Hidden Brain - Radio Replay: Eyes Wide Open

Episode Date: September 22, 2018

When Randy Gardner was 17, he won a world record for going eleven days without sleeping. On this Radio Replay, Randy shares insights from that experience and warns others against copying his stunt. Later in the program, we speak with neuroscientist Matthew Walker about the mind and body benefits of eight full hours of sleep.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the early hours of the morning when the air was heavy and the ticking clock ran slow, Randy Gardner would step out into his yard. He would stand beside the cactus's seat planted and listen to the cars that whiz by on Highway 54, which runs behind his home in San Diego. Standing in the moonlit shadows, he would call out in agony. I would go out on the back yard of three in the morning and scream my head off like a wild animal. Many people are familiar with the suffering Randy experienced. Insomnia. There's a lonely communion that binds those who plead with the gods

at 3 o'clock in the morning. No one can help you. No one can make you feel better. No one can do anything. It's like you're going insane. But Randy also knew he was different from everyone else. Many years ago, as a teenager, he tempted those very same gods. His punishment, he understood, was payback. Thank you again. Have a lovely day.

I was in San Diego recently for a conference. I had some downtime, so I hopped in an Uber and headed to Randy's house. Hey! Are you Randy? Yeah, I'm Randy. Randy Shankar is so nice to meet you. So nice to meet you. How are you?

Randy Gardner greets me in the driveway of his home. He gives me a warm handshake and a smile. He's wearing a lemon colored shirt and sky blue shorts that set off his deep tan. He exudes Southern California charm. Man, you live in paradise. Well, it sits okay. Do you have bad weather events here?

We have hotter than hell. It's a lot of flex we're doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Randy lives in a small green and white house Do you have bad weather events here? We have hotter than hell. What a flex we're doing. Randy lives in a small green and white house surrounded by sandy brown stucco homes. The backyard is next to a noisy freeway. Randy and his wife Ilona share their place with a 13-year-old Bengal cat, George. Sorry, what I meant was Prince George. We did not spoil him, he came that way.

Randy and Ilona are now retired, which means lots of time to focus on George and their hobbies. These are photographs that I took. The walls are covered with some of his favorite shots, the golden gate in San Francisco, and stacked on the shelves are knickknacks and toys. At one point in the cross space I had over 500 puzzles. Oh my God. And you were a little bit... Our story really begins in 1963 when Randy moved to San Diego.

He was 17. It was the last in a long line of childhood moves. I'm the oldest of four siblings in a military family and my father traveled around so we were in different places every two years we lived somewhere else. In every town they lived in, Randy entered the science fair. I was kind of a science nerd when I was young. When we came to this town, San Diego, I thought boy, this is a big city.

If you wanted to win in San Diego, because I always got in San Diego, he'd have to pull out all the stops. There were 21 times and here come the Skyliners, since I don't have you. To understand the project he came up with, it's important to know something about the time. Rock and Roll was changing radio, and it wasn't just the songs that were gaining notice. It was the DJs playing them. The fabulous 40 of 1959, your hits for the year are Peter Tripp. One of them was Peter Tripp, a New York City DJ who hosted Your Hits of the Week on WMGM.

Peter plays an important part in our story. He wanted to stand out in the Disjockey world, and so in 1959 he came up with a stunt. He announced he was going to do a wake-a-thon to raise money for charity. He'd go eight days without sleep and be on display the entire time. On January 20th, 1959, Peter began broadcasting from a small glass studio in the middle of Times Square. Scientists were there to watch. For the next eight days, he hosted his show while fighting off sleep, preening it first, then yawning, eventually hallucinating. One thing he didn't do, sleep. Me, because it was at 7.14 pm on January 28th of 1959, and we played this record after heading straight away for 200 hours.

Here are the bill, though, that I've had it. Peter's tongue invited others. A few months later, Adijay and Honoluluolulu Tom Rounds raised the stakes by going 260 hours, more than 10 days without sleep. Intentional sleep deprivation was apparently like the ice bucket challenge for DJs in the 1960s. 17-year-old Randy Gardner, looking to make his mark on the science fair in a new city, wasn't

impressed by these feats. Eight days without sleep, ten days without sleep, big deal, he thought. You don't need a lot of sleep. You don't need sleep. It was, that was the thinking back in the 60s and that's the thinking that I had. Randy decided to show up the showman. He decided he was going to go without sleep for 264 hours. Exactly 11 days.

