Science Friday - Sleep Questions, Portable Museums, Digital Health Records. May 25, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: May 25, 2018

What’s the difference between being fatigued and sleepy? Do melatonin and other sleeping aids work? And what can you do if you just can’t sleep?Neurologist and sleep specialist W. Chris Winter, author of the book The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It, talks about how the brain and body regulate sleep. He also gives ideas for controlling your behavior to improve your “sleep hygiene.”  Science museums can be a fun and educational way to spend a day—but what if you don’t have a day? What if there’s no museum near you? Or what if you don’t think you like science enough to spend money on an entry fee? All of these are reasons one nonprofit is working to shrink the museum, and bring it to you—starting with the Smallest Mollusk Museum. It’s a vending machine-sized exhibit on the slimy tricks, strange brains, and ecological importance of snails, squids, octopuses, and their chitinous cousins. Amanda Schochet, co-founder of the project and a former computational biologist, explains what goes into making a small museum that can still share big ideas. In recent years, medical providers have largely moved away from scrawled paper charts to electronic health records. But a team of researchers argues that the transformation of medical records hasn’t gone far enough. While there has been widespread adoption of electronic health records, most are just static, flat translations of the format of the old fashioned paper file. If we can subscribe to specific categories of news online, the researchers say, why shouldn’t medical specialists be able to subscribe to a given patient’s medical records to get updates and alerts of specific interest to them? Why shouldn’t medical teams be able to get notifications and share information when patients needing special care plans arrive at the hospital? Plus, a satellite launched this week would aid in planned Chinese lunar exploration.   Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I am Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we'll be taking your questions about sleep. Oh, so many questions about sleep. And you have questions for a sleep doctor. We have one on call, but only if you make the call. Our number is 844-724-8-255. That's 844 SciTalk, where you can tweet us at SciFri. But first, it's been 46 years since humans have been on the surface of the moon. Hard to believe. Earlier this month, NASA administrator, noon, NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstein, said that the U.S. was going back. Yes, we've heard that before, and despite past proposals to return, this time it's for real. He says this will not be Lucy and the football again, he told the conference. We'll see. But the U.S. isn't the only player in the game. China has plans for its own human moon mission by 2025, and this week it launched a satellite.

It's part of that larger moon exploration program. Sounds exciting. Ryan Mendebaum is here. To tell us about that, another selected short subjects in science, he is science writer at Gizmodo. Wow, good to see you. Nice seeing you. I heard what's going on. Let's start with that very basic question about what's going on the news, electronic, you know, what's the deal with the satellite?

All right. So basically, China needs to put a re, if you want to land something on the back side of the moon, which is they're going to be the first ones to land on the dark side of the moon, well, the back side of the moon, sorry. They need to put a satellite there to talk to it. So that satellite was launched on Monday as part of their Changa, mission. And on this satellite, there's also going to be a radio antenna to map the radio skies, the distant universe. Well, you know, that's a good spot. But scientists have always said the backside, the far side of the moon is good because it always faces away from Earth. So you

don't get electronic interference from cell phones and stuff like that. So that's why they're going to do it. So when we talk about telescopes, people always say, why can't we put a telescope on the far side of the moon? And they're going to try to do that? Is somebody actually have a plan to do that? For now, the plan is to have the satellite is going to have the telescope on there, but this is sort of the first step. Yeah, that would be great. Okay, let's talk about troubling news coming out of the Congo about an Ebola outbreak. Another, we have another Ebola outbreak. That's right.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we've got at least 58 cases and at least 27 deaths, which was reported on May 21st. But this is important. For the first time in an Ebola outbreak, there's a vaccine. It's an experimental vaccine. but experimental doesn't mean quite what you think it means. It means that it's been tested, but it hasn't been released to the market yet. And the results looked really successful of this vaccine, so people are worried but cautiously optimistic. So how big is the outbreak?

How many people have been? Right. So 58 cases and 27 deaths was reported on May 21st. Wow. And as we say, hopefully this new vaccine might work. It's worked in the laboratory, right? Right. It's worked in clinical trials, but now we just need people to actually get it.

I mean, there's similar mistrust all over the world for vaccines, so hopefully people will agree to take this one. All right. Let's get to this spook. I know that you love physics. I do. Me too. There's a spooky story about antimatter in a hurricane? Come on.

Oh, it was so cool when I saw this. So, terrestrial gamma-ray flashes are a known phenomenon that sometimes with lightning, there will be a gamma radiation burst associated with the storm. So during Hurricane Patricia back in 2015, and Noah plane flew through the eyewall and not only caught one of these terrestrial gamma-ray flashes, but caught what appeared to be a beam of antimatter going towards the ground. I know.

It was so... But in the movies, though, you get matter and antimatter explodes and we're all annihilated. It doesn't happen like that here. It doesn't... I mean, they do annihilate, but the thing is that positrons, which are anti-electrons, are not... They're actually a pretty typical decay product of beta-radial.

