YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Walker

lines on the record: 148
first: 2023-02-08
most recent: 2023-02-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“First, is to brainwash you into thinking for yourself. The second is for you to gain long-term information. So we did a study where we suggested, okay, you haven't learned any of the information and we tested your hypothesis. And sure enough, yes, time on task returns some degree of a greater benefit. If you pull the al-nighter and they were better in terms of the testing relative to if you chose, you know, obviously not to engage in the material at all at that point. There's no learning whatsoever. Of course you're worse. What was interesting, however, is that in the people who had the same amount of learning opportunity but then got a full night of sleep afterwards relative to the next day, yes, the people who got sleep were better than those people who were sleep deprived. But then we brought them back four weeks later. And then we tested them a second time. And the difference between those”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At fault, and we need to reorganize and restructure how we examine individuals. Now, of course, that was the last time I was ever asked to write an op-ed piece for the crimson. So I suppose that told me everything I needed to know. But it comes on to my point, which is this. What's the goal of education? The goal of education, in my mind, is twofold.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But let's just put that aside for now. Let's think about it from an educational context because I wrote an op-ed for when I was back as faculty at Harvard and I was asked to write a piece for the Harvard Crimson. We just published some work on sleep and memory, some of the first in that area. And I wrote the op-ed and said the frequency of pulling all nighters at the end of the semester for exams is so rife and it is not the student's fault. The fault is us, the faculty. Why? Because we end load the semester with all of these inane idiotic exams and no wonder what do you think is going to happen? You're putting students in a pressure cooker. Of course they're all going to be pulling all nighters and it's counterfactual to the very idea of higher education. So it's not the students' fault. We are the people.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I think that's very true. But one of the other interesting things that we did a study, and we never actually ended up publishing the data, we wanted to do some follow-up studies, but it comes on to this point. I think you're right in that logic that if you've not learned 80 to 90 percent, even though your learning is going to be 20 to 40 percent deficient in its capacity, time on task in that break glass in case of emergency situation is still going to be in your favor, you could argue. Setting aside, of course, all of the deleterious consequences that come of that night of sleep, not to mention if you're driving to your exam the next day, your chances of getting in a fatal”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's very sounds like a flippant comment. No, I think it's, I don't think it is a flippant comment, especially, I think one may want to think about engineering. Look, life is to be lived. Have a drink, of course. I'm not being puritanical. But if you are, let's say, a student or you've been learning new information for new job or you've been learning a new skill for a new particular sport and you know when you've been learning and you know when you probably want to have a night out, restructure those things to implement them in the smartest way possible for optimizing outcomes.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that's a really interesting point when it comes to therapy because therapy is not just about targeting any one individual memory. It's trying to put it together both in the context of your back autobiography catalog of knowledge and experience. And it's also often in therapy trying to recontextualize it with new information to dissipate the negative affect. That is an incredibly complex thing from memory system to achieve. In other words, what you're trying to do is break previous associations, form new associations, and change the essentially the emotional and the informational weighting of memories and the weighting of the different connections dissipates some, increase others. That's a process that I suspect does not happen across one night of sleep. It happens across multiple nights of sleep. And I think it has implications for therapy.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On day seven because of the impact of alcohol on night one on REM sleep. But the frightening part was the night three group. So the third group, they were very good. They said, okay, I've been, let's say it's a student. I've been learning on Wednesday and I've got all this information. I'm not going to go out with my friends drinking on Wednesday night because sleep is important for memory. And then I'm not going to go out on Thursday night because I've just learned all this information. But then on Friday, surely my memories are now safe. I'm going to go out. I'm going to have a few drinks. Au contra because even alcohol on night three caused almost the same. It was about a 40% deficit in memory. And what that tells us is not just something about alcohol. It tells us that the sleeping brain is still processing and consolidating and digesting information three days after the”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Blood alcohol illegal 0.08%. And it was body standardized dose across individuals. So you had one group, the control group. The second group, they got a little bit tipsy on night one. And then the subsequent nights, they were alcohol-free. Then there was a third group of individuals. They learned on day one sober. Then they had natural sleep the first night, no drinking. Then they had natural sleep the second night and no drinking. And then on the third night, that's when they dose them with alcohol. And then again, everyone was tested on day seven. And what did they find? Firstly, relative to the group that got a full night of good sleep every single night across the six nights, their memory was still there, it was present. But in the group that had alcohol dosed on the first night, there was a greater than a fifty percent loss of their memory.