Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Why do we sleep and dream? (featuring Dr. Gina Poe)

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Daniel and Kelly chat with Dr. Gina Poe about sleep and dreams - including whether mushrooms sleep, what Daniel's dog is doing in the middle of the night, and what rats dream about.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Sleep. We spend around a third of our

entire lives doing it, completely oblivious to the world around us. Some animals, like cheetahs, toads, and squirrels, spend at least half of their lives asleep. It's kind of baffling when you think about it. Time spent sleeping is time that can't be spent doing things like searching for food. And if you're a wild animal, time spent sleeping is time when you're less able to detect a predator in the area.

So why do we sleep? It turns out, this activity that swallows up so much of our short time on this planet is really hard to study. But scientists have made some headway on this question of why do we sleep. And today we're going to talk to Dr. Gina Poe about why we sleep and chat with her about other fascinating questions like, do mushrooms sleep? Does an octopus dream?

And does all of our brains sleep at the same time, or do some parts fall asleep before the others? Welcome to Daniel and Kelly's Sleepy Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist, and I don't sleep particularly well. Hi, I'm Kelly Weiner-Smith. I study parasites and space, and I'm not going to blame it on the parasites, but I don't sleep very well either.

But I love sleep. Like when 8.30 comes around every night, it is like the only thing on my mind. Zach is like, it's only 8.30. Are you going to pull an all-niner and stay up past nine? And I'm like not, I'm going to do everything I can to be in bed by the time nine o'clock rolls around. Young people don't appreciate how nice it is to be home in the evening and have no plans. I know. And have a comfy bed. Oh, the blessing that is a comfy bed.

It's one of my favorite things. It is, yes. When sleep goes well, it is definitely one of the best things in the world. But when it's fraught, man, I've had nights that lasted a thousand years. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. No, me too. We went camping once and it was a little bit rainy. And wait, so we weren't really camping. my daughter and I were sleeping on the trampoline.

And it started to rain. And then it got really cold. And then my back hurt. But I didn't want to ruin the night for her. And so I tried to make it work. And then at like 5 a.m. I was like, Ada, we're moving inside. I need a nap.

This is miserable. Well, it's amazing to me that sleep is something we just cannot do without that we have to accomplish every single day. And also that it's something you can't really try to do. It's like something you have to try to not do. You know, like the harder you work. at sleeping, the more you get worked up about it, and the harder it is to sleep. It's incredible. It seems so fragile. It's incredible that it ever works. I don't know.

Yes. I think you and I are making clear that we don't have a very good relationship with sleep at all. But I wake up a million times in the middle of the night, and it's a thing. And it makes me wonder, like, why we evolved this way, why it's such an important part of our life cycle if it's yet so fraud and so fragile, right? It seems like kind of a bad idea. I mean, I think it's possible that you and I are just broken in a particular way. And that this problem with sleep is not present for everyone. I mean, my kids conk out and they are out, and it's fine for them. But that's also an age-dependent thing, right?

A lot of kids have no problem with sleep, sleep all night, sleep anywhere, all the time. But then as you get older, sometimes it gets harder to make it work. I agree. But so today's episode, we're talking to a sleep expert, and we forgot to ask her about tips for how to solve our sleeping problems. She didn't solve our sleep problems. Yes. But a guest wanted to know about dreams, why we dream, interpretations of dreams. So what is the weirdest dream you've ever had, Daniel? And let's keep it short because I think

notoriously people don't want to hear about dreams that other people have had. So real quick, weirdest dream you've had. Well, as you know, I think a lot about aliens. And so a lot of my weird dreams have aliens in them and they're pretty weird. And sometimes they eat me or my children and sometimes it's my fault. Oh, no. And so yeah, those are pretty weird dreams. There are so many insights about you wrapped up in that story. For me, it was my mom and I teamed up with the Berenstein Bears. We were a crime fighting organization and a murderer was on the loose and the murderer killed me because my mom, you know, went off down a hallway and we split up, which classically you should never do.

And the Berenstein Bears had gone another way. And anyway, big mistake. But all right. So I don't know that there's much you can extract about me out of that dream in particular. but we are going to talk to an expert on sleep and dreams, Dr. Gina Poe, and she's going to answer all of our questions about sleep and dreams. And she's going to blow your mind about what it means to sleep across the animal world. And so let's start by listening to the question from our listener that got this whole interview started. Hi, Daniel and Kelly. This is Carrie from the Pacific Northwest, and I was wondering if you can do a show on dreams, why we dream, what part of our brain is being used,

when we dream, and just everything about dreams. Thank you. Thank you, Carrie, for that wonderful question. And all of you out there listening, if you haven't already fallen asleep to this podcast, you are welcome to send us your questions about the universe. We will try to answer them, and we will sometimes rope in a world-class expert to give you answers.

And let's bring that world-class expert on now. On today's show, we have Dr. Gina Poe. She's the Eleanor Leslie Professor of Innovative Brain Research at UCLA. In addition to research, she directs three university programs aimed at supporting undergraduates who are underrepresented in STEM fields. She's done so many incredible things. I'm just going to cherry pick a few. Gina and her colleagues sent four rats to space as part of NASA's neurolab mission to study how brains map the 3D world in weightlessness where you don't really know what side is up. And she's well known for her discovery that sleep is important not just for remembering things but also for forgetting things.

Her lab at UCLA focuses on sleep and memory, which are the topics we're going to be chatting about today. Welcome to the show, Dr. Poe. Thank you so much. It's great to be here. We're super excited. Gina, I have a first question which is sort of goofy, which is, what do you call a rat you send into space? Is it a ratronaut? Yes, actually. Oh, great.

And do they have to undergo like a rigorous selection process? You know, where they like run on treadmills for hours? Actually, yes. Yes. We started with 40 rats and ended up before, so. And those were the four that had the rat stuff? Yeah, the rat stuff. Nice.