So this isn't something like the large H. I mean, it is kind of like the large Hedron Collider, but it's not something that you should be worried about unless you're in like the exact wrong place at the exact wrong time. And also, you're probably already getting hit by lightning. So there's other things to worry about. Wow. Let's get something new for the weekend.

At least interesting to talk about it. They're saying, say, this goes on all the time. These terrestrial gamma ray flashes, so just, I mean, thunderstorms can turn into particle accelerators. Whoa. But it does. It doesn't happen. This was cool because it showed that hurricanes can do this as well. I love it.

Speaking of something really cool, there's a wayward asteroid. It's a little bit odd. Everybody's been talking about this 2015 BZ-509 asteroid that was discovered in 2014. It's near Jupiter, and it's going the wrong way around the sun. What do you mean backwards? Well, they are the planet. That's right. And so the thing is that scientists then created a million clones of this asteroid and then ran it

through their simulations, and thought that maybe perhaps this asteroid was an interstellar capture, that maybe, if that's true, it's from a different star. Absolutely. And so are there any other explorations that could be? There's plenty. I think that a lot of the folks reported on this did see it with some skepticism that, you know, maybe it was from the Orte Cloud beyond the stars. Maybe the Planet X folks think that it was knocked by Planet X.

There's a lot of different things that it could have been, but it could have been from another star. It could have. It could have. It could have. Maybe. You know, extraordinary claims, extraordinary evidence. They think that they've got the evidence to prove it, and I think that now we've got to go visit the asteroid and see what's on there.

I'm with you on that. Not really going, but I'm with you on that. Finally, hippo-po. Hippo. We have to end the... We've got to end with hippo-poo. Hippo, yeah. So these scientists were noticing these mass fish die-offs, and hippos wallow in port.

pools, and in those pools, they poop and they pee, and several tons of hippo waste ends up in these pools, and then they flush, and they go down the river and create these oxygen-less scenarios down the river and kill lots of fish. I would read Ed Yong in the Atlantic's report on this, because he really captured just how brutal nature could be. So you have these rains that sort of periodically flush the stuff down the river? It's like a toilet flushing, I guess. But I mean, what...

Well, I hate to end it that way. Nature's brutal, Ira. I'm sorry. I know. I know. Actually, it's one of my favorite subjects is waste disposal, but that's for another time. Another time. Another time.

Yeah, I went to graduate school and that. Ryan Mellbaum, Science writer at Gizmoto here in New York. Have a great holiday weekend. You too. Thanks for having me. See the fleet in. Now it's time to play, good thing, bad thing. Because every story has a flip side.

Now, in recent years, medical providers have largely moved away from their old paper charts, you know. They've moved to electronic health records, and the switchover were spurred in a large part by a 2014 federal mandate, but also by the promise of better record keeping, sharing of records, and, of course, portability. You can put, you know, thumb drive in your pocket if you want, making it easier to move your records from one provider to another. Joining me out to talk about those electronic health records, EHRs in industry speak, is Dr. Catherine Choi. She's at the Penn Medical Center for Healthcare Innovation and co-author of a prospective article in the New England Journal of Medicine. Welcome to the program, Dr. Troy.

Hi, Iris. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So what's the good news on electronic medical records? You got it right. I think in the past 10 years has been a huge shift where almost all hospitals are now, instead of using paper charts, using electronic health records. And that means we avoid the mistakes that were caused by illegible handwriting, where doses were misread, or the shorthand was misinterpreted. And the chart no longer lives in one place, and it can be accessed remotely.

And now vendors are actually starting to share data between them. So you can see more of the whole picture of the patient in front of you. And this is... Yeah, and this has been really, you know, hyped very widely for years now. Has it turned out that way? Or is there some bad news to this? It was definitely a first big step into getting health care into the digital world. In its wake, though, we see the rise of burnout.

And physicians cite, EHRs as contributing to the burnout they experience on the job. And because there's a gap between what they need and what they're able to do with the electronic health record, we think that what many institutions have now achieved is closer to transcription of taking those paper charts and making a digital counterpart. But the transformation that we really needed was to move away from a model that was such a passive process where providers had to go to the chart repeatedly to see what had changed, what was new, what was missed,

and what was awry. And so instead, we need to move towards a model where the most important information comes to them. So has this become like the supposedly paperless office where it's actually more paper? than when we had paper. I mean, are we creating more work than we had before, it sounds like? It's tough to navigate.

I think there's a lot of information in these records, and now the tough part that physicians and providers have to grapple with is how do they know what they're. So the biggest opportunity is to find out how we can help them act on some of this information at the right time. And that means reimagining electronic health records, I think, to be something more dynamic and responsive. What does that mean in real speak? In other words, what would I see differently happening? What's the solution here? Yeah, I think that means designing with clinicians to see what do they wish they could know.