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Five different groups and everyone learned this information on the first day, which required them to sort of create. It was actually very much like learning a novel language. It was an abstract analogical language, almost like learning a computer code that's completely foreign to you. And it's not just about learning the individual pieces, it's understanding the grammatical rules of this big picture structure associative. So they learned it on day one. And then out on day seven, they tested those individuals. So they learned it without any alcohol in their system. And then they were tested seven days later without any alcohol in the system. But here was the clever twist. One group across those subsequent six nights, they slept normally with no alcohol. The second group, the first night after learning that information, they got them essentially just to the point of inebriation, to about the point of being”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Learning facts, textbook information, and saving that stuff, that's about deep non-REM sleep. And we can speak about the mechanisms. When it comes to integrating and associating the information, as we spoke about, that's more about REM sleep. So he did a very clever study. He knew that one of the major consequences of alcohol's disruption on your sleep is not just that it sedates you, not just that it fragments your sleep, but it's very potent at blocking your dream sleep. And the reason is because of the aldehydes, the metabolic byproduct, and something called acet aldehyde is the main reason that your REM sleep is demolished by way of alcohol. And he was very interested in this idea because we knew at the time that REM sleep dreaming, REM sleep dreaming was associated with this type of creative memory. So he took a group of individuals and he separated them into about four or five.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In that way, sleep isn't like the bank that you can't accumulate that debt and then try to pay it off at a later point in time. That was the first study. Then there was another study done by Carlyle Smith, a great memory researcher. We didn't do the study, but I'm so jealous because it's such a brilliant study. He was looking at different forms of sort of creative learning, which”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you deprive them of sleep the first night after learning. But then you don't test them. You give them all of the recovery sleep that they want on a second night and a third night, and then you test them. And what we find is that the memory recollection is still impaired out on day five. In other words, if you don't sleep within the first 24 hours after learning, you lose the chance to consolidate those memories. So sleep for memory is an all-in-a-nothing phenomenon. And, you know, if you're not snoozing that first night, you're losing and no amount of recovery sleep on the second or the third night was going to salvage the process because it seems as though that there is a selective time window of opportunity for consolidation. And if you miss it, unfortunately, it's gone.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your memory is pinpoint accurate, so your sleep is not perhaps quite as bad as one would fear. You're right. So we've done these studies and there are perhaps two studies that speak to your point. One of the studies, you have people learn some information”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Memories. And as we mentioned before, to sort of fixate them into the neural architecture of the brain, it's like hitting the save button. But the problem is it's not digital in your Word document, which happens in milliseconds. The saving of memories in the brain is an organic process. It requires the building of new proteins between new synapses. So it takes hours. But it takes hours not just during wake, but during sleep. And there, what we found is that it's during deep non-rem sleep or deep non-rapid eye movement sleep that the brain will cement those new memories. It's almost like that scene in Jurassic Park where the amber is fixated the fly, you know, in perpetuity and sleep future proofs the information within your brain. And this perhaps comes on to both the mechanism, but also the...”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The short and long of it is nap for about 15 to 20 minutes and no longer. Because when you nap for longer, what happens is that you start to go down into the deeper stages of non-rem and then when you wake up after 30 or 40 minutes, you're coming out of the deeper stage of sleep and you have what's called sleep inertia, which feels like a sleep hangover. And it's even worse when you wake up than it was before you took the nap. But if you do 15 to 20 minutes, you don't get that heavy hit of sleep inertia, but you still get sleep benefits once you get to sort of down to about nine, eight or seven minutes, we really don't see brain or body benefits. Getting to 15 to 20, you get some nice cognitive benefits, but you lose the downside of the sleep inertia effect. But I'm digressing. So that's sort of the sleep before learning. You also need sleep after learning, however, to then take those new...”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Brain the chance to say, Look, this is the stage of sleep where you're going to see the correlation with the benefit that you measure when you wake that individual up. So we want to give REM a non-rem an equal opportunity to show their prowess in transacting a functional benefit for the brain. That's why we usually do 90 minutes. But if you're trying to optimize napping, I should probably do a podcast on this myself on the optimal version of napping.