Why We Sleep: The Hidden Work of the Sleeping Brain Sleep Part One

0:00Jim Carroll, Ralph Baber, psychology take away. You need a dose of the real, life's absurd. We know the deal, did you hear? Don't let it get you down. Turn that around.

0:23Upside down, upside down, down, down. Well, hi, this is Jim and Ralph, and welcome to Psychology Takeaway, where we look at new and sometimes old issues in psychology and try to understand them from perhaps a more contemporary point of view. Today we're going to talk about something really old, right, Ralph? We are, and what we're going to try and do, we've talked about this topic before, but we're going to try and give it a little more contemporary view

0:59because there has been a lot of research in the last three or four years, and some of the new research is pretty interesting. Okay. So our old topic is sleeping. Sleeping. Sleeping. Something we all do, right? We all do. Unless we don't. Unless we don't, yeah. And some people have terrible insomnia, and as W.C. Fields said, Oh, not that one again, Ralph. Yeah. Insomnia.

1:30I know a good cure for that. Get plenty of sleep. Yeah. Oh, W.C. We should do the psychology of W.C. Fields someday. Someday, yes. Or perhaps look at other famous quotes on sleep or on dreams or on whatever. Yeah. Just do a whole show on that. Well, when we get to dreams, which will be not today probably, but next broadcast. Probably down the line.

2:00Down the line. Who knows? We want to talk about some of the sleep disorders, too. Yeah. Which really plague people. One of the things that, you know, we can think about is how dreaming can sometimes affect the way you sleep, how much you sleep. And for some people, dreaming doesn't seem to happen. Well, for example, I very, very seldom dream that I know of.

2:38Correct. That you know of. Well, we'll talk about that because everybody dreams. In fact, most animals seem to go into a dream state. Yeah. So it might not be that you don't dream. That you don't dream. It's that you don't recall your dreams. Yeah. Let's talk more about sleep and what we know. It used to be that, you know, you'd say, well, I slept, I had a good night's sleep. Gee, I wonder why I waste so much time sleeping. I don't need to sleep. You know? Well, the answer to that.

3:10Going through, you know, studying the sleep cycle, and he was looking at rapid eye movement, and he couldn't figure out what was going on. So it woke the person up. Okay, what's going on? I'm dreaming. Okay, so I'm being a scientist. Did it again later on. After a REM period, woke the same person up. What's going on? Nothing. Okay, so REM and dreaming are pretty much closely associated.

3:42Now, those other stages that I mentioned could have some dreaming going on. Fated. There's some faded dreams. There's some kind of hypnagogic dreams in the alpha state, but it's the REM state where we get, you know, the serious dreams. The dreams that Shakespeare said, what, wrapped the raveled sleeve of care. Yeah. Shakespeare had a handle on this long before we were able to put somebody into a sleep study.

4:18Now, Jim, one of the interesting things to me about this set of things that we know now about dreaming is there are people who genuinely really believe that the dreams they have are predictive dreams. Uh-huh. We talked to somebody in the coffee shop today. He said, yeah, he had predictive dreams.

4:48One predictive dream was he was going to get arrested and sent to prison, and three days later he was arrested and sent to prison. I mean, that's quite a predictive dream. We're going to talk more about dreams, or we're going to talk about a special kind of dream, and that's the nightmare. Because he told us about a nightmare, a dream, also, a recurring nightmare. Yeah, I'll talk about the nightmare that I have, too, the recurring nightmare of killing Emily. Okay. Okay, so, but we're going to save that because we still haven't unpacked everything in sleep.

5:22One of the things that, you know, we've talked about sleep as this normal experience, but for a lot of people, maybe a third of the population, sleep is not a normal experience. Some people have a great deal of difficulty getting to sleep. Some people have a great deal of difficulty staying asleep, and some people have a great deal of difficulty waking up. So we've got a whole variety of sleep disturbances or sleep disorders that we've only really begun to look at in the last few years.

5:55You know, if the purpose of sleep is emotional regulation, the question could be, what happens when we are dysregulated from a sleep point of view? Does that dysregulate our emotions? If we have difficulty sleeping or we wake up several times during the night, do we ever get into that really deep delta sleep? And those are questions that really nobody had much of a clue about Shakespeare, until Demet began to do his work where he's actually, he was staying up late watching people sleep.

6:38So, you ready to go into that one next time? Yeah, and we'll talk about, maybe you mentioned a mouse study that we haven't got to. We should do that next time. Yeah, a good study of young sleep versus old sleep. Okay. Okay.

7:08Well, I think I'm going to go and take a nap, Ralph. I can understand that, Jim. And, you know, my wife says that I am a champion napper. I can sleep on a medium soft rock. I think she's right. But in the meantime, we're going to say, keep your stick on the ice. Because we're all in this together.