A lot of these things require some action on their part, so making sure that they're aware at the right time. And this is getting the right person to know the right thing at the right time. And we use the model of thinking like they're more like feeds or channels that you subscribe to in the same way that they're subscribing to feeds in the rest of their lives to follow friends or their favorite sports teams or the price of Bitcoin. You know, this sounds like artificial intelligence might be really useful here. I think that's a component. In some ways, it could be simpler than that.

Right now, most clinicians, I think, are trying to do everything that they need to do. And they're sifting through the charts and trying to find out and stay on top of everything. So it's maybe as simple as working with them to design some of these custom channels. And then I think down the line, I can help operate. or help offload some more of that. Would it be a danger, though, that, like, you know, I get too many alerts. I can't keep up with it. My watch keeps going off, you know?

Yeah, alert fatigue is real, and it can be self-defeating. So I think what we've seen is that it takes really careful design and a design process. So our team of hybrid clinicians and developers partner with our providers to kind of come up with a first rule of what they think might be helpful. but we test it in the wild and make sure we tweak it within a couple days or weeks until we get it right. And I think it's that process that's really made a difference. You think you're going to get it right? I think so. It's going to take some work.

Yeah. Yeah. That's exciting. Doesn't everything? Well, have a happy holiday weekend to you. Thank you. You too. Catherine Choi, Clinical Innovative Manager at the Penn Medicine Center for Healthcare Innovation. That is, of course, in Philadelphia. for you. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, well, we're going to talk about sleep. I mean, you have trouble sleep? Everything you wanted to know about sleep, do you have a question?

You can give us a call of phone numbers. Phone lines are filling up already. 844-724-8255. You can also tweet us at SciFri. We'll be talking about sleep. And boy, do we all like to talk about that? We'll be back after the break. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Plato. What's the first thing you think about every morning? right? Wow, what a good night's sleep or, oh, what a bad night I had, right? Sound familiar? Sleep is always on our minds, I think. Do you wake up at night and then feel tired in the morning? Does melatonin or any of the gadgets out there really help? Why do we have nightmares? Do they affect our sleep? What happens if we get up in the middle of the night? Can we get back to sleep? Oh, how does sleep work?

What is the science that goes on in our brains and bodies? And what happens when you don't, get enough sleep. How much sleep should you? I can go on forever. That's why we're going to talk about it. We're going to ask a sleep doctor these questions. And yours, our number 844-7248255. You can always tweet us at SciFri. Let me introduce my guess. Chris Winter is a neurologist and a sleep specialist out of Charlottesville, Virginia. He's author of the new book, The Sleep Solution, Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It. And I'm very happy to have you on Science Friday, Dr. Winter. I'm happy to be back. Thanks for having me.

What is the biggest misconception about sleep? I think the biggest misconception about sleep that people have when they come to see me is that they're actually not sleeping. So the very first question I usually ask a patient or a client or an athlete is, you know,

what can I do for you? How can I help you today? And, you know, more often than not, the response is, you've got to help me sleep. I can't sleep. And I think that one of the messages I try to put fourth in the book is that you may have significant problems and difficulties with your sleep, but we as a people are not out there not sleeping, despite headlines saying things like, why 60 million Americans can't sleep?

So we may not like the way we sleep. It may take us a long time to fall asleep. We may wake up a lot. We may not perceive our sleep, which is a big problem, but nobody out there is in danger of not sleeping. Wow. And so there are so many questions people have about it. Let me ask you a couple of my own, first of all. How many hours? Is that a set number? We keep hearing, you've got to get X number. I think it's seven now. And if you don't, you're in trouble. Is that true? Well, it is. I mean, everybody has a set amount that they need. So what we are essentially doing is trying to figure out we're planning a picnic. We're trying to figure out how many hot dogs and hamburgers to buy. Maybe there's a great algorithm that.

exists out there that for every person who comes to a picnic, you need two hot dogs and one hamburger. That doesn't mean everybody's going to eat two hot dogs in a hamburger, but we use that average to try to figure out how many supplies we need to buy. So there are people out there who do very well. They thrive on six and a half. When they try to get more, they struggle, which they will often interpret as being insomnia. There are people out there who need nine hours.

So in general, the average adult under the age of 65 is probably right where you said, seven, seven and a half, maybe eight hours is ideal for them. We get into trouble when we start trying to apply this sort of population average to the individual. So, you know, it's sort of like caloric intake. How many calories should I eat? Well, what do you do? Are you an accountant?

Are you a professional football player? Are you eight years old, 80 years old? Those things all kind of come into play. Can you catch up on miss sleep? People say, you know, I'll sleep on a long time on the weekend to catch up. Is that a myth? So that is, when sleep doctors to get together, this is a big topic, the idea of sleep debt and can you repay it. So there was actually interesting that you should ask, there was a study that was just recently published out of Sweden where they looked at about 38,000 individuals using survey information.

And what made this study unique is instead of asking individuals how much they slept on average, they asked them, how much do you sleep during the week? when you're at work and how much do you sleep on the weekend and so they divided people up as being either short medium meeting I sleep a short amount of time during the week but a you know I sleep longer on the weekends or I'm short short I always sleep in adequate amounts and they looked at that and found that the people who were you know sleeping five hours during the week not getting quite enough sleep but making up for on the weekend actually live to be as old as the individuals who are getting the right amount of sleep all the time. So in my book, I took a stand, and so it's nice to see this research sort of supported. And my stand was, I think that you can repay a sleep

debt. However, it needs to be relatively quickly repaid after you incur it. So all the sleep I lost in medical school and my residency training is lost and gone forever. I'll never get that back. But I was trying to chase a bat out of my bedroom a couple nights ago and was up late, trying to figure out the best way to do that. So I'll try to get some more sleep tonight to make up for that. All right. We have so many calls. I want to get to some of them. Let me start out with a tweet from a balloon knot who says, is sleep cycle completely interrupted when I get up to use the bathroom at 3 a.m.? I'm going back to sleep, though. Does this negatively affect my required seven hour sleep cycle? It generally doesn't. And I'll give you an example. A lot of the professional

basketball players I work with aggressively hydrate themselves so much. it's very difficult for them to make it through the night without getting up to go to the bathroom. And when you look at studies of individuals who have brief awakenings, generally speaking, that's not problematic. So what I would recommend to that Twitter is they should get up, try to keep lights to a minimum, resist the urge to check your phone to see everything cool has happened in the two hours since you've fallen asleep. And generally speaking, it shouldn't really interrupt the process. Let me go to the phones because, as I say, we are lit up in a record amount of time. Let's go to Miami. Sharon, hi, welcome to Science Friday.

Yes, hi. How are you? Hey there. Go ahead. My question is, is there any long-term damage or any damage to the body for people who don't sleep or sleep very little? If they have insomnia, if they only sleep a few hours a night, and this goes on month after month, year after year. Is there any kind of damage to the body, any kind of diseases? anything that kicks off autoimmune or anything like that.

Good question. Thank you, Sharon. So now we're back to the most common misperception. And it really stems from the idea that we really have two media messages or two, you know, ideas being put out into the public about sleep. The first is sleep deprivation. Does it exist? Certainly it exists.

If you're working two jobs to pay your rent and you're only really able to find about three or four hours to spend in bed, you're going to accrue a sleep debt, and you're going to be very sleepy because of it. And these are people who fall asleep at work, and God forbid, fall asleep on the wheel of a car. She threw in the word insomnia. So a lot of people define the word insomnia as somebody who can't sleep, somebody who hasn't slept for months. I have patients who literally come to my office on a weekly basis and say they have not slept

more than an hour a night for years. And when you look at them, they look fine. They look great. And they're not at all sleepy. So the idea of insomnia being the same as sleep deprivation is not true. Insomnia is really two things. Number one, it's an individual who's not sleeping when they want to sleep. So this individual goes to bed 11 o'clock.

They want to go to bed 11 o'clock. And now it's 1130 and they're frustrated. And that's the second part of insomnia that is important to be there. It has to be there. And that is you have to be frustrated about the fact that you're not falling asleep when you want to, Meaning if I run into somebody who says, look, I go to bed at 10 o'clock, it takes me to or on midnight to fall asleep. But I really enjoy lying there, resting, thinking about my day, what I'm going to do tomorrow.

That's not technically insomnia. So to answer her question, if you are talking about the medical student or the surgical resident who is literally sleeping two or three hours every other night, falling asleep in the OR standing on his feet, sleeping in broom closets, nodding off during rounds, yes, there probably is long-term problems that kind of go along with that. If you're talking about people who have insomnia, insomnia is almost a problem that's so awful but has virtually no side effects from. When you talk to people who've suffered, quote unquote, for insomnia for a long period

of time, the issues that they kind of bring to the table are often not terribly related to long-term medical problems. Now, if you have depression, if you have chronic pain, those things may lead to a secondary insomnia, but, you know, like I said, nobody out there is not sleeping. So we have to really define what we're talking about, and I spend a lot of time writing about that in the book to help you understand, hey, wait a minute, does it make sense that I haven't slept for three years, but I can't nap, I never fall asleep when I rest. And people are functional doing. They're very fine. I know people doing that. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm two or three hours of

sleep and they don't know the difference. Let's say, but again, that's not insomnia generally. Yeah, Let's go to the phones to Ashling in Medford, Mass. I'm Ashling. Welcome. Hi, how are you? Hi there. I am a night shift worker in the hospital, and I think traditionally the data has been pretty negative for the long-term effects of that.

I've been doing it about 10 years, and I'm wondering if there's any new data on any implications of night shift work. I work a 12-hour shift usually. And then I guess, as an aside, strangely, after a night shift, sometimes I can sleep three to four hours and wake up and feel 100% rested. And then other times I'll get a huge stretch of sleep, eight, nine hours, and I'll feel horrendous when I wake up. All right, we'll see what we can get an answer for you.