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you were close with suprachismatic nucleus. You're bang on with the old tradian. So Ultradian simply means it's shorter than a day and circadian, when we describe it, it means approximately or around a day's length Ultradian, shorter than a day. And yes, you're in human beings are sleep cycle going from non-rem to rem, which we repeat is every 90 minutes. Now that's in us human beings. It's different across different species. Our sleep cycle is actually quite long relative to others. For example, birds may just have a non-rem to rem cycle of about two minutes, which is very, very short. They flip back and forth, us 90 minutes. And so usually when we do these nap studies, we give the brain the opportunity to cycle through both non-rem and rem so then we give the sleep.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Naps, there were 90 minutes in duration. Now, I wouldn't recommend that for most people, and I'll sort of come back to why.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deviation, there was a separation such that those people who nabbed, they actually had a restoration of their learning ability. Those people who didn't had a deterioration in their learning ability. And the greater the number of spindles during the nap, these sleep spindles that happened during what we call non-Rapid Eye movement sleep, the greater the refreshment and the recuperation of their learning ability.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so no wonder you can't imprint that new information. We also found that if you want to reverse that trend and say, how can I increase my learning capacity? We did a NAP study during the day. And what we found is that it's not just sleep, but it's a particular bursting electrical brainwave called a sleep spindle. And the more of those sleep spindles that you are having, the greater the restoration of your learning ability. So the way we did the study, we took group of people and we had them try and learn a whole set of information at midday. And then we brought them back. And then at 6 p.m., we had them learn an additional new set of information. And so we could simply compare what's your learning capacity at time point one versus time point two. But then half of the subjects had a nap in the middle of that six hour period. The others did not nap. They remained awake. And there was a”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We also know why that's the case. We did a study where we were looking at the brain trying to learn information with and without sleep inside an MRI scanner. And there's a structure that we've spoken about before called the hippocampus, which sits on the left and the right side of your brain. And it's almost like the inbox for memory, the informational inbox that it grabs new memories. And when you don't have sleep, that hippocampal structure, it's almost like it becomes waterlogged, as it were, and you can't absorb new information. No, it's just coming back to the inbox analogy, I suppose, it's almost like the inbox is full. And you just start bouncing those. Incoming males, you don't commit the experience to memory because”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Prepare your brain for the initial act of imprinting and learning new information. And we've done some studies where we've deprived people of sleep. And that night of deprivation, you know, should you pull the all-nighter? Is it a wise idea? And the answer is no because you're about 20 to 40 percent deficient in your learning ability when you have not been getting sufficient sleep, which I do think is interesting when you consider what's happening to sleep in higher education populations right now, but I can put that aside.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. Yeah, I would like to, maybe I should grab that Twitter handle already. But certainly what we know from the bigger perspective is that, firstly, you've got to get sleep before learning.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think what we've started to understand is that different stages of sleep do different things for different systems of memory at different times of night. Yes, the story is simple that you need sleep for learning and memory, but there is evidence that we can Hatton match what type of things that you're learning with a particular stage of sleep if you wanted to try to dial it up if we were so you know replete as scientists to have dials like a mixing deck where we could instantly say okay tonight you want more stage two non-rem sleep or you want more spindles you want more deep sleep i mean we're getting there with brain stimulation but it's not quite there yet”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are some devices out there right now where people have sort of tried to have these ocular devices where they start to sort of flash light into the eyes? And the reason they use the ocular devices that the device itself can measure some parts of the brainwave activity, it can measure the eye movements. It senses when you go into dream sleep, and then it begins sort of the flashing, and the hope is that that flashing is an instigating trigger to make you build lucidity and make you aware that you're dreaming. You know, I've seen no data on how effective those are scientifically, but people are trying to take this to the next level. People have played around with compounds. They're now playing around with technology.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The dreaming digestion at night, then all of a sudden the dreaming brain was taking what you were learning and coming up with these novel new insights. So I think it fits very well with what we know about one of the functions of dreaming. And it's the reason that you've probably never been told to stay awake on a problem.