Amazing. Great. Okay, so let's start big with why do we think we sleep and how well do we understand the answer to this question? There are lots of answers to that question. I think that there probably is one essential reason why we sleep, but we don't know the answer to that question. but we do know a lot of essential things that happen during sleep with which we can't do without. For example, energy metabolism goes way up when we're asleep. What I mean by that is not actually metabolism.

I mean restoring energy stores to our entire body. Our mitochondria wake up when we go to sleep and they are doing their job much, much faster and restoring ATP to all of ourselves. So that's just one essential function of probably 20 that we know of. Why do we have to be asleep for mitochondria to do that? Why can't they just do it while we're doing our thing? I don't know. That's a good question.

That's actually a fairly new discovery. And is that happening in all of our cells or just our brain cells? It's been discovered in fruit flies, brain cells. Okay. So that's a good question. I imagine it's going on everywhere, but we know that the longer we're awake, the more free adenosine builds up in our brain, and that free adenicine is a signal for sleepiness. And as soon as we go to sleep, within 30 minutes, that free adenicine has been repackaged by

mitochondria into ATP. So the free adenosine levels go way down when we're asleep in the first 20 minutes, which is probably why power naps are called power naps. Oh, I do love me a power nap. Me too. And now I feel way more justified in that. You said there are like 20 different things that happened when we sleep. One of them is we're restoring energy stores. What are some of the other ones? Okay. So, well, we know that we consolidate memories when we're asleep. That's my field of research and that without sleep, we don't put them away long term in our memory stores. Of course, memory is really important for adaptation to our environment, finding where our home is, et cetera.

And so you can imagine that would be important for life itself. It doesn't seem like all animals should have to learn things, but in fact, every time we've tried to teach any animal something, they've been able to learn it. Even mushrooms can learn. And there's some interesting study by Vlad Vizovsky that shows that even mushrooms need sleep. Well, what does sleep look like in a mushroom? like what are they missing exactly i don't know you'll have to ask glad but he came up with a very convincing argument that mushrooms do sleep oh wow okay so then that i'm going to jump ahead then to another question that i had before we go back to purposes of sleep okay so i would not have guessed

you were going to tell us that mushroom sleep that's an amazing surprise i'm going to try sneaking up on some of the mushrooms in my yard now kelly they're busy consolidating their memories of the day you're going to ruin it for them i'm sorry i know all the trick they were trying to learn. So what organisms sleep or like maybe it sounds like the better question is what organisms don't sleep, given that even mushrooms sleep? Like do bacteria sleep? That is a good question.

They definitely have a circadian rhythm. So they have a time when they're not actively pulsing or whatever and times when they are. So yeah, it's a good question. I don't know the answer to that one. And it would be difficult probably to tell in bacteria except for that. sort of change in activity, I guess it would be the only way you could tell. Certainly, our gut bacteria are doing different things at night versus the day, and their rhythm gets messed up when we have jet lag, for example. And in all these creatures that sleep, is it all linked to the same

day-night cycle? Yes, except that, for example, there are rats and mice who sleep during the day. So there are some things that are flipped. The switch is flipped. But it's even for rats and mice, melatonin, which is the hormone of darkness, is higher during the night when they're awake and active exploring. So I have a question based on a tiny amount of anecdotal data. When I go to sleep, my dog is in one place. And if I ever wake up in the middle of the night, he's sleeping in another place. And in the morning, he's in the third place because he has like 19 different places he likes to sleep in our house. So my question to you is, what is my dog doing all night?

Does he just take naps and then move around? Is he like, you know, up learning how to make soufflays in the middle of the night? Like, why don't dogs sleep all the way through the night? What's going on in my house, Gina, tell me. Dogs and cats, predators actually sleep a lot more than prey species do. They sleep about 16 hours a day in a nice home environment. So, yes, your dog is waking up more than you do probably at night and maybe going to get some water or just checking out the house and finding a cool. place to sleep. But if you were to put a camera on your dog, your dog isn't roaming around and

hunting like a cat. A cat is more crepuscular. So they have a lot of activity in the morning and in the evening, but they sleep a lot during the day and they sleep a lot during the night as well. But dogs are a lot more diurnal like we are. So yeah, your dog is pretty much rest assured sleeping all night, just getting up once in a while when they're uncomfortable or they're done with sleep cycle. I was kind of hoping he was writing like the Great American novel in the middle night or something. Yes. So my brain is a little bit stuck on the mushroom thing. And it's making me wonder, how do we define sleep? Because I, you know, I thought maybe we would define it by like brain waves or things that you wouldn't be measuring in a mushroom. So, so let's step back

even farther than. How do we define sleep? Yeah. So there are animals we can't define sleep via of brain waves because their brain isn't organized the same way ours is. In order to be able to see those brain waves, we have to have an alignment of neurons because each neuron has, you know, a tiny little electrical signal. And when they're all aligned in the same orientation, you can see that electrical signal sums and we can see it from a place as distant as the surface of your scalp. There are three layers of skin, four layers of skin, actually, between your actual brain cells and the electrode plus bone and water. So you can imagine that that signal would be reduced for the distance you are away from your brain. So that's what brain waves are? Sorry to

interrupt. I just, I've always wondered, brainwaves are measurement of the electrical field caused by firing neurons? Yes, exactly. They actually don't even have to fire. The membrane potential just has to depolarize or hyperpolarize, so become more positive or negative. It's amazing there's any signal in there at all. Why are the neurons oriented physically in the same way so that they can constructively build a signal? That's incredible. Yeah, why is a great question?

