Stuff You Should Know - How Sleepwalking Works

Episode Date: August 24, 2010

Sleep behaviors are pretty fascinating. Some people snore, some grind their teeth -- and some take a little stroll, or perhaps a drive. In this episode, Josh and Chuck investigate how sleepwalking, or somnambulism, works. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Flooring contractors agree. When looking for the best to care for hardwood floors, use Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner. The residue-free, fast drying solution is specially designed for hardwood floors, delivering the safe and effective clean you trust. Bona Hardwood Floor Cleaner is available at most retailers where floor cleaning products are sold and on Amazon. Also available for your other hard surface floors like Stone, Tile, Laminate, Vinyl, and LVT. For cleaning tips and exclusive offers, visit Bona.com slash Bona Clean. The War on Drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops, are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call,

like what we would call a jack move or being robbed. They call civil acid work. Be sure to listen to the War on Drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready, are you? Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. That makes this Stuff You Should Know. The late night edition. It's late. How's it going, Chuck? Great. Awesome. Couldn't be better. How are you?

You too. Same. Just the same. So, Chuck, I got a story for you. Let's hear it. Back in 1845, in a little town called Weymouth, Massachusetts. Although in Massachusetts, they probably pronounce it in some radically different way than it would be spelled. Weemouth. Walmouth, or Worcester, or something weird like that. There was a woman named Maria Ann Bickford, and she was a prostitute. She was discovered on October 27th of that year, murdered and brutally murdered, actually. It was quickly traced back to a guy by the name of Albert Terrell. Jack the Ripper? No, but it was Ripper-esque. Her head was almost completely severed. Yeah, and it was with the knife. The reason everybody knew it was Albert

Terrell is because that was her boyfriend. He had left his wife for her. He was a wealthy guy in Massachusetts, and he left his wife to be with Maria Ann Bickford. He wanted her to quit the job, I guess you could call it. I would say that too. Well, she didn't. She liked having an income because she didn't have to depend on any man for whatever she wanted. She refused. Which is ironic, though, because she was depending on men for her income. Yeah, that is very ironic, actually. She ultimately died, was murdered, and it was Albert Terrell who admitted to doing it, but he was sleepwalking, he said. It was a pretty thin case, but he was ultimately acquitted, even though he had set three fires in the brothel in an obvious attempt to cover up what he'd done

while he was still supposedly sleepwalking, but the jury bought it. One of the reasons they bought it was because it was a jury of wealthy white men who weren't about to put one of their own behind bars as big of a crook as he was, but secondly, because in 1845, we didn't really understand sleepwalking. We didn't understand what people were capable of. We didn't understand how sleepwalking worked, and I know you sent me an article as recently as a month or so ago. A guy in Arizona was acquitted of sexual assault because he was sleepwalking, right? Yeah, it was Illinois, but that was today, the news articles from today. Wow, even better. Even more recent, which makes my point even more thorough, which is we don't understand sleepwalking too terribly

much more than we did in 1845, as far as explaining why it happens, right? Absolutely. But there are some really interesting aspects of this sleep disorder, which is called parasomnia, right? Yes, it's one of many, but it's called somnambulism specifically, sleepwalking is. Not to be confused with botulism. No, not at all. And there's an official definition, if you want to look in a mental health professional handbook called DSM for yes, you leave your bed while you're sleeping and you find it. Others find it difficult to wake you when you're sleepwalking. You can't remember what happened afterward. You're confused when you wake up. You aren't suffering from dementia or anything else physical. That's a big one.

And it impairs your social life or work life or your life and that's for straight up sleepwalking. Yeah, there are sleepwalking can be a symptom of things like dementia or Parkinson's or something like that. But that's kind of significant. And you should think that it's found in the DSM for, which is the psychological Bible, right? So it's considered a disorder, a disorder of arousal, I think is what it's called, right? Yes. So Chuck, while you're sleeping, when does this occur? When does it take place? If you're an adult or actually kids too, I think it occurs in the first third of your sleep, which is the non REM sleep, which is when your body is you're in your deepest state of sleep,