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is designed to build the obvious connections, it seems to do a Google search gone wrong where it takes the new information, it inserts it, and it And it's the biological basis of creativity. And so I think what's happening with that description that you mentioned is that you're waking up in terms of your skills and your motor skills, but it also happens with knowledge with a revised mind-wide web of associations. It's almost like informational alchemy that happens at night. And that's why you can have these remarkable stories of people solving problems and coming up with incredible creative solutions. wonderful pieces of art and music and literature have all been inspired by way of dream creative insight and I think that's perhaps in part why you're feeling good about that benefit is there are certain ways that you are performing skills and movements that you just couldn't see when you're awake but when you go into the dream state and you force that to be on the menu of”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's And I think that it's fascinating that last spot that you said where when you were working with the coach that you truly actually never worked with, but you saw it translate to the mat in the waking real world, I think it fits very well with the idea of what one of the functions of dreaming, which is this notion of abstract creativity of problem solving. And we know that it's during the dream, it's during deep non-rem sleep when we take individual memories that we've been learning and we cement them and we essentially hit the save button on them and we concretize them in the neural architecture of the brain, but it's during dream sleep that we take those newly freshly minted memories and we start to interconnect and associate them with this vast catalog of previous knowledge that we have so that you start to divine solutions to previously impenetrable problems. And the reason that happens is not because the dreaming brain”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And hence, I understand that I'm probably in conscious waking reality. And you start doing this throughout your entire waking day to the point where it becomes a reflexive habit. And then the hope is that that habit bleeds through into your dreaming life from your waking life and you start to do the same reality testing in dreams. And then all of a sudden I press my hand down on the table and it moves all the way through the table to the other side. And at that point, I think, oh, the jig is up. I'm not awake. I'm dreaming. And then you gain lucidity.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's so clever. It's perfect. It is so clever. Isn't it genius? Maybe we won't spoil it for people who haven't seen it. But the idea of the reality testing method is that during the waking day, you start to test reality in a way that you don't normally do. So let's say that I would walk over to the table that I'm sitting next to here and I press my hand down on the table and the table is resisting my hand just like the waking laws of physics would predict. Or I go over to the wall and I switch on the light switch to the lights go on. And when I turn them off, do they go off?”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If people, and maybe we can link to it in the show notes, if people haven't watched it, don't worry if you're not interested in lucid dreaming. Yes, the movie revolves around lucid dreaming, but the philosophy and the conversations will blow your mind. It is one of my favorites.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's actually, well, so Stephen LeBerge was a fascinating researcher who was working here in the Bay Area in the 1980s and 90s, who probably was really the pioneer of modern-day lucid dreaming. And then at some point, he was doing academic, you know, really interesting scientific studies. And then he moved away and he developed his own lucidity institute and sort of was selling CDs to how to do that. And so I think went off in a slightly strange direction. And I don't know what came of him. But the reality testing method actually came to fruition on many people's radars with a brilliant...”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And essentially, it's pretty simple that you create a conscious and very deliberate intention to remember that you're dreaming. And usually this is pre-bed, that you're lying there before you go to sleep, and you start repeating this intention. I'm going to deliberately remember that I'm dreaming as I am dreaming. And you keep doing that night after night over and over again. And it sounds hokey. It sounds really quite science L-I-T-E light. The evidence is suggesting it's in favor. I think the other one that's probably more popular is called the reality testing method. And it's, oh gosh, it was popularized in a, at least, I think it was popularized in a”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, right now in terms of the science, we probably have two methods that have been put out that have some degree of validity to them. Although I would say that when you look at each one of the papers, the statistical robustness in terms of the reliability of these things, it's not especially high. I mean, some of these techniques do gain statistical significance, meaning that when you try them, it does significantly from a statistical perspective increase your likelihood of lucid dreaming. The first one is called, it's called the mild method for short, but it stands for the mnemonic induction of lucid dreaming, M-I-L-D method.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, sorry, the next morning when they wake up after the night, when they have had lucid dreaming, they find that it was more fatiguing, perhaps because it's more effortful, because you're engaging the prefrontal cortex. That's one argument, but I don't think that's a particularly good argument to say that if you are a lucid dreamer, you need to be worried, or if you want a lucid dream, you should not engage in some of the different methods that we've developed to improve it.