,
you gotta know when and how and why to use that information.
And that's what your brain figures out
while you're sleeping.
There's all kinds of things we know dreams are related to,
the memory consolidation, emotion the next day,
but there are no studies.
And I mean, literally no studies
which try to manipulate those on purpose.
There's no just one reason for sleep.
I published a paper a couple of years ago about this.
Generated quite a bit of irritation
from my sleep colleagues because the title of the paper
is there is no mystery to sleep.
It's a period of physical inactivity
where we to do a whole bunch of biology.
We basically slotted that important biology
to the time when it is best suited,
when we're not moving around, interacting with our world,
getting more sensory information in.
In the same way people have asked, why do we sleep?
You could equally ask, I think, why are we awake?
It's to do a whole bunch of critical stuff.
All of the research shows that the greatest benefit
to our health and our wellbeing
is when you can consistently make between seven
and nine hours of sleep part of your regular routine.
Sleep really matters for our cardiovascular health.
Over the course of our sleep,
our blood pressure actually drops
to its lowest point in the typical 24 hour day.
Individuals who aren't sleeping enough
consistently are at much greater risk
for high blood pressure,
and then subsequent cardiovascular disease.
During sleep, there's an accelerated clearance
of toxins in the brain.
And that happens at a 60% increased rate,
that removal of toxins during sleep than during wakefulness.
We've understood the importance of sleep
because we appreciate now what you become
if you haven't got it.
If you think about our biology, any biology of any organism,
what it needs to do is deliver the right materials
in the right concentration to the right tissues
at the right time of day to succeed.
What our circadian systems do is give that temporal,
that timing structure.
The analogy I've made, it's a bit like an orchestra.
You've got lots and lots of rhythms going on
and they all need to be coordinated to generate a symphony.
And of course, if you don't have that coordination
to shoot the conductor, then instead of a symphony,
you have a cacophony.
And that's what lack of a circadian control would be.
You'd have biological cacophony.
As human beings we're really not built
to make sweeping changes in our sleep routine,
we're really truly creatures of habit.
There's also now a preponderance of evidence
that burning the candle at both of end
doesn't lead to increased productivity.
The societal loss that comes with sleep deprivation
or too little sleep, it's about 400 billion US dollars
in the United States alone.
It's pretty much due to three causes.
On the one hand, people with too little sleep
have a higher mortality risk.
Secondly, there is workplace productivity factors
such as increased absenteeism from work
or lower productivity at work.
And finally, there's also factors around skill development
that people who don't get enough sleep
suffer in the skill development.
Going beyond what and how we sleep,
some scientists are pushing the envelope
in terms of how we can use sleep and the dreams
that come with it to better understand ourselves
Dreams in particular serve to let us explore
possible connections between the events of our day
and other older memories that we might never
think of connecting them to.
So when we do dream, our brains go looking
for weakly associated memories that might be
of potential use in solving problems of our day
and tries to construct a narrative story
of what that might look like.
We might be dealing with a coworker or a boss at work.
And in a dream at night, that topic might be activated.
It might connect to early fights I had with my father
and some in particular that I remarkably close
to the fight I'm having with my boss now.
And in playing out that dream, the brain calculates
that this is actually a useful association.
So the next day I'm in the office with my boss.
Again, I'm about to say something
and all of a sudden, for reasons unknown
to my conscious mind, up comes this image
of me and my father having this fight.
And I already pause and I laugh.
And I say to my boss, I don't think this fight
really has anything to do with you.
The concept is from an evolutionary point of view
that functions of dreaming occur while we dream.
We never need to remember them.
It's hard to overstate the kind of different brain
you get in sleeps.
It's totally weird.
You're amnesic and you're hallucinatory,
you're delusional.
I kind of, I think, got to sleep in dreams
by being interested in how it was possible
that someone could get outta their own way
or how it was possible that I could be in my own way,
in general how I could be multiple people at once
and how sleep was an access point
to seeing those other people.
In order to make those connections
more controllable, Robert Stickgold, Adam Haar and others
at MIT Fluid Interfaces have created a process
and device to implant dreams
into people as they fall asleep.
Your first reaction might be,
hey, they made Inception in real life,
but far from pulling off a high stakes dream heist,
the creators of Dormio, the device the team uses
to achieve targeted dream incubation have higher minded
if less lucrative aims.
Targeted dream incubation.
If you take away the targeted,
dream incubation is a practice that's been going on
for millennia and it's basically
a kind of supplication or prayer, it's an ask.
Typically in spiritual context,
people before sleep would perform a kind ritual,
they would fast for a few days,
or they would sleep in a holy place.
And that would be a way of asking for a big dream.
That could be a healing dream,
a dream which prescribed a remedy.
It could be an introspective dream off in a prophetic dream.
What we were interested in is taking
some of those ideas from dream incubation
and about the kind of moment of sleep onset
as a really fertile moment to change dream content.
And to add in a bit of specificity.
I think there's a kind of creepiness
that some people find to the phrase, dream control.
And so I try to be clear that there's no chance
that I can say you're gonna have a dream
where you're Tiger Woods and then you turn into a tree,
and then you feel bad about it.
And then everything turns red and like, no, that's not it.
What we can do is we can plant a seed.
Basically it's a sensor which sits on the hand
and has some information about your heart
and some information about your muscles
and some information about your skin and the sweat on it.
And it tells you a little bit
about where you are in between wake and sleep
'cause you don't fall asleep all at once.
You fall asleep in stages, in about nine stages.
And so right about when you're halfway
in between those stages, it'll say,
hey, why don't you think about a tree, literally with audio.
And then it'll let you go down
right about to that ninth stage.
And then it'll say, hey, what are you thinking about?
And you'll wake up a little bit and say,
oh, I don't know, my toes became leaves.
And then you say, okay, you can go back to sleep now
and then it'll go right back down about halfway.
Do it again, do it again.
That's it, rinse and repeat a bunch of times.
So like in a 45 minute nap,
you get like five or six dreams usually.
In terms of possible benefits for dream incubation,
I think the smaller answer is we can look at any study
which has shown us a correlation between dream content
and some kind of cognitive change,
and we can say, I'm gonna make that correlation a cause.
So to give you an example, hey, it seems like people
who start dreaming in a foreign language
do better in a foreign language course
than those that don't.
And then we would ask a question,
oh, can we help people along to start dreaming in French,
in their French language course
and see then a causal improvement
in their performance in that course?
That's interesting.
We also have some understanding of dreams
and their relationship to the progression
of depressive disorders or of post dramatic stress
or of anxiety disorders.
We have a sense of their importance for pre-surgery anxiety.
I think the thing that's more interesting
and perhaps more important is what happens
when you leave people with a tool
that even in a very small way can show them
a part of themselves they haven't seen before.
Though Haar and Stickgold
are optimistic about TDI, they were part of the first group
to warn against its potential for misuse.
In a letter posted in November, 2021,
they warned against advertisers invading your dream space.
Something that was in fact already happening.
As a 2021 Super Bowl advertising tie,
Molson Coors encouraged people to watch a short video
before bed featuring beer cams and flowing mountain streams
then listen to an eight hour sounds scape
all incentivized with free drinks from the company.
Can you tell me what you were dreaming?
I was dreaming about waterfalls.
I think it was something to do with Coors.
The alarming implications of it
were troubling to the team behind Dormio.
So there was a study a few years ago
that showed if you take people who wanted to quit smoke
and while they were asleep,
expose them to the mixed smells of cigarettes
and rotting fish, they would over the next couple of weeks
end up smoking only half as much cigarettes
as the control group who got no smells at all.
But there's two important things to know about that study.
First of all, nobody when they woke up
reported remembering how having been exposed to the smells.
So it was done completely out of their waking awareness
and when the same combined smells were played
to subjects while they were awake, it had no effect at all.
So what if instead of pairing it with rotten fish
they had paired it with roses or with chocolate,
you should be able to push people
towards buying more alcoholic drinks,
buying more cigarettes.
It's the last bastion of completely private,
independent world building that we have.
And let's just not give it away.
Simple.