And when I said, let's go 11 days, I wasn't even thinking about any negative things. I was thinking, this really isn't that big of a deal. You know, when it's over, you catch up, you get your sleep and you go right on by. Even as a teenager, Randy knew that he had a special skill that made him different. I'm a very determined person, and when I get things under my crawl, I can't let it go until there's some kind of a solution. He recruited two of his friends, Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano, to help him stay awake. If you're on your own, you're going to succumb. You're going to fall asleep.

Christmas break was coming up, and Randy and his friends decided it was the perfect time to break the world record for going without sleep. The first two days were easy. He stayed away from beds and tried to stand as much as he could. But on day three, I noticed that in the morning I was really nauseous and this went on for just about the entire rest of the experiment. And that's when I stumbled

on eating citrus for some reason. Tangerines or oranges seem to take the nausea away. So your friends, of course, were keeping tabs on you, but they weren't actually accompanying you in the experiment. So what happened? Was one keeping tabs on you but they weren't actually accompanying you in the experiment so what happened was one of them did you have a rotation system and one of them was always up with you? That exactly was a rotation system where one would be with me and the other would be sleeping or if it was in the daytime they both be with me obviously. Soon the stunt was attracting television reporters and that was a good thing because that kept me awake. You know, you're dealing with these people and their cameras and their questions.

Did you start to feel like your mental faculties were slipping? That it was harder to answer questions, it was harder to remember something to formulate a phrase or a sentence? That happened pretty soon. to answer questions, it was harder to remember something to formulate a phrase or a sentence. That happened pretty soon. That was, that started maybe day four or five and it just kept going downhill. I mean, it was crazy where you, you couldn't remember things. It was almost like an early Alzheimer's thing brought on by lack of sleep. The early hours of the morning were hardest.

Everything was closed, everyone was asleep. Randy remembers visiting the local jail. Why did he go to the jail? I don't know. Maybe because it was open at three in the morning. We never close. A few days into the wakeathon, a sleep researcher from Stanford University showed up. His name, and this may feel like a pun to some of you,

was William Dement. And he got a he rented a car convertible. We drove around that. So we had a really good time when Dr. Dement came down. That really helped me because that was like a fresh of something different and new to keep me going. I understand that Dr. Dement also played a lot of games with you. He, besides sort of doing sort of psychological tests, he actually played various sort of

sports with you, is that right? We did a lot of pinball. How do you do? I did good. I think I beat him most of the time. Actually, Randy won all the time. Physically, I didn't have any problems. Not walking or throwing the basketball around or playing the pinball games, but the

metal part is what went downhill. The longer I stayed awake, the more irritable I got. I had a very short fuse on day 11. I remember snapping at reporters. They were asking me these questions over and over and over and I was just, I was a brat. On January 8th, 1964, Randy broke the world record for going without sleep.

He'd gone 11 days, 264 hours without drifting off. There was only one way to celebrate. He was whisked off to a naval hospital where researchers kept an eye on him and he went to sleep. How long did you sleep? I slept just over 14 hours. I remember when I woke up I was groggy but not any groggy than a normal, normal person. And did you find that over the next several days or weeks you needed extra sleep? No, not at all.

I went right back to the regular mode and everything was fine. Strange, isn't it? Randy's sleep project earned him and his friends first place in the 10th annual Greater San Diego Science Fair. It also ushered in a lifetime of fame. This is sound from the popular 1960s TV game show to tell the truth. The show brings together four celebrity panelists.

I'm Poston, Aggie Cass. The panelists face three people who all claim to be the same person. What is your name, please? My name is Randy Gardner. My name is Randy Gardner. My name is Randy Gardner. The panelists have to guess which one is the real Randy.