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Key different functions like emotional therapy and emotional first aid. It supports creativity. I've worried myself, is it hubris for me to think that I should then take the reins and get into the driver's cockpit and start steering the vehicle rather than just allowing whatever Mother Nature thinks should happen for me? I don't know. The only other strike against Lucid Dreaming, and I don't think it's a big one and I don't think it's anything to be worried about. When you survey people and when we've examined people who claim to be lucid dreamers, on a night after lucid dreaming, they typically report that their sleep is less restorative and less refreshing. They find it to be perhaps more mentally fatiguing.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can push back on my own argument because there's a desperate flaw in that logic. That argument assumes that we've stopped evolving. And we haven't. So maybe that 10 to 20% of natural lucid dreamers are the forefront of hominid evolution and we don't need to be worried about AI. We need to be worried about the lucid dreamers becoming the next super race of humanity. I wrestle between those two if it's that volume though that 80 to 90 percent of people don't actually do it at this stage of after 3.6 million years of evolution of homoid development. My sense is that do I think that I understand better than Mother Nature's blueprint exactly what I should be serving up in my dreams at night to get all of the benefits of dreams? And by the way, we know that dreaming above and beyond REM sleep itself serves a number of”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Unfortunately, I am not a common lucid dreamer. It's happened probably about two or three times in my life. And when it's happened, it's immensely pleasurable. Have I tried to curate it, develop it, and use different techniques? And we can speak about the current techniques that are out there in the science. I have not chosen to do that. And it's not necessarily because I see in the science anything to be worried about. I can steal man both sides of that argument. We know that only about 10 to 20% of the population are natural lucid dreamers. And you could argue from an evolutionary standpoint that if it lucid dreaming is so adaptive, so beneficial to us Homo sapiens, then the reverse would be true. That Mother Nature would have heavily selected it and 80 to 90% of the population would be lucid dreamers.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the jury is still out on this idea that the electrical bursting brainwave activity comes back online over the prefrontal cortex. And what they were finding is that it's potentially an artifact of the eye movements that start to happen. So the eye movements, when you're moving those muscles, those extraocular muscles, you move muscles using electrical impulses. And those electrical impulses that are coming from the eye will also bleed up into the brain. And when you get all of this frenetic eye movement, it starts to masquerade as if it's the prefrontal cortex which sits directly above them as getting re-engaged. And hence, when you control for that, you don't see as powerful an argument for the re-engagement of the prefrontal cortex.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You put people in scanners, the imaging activity in those regions starts to ramp back up again as if You regain your rational logical control over the dream state. And so the prefrontal cortex gives you that capacity to take back what you lost, which is volition. There was a study recently, however, that I think did a pretty good job to say that may not be the case, that some of those results are confounded by the method of the analysis and the method of the recording. So I think it's the jury is still a little bit out. But even in that study, they demonstrated that there's something about their brain waves that is radically different at that fulcrum point where they shift from going from non-lucid dreaming to lucid dreaming. It's not a question of if it's just how.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've got these experiments now. And by the way, we've done imaging studies that are less messy for the experimenter to prove. But I should explain that, by the way. People would then say, okay, I'm now starting to have sex and I'm now just about to have an orgasm. And then they would say, I've just had my orgasm. And you can go into the room. And sure enough, with males, especially you've got proof positive data that what they said was real. And hence, you've just scientifically proven lucid dreaming. It's great. We've got much more sophisticated MRI scanning methods now and I won't bore you with the cities, but it's very clear that we know that lucid dreaming is real. The next question then was, how do people lucid dream? What is the underlying neural mechanism? And this comes back to the prefrontal cortex and those dorsal lateral prefrontal parts of the brain, which are the volitional control centers which go offline. What we found is that activity, both the electrical activity and also”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All I'm going to do at the beginning. Exactly It was the original Dreamscape pornography, you know, forget Pornhub. You just had to lose a dream.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Claim to be able to because when you control lucid dreaming, by the way, the definition is just that you are aware that you're dreaming as you are dreaming. That's our basic scientific definition. But what most people in the lay public think of as lucid dreaming is not just that you know that you're dreaming. You take control of your dreams. And of course, if you can control your dreams, one of the things that people enjoy doing is, you know, having sex and having an orgasm.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deliberate flicks to the left, and that's your signal to me that me, the participant, I'm now lucid. Okay, great. Now then you're going to do two big circular movements to the right, and that's you saying in my dream, I'm now clenching my right hand and then moving your eyes circular to the left. That's me moving my left hand. And so you can be telling me every time that you're doing something in your dream what it is that you're doing, which is, I mean, could you imagine who...”