Thanks for calling. I'm glad she called. And in my opinion, there are few things worse, and there are few people who are sleepier than shift workers. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of a lot of positive research coming out about shift work, although I think you can look at the Swedish study and kind of infer that, hey, you may be losing out on sleep during times of your work schedule that you might be able to make up for. But shift work is very hard. The average shift work in this country is probably losing out on about seven hours of sleep every week compared to the non-shift working individual.

And the shift work is particularly difficult. I think she said she was a night shift nurse. Yes. That's usually about the pinnacle of brutality when it comes to shift work because when you talk to an individual like the caller about her schedule, she'll often say things like, well, I work three nights, then I have a night, a day off, and then I come back and work two afternoons, an overnight. You know, you almost need a PowerPoint presentation to understand what's going on with their schedule. That is extremely disruptive to the body when it doesn't understand when am I supposed to be awake, when am I supposed to be asleep. When should I be eating? When should I be active?

When should I be socializing with other people? When should I be in light or in darkness? And so I think that a lot of the sleep issues she's describing are exactly what shift workers feel. Their brain does not really understand what is expected of it at any given time during the day. So shift work can be incredibly disruptive and is actually classified by the World Health Organization as a Class 2A carcinogen. And so I would say to her really work hard to, you know, work with the individuals who are making your schedule to make it more friendly for shift workers. That's about what you can do right now until we get rid of shift work altogether in this country, which will be difficult. Talking with Dr. Chris Winter, author of the sleep solution, while your sleep is broken and how to fix it.

And there are so many questions. I don't know where to go on all of these. I'm going to go to another tweet. He says, what actually is good, Brandon says, what actually is good sleep hygiene and what really does it? What really doesn't matter, do I really need to keep my laptop off my bed? That's a great question. And again, as we talk about media messages with sleep, there is a perception in a lot of people's minds that everything about sleep is under their control. With the right sheets, the right mattress, the right level of light in your bedroom, the right thermostat setting, you can solve all of your sleep problems.

I think sleep hygiene is very important. I think that it can probably fix or at least help. significantly 25% of people's sleep problems. And I kind of liken it to a knee injury. You can buy your own brace at the drug store. You can ice it. You can take some time off of your running. And maybe that'll help the problem.

Or maybe you find that you really just can't move your leg. At some point, you're going to have to see a sleep specialist. I think a lot of people don't really understand that when your sleep problem gets to be a certain point, it may be beyond what sleep hygiene can do. So I would say to him if he says, look, I'm sleeping fantastically. I feel great. I have no health issues or sleep issues. I'm not sure that the laptop's that big of a deal,

but I would certainly prefer him try to watch TV, try to have that light exposure somewhere outside of the bedroom. But when we're looking at sort of a global, you know, ranking of shift work or sleep apnea or the laptop computer with endless episodes of friends running during the night, it's probably a little bit further down the line. But it is something that you can control. And I will tell you,

there was studies that showed individuals who were asleep But had that kind of stimulus playing, your brain is awake and listening to it, even though you don't think it is. So you will improve the quality of your sleep if you get rid of the laptop and put it somewhere else. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Getting as many questions as I can into Dr. Chris Winter, author of the Sleep, a solution. Here's one that's been asked a couple of times. Can marijuana help with sleep? I'm going to – what I would say about can marijuana help with sleep is –

let's take a step back. How are we defining help? And a lot of individuals are going to, when you ask them, how do you sleep? I'm a terrible sleeper. I'm a great sleeper. The criteria for somebody saying that they are a great or a terrible sleeper usually fall into one of three categories. Number one is, how quickly can they fall asleep?

That's very upsetting to a lot of people if they're lying in bed for a certain period of time and not becoming unconscious. The second question is one of your previous callers alluded to is, How many times do you wake up, regardless of how quickly you fall back to sleep? A lot of people asking that question about what happens if I wake up a lot, you know, the same time every night. Sure. So, right. So, you know, so the third criteria would be, how do you feel the next day? Are you listening to my interview and struggling to stay awake? Do you fall asleep at red lights? You know, to me, that's probably the best criteria for trying to figure out how your sleep is.

Are you sleepy the next day? If you are hungry and looking for food in a trash can, I'm going to assume, that you're not eating enough or the food you're eating is not good. So how does this overlap with marijuana? So for the marijuana, he's saying, can it help with sleep? How are we defining help? Do you need something to make you fall asleep faster? Do you feel like you're waking up a lot during the night, or are you exhausted the next day

and feel like this might somehow improve the quality of your sleep and the way you feel the next day? I think the answer to the question is marijuana might sedate you, potentially might make you stay. sleep a little bit longer in terms of wakening's, but that's never been really scientifically shown. It is not going to make you sleep better and theoretically make you feel better the next day. So how are we defining help?

So to me, I'm not a big fan of medicinal AIDS to knock you out. You know, Michael Jackson looked for it. He found it. It didn't work out very well for him. We can never confuse sedation with sleep. They're not the same thing. We got a quick question before the break. Caitlin and Manhattan, hi, welcome.

Hi. Thanks for having me. You're welcome. So I spend, this is kind of related to the last question, a lot of money on melatonin, and I think I just do it by habit. I'm wondering kind of like two things. First is if I stop taking it,

is it going to be bad? And also, like, is there any value in my spending all this money on melatonin at all? I got about a minute till the break, doctor. See if we can get that in. Great, great question, Caitlin. Thanks for calling in. Would stopping it be bad, no.

Let's think about real quickly about what melatonin does in our brain. Our brains make melatonin. It's made by this tiny little pea-shaped organelle called our pineal gland, and our bodies make it when sunlight starts to disappear. So you go out camping, eating your s'more. The sun starts to go down. We're not around artificial light. As that sun starts to diminish and the light around it starts to go away, we have this surge of melatonin. We call the dim light melatonin onset.

that melatonin is sleep promoting, but it's not necessarily designed to make us sleep. That's really a Denazine's job. It's designed to help us time our sleep with our day-night cycle. So what happens is a lot of people will take melatonin when they go to bed. Well, the sun has gone down a long time ago when you've gone to bed. So what happens over time is you start convincing your brain that the sun's going down at 1130 after the Stephen Colbert show. That's not when the sun's going down. So you're actually traveling yourself westward and actually starting to delay your sleep.

So I would recommend, oh, go ahead. I have to take a break. We'll come back and finish the answer after this break. Stay with us. A lot more questions for Dr. Chris Winter after this break. I'm Ira Flater. This is Science Friday. We're talking about sleep with Dr. Chris Winter, author of the sleep solution.

Something that we've been talking about not getting full seven hours, all different kinds of things. And what we haven't gotten into is this whole idea that your brain needs to sleep, to do housekeeping or whatever it's doing. And we've always heard about REM, rapid eye movement sleep. If you're not getting enough sleep, number one, are you not getting enough of that? And two, do you need enough of that? Absolutely. So I remember being in medical school and a professor saying, we were talking about the lymphatic system, which kind of removes waste from our body. And he said, but our brain doesn't have one.

And I remember thinking the most important organ in your body doesn't have a means of getting rid of waste. And what was interesting, they never found it because when you prepared a cadaver, it made it very difficult to find. So it was only recently that some researchers in Maryland found it. And they named it not the lymphatic system with an L, but the glimphatic system with the G. So the glimphatic system operates like the lymphatic system to remove waste products from our brain. The biggest one being a protein called beta amyloid, which is actually the main constituent of plaque in Alzheimer's disease. So that's great, really interesting, kind of makes sense. The universe is suddenly adding up now.

And what's really cool is that this glymphatic system's pumping ability is something like 10 times better when we sleep than when we're awake. So it was this great sort of discovery that lined up with this idea that we've always. known that people who don't sleep well tend to have more issues with dementia, and now we have this elegant explanation for why that is probably the case. And what about the, well, we have all kinds of questions. I'll try to go through them. Let me get a couple of questions. And Scott in Miami, hi, Scott.

Hi, how are you? Hi there. First time, long time. Oh, great. I have a question. First of all, I'm a great sleeper. but I've always theorized that eating just a little bit, like a gulp of milk or a tiny cookie, would activate the parasympathetic or sympathetic, I would get those mixed up system,

and help you gear down to sleep. Yeah, what about it? Is it bad to eat before you go to sleep? I don't think it's bad, especially if you're strategic about what you eat. And I think Scott is making good choices in terms of what he eats. He's choosing things like milk. Milk has a lot of the proteins that eventually get synthesized. sized into the chemical melatonin we were talking earlier about.

And then he's also talking about maybe eating a little bit of a cookie. A cookie is high carb. When we think about Thanksgiving sitting down the couch after a big meal and watching the lions get beaten in football every Thanksgiving, that tends to be because carbohydrate tends to spike our insulin and create changes in terms of our brain's chemistry that make us feel sleepy. There's a reason why we get really tired after eating that enormous carbohydrate meal. So, you know, I think probably it's good not to overeat before you go to bed, which Scott's not doing and kind of being selective.

So, you know, hummus, things high in try and triptophan. And Turkey is not that high in triptophan, interestingly. High glycemic index foods like jasmine rice, nuts are fantastic. Montemisari tart cherries are the tart cherry variety grown here in this country. Very helpful, both in juice and dried form. Even salmon and game meat is very helpful with sleep. So my son eats a lot of salmon jerky in the evening to help him sleep. So lots of good choices out there.

Let me get back to in a few minutes. We have the question that we had before the break about melatonin. Is it a good thing to take? To me, it's not a necessary thing to take. And my God, if pediatricians don't stop giving kids melatonin, I'm not sure what I'm going to do. It's one of those things where it's great if you're going to New Zealand for the Peter Jackson Hobbit trip of a lifetime. and you want to get right to the sightseeing as soon as you land in New Zealand because you live in Baltimore. It's a great drug for realigning a circadian rhythm.

It's not really a sedative. So the problem is people use it. They have absolutely no idea what they're doing with it. And because it's not an FDA regulated drug, who knows what you're getting and what you're really doing with it. So, you know, the melatonin gummies because your kid won't sleep and things of that nature, let's really try to explore why your kid's not sleeping or why he's not sleeping the way you want him to and tackle it that way instead of just giving him candy melatonin at night. It's not really appropriately used for most of what's being used for.

I just have a couple of minutes, and I want to end by saying, when should you go to see your doctor about a sleep problem? How do you know you're in trouble? You know, I would say the biggest thing that we have to be very careful of, probably two groups. Number one, you've got a partner or you've been told because you shared a hotel room with somebody that you stop breathing. You know, it's interesting sleep apnea patients.

These are individuals whose brains cannot breathe and sleep at the same time particularly well. So it's not a great choice for your brain to have to make. These individuals often feel like they're great sleepers because every time they sit down, no matter what the circumstance, they fall asleep. So in their mind, well, I'm a great sleeper because I can lie down on gravel and fall asleep. If you stop breathing, if people tell you that you snore and choke and your blood pressure, going up and your weight's problematic, you need to see your doctor about that. It could save your life and make you feel like you're 20 years old again. The other group is the group that is excessively

sleepy. You're falling asleep at stoplights. You have to roll your hair up in your car window to keep yourself awake as you're driving, you're nodding off at inconvenient times at work or you're sneaking out to your car to take naps, particularly, you know, if these things are endangering your job, your livelihood, or your life, you should definitely talk to people about. that, you know, the melatonin gummy worm is not going to help you. Oh, it's great, great advice, and also a really interesting book called The Sleep Solution, while her sleep is broken and how to fix it, Chris Winter, who is an MD, and a neurologist, sleep specialist out of Charlottesville, Virginia.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me. You're on. And not a fan of electronic medical records. I heard that earlier, so I just putting my vote in. Okay. Thank you.

Have a good weekend. Science museums, aren't they fantastic places? You could spend a whole day in just one or two rooms at the Giant Field Museum in Chicago or the cozy science zone in Casper, Wyoming. But what if you live far away from the nearest science museum? You don't have a whole day. The line to get in might be along. The entry fee might be steep.

Maybe you don't even think you like science enough for to be worthwhile to even go in there. Well, one nonprofit is trying to bring. bite-sized museums to public spaces to increase access to the stories of science. And they started with a mollusk museum. Interesting question why. It's the size of a vending machine, and it's covered on all sides with the story of squid, slugs, and all their kin like the Limpit. The strongest biological material on Earth is the tiny tongue of a tiny critter.

You step over every time you go to the beach. The limpet uses that tongue to scrape algae off the rocks for dinner, and that tongue is so strong that it can literally lick through a bulletproof vest. Oh, that's a sample of our audio tour from the smallest mollusk museum talking about the amazing tongues of limpsets, and video producer Luke Groskin recently visited one of these mini-museums, and you can learn more about it and see this video, his video of his tour on our website, ScienceFriiday.com slash museums.

Now we're going to talk about these tiny little museums with Amanda Shackachis, co-founder of Micro, a former computational biologist and a creator of small museums. Welcome to Science Friday. Thanks, Ira. Nice to be here. Nice to have you. Why start off with a mollusk museum of all things? Yeah, it's a common question.

And the reason that we actually started with mollusks is because I misheard my my co-founder Charles, who was going to the smallest museum, and I got really excited about the Molisk Museum, because mollusks are amazing. I wanted to learn more about them. They are super important to our ecosystems. They have crazy brains. Everything that they do to survive has been an exceptionally weird technique. And we realized pretty quickly that as far as tiny museums go, a mollusk is a great lens through which to learn about the world. You can, you know, as I said, learn about neuroscience through them. You can learn about hard materials, strong materials,

and all the different ways that creatures have learned how to survive on Earth. And so you're sort of bringing the museum to people if they can't get to the museum. Yes. And where would you find these museums? So the museums really are for anywhere that people are already living their daily lives. So they've been in hospitals, transit hubs, libraries, community centers. If you're going there to do something else and you can spend, you know, 10, 20 minutes learning about something exceptional that will broaden your perspective for the day. That's where these museums have gone and are continuing to go.

So let's talk about a typical museum. Walk me through what it might feel, what it might feel like to visit one. So when you approach the Mollusk Museum, which is the first series that we have out, The first thing that usually attracts people is this hologram that's in the base right at kids' eye level. And it's this holographic aquarium full of nudie bronx, which are sea slugs that are very colorful or octopuses or squids hunting. And that lure kids and adults alike in as they watch how these strange creatures live. And then up above, there's 15 exhibits that tell you the story of the last 650 million years of life on Earth. So those are exhibits that have movie theaters in them.

They have sculptures, optical illusions. There's a scavenger hunt tucked in there for someone who is more of the explorer mindset. And then for people that get really curious and want to learn more, we have the audio guide that you played a sample of. We have a book that's available for free online. So it's really made for people that are in their normal daily experience. And if they have a little bit of time, they can learn a little bit. If they have a lot of time and they want to go further, there's a lot of opportunities to do that. And how much can a visitor really learn about mollusks if the museum is so small?

That's a fun question. There's a lot to learn about mollusks, and the museum does pack a punch. It has everything from these bigger picture kinds of exhibits that talk more about the origins of mollusks and where they came from, or the concepts of biological tradeoffs. Like, you know, you have to choose, organisms choose between being good at one thing or another thing. There's also a lot of very small kind of power fact exhibits, we call them, exhibits that you can take a little bit of information away from that and go tell your friends later. So, for example, we have an exhibit that is a leader of snail slime, which is how much slime it would take for a snail to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. and they spend a third of their energy just making slime.

So you can go learn that in a minute and then walk away. That's interesting. I know. It's the least energy-efficient mode of locomotion in the entire animal kingdom. So how did you get out of the, as a biologist, get out of the lab and decide to go into this? Yeah, it's partly, you know, I've really enjoyed being a scientist, not just because I enjoy research, but mainly because I enjoy the way that it makes me think. the whole world feels really marvelous and interesting all the time. You know, I've never been bored.

There's always so much to look at and examine and ask questions about why. And my partner, Charles, who I started micro with, is a media producer. And he's really good at getting that kind of sensibility into people's brains without the whole experience of studying science in school, just transmitting this curiosity and excitement to people and inviting people to put on that. hot. That's a great, great idea. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Kser, you're just joining us, talking with Amanda Schockett, a former computational biologist, but she's co-founder of Micro, a nonprofit that makes miniature museums in New York.

What kind of excitement have you seen from people when they encounter these little museums? They, you know, they go, wow, look at that. Does it feel like they're watching a toy house? you know, but on a museum level? Yeah, one of my favorite things about the museum is it really fights people's ability or people's drive to be polite about giving each other space. So, you know, if you go to a big museum, everyone's going to spread out across the room and not crowd one exhibit because it, you know, it might seem rude. But at the Mollusk Museum or at any of the micro museums, they're so small that people really crowd in together. So one of my favorite things to see is when people make friends around the museum. So I see it all the time.

Kids will be huddled around the hologram, and then they'll start talking to each other, and their caretakers will start talking to each other, and I'll watch them walk away as a group together. Or, you know, people my age in their 20s will be crowding around, and there will be, you know, a joke on one side or some fact that they just can't imagine. And then all these other people will run over to read it, too, even though they came over at separate times they didn't know each other to begin with. That's cool. So the social aspect of the museum, I think, is really special.

Yeah, that's great. Another thing... I'm sorry? Oh, just another thing that I really have enjoyed from seeing these museums go out into the world is every place that they've been in has made the museum part of their own space. So when we've gone to medical facilities, you know, those places more... focus on soothing people or comforting people and making people feel happy. So they're using the science and the museum to do that.

Whereas at a library, it's more to be educational. So I've really enjoyed seeing the programming that places build up around the museums. It's very much their own thing. Would you like to build? Give me what. It's so hard to choose. There's so many. There's, we're coming up with our physics and engineering museum is actually in

prototype form right now. And that one's really exciting for us. We also will be coming up with more basic science ones, so choosing topics for chemistry. I think human health and biology is, of course, a really interesting one. People have a desire to learn more about themselves, and we'd love to tell great stories about that. Well, I want to wish you very luck, a lot of luck, and we'll be looking forward to seeing them all around the country. Thank you very much, Amanda. Amanda Shackett, co-founder of Micro, a former computational biologist and now creator of small

museums. One last thing before we go, a Chicago, join us on Saturday, June 16th, writing down Saturday, June 16th for a special night of science and music at the Harris Theater. We'll talk with mathematician Eugenia Cheng, Eugenia Cheng, and here,

she's going to play the piano. She's a great piano player, and we'll search for urban coyotes with WBEZ's Curious City, and we're bringing you a radio play about space rocks falling from the sky, performed by Second City Sketch Comics. You don't want to miss. It's going to be Second City.

Eugenia Chang, Space Rocks. Wow. Saturday, June 13th, I'm sorry. Saturday, June 16th, tickets at ScienceFriday. com slash Chicago. Saturday night, June 16th, Science Friday.com slash Chicago. Hope to see you all there. That's about all the time we have today.

technical engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fishman, Jack Harrowitz. We're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all the social media. And you can ask your smart speaker to play Science Friday. Have a great and safe holiday weekend. Hope to see you all back here next week. I'm Irafato in New York.