On the show, the real Randy Gardner is number two. Number two, how long did you sleep the minute you were through with the 11 days and nights? Fourteen hours and 43 minutes. And did you feel like Clark Kent? He wears dark, haundering glasses, his hair swoops to the left, he soft-spoken and direct when answering questions. Most of the panelists figured out that this Randy was the real Randy. I've heard it's an average ambiguity because he looks asleep-y.

I mean, carlaw. That's not too highly spreader as reason number two, one for number two. Over the next decade, Randy Gardner's life took different turns. He worked in horticulture, took a stab at photography, and finished up his career working as a stock trader. But whatever he did, his teenage accomplishment stayed with him. I'm some kind of a Bruce Springsteen in the sleep world. It's a very strange feeling.

Plenty of people have tried to do what Randy Gardner did, go days on end without sleeping. You can find clips of all their adventures on YouTube. It's Sunday afternoon right now, and tonight's day one of going without sleep for the next week. I'm about to stay up for three days. This is going to be the hardest challenge I've ever done. But if you're looking to set a new record for going without sleep, I'm quite stuck.

I don't know what you're going to do. I'm just really going to. It's only been. You're out of luck. The Guinness Book of World Records has eliminated the category, citing the health dangers of severe sleep loss. That's right. This is UC Berkeley Neuroscientist Matthew Walker. And I think it's important to keep in mind, by the way, that Guinness does seem to deem it acceptable for a man, I believe it was Felix Baumgartner, to ascend to the very outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere in a capsule in a space suit, get out of that capsule and then free fall back down to Earth, breaking the sound barrier with his body traveling at well over 1000

kilometers per hour. That deemed as okay to do. Sleep deprivation, because of its deathly consequences, no longer. So I hope that frames the disease-related risk that Guinness rightfully recognizes regarding insufficient sleep. Matthew Walker calls himself a sleep diplomat. He spent more than 20 years studying the topic and he's written a book titled Why We Sleep. If your idea of being sleep deprived as days on end without

enough rest, Matthew says, think again, even just the smallest amount of insufficient sleep we seek health consequences. And I think perhaps, you know, one of the best examples of that small perturbation Is the one of the largest sleep experiments ever done? It's been performed on 1.6 billion people It happens twice a year and it continues to happen. It's called daylight savings time and In the spring when we lose an hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in heart attacks. In the fall, when we gain an hour of sleep opportunity, there is a 21%

decrease in heart attacks. So that's how fragile our brain and body can be to even just the smallest fluctuations of sleep. So we don't have to go to the Randy Gardner extreme of eleven days. Just one hour of sleep is all that it takes to show these types of demonstrable consequences in terms of ill health. If you do the math, eleven days times eight recommended hours of sleeper night, that's 88 hours of sleep that Randy missed. When he finally went to bed, he slept only 14 hours.

The human brain is not capable of getting back all of the sleep that it has lost. So sleep in this regard is not like the bank, you can't accumulate a debt and then pay it off at some later point in time. There isn't a credit system in the brain or the body. And we can ask by the way, why isn't there something like that? Wouldn't that be wonderful? And there is precedent there, that sells. So there were times in evolution when we would have feast and there were times when there was famine. And we designed a system to come up and store that caloric credit, and so that we could spend it when there was a debt. There may be a reason our bodies don't do this. The right analogy to sleep might not be eating, but breathing. You can't say, For a long time, Randy simply passed in the celebrity that his stunt had brought him.

He'd found a way to cheat sleep. Life was good for him and his wife, Ilona. The focus of our life is pretty much George. George the cat, that teenage Bengal. Randy and Ilona love George. I don't know much about cats, but apparently, Bengals have the personality of a dog. They fetch a cat that fetches. Are you serious?

He doesn't do it much anymore. Listening to Randy and Ilona, ooze with affection for George is very sweet. When I came to visit, Ilona was getting ready to take George to the vet. They're very meticulous about his health. That's partly because, a decade ago, there was another cat in Randy and Ilona's life. She died of a tongue cancer, and I was so upset that theets didn't catch it, that they never looked in her mouth to find this tumor that they blamed every other thing. And then she died, and I was so racked with guilt, which is stupid. You know, I would never do that. Now you have to move forward. You can't go back. But I didn't then. And I think that's what triggered it.