but your body is kind of awake. So you're tossing and turning a lot, but your brain is shut down. So it's sort of the opposite of REM sleep, right? You've got non REM and REM sleep, right? And usually sleepwalking occurs during the deepest part, which is what I think phase three or four, or possibly three and four, when as Katie Lambert, who wrote this article, put it, with REM sleep, your brain's active, but your body's not with non REM sleep, which is when sleepwalking occurs, your brain is just dead to the world, but your body's still moving around. Yes. Which accounts for sleepwalking, right? Perfect recap. Thanks a lot. And you know, your brain is also resistant to arousal when you're asleep. So that explains why

it's hard to wake somebody up when they're sleepwalking, but it's not dangerous necessarily. No. And that's a question that we should probably just go ahead and answer. Should you wake a sleepwalker? You've heard warnings against that kind of thing. I think on everything from the Brady Bunch to Hawaii 5-0, let's say. Okay. Myth. Yes. You can wake a sleepwalker, but the rule I put in is wake a sleepwalker like you would want to be awakened just from bed. Don't go shaking them or anything. You wouldn't do that to somebody laying in bed asleep either. They'll probably have a heart attack. So be gentle and try and guide them back to the bed. If they wake up, that's fine, but it's not, it's not like a danger. They're not gonna have a heart

attack if they and die if they're awake from sleepwalking. No, but you could arouse their startle response and they are gonna be confused and not know what's going on. That's, like you said, one of the symptoms of sleepwalking. But if you do manage to get the sleepwalker back to bed and they lie back down, that's it. You can pretty much rest assured that there's not gonna be another incident like that because most people sleepwalk only once per night, interestingly. That's what they say. And 30 seconds to a half hour, I've heard it even longer than that. It very much depends on what's going on or maybe what you feel like you have to get done while you're walking around in your sleep. You're gonna be sort of zombified, but you're not gonna

be walking around with your arms out in front of you like in the movies. That's a bunch of bunk. And you're probably gonna be pretty clumsy, but you can still perform activities, which is kind of the weird thing about it. One of the weird things about it. Right. You just perform them clumsily. Or you, oddly, I guess, is another way to put it. And sleepwalking is one of these. It's a hilarious disorder, really, because it's not generally that dangerous or doesn't have to be that dangerous, although it can put you in dangerous situations. And people have been hurt in sleepwalking, but the idea of just interacting with somebody with a glassy-eyed look on their face who's clumsily playing the guitar, that's a funny

disorder. It's funnier than cancer. I've never had a chance. I haven't either. I've never been much of a sleepwalker. I don't think I've ever sleepwalked. Oh, I've sleepwalked, but I've never interacted with someone who was sleepwalking. Gotcha. So, yeah, I've done it myself, though. It's good. It's a lot of fun. But it's one of these conditions where we have all this evidence and all this data. We just haven't been able to fully put it together to figure it out once and for all, which makes for a better podcast for us, right? A little bit more data that we have on it, Chuck, is that sleepwalking tends to run in families. Children sleepwalk more than adults by far. Yeah, you're 10 times more likely if you have a family member who has sleptwalked to be a

sleepwalker yourself. So, is it sleptwalked or sleepwalked? I don't know. Sleptwalk? Sure. That sounds good to me. We'll just call it SW past tense. More often than it's found in kids, obviously, it's something you usually outgrow. More often, identical twins, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, well, gene expression and all. And I think they said adults, 2.5 to 4% of adults sleepwalk. And they're almost always adults who sleptwalked as children. Right. And if you start sleepwalking for the first time as an adult, you might want to get that checked out. You definitely want to get that checked out because, again, it can be a symptom of another problem like Parkinson's, Alzheimer's. Severe stress, I think, has been associated with it,

not just in children or not adults, but children, too. Yeah. Which I was kind of like, if you have a child who's suffering from sleepwalking and it's stress-related, what are you doing to your poor kid to where the kid's suffering from such stress that he's running around at night? Absolutely. I wonder what I was stressed about. I don't know, man. Yeah. I find it odd that you haven't asked me about sleepwalking yet, even though I've said three times that I've sleptwalked. I'm trying to drum up the tension. They used to think that it was like an epileptic thing or hysteria. Well, it still is associated with epilepsy, actually. Hysteria is kind of out

the window, though. Yeah. They still think it's caused by epilepsy, though. It's associated with it, still, yeah. Did not know that. Yeah. We should change this article. And like you said, no one knows exactly why it's happening, but they can just say kind of what goes on when it does happen. Right, right. We have all this information that hasn't been fully put together, which, again, I find fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. So, Chuck, what are some of the, I guess, competing theories for why we sleepwalk? Well, a lot of people think it's just like you're in a transition stage between being awake and being asleep. So, if you've got a dead brain, well, not dead, if you've got a very sleepy brain and a very wired body, you could potentially get triggered. They think a lot of