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got no good way to tell you okay, I'm now lucid, and they have no way to tell you what I'm dreaming about and what's happening, except that they do, which is their eyes. Because one of the two muscle groups that is spurred from the voluntary skeletal paralysis of your muscles are the extraocular muscles that move your eyes up and down and left and right. And that's why, by the way, you still have rapid eye movements during REM sleep, because those muscles are not inhibited. So we can now generate essentially a language between me, the experimenter, and you, the lucid dreamer, which is like an ocular Morse code. And you can be telling me using predefined eye movement instructions what's going on. So at the moment you become lucid, you've gone into dream sleep, and I can see that in the next door sleep control center. And then all of a sudden, I see based on your eye movement traces that I'm measuring, you do three.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, lucid dreaming, it used to be a complete charlatan science. You know, back in the 60s and the 70s to suggest that you could gain control over a normally non-volitional process only added insult to the idiotic nature of this thing called sleep and dreaming by itself. And now you're telling me, okay, we've got these things called dreams and also you claim to be able to control them and do whatever you like in them. Really? Show me some good science. But now we have some exquisite science and it's not even debated anymore. It's not a charlatan science. And the first experiments actually come back to our first topic, which was sleep and sex. The first experiments used orgasm and ejaculation as the test. So with a lucid dreamer, when they are asleep, just like you and I, when we're not lucid dreaming, they are paralyzed.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You up during REM sleep, you would be like a rag doll. All of your skele muscles are inhibited. People don't need to worry, by the way, your involuntary skeletal muscles that control your respiration and your heart, they're not affected. But all of your voluntary muscles are because your brainstem, which is where the REM and non-REM mechanisms play out, not only does it beam an activating signal up into the dreaming brain, it sends one down the spinal cord and it paralleles what's called the alpha motor neurons of the spinal cord that control your voluntary skeletal muscles. So you are locked into a physical incarceration during REM sleep during dream sleep, which by the way explains something called REM sleep paralysis upon awakening and adequately explains most alien abductions, but we don't need to go there. We can always move on to what's different about dreaming when it comes to lucidity or just pause there and go into anything that comes to mind.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That part of the brain goes offline when we go into REM sleep. Your dorsalateral prefrontal cortex doesn't erupt with activity like many of these other regions. It is suppressed in its activity. And that, I think, is our current explanations to why your dreams are so visual, so motoric, filled with past memories, also just highly emotional, but they're utterly bizarre, utterly erratic, and you have no volitional control. The prison guards have left the building and the prisoners are running a mark. Your prefrontal cortex is down. And so that's one of the fascinating parts of dream sleep neurologically, as well as the body, by the way. I think we probably didn't discuss this before, but when you go into dream sleep, your brain paralyzes your body. You are completely limp. So if I were to come into the bedroom and just pick.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Firstly, vast swaths of the visual cortex start lighting up. And in fact, some parts of your brain are up to 30% more active when you're in dream sleep than when you're awake, which is stunning to me because we often think of sleep as just this passive, non-conscious state metabolically from the brain perspective. It's wild. But the freakish part is what happens to another region of your brain called the prefrontal cortex. And particularly the left and the right side, which sits just above your eyes. And it's particularly a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, left and right side of the frontal lobe. That part of the brain normally when it's active acts like the CEO of the brain that it makes high-level sort of executive top-down control decisions and it allows you to have not just rational decisions but volitional decisions. In other words, you're choosing to make that choice and you're choosing to do that action. That's part of the prefrontal cortex job.”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, if you were to experience any one of those five things while you're awake, you probably would be seeking some form of psychiatric intervention. But for reasons that were now only starting to understand when it comes to the functions of dreaming, it's a perfectly normal biological and psychological process. The biological process is utterly interesting. We and others have done studies where we've been putting people inside of brain scanners and we let them go through the different stages of sleep and we let them go into REM sleep. Now, dreaming if you use a loose definition, which is the report of any mental activity up on awakening, if you use that loose definition, you dream in almost every stage of sleep. But what most people think of when you say dreaming are REM sleep dreams. Those are the emotional, the narrative, the bizarre, the strange. That's really the state from which you dream. And when we look at that,”
2023-02-08 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #654: Dr. Matthew Walker, All Things Sleep Continued — The Hidden Dangers of Melatonin, Tools for Insomnia, Enhancing Learning and Sleep Spindles, The Upsides of Sleep Divorce, How Sleep Impacts Sex (and Vice Versa), Adventures in Lucid Dreaming, The One Clock to Rule Them All, The IP Addresses of Your Memories, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT