YouSaid · the spoken record

Matt Walker

lines on the record: 154
first: 2021-08-11
most recent: 2021-08-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Whereas I see dream sleep as doing something very different. I think dream sleep is a little bit like group therapy for memories, that everyone gets a name badge and sleep gathers in all of the individual pieces of the day. And it sort of starts to get you to forces you, in fact, to speak to the people not at the front of the room that you think you've got the most obvious connection with, but to speak with the people all the way at the back of the room, that at first you think, I've got no obvious connection with them at all. But once you get chatting with them, you learn that you do have a very distant non-obvious connection, but it's still a connection non the same. And it's almost as though you're doing a Google search where, you know, I input, you know, Lex Friedman. And it doesn't take me to the first page of your home site.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the assimilation, the way I've been thinking about it with sleep and its particularly sort of dream sleep that we think can help with this assimilation That during wake, we have one version of associative processing. And what I mean by that is we see the most obvious connections. So I think of wakefulness. Has a Google search gone right.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember when people, I met people two years ago and I'll say, Oh, yes, we met there. And I remember you had those fantastic boots on. I thought they were. Pretty great pair of boots, you know, and they're like, how do you? I didn't even remember what I was wearing that day.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. I think it's just allowing yourself to be an eight and who you are is also a beautiful thing too. I'm not suggesting it's not important to try and better oneself, but also sometimes worry about the misery that that puts us in. I do struggle with him, but I know for the first time when we met in the lobby, I know exactly what you look like. I know that you were wearing headphones. I know the shape and the size of those headphones. You didn't have your black jacket on. I know exactly what the weave of your shirt looked like. I know what your shoes Look like, and I knew exactly the height of the end of your pants from the top of your shoes. And so those things I don't forget. And I can”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I find that a little bit activating. And so it's not as though there's anything wrong with my memory. It's just the emotional state I'm in when I'm first meeting someone. You know, it's a little bit perturbing, but I will never forget their face.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But not good with names. So I am exactly like. And there is an understanding of that in the brain too. We understand that there is partitioning of those in terms of the territory of the brain that takes care of faces and facts and places and they can be separate. So I will never forget a face, but as I said, I usually forget very little. But for some reason, names are struggle. I think in some ways because I'm probably just slightly anxious person. So when you first meet someone, which is usually the time when a name is introduced, you know, you were saying you were sort of anxious maybe about sort of sitting down with me.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Both because it was written exquisitely, but he was studying these sort of memory savants who basically could remember everything that he gave them. And he tried to find a chink in their armor. And the first half of the book is essentially about him seeing how far he can push them before they fail. And he never found that place. He could never find a place where they stopped remembering. And then in his brilliance, he turned the question on its head. He said, not what is the benefit of constantly remembering, but instead, what is the detriment to never forgetting? And when you start to realize his descriptions of those individuals, it's probably a life that you would not want.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unless we are programmed to say we've got a hard drive space of about 85 to 90 years and we're good and we can do that, maybe that's true. I don't think that's true. I think forgetting is an incredibly good and useful thing. So for example, it's not beneficial from an evolutionary perspective for me to remember where I park my car three years ago. So it's important that I can remember today's parking spot, but I don't want to have the junk kind of DNA from a memory perspective of where I park my car two years ago. Now I actually have, in some ways, a problem with forgetting. And again, I'm not trying to sort of be laudatory, but I tend not to forget too many things. And I don't think that that's a good thing. And there's a wonderful neurologist Luria who wrote a book called The Mind of the Mnemonicist. And it was a brilliant book.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, exactly. I love it. So, and we can sort of double click on any one of these and go into detail. But the fourth, I became really enchanted by about eight years ago in our research, which was this idea of forgetting. And I started to think that forgetting maybe the price that we pay for remembering. And in that sense, There is an enormous Benefit to letting go. And you may be thinking that sounds ridiculous. I don't want to forget. In fact, my biggest problem is I keep forgetting things. But the brain has a fire, well, we believe has a finite storage capacity. We can't prove it yet, but my suspicion is that that's probably true. It doesn't have an infinite storage capacity. It has constraints. If that's the case, we can't simply go through life being constantly informational aggregators.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every language that I've inquired about that phrase, or something very similar seems to exist, which means to me that this creative associative benefit of sleep transcends cultural boundaries. It is a common experience across humanity. Now, I should note that I think the French translation of that is much closer to you. I think you sleep with a problem, whereas the British, you sleep on a problem. The French, you sleep with a problem. I think it says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French, but let's not go there. That's brilliant.