I don't know the answer to that. But they are. The biggest neurons in our brain are these things in our cortex called pyramidal cells, which are shaped like pyramids, which is why they're called pyramidal cells. And they are just oriented on the folds of our brain facing outward. And there are tufts of antenna at every pole of the pyramid, and the ones at the base are called basler dendrites, and the ones at the top are called apical dendrites. And the apical dendrites are the ones that reach all the way to the very surface of our brain, and they are the ones that get communication from other areas of our cortex. So when we're thinking thoughts, that's all coming in, our apical dendrites, when we're feeling feelings that are coming from the out.

side like our sensations, they come in at the baseloidrites and the ones that are closest to the apical dandrites, not the distant ones. So they're just all aligned like that and our striations of our cortex or, as you've probably seen them, they're folded. So it's only at the top of those striations that you can get the electrodes and see what's going on. So we can, with our electrical EEG electrodes, you can only see a small percentage of what's going to. on in our brains and only what's at the surface. Because as the distance increases, the signal decreases exponentially. Yeah. And so we use that information to define sleep in organisms where that works. Yes. Is that, and then otherwise, what kinds of things would we be looking for in organisms

that have a more like distributed nervous system where it's harder to do that kind of stuff? Yeah. So organisms like the octopus. It has more ganglia like it doesn't have a cortex like we have. And so the neurons are there, of course, they're there. They're all over their legs and central brain area, but they're organized in a very kind of more random fashion. So even though they're just as electrically active as ours are, the electricity, you know, is going in different directions. And so it doesn't summate, so we can't really see them with electrodes. So instead, we need behavioral measures. And so animals usually have a typical sleeping position or positions. Even the C. Elegans worm has a typical

sleeping position. They sleep like a, it's called a shepherd's hook. It looks kind of like a question mark. That's their sleeping position. It's kind of cute. Yeah, it's really cute. And then all these animals are less sensitive to what's coming in from the outside. So I wouldn't suggest this, but you can tap on your fish tank at night and the fish won't respond the same way that they respond during the day. During the day, they'll respond right away and swim around. But at night, they'll just sit there and maybe a few seconds later, they'll sort of arouse and respond. So they're less responsive to the outside world. But it is a reversible state to determine and distinguish it from coma. It's homeostatically regulated, which means that all

animals that you deprive of sleep will try and get more sleep the next opportunity they have. So there is a great study of jellyfish, which don't have a central member system either, at Caltech, that showed that these Cassiopeia, which are these upside-down jellyfish, sleep at night like we would expect. And what they do is they find the bottom of the tank or whatever. They find something to rest on and to sleep. And then they just start pulsing more slowly. And then if you wake them up a bunch of times at night by giving them a jet of water or something to disturb them from their. their sleeping position, they will wake up pulse faster, try and find the bottom again and go right back to sleep. And if you do that all night long, the next day, they'll nap a lot more.

Whoa. I know. Do you need some sort of ethics review to torture these jellyfish this way all night long? You know. Is that a yes or no? I wasn't sure. No, but thankfully, not many people are doing this. So if they had vertebra, you would have to. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Oh, I see. So rats have ethical protection, but jellyfish, you can torture as much as you like all day long. Right, right. Wow. We would not call it torture anything, Daniel, the physicist. I'm trying to speak here on behalf of the jellyfish. This sounds like torture to me. You come in my room and wake me up 10 times the middle of the night. I'm not going to be very pleasant the next day. I'm going to do more than just nap. I'll tell you that much.

Yeah, you can't get their consent with people. You know, you get people volunteering for these kinds of studies all the time. And, yeah, it's not great, but they, you know, they like contributing to our knowledge of what sleep is about and seeing what their own sleep is like. We can't give the same feedback to jellyfish, but we do allow them to sleep the next day. Nap as much as you want. You can also give them caffeine. It works the same way. It keeps them up and makes them more active. Interestingly, in that study of jellyfish sleep, they found that they pulse more slowly at night.

If you wake them up, they pulse faster. But in a, I think it was figure two of that paper, they don't even describe there are periods of time when they're not pulsing at all, which is, you know, like not breathing, essentially, for 20 or 30 seconds at a time. And that could mirror the second stage of sleep, which I'm sure we're going to get into later, which is our dream stage at sleep. And in order to not act out our active dreams, we actively inhibit all of our muscles, not our breathing muscles. thankfully, not our heart muscles, thankfully, but all of our anti-gravity muscles so that we aren't acting out our dreams. And it seems like jellyfish have the same kind of called atonia,

no muscle tone, that we have, and they do it periodically throughout the night. The authors of that paper didn't describe a second state of sleep for jellyfish because I guess they just wanted to avoid controversy, or maybe they had it in the original draft and reviewers just said, You need more evidence. But also spiders and octopus, they all have this second stage of sleep.

And when spiders have atonia, what do you imagine that they look like? Do they look like the dead dried up? Yes, they do. Wait, so like if I find a black widow in my garage and it's all dried up, it might just be sleeping and not dead? It might just be sleeping. Oh, interesting. That's a little scary.

Okay. It might be in that REM sleep. Now, we call it REM sleep in humans, because we have rapid eye movements and that corresponds with our dreaming. Actually, spiders also have rapid eye movements during that state. And do all of their eyes move? Yeah, their eyes move. You can only see it in very young spiders where they don't have the dark carapace yet,

coloring, so you can see through their carapace and see their eyes moving. And also, coolly, when we're in REM sleep, our eyes don't always move conjointly, like if they do when we're awake. So we could have one eye moving this way. And it's just not, for some reason, maybe our brainstem areas that are helping our eyes track the world are not coordinated when we're in REN sleep. And that's true of spiders as well. So during wakefulness, their eyes move together in that REM sleep state, which we can call REM sleep in spiders because their eyes are also rapidly moving. Your eyes don't move conjointly.

In cockroaches, they have rapid antennal movement sleep. So their antenna will, you know, jiggle. That almost sounds cute. Yes. And bees as well. These will have rapid antennal movement sleep. And do we have evidence for these animals that they're also consolidating memories while they're sleeping? Or do we think they're doing something different?