times, I saw this one study where they took 10 sleepwalkers and they kept them awake for more than 24 hours and then allowed them to sleep. And they found that a buzzer going off 100%, all 10 people got up and sleptwalked when they heard this buzzer. Weird. After sleep deprivation. And before, during just regular sleep, three out of 10 were triggered by the buzzer. So, they think that like any noise, like a dog barking outside could like wake you up, wake your body up and send you doing whatever. Good to know. Yeah. And sleep deprivation is a magic term as far as sleepwalking goes. They found that sleepwalking increases dramatically in studies when they're sleep deprived, when the person's sleep deprived first. And they recommend also that if your kid

is sleepwalking, you should not only decrease their stress somehow, maybe let them give up the trumpet if they really hate it. Right. But also, to get them on like a regular sleep schedule too, that that could be part of it as well, that they may just be sleep deprived and stressed out. Yeah. Adults too. For real kids. For show. Another theory with the kids is that there's all kinds of crazy hormones being shot about the body during the night and that that may disrupt the kid. And that's why that would explain why it like tapers off after puberty. Yes. Have you ever like done something, say driving or walking or doing anything where you realized you got somewhere and you hadn't been paying attention, you didn't really, it wasn't like you're blacked out or drunk

or impaired or anything, but you were just distracted or doing something else. Daydreaming. Absolutely. So I would have mentioned that that has a lot to do with how we could possibly sleep walk. It's like maybe more basic part of our brain is activated. Right. Like the brainstem with the controls like breathing, walking, that kind of stuff, correct? Right. So maybe it's all brainstem. Makes sense to me. Uh, people have actually killed people in their sleep. Like you said, the first guy, uh, there was someone else who, and it kind of depends on the case from what I've seen. Some of them get acquitted. Some of them get convicted. Uh, one guy stabbed his wife 45 times and he was convicted. Another guy, uh, murdered his father and he was acquitted. So

I guess it's sort of a crap shoot. There hasn't been any, you can't go to a law book and say, well, we gotta, we have the sleepwalking defense. Right. Like the insanity plea. No, but, um, I think that, uh, you could probably find the same, um, state witness or defense witness in the acquittals or, or, um, convictions. Yeah. I bet there's some like great professional witness out there who like can convince any jury that actually if you're sleepwalking, you can't, you can't possibly know what you're doing. Right. Well, the guy from Illinois last week that was acquitted was, uh, I think they proved that he had a long history of sleepwalking and this was some friend of his. He like went out drinking with her and slept, crashed on her couch and then

he said, he woke up to some guy punching him in the face. She said, that guy was the guy I called because he were assaulting me in my sleep. Right. And he was like, uh, that didn't mean it. Right. And they said, okay. Yeah. Took him like a couple of hours or something to decide. Yeah. The jury. Yeah. That was really fast. I thought so too. That's what I'm saying. There has to have been somebody who convinced them and just laid it all out for him because it's not like the average juror knows a lot about sleepwalking. It's all, you know, the cabinet of Dr. Kelgari or, right, again, the Brady bunch. Yeah. Who was, who was that? I don't remember. I just remember there was a sleepwalking episode and then he was like, I could be making it up. Uh, you talked about injury

and, uh, I saw a study in England that 11% of, uh, people that responded sleepwalkers said they have been injured and it's usually like bruising or cuts, but I think 11% of that 11% actually broke bones. Well, which is not a happy way to wake up. I wouldn't think it's not. Um, Chuck, sleepwalking is not the only parasomnia. Remember we call it parasomnia. Yeah. It's a sleep disorder. There are other parasomnias and the first that I think we should talk about is called some nambulistic sexual behavior. Inexplicably, um, abbreviated as SPS. Yeah, that's weird. Uh, I wonder what the B stands for. I guess that's part of the ballistic. Maybe that's the Spanish, um, the Spanish abbreviation. Perhaps. It's some nambulistic behavior, sexual. Yeah. So,