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sleep doesn't simply just take individual memories and strengthen them. Sleep will then intelligently integrate and cross-link and associate that information together And it's almost like informational alchemy so that you wake up the next morning with a revised mind-wide web of associations. And that's probably the reason that you've never been told to stay awake on a problem You know”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it means that it gives it a higher degree of assurance. To be remembered in the future rather than go through the sort of degradation that we think of as forgetting. So the brain has, in some ways, by default, there is forget. And actually, I would love to, I was going to say sleep is relevant for memory in three different ways, but I'm going to amend that and say there's four different ways, which is learning. Maintaining, memorizing Abstraction assimilation, association, Than forgetting, which the last one sounds oxymoronic based on the former three, but I'll see if I can explain. So sleep after learning then sort of, you know, Sets that information like amber in solidification. The third benefit, however, is that sleep we've learned more recently.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you need sleep before learning, but you also need sleep, unfortunately, after learning too, to then take those freshly minted memories and effectively hit the save button on them, but it's nowhere near as quick as a digital system. It takes hours because it's a physical biological change that happens at the level of brain cells. But sleep after learning will cement and solidify that new memory into the neural architecture of the brain, therefore making it less likely to be forgotten. So I often think of sleep in that way as it's almost sort of future-proofing information. In what way?”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sleep is profoundly and very intimately related to your memory systems and your informational systems. The first, as you just mentioned, is that sleep before learning will essentially prepare your brain almost like a dry sponge ready to sort of initially soak up new information. In other words, you need sleep before learning to effectively imprint information into the brain, to lay down fresh memory traces. And without sleep, the memory circuits of the brain, and we know we've studied these memory circuits will, you know, essentially become waterlogged, as it were, for the sponge analogy, and you can't absorb the information as effectively.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is huge variability, and I think everyone themselves, to a degree knows it, although I'll put a caveat on that too, because it's a slightly dangerous point. So, the recommendation for the average adult and who, where is the average adult in society? There is no such thing. But for the average adult, it would be probably cutting yourself off maybe 10 hours before. So assuming a normative bedtime in society, I would say try to stop drinking caffeine before 2 p.m. and just keep an eye out. And if you're struggling with sleep, dial down the caffeine and see if it makes a difference.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As the sort of moving into their addiction, they will build up a progressive tolerance to that drug. So they need to take more of it to get the same high. But then if they go cold turkey for some period of time, the system goes back to being more sensitive again. It starts to repopulate the surface of the cell with these receptors. But now when they reuse and they fall off the wagon, if they go back to the same dose that they were using before, you know, 10 weeks ago or three months ago, that dose can kill them. They can have an overdose. Even though they were using the same amount at those two different times, the difference is that it's not the dose of the drug, it's the sensitivity of the system. And that's the same thing that we see with caffeine. In terms of training the muscle, as it were, is the system becomes less sensitive, can calibrate.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Things are going a little bit too ballistic right now. I'm going to take away at least two of those receptors and downscale it to just having three of those. And now you need two cups of coffee to get the same effect that one cup of coffee got you before. And that's why then when you go cold turkey on coffee, all of a sudden the system has equilibriated itself to expecting X amount of stimulation. And now all of that stimulation is gone. So it's now got too few receptors and you have a caffeine withdrawal syndrome. And that's why, for example, with drugs of abuse, things like heroin, when people go into abstinence,”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Receptor internalization. So the cell starts to think, gee, where's, you know, there's a lot of stimulation going on. This is too much. So I'm just going to, when normally I would coat my cell with, let's just say five of these receptors for argument's sake.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not how the body is able to get rid of the caffeine, but it does alter how sensitive the body is to the caffeine. And it's not at the level of the enzyme degrading the caffeine. It's at the level of the receptors that caffeine will act upon. Now, it turns out that those are called adenosine receptors, and maybe we can speak about what adenosine is and sleep pressure and all of that good stuff. As you start to drink more and more coffee, The body tries to fight back and it happens with many different drugs, by the way, and it's called tolerance. And so one of the ways that your body becomes tolerant to a drug is that the receptors that the drug is binding to, these sort of welcome sites, these sort of, you know, picture myths, as it were, that receive the drug, those start to get taken away from the surface of the cell. And it's what we...”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And therefore, their half-life sort of sensitivity could be somewhere between eight to nine hours. So we understand that there are individual differences, but overall, I guess the top line here is drink coffee and understand that it's not the caffeine, it's the coffee that's the benefit and the dose makes the poison.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I would love to be invested in it. It's just terrible for my sleep. So I switched to decaf. There is a difference from one individual to the next, and it's controlled by a set of liver enzymes called cytochrome P450 enzymes. And there is a particular gene that if you have a different sort of version of this gene, it's called CYP1A2. That gene will determine the speed of the clearance of caffeine from your system. Some people will have a version of that gene that is very effective and efficient at clearing that caffeine. And so their half-life could be as short as two hours rather than five to six hours. Other people, hands up Matt Walker, have a version of that gene that is not very effective at clearing.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second component is the timing though. Caffeine has half life of about five to six hours, meaning that after five to six hours, 50% of that on average for the average adult is still in the system, which means that it has a quarter life of 10 to 12 hours. So in other words, if you have a coffee at noon, a quarter of that caffeine is still circulating in your brain at midnight. So having a cup of coffee at noon, one could argue is the equivalent of tucking yourself into bed at midnight and before you turn the light out, you swig a quarter of a cup of coffee. But that doesn't still answer your question as to why are you so immune? So I'm someone who is actually unfortunately very sensitive to caffeine. And if I have, you know, even two cups of coffee in the morning, I don't sleep as well that night. And I find it miserable because I love the smell of coffee. I love the routine. I love the ritual.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The downside there is that even if that is true, the amount of deep sleep that you get will not be as deep. And so you will actually lose somewhere between 10 to 30 percent of your deep sleep if you drink caffeine in the evening. So to give you some context, to drop your deep sleep by, let's say, 20%, I'd probably have to age you by 15 years. Or you could do it every night with a cup of coffee. I think the fourth component that is perhaps less well understood about coffee is its timing. And that's why I was saying the timing and the dose make the poison. The dose, by the way, once you get past about three cups of coffee a day, the health benefits actually start to turn down in the opposite direction. So there is a U-shaped function. It's sort of, you know, the Goldilocks syndrome, not too little, not too much, just the right amount.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Caffeine can make it harder to stay asleep, but let's say that you are one of those individuals, and I think you are, and you can say, look, I can have three or four espresso with dinner, and I fall asleep just fine and I stay asleep soundly across the night, so there's no problem.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Turns out that for most people in Western civilization because of diet not being quite what it should be. The major source through which they obtain antioxidants is the coffee bean. So the humble coffee bean has now been asked to carry the astronomical weight of serving up the large majority of people's antioxidant needs. And you can see this if, for example, you look at the health benefits of decaffeinated coffee. It has a whole constellation of really great health benefits too. So it's not the caffeine, and that's why I liked what you said, this sort of separation of church and state between coffee and caffeine. It's not the caffeine, it's the coffee bean itself that provides those health benefits. But coming back to how it impacts sleep, it impacts sleep in probably at least three different ways. The first is that for most people, caffeine can make it obviously a little harder to fall asleep.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is a distinction. So I think the first thing to say, which is going to sound strange coming from me, is drink coffee. The health benefits associated with drinking coffee are really quite well established now. But I think that the counterpoint to that, well, firstly, the dose and the timing make the poison. And I'll perhaps come back to that in just a second. But for coffee, it's actually not the caffeine. A lot of people have asked me about this rightful paradox between the fact that sleep provides all of these incredible health benefits and then coffee, which can have a deleterious impact on your sleep, has a whole collection of health benefits, many of them Venn diagram overlapping with those that sleep provides. How on earth can you reconcile those two? And the answer is that, well, the answer is very simple. It's called antioxidants.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But having the reverence of a humble mind and simply accepting the things that are wrong and correcting them and doing the right thing, I know that that's his mentality.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Being, you know, unfortunately British and sort of having that slightly awkward sort of Hugh Grant gene, it's very, very... The opposite end of the spectrum of the remarkable feat of Al Pacino at the end of that scene. And yeah, integrity is challenging. Thing and I value it much, and I think it can take 20 years to build a reputation in two minutes to lose it. And there is nothing more that I value than integrity. And if I'm ever wrong about anything, I truly don't want to be wrong for any longer than I have to be. That's what being in some ways a scientist is. Just driven by truth and the irony relative to something like mathematics is that in science you never find truth. All you do in science is you discount the things that are likely to be untrue, leaving”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It depends on what conscious state you're in that you would be ready and receptive to. But CenterVorman, I think it has one of the best monologues at the end of the movie that has ever been written or at least performed.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I left the line instance of a woman with Al Pacino where he's speaking about the tango and he says really it's just freedom that if you get tangled up you just keep tangoing on”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've already got human consciousness. What if we were to think about creating some other form of? Why do we have to think that the ultimate in the creation of an artificial intelligence is the replication of a human state of consciousness? Can we not think outside of our own consciousness and believe that there is something even more incredible or more complementary, more orthogonal? So I'm sometimes Perplexed that people are trying to mimic human consciousness rather than think about creating. Something that's different”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Correct, yeah, but there is something about the complexity of the nervous system that I think is fundamental to consciousness. And the reason I bring that up is because when we're trying to then think about creating it in an artificial way, does that inform us as to the complexity that we should be looking at in terms of development? I also think that it's a missed opportunity in the Sort of digital space for us to try to recreate human consciousness.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bacteria, whatever you want, and you can go through this and say, okay, where is the hard line of what we would define as consciousness? And I'm sure it's got something to do with the complexity of the neural system. Of that, I'm fairly certain. But to me, it's always been fascinating. So what is it then? You know, is it that I just keep adding neurons to a petri dish and I just keep adding them and adding them and adding them? At some point when I hit a critical mass of interconnected neurons, that is the mass of the interconnected human brain, then bingo. All of a sudden, it kicks into gear and we have consciousness.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I love the fact that there are still questions that are so embryonic because I suspect it's the same with you. Answers to me are simply ways to get to It's questions where questions turn me on, answers less. So, and I love the fact that we are still. Embryonic in our sense of arguing about even what the definition of consciousness is. But I also find it fascinating. I think it's thoroughly delightful to absorb yourself in the thought. Think about the brain and we can move back across the complexity of phylogeny from humans to mammals to sort of birds to reptiles, amphibians, fish.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's like trying to launch a rocket. You know, the energy that has to be put in to create escape velocity from the gravitational pull of this thing called planet Earth is immense. The same thing is true for For us to abandon our sense of conscious self, the amount of biological, the amount of substances, the amount of wacky stuff that you have to do to truly get escape velocity from your conscious self. Does that tell us about then the fundamental state of our conscious self?”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nested at the heart of it, meaning that I think it's very difficult for us to abandon our conscious sense of self. And if it's that hard, you know, the old adage in some ways that you can't outrun your shadow. But here it's more of a philosophical question, which is about the conscious mind and what the state of consciousness actually means in a human being. So I think that to me Become so dislocated from so many other rational ways of waking consciousness. But one thing that won't go away, that won't get perturbed or sort of manacled. Is this your sense of conscious self?”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are five essentially good reasons. Firstly, you started to see things which were not there, so you were hallucinating. Second, you believe things that couldn't possibly be true. So you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time and place and person. So you're suffering from what we would call disorientation. Fourth, you have wildly fluctuating emotions, something that psychiatrists will call being affectively labile. And then how wonderful you woke up this morning and you forgot most, if not all, of that dream experience. So you're suffering from amnesia. You had to experience. Any one of those five things while you're awake, you would probably be seeking psychological help. So I placed that as a backdrop against your astute question because despite all of that psychosis, Is still a present self”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At all, in fact, for you to end up becoming someone other than who you are in your dreams. Now, you can have third-person perspective dreams where you can see yourself in the dream as if you're sort of, you know, you've risen above your physical being. But for the most part, it's very rare that we lose our sense of conscious self. And maybe I'm sort of doing a sleight of hand because it's really what I'm saying is it's very rare that we lose our sense of who we are in dreams. We never do. Now, that's not to suggest that dreams aren't utterly bizarre. And I mean, you know, when you slept last night, which I know may have been perhaps a little less than me, but when you went into dreaming, you became flagrantly psychotic.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's a deeply embedded feature that I can imagine has a whole panoply of biological benefits. But to your point about sleep, what is interesting if you do a lot of dream research, and we've done some. Very, very rare.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Drugs or alcohol, which certainly is a terrible thing to be behind the wheel. With those, often you react too late. And that's the reason you get into an accident. When you fall asleep behind the wheel, you don't react at all. At that point, there is a two ton missile driving down the street, and no one's in control. That's why those accidents can often be more dangerous.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Understands when you are well slept. And then you've got the data of the individual behavior unique to that individual snowflake like when they are well slept. This is the signature of well-rested driving. Then you can look at deviations from that and pattern match it with the sleep history of that individual. And then I don't need to find the sort of the one size fits all approach for 99% of the people. I can create a very bespoke tailor-like set of features, the savile row suit of sleepiness features. That would be my, if you want to ask me about moonshots and crazy ideas, that's where I would go. But to start with, I think your approach is a great one. Let's find something that covers 99% of the people because the worrying thing about microsleeps, of course, unlike...”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we need to take necessarily quite that approach. I think what we could do in some clever fashion is using the individual. So what you and I are perhaps suggesting here is that there is an array of features that we know provide information that is sensitive to whether or not you're falling asleep at the wheel. Some of those, let's say that there are 10 of them, for me, seven of them are the cardinal features. For you, however, six of them, and they're not all the same sort of overlapping, are those for you. I think what we need is algorithms that can firstly understand when you are well slept. So let's say that people have sleep trackers at night and then your car integrates that information.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if you consent the pressure on the pedals as well, my guess is that there is some combinatorial feature that creates a phenotype of you are starting to fall asleep and as the autonomous controls develop, it's time for them to kick in. Some manufacturers, auto manufacturers, sort of have something beta version, maybe an alpha version of this already starting to come online where they have a little camera in the wheel that I think tries to look at some features.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do, and I think there are a number of other features too. I think aperture of eye, so in other words, partial closures, full closures, duration of those closures, duration of those partial closures of the eyelid. I think there may be some information in the pupil as well, because as we're transitioning between those states, there are changes in what's called the automatic nervous system, or technically it's called the autonomic nervous system, part of which will control your pupillary size. So I actually think that there is probably a wealth of information when you combine that, probably with aspects of steering, angle, steering maneuver.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To the next, and it takes two seconds to go completely off the road. So if you have one of these microsleeps at the wheel, it could be the last microsleep that you ever have. But I don't now see it as a set of very binary, distinct step function states. It's not a one or a zero. I see it more of a continuum.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've also then found that when you are sleep deprived, there are even individual brain cells will fall asleep. Despite the animal being behaviorally from best we can tell awake, individual brain cells and clusters of brain cells will go into a sleep-like state. And humans do this too when we are sleep deprived. We have what are called micro sleeps where the eyelid will partially close. And the brain essentially falls, lapses into a state of sleep, but behaviorally you seem to be awake. And the danger here is road traffic accidents. So these are what we call these sort of microsleep events at the wheel. Now, if you're traveling at 65 miles an hour in a two-ton vehicle, you know, it takes probably around one second to drift from one lane.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we are in a very different wakeful state in those daydreams than we are when we are, as we are now together, present and extraceptively focused rather than intraceptively focused. And then we also know that as you are progressing into those different stages of sleep during non-rem sleep, you can also still dream, depends on your definition of dreaming. But we seem to have some degree of dreaming in almost all stages of sleep.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about it as a state space diagram. And I think it's probably more of a continuum than we have believed it to be or suggested it to be. So we used to think absent of anesthesia that there were really three main states of consciousness. There was being awake, being in non-rapid eye movement sleep or non-dream sleep, and then being in rapid eye movement sleep or dream sleep. And those were the three states within which your brain could percolate and be conscious. Conscious during non-rem sleep is maybe a stretch to say, but I still believe there is plenty of consciousness there. I don't believe that, though, anymore. And the reason is because we can have daydreams.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have periods, whether active and periods whether passively asleep. It's called lethargic. And so what that in some ways suggested to me was sleep evolved with life itself on this planet. And then it has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary pathway, which then leads to the sort of famous sleep statement from a researcher that if sleep doesn't serve an absolutely vital function or functions, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process has ever made. And we've now realized Mother Nature didn't make a spectacular blunder with sleep.”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Why? Because, and you know, there was an energy conservation hypothesis for a while, which is that we need to essentially go into low battery mode, you know, power down because it's unsustainable. But in fact, that actually has been blasted out the water because sleep is an incredibly active process. In fact, the difference between you just lying on the couch but remaining conscious versus you lying on the couch and falling asleep. It's only a savings of about $140, 150 calories. In other words, you know, you just go out and club another baby seal or whatever it was and you wouldn't worry. So it has to be much more to it than energy conservation, much more to it than sharing ecosystem space and time, much more to it than simply predator prey relationships. If sleep really did, and looking back even very old evolutionary organisms like earthworms millions of years old, they”
2021-08-11 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #210 – Matt Walker: Sleep · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source