I don't think they're doing something different. For example, in the octopus, so they don't, actually, I don't know if anybody's looked at the eye movements of octopuses. I think probably they have and they probably do move, as I recall. But in any case, what they do, one of the ways you can tell they're in. REM sleep is that they flash their colors. So their camouflage gets flashy, like, for example, a dog twitching its paws. That sounds like science fiction. That's crazy. Yeah, I know. It is crazy. So they have a sleeping position, too. They don't like to sleep, except if they're safe, like crawled into a hole in a rock or something like that, because they also are prey for other

sea animals. So they try and get to a safe place. And a place where where when they're flashing, they can't be seen. Yeah, I'd want to hide that color party for sure from predators. Yeah, exactly. So this has been a fascinating tour of sleep across the animal kingdom and the fungal kingdom and all sorts of crazy stuff. But it sounds to me like the fundamental answer is that we don't really know what sleep is. We have this thing in humans we call sleep and we can find correlated activities

and other creatures that are not the same because they have different brains and different bodies, but we still call them sleep. What is the thing we can say unifies sleep across all of these folks? How do we know we're not just projecting our human experience onto mushrooms and black widows? Right. Well, I think the less responsive to the environment, you're not reproducing, you're not ingesting food. Actually, in ungulates, let's go back to ungulates for a second. I think it was studied in, I think it was camels, ruminants, not ungulates, ruminants.

they were thought to sleep a lot less because they're actively chewing a lot. But in fact, they can chew while they're asleep. So it's a really good question. Whoa. I'm lucky I can't chew while I'm asleep. I know. I'd get myself in trouble. I do love food. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like teeth grinding, I guess, in humans. But, you know, they have something to chew on their cud. So that's a really good question. And I think that it's still controversial, Daniel, because if you define it behaviorally, you would say someone who's sleepwalking isn't sleeping because they're walking. But in fact, we know because we can measure EEG that they are asleep while they're sleepwalking. So it's, it is tricky. But we do also know that the brain at least is doing something wildly different, wildly different than when we're awake. We are not processing the outside world in the slow wave state of sleep, which is one of the two states, are brain activity electrically is periodically active and inactive. And the frequency is about 1 hertz.

So we have this blip of activity and then a lot of silence. And this silence is something you never see during wakefulness. And then a little blip of activity and then a lot of silence. And so consciousness is probably completely severed during those periods of time when the brain is completely inactive. And those little blips of activity, 100 milliseconds long or so, are probably too short to be called consciousness and certainly too short to write memories into any long-term stores. So that's probably why we consider ourselves unconscious. During room sleep, it's an entirely different state. The brain is super active. But that activity is all internally focused.

So I'm not focused on what the outside world is, but this inside reality. And that's probably the case of octopuses when they're flashing their camouflage. All right. So that's been a fascinating discussion of meditative mushrooms and napping black widows. When we get back, let's talk more about what's happening while we sleep and what it means to dream. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

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And I just hit call. I said, you know, hey, I'm Jacob Schick. I'm the CEO of One Tribe Foundation, and I just wanted to call on and let her know. There's a lot of people battling some of the very same things you're battling. And there is help out there. The Good Stuff Podcast, Season 2, takes a deep look into One Tribe Foundation, a non-profit fighting suicide in the veteran community. September is National Suicide Prevention Month, so join host Jacob and Ashley Schick as they bring you to the front lines of One Tribe's mission.

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Listen to the Good Stuff podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hola, it's Honey German, and my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

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it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasas Come Again as part of my Cultura podcast network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. So I remember hearing that

something like dolphins and birds sleep with half of their brain at a time, which sounds great, because then you can be awake. But anyway, so my question is, is that actually happening? And what does that look like? And what are the like bonuses or drawbacks of that technique? Right. Well, if you're a dolphin, the bonuses that you can continue to breathe all night long while you're sleeping. So the half of your brain that's awake keeps the dolphins swimming at the surface and able to breathe all night long. they switch sides so one half of the brain is sleeping for a while and then the other half of the brain sleeps for the rest of the time and just switch back forth interestingly that the one neurochemical that seems to be changing when the consciousness side changes is acetycholine

which is a neurotransmitter that goes all over the brain from one area of the brain stem and it's considered to be the searchlight of consciousness so when you're When you're thinking about walking upstairs, acetylcholine goes to the motor areas that are responsible for your feet walking upstairs. And when you're thinking about doing math, acetycholine goes to the math areas of your brain and away from the walking upstairs. If you're walking upstairs and doing math at the same time, of course, acetylone is in both places.

And you're probably going to fall. Anyway. So for dolphins, fur seals that are out, you know, hunting for. long periods of time and not accessing land for several weeks, they can also sleep unihemispherically. Whales, sleep, you know, hemispirically. And it's true, the side that's asleep that doesn't have the acetylcholine has the big slow waves of unconsciousness. And the side that's awake looks like, you know, awake and the eye is open on that side and all of that. So actually, so we control our brains. This is a little confusing. Our left side of our brain controls the right side,

of our bodies. So if the left side of the brain is awake, the right eye is open and watching the world around them and vice versa. But so REM sleep, rapid, I'm in sleep, the one that I talked about where you have atonia, seems to occur only very briefly in these animals that are unihemispherically sleeping. So there is something different about REM sleep that really requires atonia. And maybe that's why it's only 15 seconds long in the dolphin. And we have a recorded the EEG, the electrocephalogram from dolphins or whales, it's a little more difficult. There's a lot of fat to help them float between their skin and their brain, and no one has attempted it. But we do have another state of sleep in whales at least, and I don't know if it's been

observed in dolphins. It would be interesting to see, but where they're not just floating at the surface and breathing and sleeping one hemisphere at a time, but they're actually below the surface instead of a horizontal position and a vertical position, either head down or head up. And usually what they do is they start with head down and then as the waves and tides, you know, move their atonic bodies. They eventually sort of go to the head-up position

and just they have a lot of fat in the head. That's the one that's the more neutral position. And they will do that for 20 minutes at a time. And that's where their body is completely also atonic. And then they swim to the surface. and breathe again, you know, wake up and breathe again. But I'm not sure I follow the basic idea of why some animals do this and some don't. You said, you know, dolphins need to keep swimming and breathing, but we also need to keep breathing while we're asleep.