The it, Randy's referring to, is that I would go out in the backyard at three in the morning and scream my head off like a wild animal. Is insomnia. About ten years ago, I stopped sleeping. I could not sleep. I would lay in bed for five, six hours sleep, maybe 15 minutes, and wake up again. I kept thinking, well, this will change because it seems to me that eventually, if you don't get enough sleep, your body will just say, we're going to sleep,

but it never happened. The man who conquered sleep was now begging for a full night's rest. That's why I keep calling this some, some karmic payback for, you know, my body going, okay, buddy. Yeah, okay, 11 days without sleep. And you know, damn, you need sleep. Well, let's try this out for size. Randy says going without sleep changed him. And everybody thought I was some kind of

There's all kinds of ways to go to sleep. They say, you know watch television Read a book and I'm thinking you know if you can't sleep in the first place reading a book isn't gonna put you to sleep I got news for you. I don't know where they came up with that. What read a book? Watch TV. No, no, no, no If you have that kind of a serious problem, you're done. Day in and day out, for years on end, Randy began to feel the way he'd felt at the end of his sleep stunt. Except this time, there were no TV cameras, no reporters, no prizes. I was awful to be around. Everything upset me.

It was like a continuation of what I did 50 years ago. We don't know what triggered Randy's insomnia, but there's some anecdotal evidence that prolonged sleeplessness can really mess up the brain. Remember Peter Tripp? You're here for the year I'm Peter Tripp. The radio DJ who inspired Randy with his wickathon, here's psychiatrist Floyd Cornelison,

who monitored Peter, speaking on the television series, Secrets of Sleep. The man I saw the first morning that he began this, when he was waving at everybody through the class one's and smiling and laughing and joking with us, after the 200 hours had become a change in the visual. In the months that followed, trips seemed unable to recover his center of gravity.

He fought with his boss and lost his job. He ended up as a salesman, drifting from time to time across America. Those that knew him well were convinced that those eight days without sleep had left him permanently damaged. So some of that might have been hyperbole. Still, roundly things, what happened to Peter was real, and his age might have been a factor. That's why I don't think you can do this kind of thing unless you're 17 or in that age group.

I know I couldn't do it now, and I wouldn't do it now, because I have more sense. After a decade of insomnia in his 60s, Randy finally made an uneasy piece with sleep. He's regained the ability to drift off, but only for about six hours a night, and it's required sacrifice. I love drinking tea. And to this day, I can't drink tea because I'm afraid I won't be able to sleep at night. You have to have sleep.

It's as important as I call it the big three. Water, food, sleep. You've got to have them, all of them. I call it the big three, water, food, sleep. You gotta have them, all of them. Randy Gardner, the man who conquered sleep, is now terrified of going a night without it. After the break, we dive deeper into the science of sleep with neuroscientist Matthew Walker.

If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and we could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25% of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do. You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is NPR.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He studies sleep and he's the author of the book, Why We Sleep. I started our conversation by asking him to tell me a story he describes in his book. It's about a pianist who relied on sleep for his creative process. Yeah, I was giving a public lecture on sleep. And this wonderful, sort of, distinguished looking gentleman with a fantastic kindly face walked to me, stressing this great to tweed suit. And he said, I'm a pianist and I was fascinated by what you were saying about sleep and how active a brain state it is. And I wanted

to tell you that there are times when I will be trying to learn a new piece and I just can't get it. And I get frustrated, I make the same mistake at the same place each and every time. And I'll sometimes play late into the evening and I will walk away continuing to be frustrated. Have a night of sleep. And then when I come back and I sit down the next morning, I can just play perfectly. And what he was suggesting perhaps was that it wasn't practice that made perfect. It was practice with a night of sleep that made perfect. I want to run two other examples by you, both of which seem to suggest that remarkable things happen to us while we're sleeping. I understand the guitarist Keith Richards from Rolling Stones kept his instrument and

a recorder by his bed, and he did it in case inspiration struck while he was asleep. Did it ever happen? It did. He would have this tape recorder and he would have his guitar and he would have his whilst else around in the bedroom at the time. And one morning he woke up and the tape had recorded all the way to the end. And he didn't remember anything about that night. So he rewound the tape and he played it and he says, and this is in his autobiography, there was almost this sort of ghostly vision of him strumming the chords to satisfaction.