sleep sex or sexomnia is, um, I like Katie says in here, it's pretty much what you think. It's being asleep in the middle of the night and either, you know, masturbating or doing something to whoever is nearby sexually. Yes. And again, that can lead you to an assault conviction or you could wake up very happy depending on the situation. Yeah. Right. I guess so. And then, of course, there's the very, very famous sleep eating, which one generally associates these days with the, um, sleep aid ambient. Right. Yeah. Eating all kinds of crazy things with ambient cigarettes and raw meat. I think we've talked about it before. It seems like, yeah, we've talked about it. Uh, Kristen Conger wrote an article on it and, um, apparently the chemical

zolpidem in ambient, like crosses the eating and the sleeping wires in like one in a thousand people and they don't know why, but I also found another stat that said one in one percent of people have sleep eating disorders anyway. So I can't, you know, well, there's reports of people who have been on ambient and then switched to another similar drug and it said that it all went away. They're sleep eating, abnormal sleep behavior. And then there was the first case of, well, the first documented case of a woman who was on ambient, um, who sleep emailed. And I can't stand the, um, the term the media gave it, but z-mailing with three z's. That was awful. Yeah. It's completely awful. Uh, yeah, that was pretty cool because she emailed, she fired up her computer

in the middle of the night, logged in to the internet, onto the internet. She had a user password too. User password and sent, uh, several emails that apparently were a random mix of upper and lower cases and they were written in some strange language. Although when I read the first email, it didn't seem very strange to me at all. Uh, no, it said, um, this is a quote, come tomorrow and sort this hellhole out. Dinner and drinks four p.m. Bring wine and caviar only. That seems like a very normal email to me. Right. I've sent that same, very same email before. What about the second one? Yeah, one said what the dot dot dot. I think, but it was the mix of all caps and lower case that really just kind of, that had to be a little off-putting to see that. That looks like brain

damage. Yeah. You know, it's like brain damage in text form. She's probably seen a doctor by this point, I would say. Yeah. Although she was on Ambien, right? Yeah. Okay. Well, that probably explains that. Zolpidem, like you said. And then also, uh, this week, very sadly, a guy fell, he basically walked off of his third story hotel room in Mallorca and just like broke a leg and hit his head too. And hit his head. And his girlfriend just like this. She woke up to find her boyfriend had gone out the window. Yeah. Awful. That's more than a bruise, my friend. And if you like connecting podcasts, there was a guy in England in Hartlepool, right? Yeah. And on Holy Island at the Crown and Anchor on Holy Island off the Northumberland coast. He woke up in Quicksand. Actually,

he drank too much, but then he sleepwalked, he SW passed tensed into the marshland and found himself waking up and sinking in Quicksand or trapped in Quicksand. Crazy. And the guy was smart enough to know that you stop struggling and lie flat. What if you listen was a fan? Wouldn't that be something? It's possible, Chuck, because this just happened, right? It was August 11th. I wonder. So, sleepwalker Stephen Rook, if you listen to this podcast, let us know if we saved your life. Put the bottle down. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he said he did. He said he spent the next day in bed and he was avoiding alcohol for a long time and wants to thank everyone, a friend said. Yeah. He'll be back on the sauce this weekend. Totally. I've said that before too. Yeah.

My uncle actually, it was a famous sleepwalker in my family. He, my uncle Steve, who, you know, is the guy who's helped us out before with some stuff, the guy we bought Scotch for, aka. Oh, yeah. He had a few incidences when he was young and one time they found tracks in the snow leading from his house. So he went, apparently he said he went outside to see if it was snowing. Another time he fell asleep on the couch after school, got up and ate dinner and then later on woke up and said, hey, what's for dinner tonight? And they're like, you just had scallops. And another time. Was it scallops specifically? That's what he said. I asked him today. And then another time he was going to the store with my grandfather and he fell asleep in the car on the way to the

store and then woke up like in the shop that they were going to, like at the counter paying for something. Weird. What was he buying? I think he said tickets to like a Danny Thomas benefit show or something. This is like the early 60s. Yeah. I think pretty much everybody was sleepwalking in that line. Yeah. That's a hot ticket in Memphis. So back in the day. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And I used to sleepwalk. All right, let's hear it. Well, a couple of times I'd gotten up and just gone out to my, we had a split level. So I'd go out to the banister overlooking our den and just start yelling things. And another time I specifically remember, I got up. I mean, I remember after it, obviously, I got up and I got ready for school and took a shower and

got dressed. And then I woke up the next morning and I was like, that was weird. I must have dreamt that. And I saw like the wet towel and my clothes on the floor. Like down you had your saddle shoes on. You're like, I was like clutching shampoo. So I don't sleepwalk anymore though. I sleep talk though. Do you? Oh, yeah. I do too. So does Emily. I think a lot of people sleep talk. That's no big deal. Yeah. What do you say in your sleep? Yumi actually likes to use her iPhone to record me sleep talking. Yeah. And she loves to share it with everybody who will listen. I've never heard. Has actually emailed the sound clips to people before, but there's this one of me like just muttering and all of a sudden I go,

to see real pop. And then that was it. I have no idea why. Why am I not on that email? That's disappointing. I don't know. I'm sure I could get it for you. Yeah. Lastly, Chuck, there's one appointment that I found fascinating, which is people have always thought and still probably think because for dumb that you act out your dreams while you're sleepwalking. Not true. The point that Katie Lambert makes is your brain's not really active. It's in this low Delta wave that you couldn't possibly be dreaming in. So you're not actually acting out your dreams, but there is a disorder called REM sleep disorder where you actually are acting out your dreams. It's a sleepwalking that occurs in that phase of sleep, the REM phase,

where your brain's active, but your body's not supposed to be. So you are really wound up if you have REM sleep disorder. You really need to give up the trumpet immediately. Yeah. That's when you wake up and you're dreaming that you're cutting wood for the fire and you're chopping your wife's leg with your hand. Exactly. And she goes, what are you doing? That's not what she's saying. I'm cutting wood, babe. You say I'm correcting you. All right. Well, that's it for sleepwalking. I can virtually guarantee you guys will email us your sleepwalking story. So please do. If you want to learn more about sleepwalking and read a page that didn't make it into this podcast at all about sleepwalking and the organically did not make it in. I guess you could

call it organic. Well, we didn't say let's not include that. Just go ahead and type in sleepwalking. That's one word or try SW past tense and see what happens into the handy search bar at howstuffverse.com. And I said I wasn't going to use handy anymore. Either way, we've arrived at listener, man. That's right. Josh going to call this pot growing granny. And this is from KM. That's cryptic. Yeah, it is. Hi, guys. I literally just finished listening to your how grow houses work and I couldn't resist sending you the story. My grandmother has always been an avid gardener and avid gardener. She was very interested in pretty plants and had learned at some point that marijuana was a very beautiful plant. So she decided she wanted to grow some just for the sole purpose

of seeing what it looked like firsthand. Now, where would a middle age woman in eastern Pennsylvania get seeds to grow pot from my college age mother? Of course, my mom, though, was not a smoker by any means. So when she asked to find, she was asked to find pot seeds. She of course, pawned the task off to to her frat, a frat member boyfriend who later would become my father. My father was also not a smoker, but he had a frat brother that was known to partake in this particular lifestyle. And he has always only been known as Bob O and my family, which I think is pretty cryptic. So Bob O got him some seeds for the grandmother. She planted them began growing pot in her yard to the dismay of my grandfather, who was good friends with the chief of police and the mayor.

Well, the plants grew beautifully in the open air of my grandmother's garden. They live pretty close to the center of the city. And as far as I know, there was no attempt to obscure them from being seen. The plug was pulled out when my grandfather decided that come winter, well, the grandmother said, we got to bring them inside this winter. And granddad says, no, we're not bringing those inside. So they went through the compost pile. Or that's what that's what the kid was told. And her glaucoma got much worse. Right. Yeah. Well, thanks for that. Who wrote that KM? KM. Thank you KM for your cryptic email. We appreciate that one.

KM, if you have a story about your grandmother breaking the law, we want to hear it. Send it in an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our blogs on the howstuffworks.com homepage. Brought to you by the reinvented 2012 Camry. It's ready. Are you? The war on drugs is the excuse our government uses to get away with absolutely insane stuff. Stuff that'll piss you off. The cops. Are they just like looting? Are they just like pillaging? They just have way better names for what they call like what we

would call a jackmove or being robbed. They call civil answer for it. Be sure to listen to the war on drugs on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if you had the chance to change the past? September 27th, 1996. And create the future you've always dreamed of. Einhorn's Epic Productions and iHeart radio bring you a new 12-part scripted audio time travel adventure. Join Nikki and her friends as they travel back to the 90s and change the past to save our future. Listen to Nikki Fix's Time Mix on the iHeart radio app,

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