Why don't we do this as well? Right, because, well, we can breathe while we're asleep without having to swim. You know, we just, you know, so also dolphins and whales breathe voluntarily. So it actually requires a voluntary sort of waking brain to breathe, whereas we breathe involuntarily. When we go unconscious, if we were holding our breath before we went unconscious, we will start breathing again. And whales and dolphins have ancestors that were land animals, right? Which probably slept more like us? How do you think that evolution happened?

How do you evolve this kind of thing? Right? I don't know. It's incredible. You know, the differences between species is really a beautiful and amazing thing. So you mentioned that seals, when they go off on long foraging trips, can do unihemispheric sleep. Do they alternate between unihemispheric sleep and then everything? Yes. Like the whole brain going to. Oh, wow. They can do both. Yeah. When they're on

land, they do by, you know, whole brain sleep. Wow. Yeah. And there's an elephant seal that isn't found to do in a hemispheric sleep, either on land or at sea. And so that was used to argue that maybe sleep isn't necessary because they would be out there foraging for a couple of weeks and they're not sleeping for those couple of weeks and then they go back to land and they don't have homeostatic rebound like they had been sleep deprived for a couple of weeks. So it was thought that maybe these are animals that don't need to sleep and maybe sleep isn't necessary or at least not always homeostatically regulated. But a few years ago, someone at E.C. Santa Cruz outfitted these elephant seals with head caps so they could record from their brains while they're

out there swimming. And they found that in fact, these headcaps also had GPS. They found that they actually do sleep while they're out there foraging. And what they do is they take a deep breath, you know, lots of deep breaths. They swim down, down, down to a depth beneath where sharks and killer whales would predate them. And where if they fall asleep and when they fall sleep, they start sinking instead of floating back up. And so what they do is they go into slow wave sleep and they have these beautiful slow waves. And they're just kind of coasting down as they go into slow wave sleep. And then when they go into REM sleep with the atonia, whatever body position they're in, if it's less than perfectly straight, which always is going to be less than

perfectly straight, they'll start spiraling. The fin that's down will make them spiral. So they will spiral down and down and down until they hit the ocean floor or until about seven or eight minutes have passed and they start the oxygen need starts giving them decide that they need to wake up and so they wake up and start swimming up to the surface wow and they even when they're swimming to the surface they can hold their breath for a long time so even when they're swimming to the surface they could have little naps and then swim some more and yeah it's it's it's Super cool. So really sleep has been found in every animal and in every animal who look closely enough seems to have these two stages of sleep. So both stages are independently regulated. So both stages seem to be important. So wait, when one hemisphere is asleep, I assume that they're less good at doing, like they can't have social interactions or anything like that. They're just watching out for predators and trying to breathe. Is that right? Yes. Okay. I think so. Yeah. We don't see social behaviors. which would take the whole body.

I suppose they could flat one fin waving. Hey guys, taking a nap. Okay, right. And it makes sense to me that predators might sleep, like they eat very calorie-rich food, they don't need to move around, they're conserving energy. But prey, it seems to be like a huge disadvantage

to ever go to sleep. That's right. Does that mean that it must be fundamentally important that you can't escape it? There's no evolutionary path away from it? I think that's what it means, yes. So I would love to see sleep in the pond organism that can survive in space and radiation. Tardagrades.

I would love somebody to do a sleep in Tardigrades study because they survive so well, despite all of these different assaults on them. They have amazing abilities to rebuild broken, double-stranded breaks in their. DNA, which seems to be also one of the functions for sleep, is to rebuild a double-stranded breaks in our DNA. So another animal that seems to be really good at repairing their DNA is the naked mole rat, which are really ugly or cute, whatever you think. It's a personality test, actually, whether you like the naked mole rat.

It is, it is. So there are some studies done in San Diego. ago and then some more studies done in Russia of sleep in the naked mole rat. And they seem to sleep so much more than the rest of us. And the naked mole rat, unlike other rats, which live about two years, the naked mole rat can live 35 years. And when they die, it's usually from accidents or injuries or something like that. So why do they live so much longer? Well, they have this superior ability to repair their double-stranded breaks in DNA. And their REM sleep is about 50% of their sleep, which, as for us, it's about 25% on a good day.

For rats and mice, it's more like 12, 15%. But with naked mole rats, it's 50%. And that's as much REM sleep as we get as babies. So when we are learning so much from our environment, and actually, I want to give you another factoid, which is learning, requires double-stranded breaks in our DNA. So every time we learn, we're breaking our DNA in order to do that. What? Yes, I know.

Why? I've never heard that before. Yeah, I don't know why. I don't know why. But sleep helps repair, repair that. And so what are naked mole rats doing? Babies are learning, of course, a ton, right? and they have about 50% REM when they're born. So why are naked mole rats having so much REM all through their lives? Are they learning a lot?

There doesn't seem to be any evidence that they're so much smarter than anybody else. They're writing the Great American novel, of course. Maybe writing a Great American novel that only they can read. So you have a lot of questions about sleep and all these creatures and in humans. Tell us a little bit about how we've learned these things. Like, what experiments have you done? How do we know these things? Yeah.

Other than torturing jellyfish. Right. Watching. Right. Watching, just anybody can be a scientist, as you know. You just need to observe the world around you. Ask questions and try and answer them by perturbing that universe and seeing what happens. So we know sleep is homeostatically regulated, even in ourselves, because when we get less of it,

one night we are sleepier the next day, our drive to sleep is higher. But yes, there have been some key experiments throughout history. For example, the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep was probably not the discovery of rapid eye movement sleep, but rather the first report of rapid and eye movement sleep that other people could read. And that was an observation made by, at the University of Chicago, by a research scientist who was actually the trainee of a another researcher who was studying sleep, yes, had EEG electrodes on people's brains. And this trainee said, hey, there seems to be this second state where eyes are moving and there's a bit of twitching and respiration changes.

And the principal investigator, the PI, didn't believe it. You know, like, yeah, it's just a little bit of wakefulness or something else. Sleep is just one thing. And we thought at that time it was a disconnect from the world. and it was saving energy, which doesn't appear to be very true, actually. So this trainee hooked up the sun of the PI all night long, and this was a young kid, I think 10 years old or younger, who has more REM sleep and is very thoroughly asleep. Kids, boy, it's hard to disturb them.

It's hard to wake them up out of sleep. And, yeah, and so he showed the record. to the PI, this is your son. And look at these states. And the PI said, wait a minute. And had his son sleep another night and watched him and, you know, tried to poke him awake during the REM sleep when he thought that it must have been wakefulness. The son was quite, quite heavily asleep. And realized, okay, there may be, you know, maybe there is something to this. Maybe there's a second state of sleep. So it's kind of, you know, observations like this, someone saying, hey, this is weird.

This doesn't follow my hypothesis. This isn't what I thought would happen. And then pursuing that thing that's weird to its end to see what the answers are. For humans, you're obviously limited in the experiments you can do. I want to ask you a weird question. Imagine that we're not limited. I think that's the only kind of question you ask, Daniel. I know, but this one's going to feel a little extra weird.

Imagine you weren't limited by any ethical concerns, and you only had scientific questions. What experiments would you do to learn more about sleep, you know, slicing brains open, torturing people, sticking things inside them? I don't know. What would you do just from a scientific point of view to learn about sleep? What experiments do you wish you could do? Yeah, I mean, if it weren't for the dangers involved, I would put electrodes in my own brain, a ton of them. I would put a thousand of them in my own brain because one of the things that we have discovered from people with electrodes in their brain, and they put electrodes in their brain because they want to find out where epilepsy is starting

so that they can go in and just take out that little section of brain, which is generating epilepsy all over the brain. So when we have looked at 12 of those people who had electrodes already implanted in their brain, and we find that, in fact, sleep isn't a whole brain phenomenon. One third of the time, for example, your hippocampus, which is involved in recording memories, in the first place and then consolidating those memories to other parts of the brain,

your hippocampus can be an entirely different sleep state than the cortex is and it's about a third of the night that it's in an entirely different state. So, for example, the hippocampus can go into rapid eye movement sleep faster and better and longer

than the cortex does. It can go to sleep, actually, the first place, sooner than the rest of the cortex does. So you could be in bed reading a book and about two minutes on average before you actually fall asleep and the book hits her face

or whatever it is, your hippocampus is already asleep. It's not going to remember that last page that you read. You can also tell when you're falling asleep, you have to reread the same patches again and again. What was that? I don't know, you know, what was that? And that's called sleep onset amnesia.

And we found in people that your hippocampus can be asleep for 20 whole minutes before the rest of your brain is asleep. So don't have a critical conversation with your bed partner while they're trying to fall asleep because it's possible they will not remember the conversation the next day at all. Oh, my gosh, you have disinsured yourself in my marriage. I have no important conversation after 10 p.m. rule, which is controversial in my marriage. It seems reasonable.

I'm almost always asleep by 10 p.m. So Zach would not make much progress. anyway. But now I have a scientific foundation for winning this argument. So thank you, Gina. Yes. And thank you, science. Yes. All right, let's hope we helped some other marriages as well. And when we come back, we will talk about dreams. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal.

Apparently the explosion actually impelled metal, glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to say. Day. Terrorism. Law and order criminal justice system is back. In season two, we're turning our focus to a threat that hides in plain sight. That's harder to predict and even harder to stop. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your entire identity has

been fabricated. Your beloved brother goes missing without a trace. You discover the depths of your mother's illness the way it has echoed and reverberated throughout your life, impacting your very legacy. Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the profound and powerful stories I'll be mining on our 12th season of Family Secrets. With over 37 million downloads, We continue to be moved and inspired by our guests and their courageously told stories. I can't wait to share 10 powerful new episodes with you, stories of tangled up identities, concealed truths, and the way in which family secrets almost always need to be told.

I hope you'll join me and my extraordinary guests for this new season of Family Secrets. Listen to Family Secrets Season 12 on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your Podcasts. Hola, it's Honey German. And my podcast, Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment

with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah.

We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a star. We talk all about what's viral and trending with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs,

and those amazing Vibras you've come to expect. And, of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching?

I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me. Yeah? But the whole pretending and coat, you know, it takes a toll on. Listen to the new season of Grasas Has Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it.

They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be. identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA.

Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab we'll learn about victims and survivors

and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Authrum, the Houston lab that takes on the most hopeless cases to finally solve the unsolved. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. That's a great question. And we can only study dreams in people because we can only ask people about their dreams. It's a hard one because you can only ask people about their dreams when they're awake. So it's kind of a retrospective study rather than a live study. However, we do dream most when we're in rapid eye movement sleep, when our bodies are actively inhibited from acting out those dreams. So that's a good thing. But how do you know that if you can only ask people about their dreams later. Yeah, you just wake them up out of different stages of sleep.

And when you wake them up out of REM sleep, they're most likely to report having had a dream. And the dream is most likely to be the most bizarre and lengthy. So if you wake them up out of stage to sleep, which is not the deep, slow wave, unconscious state, but rather the first state you go into when you're asleep and then the state that you go into right before REM sleep, so it's called a transition to REM, there are more dreams. But they are usually very, very brief, also bizarre, but they're not long stories, usually. They're just short little snippets. So when we wake people up out of deep slowly sleep, which is hard to do because there's a lot of sleep inertia and you ask someone what they were dreaming, they'll say, I have no idea, I wasn't dreaming anything, let me go back to sleep, you know, grunt and turn over, right?

It doesn't mean that definitively people aren't dreaming of the slow I sleep. It might just be that they're not remembering it when we wake them up. But do you have any way to know their reactions or their stories or their retelling of their dreams correlated at all to their real dreams? Yeah, so there is some evidence. But it's controversial or it has been controversial because there was this idea of activation synthesis so that in fact you just have little blips of random. randomness when you're in REM sleep and then when you're awake because we don't like little blips

of randomness, we sew them into a story. And that dream isn't actually a story, but we've sewn them into a story. And there's some, a little bit of evidence for that. For example, if you have an alarm waking you up, you will have a dream that can incorporate that alarm. Not everybody does, but you can have a dream that incorporates that alarm that starts before the alarm started ringing. Like, for example, in your dream, your alarm is a ticking bomb and you have to diffuse it. But in your dream, you're coming up upon the bomb and then you start hearing the ticking. And so is it that you've retroactively dreamt about the silence before the alarm starts ringing in order to make this a story? Or is it that, you know, we don't know the answer to that. But interestingly,

because we can put electrodes in the brains of rats. Actually, I want to tell you that it doesn't hurt to have an electrode in your brain. With these people with electrodes in their brain for epilepsy will not report having any pain. We actually, strangely, don't have sensory structures in our brain to sense what's there. So rats with electrodes in the brain

will not know that they've got electrodes in their brain and they will sleep wonderfully. They will sleep beautifully. And you can see, because you can control what happens to a rat during the days, you know, a rat's exploring a maze during the day and they're finding food in your maze, they will re-dream about that maze. They will reactivate the same neurons that are active in a particular order during the day will reactivate in that order during their dream state of rapid eye movement sleep.

And you'd say, why would they dream about the same thing that they were during during the day? well, they have a pretty boring life except for that exciting maze running time. And so they're much more likely to activate that particular dream. But there are a lot of times in REM sleep where they're not activating that maze. And so what are they dreaming about? We don't know. We'd have to record every minute of their lives in order to see what they're reactivating and what they're dreaming about.

But we do know that they do reactivate the maze. And interestingly, they can reactivate the maze in the same order in which they ran it during the day. But they can also do bizarre things that they can't do during the day, like leap from one side to the other base to the next like we can in our dreams. We can change scenes, right? We can, you know, suddenly we're in a boat, you know, versus before we were in a house. So, and rats can do the same thing. So we can't ask them about their dreams, but we can see their brain activity reactivating this reality that they were in the day before. Also, we have this tiny little brainstem area that inhibits our mind.

muscles when we're dreaming so that we don't act them out. When that tiny area of the brain stem degenerates, we act out our dreams, that's called REM behavior disorder and people with that have to actually tie themselves down while they sleep so they don't hurt themselves because you're completely insensitive to the world around you. You are totally in your dream world and you could fall downstairs or walk through a plate glass window or beat your bed partner because you're dreaming about, you know, an alligator over the side of your canoe. So you can also elision that tiny little area of the brainstem in a rat and see the rat act out their dreams as well. So they will be, you know, cowering as though they're dreaming

they're being predated upon. There's somebody's praying on them. They can fight. They can walk around. They can, you know, phantom eat. If it's a, I've seen the Cats do it. They can, you know, swat at imaginary butterflies and also pounce on imaginary prey. So, yeah, this is some evidence that all animals seem to dream, including cephalopods, which have this flashing of their camouflage while they're in that state. So we think that's a dream where their body is physically responding as opposed to that's just, okay. Huh. Yeah. So. So. what is the origin of dreams? We don't know. But there is another part of the brain stem that only is active during REM sleep. So during this dream state.

And it's filled with big excitatory neurons that project all over the brain. And it starts firing when we are in that N2 stage of sleep, which is the state when if you wake someone up, they'll report little short dreams, but not long ones. And then it fires like crazy. when we're in REM sleep. And it might be the origin of the internal origin of dreams. It's right beneath an area of the brain stem called the Locusurus, which gets all sensory information from the outside world, and that is actively inhibited when we are in REM sleep.

But just beneath that is this area that comes on and comes alive when we're in dream state. So it might be the way we feel things and hear things and start speaking. speaking and all of that because this subcerulus area, it's called subcerulus, projects all over our cortex. And we don't know because we haven't been able to control which areas are active and which are not active in the subteros to try and control and formulate a dream, like an inception of a dream. We can't do that yet. But maybe someday we will be able to do that. Wow. So there are a lot of people who are interested in interpreting dreams and trying to decide, like, what they mean.

Is there any hidden meanings and dreams, or is it, what's, what's the science there? Again, that's really difficult because, again, you can only study it in waking people. But there is a reactivation of memories. If you deprive someone, a person of REM sleep, you will get a much more pedantic mindset. You can't deprive people of REM sleep for very long. That's, again, independently regulated. And if given any nap opportunity, normally REM sleep comes after about 90 minutes or 80 minutes of sleep. It follows slow-wave sleep because your brain needs to be in the perfect state, temperature-wise, et cetera,

in order to go into this dream state of sleep. But if you deprive someone of particularly that dream state of sleep, they will go into REM sleep earlier and earlier and they'll get more or more of it. And in fact, just at sleep onset, they can go into REM sleep. There does seem to be, you know, a lot of anecdotal evidence that dreams do relate to things that we're experiencing. And for some people more than others, a lot of people don't remember their dreams at all. So they're not the ones to study for this. But those who can remember their dreams, sometimes it, in fact, dreams do seem to relate to the things that you've learned during the day or the week before, the month before.

And the bizariness of dreams seems to allow us to put things together. So we wake up with an aha moment, not always, but sometimes with an aha moment where we've put things together that we couldn't, in our conscious brain just couldn't let us put together. So the study of dreams and creativity does show that people, for example, doing a task that requires a creative insight in order to do it quickly. About a third of the people doing this task get the creative insight while they're awake and doing the task in the first place. Two-thirds of people don't see the hidden rule that allows them to take this shortcut. And of those, half of them through sleep, wake up and then can do the creative leap. And then one-third seemed to never get it. So, unfortunately.

And those that make that creative leap seem to have a lot more activity in this, area of the brain that causes sleep spindles, which is related to these substerillus area, which causes this activation, this random activation during dreams. Are you saying that people have this idea solve a problem while they're asleep and then they wake up and they have the solution? Yeah. Or that the sleep is somehow prepared their brain to be able to solve this problem? It seems like they wake up with the solution.

Wow. So that the first time that they're doing it, you know, they've got it. So it is possible to dream up. the Great American novel. Yes, I think so. All right. There's one famous songwriter who said that when he wakes up, if he doesn't write down the song that he was dreaming about, God will give it to Bob Dylan.

That's excellent. So what do we know about the cultural dependence of sleep and dreams? Do people sleep the same way around the world? Do they dream the same way? Do we have the same relationship with dreams around the world? There are cultures. that have strong beliefs that these insights that come through dreams come from ancestors that are, you go to visit your ancestors and your dreams and they give you wisdom.

Again, there's, you know, no scientific evidence, but there are, you know, cultural norms surrounding dreams that are different in different cultures. There's also cultural norms surrounding sleep in general that differ between different cultures. Some cultures don't value sleep at all. It's for the lazy, they believe. And there's nothing good happening except just turning off your brain and resting. And if you're tough, you can do without it. Other cultures have a much more, you know, open or receptive view of sleep. And sleep is something they welcome each night and, you know, with open arms because that's a time when, you know, lots of things happen like consulting with your ancestors or whatever.

it is. There's a really cool study in South America by a researcher who's actually at University of Washington in Seattle. He put sleep trackers on people in a village without any electricity in South America in the Amazon. And another set of sleep trackers on people with bare minimum electricity, like a single light bulb and a ceiling, and then on people living in the city. And he found that all of these cultures, no matter where they were living, sleep less during the full moon or the new moon. So he was tracking them for a full month. And there's a statistical significant difference where people sleep less, either the full

moon or the new moon. And so you think it's not light because the new moon, there's no, you know, there's no moon. And the only light you see is the stars when you're out in the Amazon, if that at all. so it can't be light disturbance and in fact the people in the city also these are college students they typically spend very little time looking at the moon or thinking about the moon so it's it seems to be the only explanation that they could come up with in this paper is that the gravitational pull is stronger on the earth during both a new moon and a full moon and so maybe there's something have to do with gravity and sleepiness.

Maybe that explains why we sleep worse at high altitudes. I always thought that was the oxygen. Yeah, no, the oxygen definitely does disturb our sleep, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. What about people who have different sensations of the world? Do dreams play a different role in folks who, like, have always been blind or always been deaf? Can people see in their dreams if they're blind? No, they do if they're not blind from birth.

But if they're blind from birth, no, it's different. that are activated in dreams. Daniel, do you want to ask your alien question? Oh, no. Right, so we've asked you about whether sleep is something that's common across Earth creatures. How common do you think it is across the universe when aliens come and visit, are they going to need to take naps in between our conversations? Or do you think this is something that happens only on Earth?

Well, it does happen on Earth, but whether alien sleep is a good question. It depends on what, whether aliens. need to repair double-stranded DNA. Do they have double-stranded DNA? It depends on whether their energy stores works the same way. That's a great question because there are people who would like to do away with sleep altogether. The few ones who think it's a waste of time or who would like sleepiness to not affect people's performance, for example.

But we have not found anything on earth, at least, that can replace sleep itself. And, in fact, without sleep, eventually we die. And that eventually is about as long as we take to die without any food. So it's as essential as food for us. So, yeah, it's quite possible there are aliens who don't need sleep that work differently. Well, when the aliens do arrive, I think I hope that they're invertebrates so that you can do all sorts of terrible experiments on them and understand. No, no, no, no, no. I think they're coming up with new rules

for working on like octopus as well because they're particularly intelligent and yeah, so it's a little more complicated. There are already rules for octopus, yeah, absolutely, yeah. All right, well, thank you so much for chatting with us about sleep and dreams. This has been fascinating, and let's go ahead and hear if our listener had her questions answered.

Thanks for doing your podcast on this. It was really interesting. Dr. Poe was really interesting. I've never knew that, that people believe they talk to their ancestors in their dreams. I found that fascinating. Thanks for everything you do, and I look forward to hearing all your future podcasts.

Bye-bye. Daniel and Kelly's Extraordinary Universe is produced by IHeart Radio. We would love to hear from you. We really would. We want to know what questions you have about this extraordinary universe. We want to know your thoughts on recent shows, suggestions for future shows. If you contact us, we will get back to you. We really mean it. We answer every message. Email us at

Questions at Danielandkelly.org. Or you can find us on social media. We have accounts on X, Instagram, Blue Sky, and on all of those platforms, you can find us at D and K Universe. Don't be shy. Write to us. Hi, it's Honey German, and I'm back with season two of my podcast. Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest and music and entertainment with interviews with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition?

No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And of course, the great bevras you've come to expect.

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