Arguably the most popular Rolling Stone song ever and he said he created that classic guitar riff from his sleep. It was a dream inspired musical piece of creativity, followed by about 42 minutes of snoring. Lots of scientific discoveries, though, to have been birthed by way of dream sleep inspired creativity. Speaking of scientific discoveries, I understand there's a connection between sleep and the discovery of the periodic table. Demetri Mendelayev was trying to understand how all of the known elements in the universe fit together, and it was his obsession for years, and he struggled and

he couldn't figure it out, he would create playing cards with all of the different elements and he would deal them to see if he could find some equation by way of which they all fit together. And apparently Sir The Stry goes, February 17th, 1869, he fell asleep, exhausted, frustrated, couldn't figure it out. And that in his sleeping brain, he started to realize how all of these swirling elemental ingredients could actually snap together in this sort of what he described as a divine grid. And he woke up and he pinned down this remarkable table, the table that we now call the periodic table of elements, and he noted that he made just perhaps one or two changes. Matthew says there are two types of sleep. Rapid eye movement

sleep, also known as REM. This is when we dream. Then there's non-rappad eye movement sleep or non-rem. And those two types of sleep actually play out in this wonderful battle for brain domination throughout the night. And that cerebral war is one and lost every 90 minutes and then replayed every 90 minutes to produce what we call a sleep cycle. And you go down into non-rhym sleep first and then you go up into REM sleep and then you repeat the cycle. You say that non REM sleep might be implicated or involved in cementing memories and that

there's a popular song that might get it this idea. Hello, darkness, my old friend. I've come to talk with you again. So Matthew, what does Simon and Garfunkel get right about 9 Ramsley? It is prophetic wisdom of the most remarkable kind. We imprint information during the day. We sort of that seed is planted there within the brain during the day. In other words, we learn information. But we also know that that vision that was planted in the brain still remains in the sound of silence, in this, in the dark of night, and it's there that specifically deep non-rem sleep

goes to perform its memory functions. Deep non-rem sleep almost hits the save button on those recently acquired informational pieces so that when you wake up the next morning you have remembering rather than forgetting. Non-rem is all about helping us retain information and as we saw from the music of the Rolling Stones and the creation of the periodic table, REM sleep, dream sleep, spurs creativity. But Matthew says, dreams also have another function. That function seems to be about emotional therapy or what I would describe as overnight therapy. Dream sleep provides a fascinating neurochemical soothing balm. It is during dream sleep and only during dream sleep

when our brain shuts off a stress-related neurochemical called Nora Drenlin. Now, it's sister chemical, everyone will be familiar with in the body, that's called a Drenlin. And it's during dream sleep that that chemical is actually shut off. But what we also know is that the emotional and memory centers of the brain during dream sleep

light up in terms of their activity. And so we've proposed that dream sleep provides this perfect opportunity where we can start to reactivate and replay painful, difficult emotional experiences. and replay painful, difficult emotional experiences, but we do so in a neurochemically quote unquote safe environment. And we now understand that dream sleep actually helps separate and strip away that painful emotional sting from those informational experiences so that you wake up feeling better about it. BELL RINGS But what about bad dreams? Hi, I'm Greta Pitinger. Greta is a researcher at NPR,

and about eight or nine years ago, her relationship with sleep changed. I let her tell you the story. I had been dating a guy who is now my husband, but at the time we were just dating. He wrote a motorcycle and that was his only form of transportation. So whenever I'd go out with him or he'd drive me to work or something, I would ride on the back and had my own helmet and stuff. Late one night we were coming home from a party and we were in downtown Seattle. Streets were pretty empty but we were going pretty slow coming out of a stop light and

a large white SUV, Ranna Red Light and crashed into us from the left side. The next thing I remember is waking up on my back in like a elevated planter kind of off on the side of the sidewalk. You know, there's like the street on one side and then the other side has like a little kind of retaining wall with like plants and ferns. And so I was kind of halfway into that. It was about I had flown off the bike and hit my right thigh on that concrete planter and broke the femur like right and half. And when I woke

up out on my back with my legs kind of dangling and there was flames around me. And then like that's when I think I saw my then boyfriend Joey on the sidewalk and it was like he was also injured separately but didn't have much time to think about any of those things because luckily the police station was two blocks away. And so then police were the first people there and then came and dragged this out. The actual crash of the car had punctured the motorcycle and then the first sound I really remember was an explosion.

Of the motorcycle tank blowing up which was... yeah I don't trust my memories of how intense it was but it was very very scary. Joey actually broke the other femur. He broke his left femur from the impact of the car. I broke my right femur from hitting that wall. He also broke a few other bones. So I stayed in the hospital for maybe four days after surgery. And he stayed for, I want to say at least a full week, maybe 10 days, because you had a couple surgeries. I didn't sleep pretty much at all. Partially because of the painkillers, but I think also that's when bad dreams were starting

and I couldn't stop reliving that moment of the crash. I'm not sure if I had these exact dreams in the hospital, but for a couple of years after all of this, I would just keep having dreams about things crashing into me or things running over me. And then specifically that moment also when that car hit us. I would keep going back to that and I remember waking up with a start. You know, like when you wake up suddenly and sometimes you can't remember why, but you know you feel like you fell.

Like you feel like you just fell into bed, that feeling. I like to write and I've kept a journal since I was in fourth grade. I had written about it right after it happened. I had my mom's insistence. I was staying with her, my dad, at the time, and it's just like, I'd wake up from my nap just bawling. She said like you know maybe you should just write it down and let it go. Kind of hoping that might help and I think it did for

a little bit but then it kept coming back and I tried to avoid it. When we were talking about dreams some time ago Matthew you said that one of the motorcycle tech. When we were talking about dreams some time ago Matthew, you said that one of the potential virtues of dreams is that they might allow us to relive or experience things that happen to us or things that might happen to us in a relatively safe space. And as we do this, we process what happened and then potentially learn from it. What about nightmares though? Nightmares are not pleasant.

They can be disruptive. They can actually be acutely painful. And certainly in Greta's case, they were disruptive to her life. Why would the brain be designed to have nightmares? It's not clear whether the brain actually is designed to have nightmares or whether this is actually the process going awry.

And we think it may be the latter because when we look at patients, for example, who have post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, repetitive nightmares are actually so reliable in those patients that they actually form part of the diagnostic criteria for that disorder itself. What we think is happening in the case of PTSD is that that chemical that we spoke about that normally is shut off during dream sleep, the chemical noradrenaline, remains too high. And it may be that when that

chemical is too high in its concentration, we can't gift ourselves that normal therapeutic benefit that REM sleep provides, so that the dreams themselves become particularly emotionally strong and difficult, and you don't get that resolution the next day. And so the process steps and repeats and it happens time and time again. And it is perhaps only when there is some degree of contextualization, be it by way of medication that is now given to certain PTSD, war veterans, for example, drugs out there that seem to help lower that chemical, that stress related chemical, give them normal dream sleep and it gives

them back that ability to process those events. That's one way to help. Another is that perhaps by journaling it and going through that process of shifting the context or reformulating it in one's mind, it becomes less stressful. In fact, this is exactly what Greta discovered herself to. In fact, this is exactly what Greta discovered herself to. So, about two or three years after the crash, I was finally seeing a psychiatrist about the kind of lasting trauma and trying to get over that and trying to sleep. I mean, I was trying to help my insomnia as well. And we talked about those dreams. And he knew I like to write.

And so he suggested in my journal just rewriting that dream. Because it's a dream, it's not reality. And so it doesn't need to mimic reality. So just change it. The way I changed that dream was that instead of a car coming and hitting the motorcycle, the motorcycle transformed into a winged horse and flew away. Away from the car, away from all that crash, and then just landed safely back at our apartment, dropped us off.

And so, writing about it again years later, but in a totally different way, not trying to be accurate, not trying to remember, was much different. It definitely got me to stop having those vivid dreams. I've had flying dreams in the past, but I started to have more types of those dreams of kind of being lifted away from gravity and from the weight of these emotions, you know, like when you wake up from a dream

and it doesn't really leave a mark on you, that was a good feeling to him. Like, oh yeah, I guess I did have that dream. Oh yeah, that was nice. Just like this past month, Joey and I bought Moe Peds, which is like something he used to do before he even had a motorcycle and I have never ridden before and I'm like, I feel like something he used to do before he even had a motorcycle. And I have never ridden before. And I'm like, I feel like such a badass on this little like,

like it's such a dorky little thing. It's like half bike with a tiny engine on it. And it sounds like super high pitched and has the dorkiest horn. But it's like, yeah, look how cool I am. I have to wear a full face helmet. Hahaha. I have to wear a full face helmet. When we come back, we look at the amazing range of things a good night's sleep can accomplish. You know, sleep is the swissohami knife of health.

You're listening to Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. This is NPR. Welcome back to Hidden Brain I'm Shankar Vedantam. I'm speaking with Matthew Walker, he's a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, and he's the author of the book Why We Sleep. So let's talk just for a bit about the amount of sleep that people need. You and many other experts say people should strive to get eight hours of sleep every night. To tell you the truth, I got about six hours last night and I feel fine. Tell me where you live.

I'm coming around tonight. We will have a sleep so long, a sleep so I will inflict change no matter what. Here's my question Matthew. If I can get away with sleeping 25% less than the recommended amount one night, why can't I do it every night? And just think of the upside, I can spend two hours every day reading wonderful books like yours, building a better podcast, being more productive, surely it's a good thing. If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and we could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25% of our sleep time millions of years ago.

Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do. You're not finding a mate, you're not reproducing, you're not finding food, you're not caring for your young, we're still, you're vulnerable. So as it's been said before, if sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made. And it didn't make a spectacular blunder in putting in place through 3.6 million years of evolution, this thing called an eight-hour sleep need. You know, I remember one's going to a talk that showed the level of light pollution on the planet,

the parts of the planet where there were the highest levels of artificial light. Then the researcher took the image off the screen and replaced it with an image showing the distribution of prostate cancer around the world. There was a remarkable correlation between the areas of the world which have light pollution, where presumably people are staying up later and later at night, and presumably getting less sleep than they need, and the incidence of prostate cancer. Now, of course, this is a correlation.

We don't know if one is connected to the other. But you say there has been some evidence at least that sleep might be implicated in the development of cancer. There is, and it's fast becoming, I think, stronger evidence and causal as well. We know, for example, that one single night of short sleep in these ill-aboratory studies where you perhaps are limited to just four hours of sleep for one single night. The next day, that will draw critical anti-cancer fighting cells called natural killer cells by 70% to 70%. That is an alarming state of

immune deficiency, and it happens quickly after essentially just one bad night of sleep. We also know from the associational evidence that insufficient sleep is linked to cancer of the bowel, cancer of the prostate, and cancer of the breast. And the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has since become so strong that the World Health Organization has now classified any form of nighttime shift work as a probable cast-synogen. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer because of a disruption of your sleep weight rhythms. Forkvina, the ha-net-ar-baite man or a villoman adhian urese kufa boiskraft.

In British Grona Surin, Denmark, based on the strength of the evidence that we were just discussing, became the first country to actually pay worker compensation to women who had developed breast cancer after years of nighttime shift working government sponsor jobs I think automation is going to help I think with this revolution of technology Where we can start to limit that type of shift work whenever possible We should absolutely do that and start to scale it back. We can also architect professions better, I think. We know

that people are genetically predisposed to being night time people or morning people. Why don't we think about asking those questions and seeing if we can help people sort of fit what we call the chronotype, which is the morningness or eveningness propensity, fit that into the job flexibility in those work hours and see if there's some overlap. When you were a kid, your family took a vacation to Greece, and then when you visited Greece again as an adult, you noticed a very big change. What was it? Back in the 1980s when I went on

on holiday there, there were signs in the shop store windows that would give the opening hours and they would open from between sort of 10 to 2 and then it said closed between 2-4 or 2-5pm and then open from 5-10-11 in the evening. And it was so different to the way in which shops back in England would operate. Maybe there was a 1 hour lunch break or a half hour lunch break, but for the most part it was 9-5 hours classic. And of course what it was describing was this classic CESTA-like behaviour. Now, back in the mid-1990s,

the Greek culture actually started to abandon the CESTA-like practice. And unfortunately, or unfortunately, a group of scientists from Harvard University School of Public Health decided to quantify the health consequences of this radical change in sleep practice. And with many Greek tragedies, as was the case here, the results were heartbreaking, but in the most literal sense, what they actually observed was a 37% increase risk for death from heart attacks across that

six-year period as a consequence of doing away with that CES to behaviour. It was actually particularly strong in working males, almost a 60% increased risk of death from heart attacks. So I think that that again suggests not only how important sleep is and when sleep is taken away, we see this type of danger to our cardiovascular health. It raises actually a different question which is how should we be sleeping? Because the way that we currently try to sleep is what's called monophysics sleep, where we sleep one single about throughout the night. But if you look at some cultures who are untouched by electricity, sort of hunt together at tribes, for example, they actually tend to sleep by-phasically. They tend to sleep for

sort of six, seven hours at night, then they'll have a CS Delight nap in the afternoon. And it turns out that we all have this in us. It is genetically hard-wired that we all have a pre-programmed drop in our alertness, some time after lunch. Now many of us think it has to do with the lunch that we have. It's think it has to do with the lunch that we have, it's actually not, you can stop the lunch and you still get it. Which actually does argue from an evolutionary perspective that we should be sleeping by basically,

rather than monophasically, two bouts of sleep rather than one, perhaps. I have to say, Matthew, that in some ways, when it comes to sleep, there's almost a sense of people bragging about not getting enough sleep, right? I mean, it's that in some ways when it comes to sleep there's almost a sense of people bragging about not getting enough sleep, right? I mean, it's certainly in the United States. It's seen as a badge of honor to say, you know, I get very little sleep because I'm so productive and I work so hard and I achieve so much. Oh, you're so you're so right because what we've done is actually stigmatized sleep. We label people who get sufficient sleep,

and I choose that word very carefully, with being lazy, with being slothful, and that is a terrible disservice to society. And we don't always have that opinion, by the way. You know, no one looks at an infant sleeping during the day and says, pfft, what a lazy baby. And we don't, you know, and we laugh, but we don't because we know that sleep at that

time of life is non-negotiable. It's absolutely necessary. But now, even into early childhood, not only do we abandon the notion that sleep is important and should be celebrated, we chastise people for getting sufficient sleep and give them this label. Tell me about your own sleep habits and tell me what you do to ensure you get a good night's rest. I'm going to sound like a desperate prude and I'm so sorry and it sounds hokey as well but I actually give myself a non-negotiable eight-hour sleep opportunity every night.

Do you try and stick to very rigid hours when sleeping at the same time, waking up at the same time, do you use an alarm clock, do you avoid technology before you go to sleep? I do so, I stop checking my email at a certain time, I have software installed on my computers that does away with the harmful blue light and I shut them off at least an hour and a half before bed. But you mentioned perhaps the single most important sleep prescription that I could give everyone which is regularity. Just go to bed at the same time, wake up at the same time no matter what, whether it's the weekday or the weekend, if you've had a good night of sleep or a bad night of sleep, stay as regular as you can. That's the best piece of advice I can give you for getting good sleep at night.

Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. He said he's sleep and he's the author of the book, Why We Sleep. Matthew, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brain. You're very welcome. Thank you very much and I do hope you sleep well tonight. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Parts Shah and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Reina Cohen, Jenny Schmidt, Thomas Liu and Laura Quarell. Our intern is Camilla Vargas Restrepo. NPR's Vice President for Programming is Anya Grunman. I'm Shankar Vidantum. I hope you have sweet dreams tonight.