 And welcome to another episode of likable science here on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen. I think likable science is all about how science is a vital and interesting part of our lives, should be embraced by us all and enjoy by everyone and not thought of as some arcane discipline that takes place only in ivory towers. Before we get into our show today, I want to give a little plug for science being conducted around the world and by everyone, SACNAS, the Society for the Advancement of Chicano's Native Americans in Science. It's having their national conference here in Honolulu right around Halloween this year, the first couple days of November. And everyone should sign up for this great opportunity to meet a bunch of interesting people. So anyhow, today we have a guest we're bringing her in from quite a distance from Quito, Ecuador actually, Tracy Tokohama. Welcome, Tracy. Thank you for the invitation and the opportunity to be here. Well, great. We're happy to have you. And Tracy works with Harvard University, their Extension School, teaching the neuroscience of learning and introduction to mind, brain, health, and education. So a wide-ranging topic they are. It's very broad, yeah. But all deeply interlinked. You can't really be, you can't have any one of those in without having some of the others. They're all balanced out, right? Exactly. This is the learning science in general, right? Psychology, neuroscience, health, and pedagogy. There we go. Excellent. And you have connections to Hawaii. You know, I got your father who up here, right? And you visited a number of times. Excellent. Absolutely. Hawaii is my second home and every Tokohama in the phone book is my relative. Oh, right. Great. Got a lot of family here then. Yeah, I do. So we're going to talk, one of Tracy's many interests and areas that she has studied is that of sleep. And so we decided we would talk about sleep because sleep is very likable. Everyone likes to sleep. Most people like to sleep. And it's accessible. So I thought we should explore this. So everyone knows sort of what sleep is, right? But why do we sleep? That's a great question. And that's just really the whole balance of human beings, right? It's very much the same of if you think about a general physical hygiene, you know, why do we keep our bodies clean? We should think about sleep in the same way. Why do we need good sleep hygiene? So along with things as fundamental as eating, this is really one of the basics of life. So your body seeks to have this balance. And it's really achieved and facilitated by sleep and dreaming. Excellent. Yeah. That makes sense. We spend like a third of our lives sleeping. So we should do that well as we eat well, exercise well, as you say. Ourself is clean. So but sleep varies, right? Over the lifespan, infants seem to sleep a lot. Adults, kids may be a little less adults, still less and a lot of elderly folks seem to sleep even less. Is that a general trend or am I a misinterpreting thing? Oh, no, it's an absolute, yeah, absolutely. You're absolutely right. The, in fact, babies or children in utero just before they're born sleep almost 24 hours, right? But newborns in general sleep up to 17 hours a day. And there's a real curiosity with this because it sort of, it begins to go down. It slows down a bit around infants and toddlers, preschool or sleep, you know, maybe 10 to 13 hours and teenagers will then need something between a nine and 11 hours would be what an average would probably need. But you're right. As we get into older adulthood, we start to slow down and say, okay, we only need maybe seven to nine hours of sleep or so. But the older we get, you'll find that very old people will sleep in maybe five or six hours, which is not too uncommon. And one of the theories is that there's a, there's this beautiful bath of combination of neurotransmitters that occurs during dreaming stage, during REM stage of sleep when most of the dreams occur. And basically, there's a hypothesis, we don't know for sure, but there's a need for those, that balance of chemicals in order to develop the brain. Okay. Yeah, it makes sense. I mean, we wouldn't sleep if there weren't some good biological reason for it, right? Almost every animal as far as I know, that's been looked at, does sleep. So I'm sleep a little differently than others. There are birds that actually stay aloft while they sleep, which And actually in mammals are the only animals that have REM sleep that have a rapid eye movement, which is associated with dreaming. So there's always this theory or this wonder, do dogs dream or, you know, do dolphins dream? And basically, yeah, based on brain scans, you can see that they do similar sleep stages. And they think that REM stages is related to thermal regulation. So basically, you know, keeping your body in balance, knowing how to, you know, when to up the temperature or the heartbeat or whatever, that seems to be given a rest during REM state. So that's one of the reasons that we think, or we know that mammals all dream. So you're right, most animals will sleep, but only a few will dream. Interesting. Very interesting. So why is it that you pointed out that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently has has declared basically that that we have a national emergency because people aren't sleeping well aren't sleeping enough for have sort of, as you put it, poor sleep hygiene. Yeah. Well, if you ask anybody around you, you know, do you sleep enough? And you can pretty much put your finger on the pulse of this general problem that we have. Very few people say, yeah, I sleep well all the time. Most people say that they could use more sleep than they get. And so they feel not rested. And basically, if they had to put a number to it within, there's a comparative study in the United States and also in the UK, about a third of adults really don't get the amount of sleep they need. And so there's nobody dictating that you need eight hours of sleep because between four and a half and 12 is normal. Eight is an average. But if you're getting less than your normal, so say that, you know, you sleep, you know, seven hours a night, but you start to sleep only six, you will have their consequences to that, right? But somebody else who might need 10 hours and then doesn't sleep, you know, they're only sleeping eight, they'll also have the same kinds of problems because they're not getting what they personally need. Right. And actually, not getting sleep when you need it, I get it has just really amazingly deep and profound, long lasting widespread effects. I was reading recently that the numbers of certain classes for your immune cells will crash. If you simply you have one night where you get one like half your normal sleep. And the next day that your immune system basically just die is basically. Yeah, you're stressing, you're generally stressing out your system. And so basically you throw your defenses out of whack because certain proteins, these are cytokines, they're they're not produced as they should be, you know, your body is out of that balance that it seeks. And so because you don't do that, then your immune immune system is shot, but other consequences of poor sleep. If you get sick, then people not sleeping well also has consequences for the economy. Because if you don't sleep well, then you miss work, for example. Or miss school if you're a kid. Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah, these we actually got a slide that I think shows a little bit of this. Some of the some of the ways that sleep deprivation can hear and impact a lot of different systems in your body, your immune system that can cause, I guess, increase your risk of type two diabetes increases your reaction times, you're reacting more slowly. Therefore, you probably shouldn't be out for driving your car when you when you've missed the night sleep increases your heart rate variability. So again, if you heart problems, you may be worse, you know, in pairs, your judgment, health hurts memory. I mean, all kinds of sort of different different ways. So all signs of awful things. And there's some other terrible statistics that come out of the UK that show that there's like, around a 13% higher mortality rate for people who don't get at least six hours of sleep a night, basically, because your judgment is impaired, you take higher risks, you don't measure things, your attention span is limited. This is also another one of these spin off effects is that kids who don't sleep well enough can actually look like they have ADHD. So we have this in the United States, we diagnose about twice the number we have an average a national average about 11% of kids have ADHD. But this is kind of strange because the whole rest of the world has an average of about 5%. And so there was a very interesting article, I believe the New York Times about 2013 or so that says we're just basically diagnosing the wrong disease. We are miss where we're believing that kids have ADHD when what they really have is really bad sleep hygiene. They're just not sleeping well enough. Wow. Yeah, it's fascinating. I was actually reading an oddly parallel thing about there. There's a certain kids come down with psychoses very abruptly, and are then treated for all these psychiatric disorders are given drugs for psychiatric disorders. And it turns out a lot of it's caused by a streptococcus infection. And in some small percentage of kids, the streptococcus infection apparently hits the brain, throws brain systems, wacky things, kids start going delusional. And yeah, and you pop these kids on. This is the problem right in general with diagnosis diagnosis is half the cure, right? But we generally we find what we're looking for. So if you've got the wrong kind of professional, trying to diagnose things like ADHD or whatever, without beginning, we generally try to coach teachers, parents to look at maybe the most fundamental things. Is the kid does he have a problem with sleep or bad nutrition? And or, you know, is he stressed out unduly because the parents are getting a divorce or he fought with his friends or something. Can we start first with the physical maybe the psychological before you jump to saying, Oh, it's probably an HD that's something neuro physiological. I mean, that's kind of crazy. So we try to coach people that start at the ground floor of diagnosis, because there are so many things that get misdiagnosed, because we're looking for them, rather than considering, you know, the whole the person as a whole. Yeah, yeah, no, that's that's a whole whole huge other discussion we could obviously have about diagnosis and problem solving in general. It's very easy to solve the wrong problem, typically. You know, Einstein's famous dictum, right when you're presented with a problem, you have an hour to solve it, you spend 55 minutes really defining that problem closely in the last five minutes and solving it. Exactly. Understand the instructions before you begin. Absolutely. Absolutely. So okay, so what we've come up with today is sleeps important people. So why are we getting? Why are we in this country? Why are our kids, for instance, getting so they sleep so badly? I mean, they're sleeping too little or these is it too noisy? Are they up and about too much? Are they breaking asleep into segments when when they shouldn't? It seems well, the average American we have, we've we're sleeping about an hour less than we used to back in the 70s. So we've really decreased the general amount of sleep we get and for some adults are this hypothesis that that works schedules have changed. It's kind of interesting because the total number of work hours has decreased overall in society, but the greater number of, you know, 24 seven job possibilities has increased. So maybe the way we're structuring our work worlds, but also and you can't take out of the equation this the temptation of technology, you know, on demand TV, or having your computer right next to you, or being able to chat with your friends late at night. So one of the things we talk about with good sleep hygiene, especially with kids is that, you know, your your bed is meant to sleep in. And so there should not be any device in your room, you should create spaces that are that really permit you to have that high quality sleep experience. Yeah, and there's there's a lot a lot of interesting research going on about about what makes for good sleep right now that how it is something you sort of have to structure and set up how lighting some some people have these theories about the color of the lighting before you go to sleep, you don't want a lot of blue light before you go to sleep. That's apparently sort of signaling your body to wake up. You much more want the redder end of the spectrum. I mean, I don't know how much of this is has been well supported, but there's all kinds of interesting stuff now going on. There's a lot more. There's a lot of people who began to make sleep research very popular. Walker Pace shot and you know, Alan J. Hobson are some great people who have done some really exceptional research lately, and they've called attention now in more popular press books about, you know, why do we sleep? Because a lot of people just sort of write off sleep, don't pay very much attention to it because they're not conscious while they're doing it. So they don't really understand why they sleep. So what's the point? Is this a waste of time, right? Or, and now we're understanding the great, you know, impact that poor sleep habits have not only on the individual, the immune system on our economics, but also, you know, just being a danger to yourself, right? There's greater risk taking when you haven't slept. Well, you have poor judgment just because you don't have your attention systems working well. So we we also know that there's this kind of a terrible cycle here that because we're sleepy, then we drink caffeine, but because we're so wired by caffeine, then we need that drink at night to go to sleep. But then because you went to sleep because of alcohol, you'll probably wake up in about an hour and a half because you didn't go to sleep naturally. And then you'll be, you know, you'll lie there awake, and then you'll finally get to sleep, but then you're sleepy again the next morning. And so there's this end unending cycle, unless we become more conscious of how we sleep well. And that's the big I think one big take home message is that sleeping is a behavior you can learn to do it better. We are we're going to explore that part more deeply when we come back. I trust in this one minute break we're going to take that not everyone will fall asleep. And they'll come back and join us in another minute. I'm Ethan Allen, your host on likable science Tracy Tokamura is here join us from Ecuador and we will be back in one minute. Aloha, I want to invite all of you to talk story with John Wahee every other Monday here at Think Tech, Hawaii. And we have special guests like Professor Colin Moore from the University of Hawaii who joins us from time to time to talk about the political happenings in this state. Please join us every other Monday. Aloha. You recycle, right? Yep, it's confusing. It's hard for all of us to recycle properly when it's this confusing. Yet recycling is the number one thing we can do for the environment and the economy. If we do it properly, we have a solution and it's working. The standardized labels help people recycle more and they help people recycle right. Let's recycle across America and let's recycle right to be part of the standardized label solution. Visit let's recycle right.org and thanks for joining us again here on likable science. Host Ethan Allen here on Think Tech Hawaii with me from Keto Ecuador, Tracy Tokamura. Welcome again, Tracy. Thank you, Tokuhama. Tokuhama, sorry. I apologize. I must have been asleep, you know. We've been talking about sleep and spent some time discussing the dangers and problems with poor sleep hygiene as you refer to bad sleep habits. But you hinted in the earlier part that sleep is not a unitary state. We go through these different stages and phases and you referred to rapid eye movement or REM sleep that I think some people probably have heard of, which is when we dream. I thought maybe we should dig a little bit more into dreaming because dreaming is pretty more important than some people believe, right? Oh, yeah. Dreaming is amazing, but REM stage of sleep is only about 25% of the total amount of sleep and and about 70 to 95% of your dreams actually occur in REM state. And so if you think about sleep in stages and most people describe it as four stages, this is measured by brainwaves, the different types of brain activity. We go through about four to five 90 minute cycles a night if you sleep this average of eight hours or so. And basically you go down into deep, deep, deep sleep and just before you wake up, you're in this rapid eye movement stage where you're actually having dreams. And if you're lucky enough to be able to wake up without an alarm, you're always waking up right out of that dream state. That's the most natural time to actually wake up. Right. And what's interesting is I mean, some people, of course, remember their dreams, remember dreams very well, remember them very vividly, you can recount them. Other people swear they don't dream at all or they own the very vaguest hazy memories of their dreams. Again, I suspect some of this is a learned behavior. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Oh, yeah. People can learn to sleep better and people can learn to wake up without alarms. I always set an alarm, but I rarely ever need it. Usually I wake up about, you know, three, four minutes just before the alarm goes off, because you can train yourself to do that. You just learn, okay, this is the end of the dream stage and you do naturally wake up anyways. There are little peaks of slightly waking up where you sort of roll over and then you go dig back into sleep. But basically, you can train yourself to do this and it is one of the most beneficial things for balance in life, for general well-being and for learning. There's a huge role that dreaming plays in consolidating memory and there's a huge role for sleep for being able to pay attention and attention and memory are the two big pillars for being able to learn things in the world. Right. I understand there have been studies done where they interrupt people when they go into REM sleep, basically break them out of their REM sleep. I don't know how they knock them deeper or wake them up and when they do that, after a little while, these people will have very bad psychological effects on these people if they can't do that REM sleep phase. Absolutely. You can probably, a human being, the record is I think it's 11 days that you can keep somebody from sleeping, like in sleep stage, but you can only go about three days with keeping them out of dreaming. So this means you can allow them to go into deep sleep where their body is restoring and all this other stuff and it's very hard to wake them up. But as soon as they begin to enter REM stage, when they begin to enter a dream stage, if you wake them up, they can only handle about three days of that and then after that they go absolutely wacko. There's a new someone who did the sleep studies, which these days are actually not even ethical to do, but they woke them up and woke them up. On the third day he literally picked up the chair that was in the room that he was being confined in through it at the lab person who came in and curled up in a fetal position and went to sleep for about two days. So basically he went straight to REM and this is what's also really interesting with even general college students that you do these studies on. When they're very sleep deprived, it's not really sleep deprived, it's really dream deprived. Instead of going down into deep sleep, they go straight into REM and it seems to be because this bath of neurotransmitters, these chemicals, are very, very important for maintaining that kind of sanity that we need. Yeah, no, it's very important things that are happening, obviously, and you're consolidating memories, you're cementing everything in place, you're probably sort of developing, sort of, it's like rebooting your computer in a sense, right? You're going back to an even baseline to start up everything again. And so yeah, it's critically important and if you don't dream, if you're to prevent it, the effects are obviously bad. Why don't we go, we've got a second little image here of the stages of sleep, this, I think you call it hypnogram, right? And this shows somebody, the pattern of, they actually have the four stages plus REM sleep actually shown on this one, but actually there's different ways of doing it, but the person drops in, swings back up to a REM sleep phase, drops back down in a very deep sleep, swings back up to REM phase, may actually wake up a couple of times during the course of a night, briefly. Yeah, and so it's a quite a different situation. Right, and each of those stages is sort of, if that's what we label the differences in the brain waves, right? So the deeper you go down, the broader the waves, the slower the waves, those are delta waves, right? So when you're wide awake, you know, you're in a beta stage, but then you're about to go to sleep, that's when you're in alpha stage, so those people who do meditation or whatever are very familiar with the alpha state just before you fall into sleep, and you go into theta, and then you have, you deep dive into delta, but then you come back up, so it's basically you're doing this wave over time, about 90 minute cycles, four or five times a night, and basically that's most of your dreams will occur then though in the REM stage, yeah. Yeah, and I think it's been pretty well established, actually everyone probably does dream, and it's just really a matter of some people remember their dream is better than others. Absolutely, everybody does dream, everybody must dream, believe it or not, because that's basically this long-standing hypothesis of why do people dream, and people might remember good old Freud who had these ideas of suppressed feelings, right? But some of the more modern thinkers, for example, Hobson at Harvard thinks that dreaming is used to rehearse emotions, so basically it's the safe space where you can, you know, approach somebody or talk to somebody or react in a different way, and so he has this theory that that's the space that humans use to rehearse emotions, which I I kind of like as a theory, because in one of the classes he taught, he basically said, I don't care what you dream, just tell me how you felt in the morning, and let me know if that influenced your feelings throughout the day, and it's true these anxiety kind of feelings that you might have with some dreams, they do spill over into your day, like you can have a pretty rotten day if you've had pretty rotten dreams, and so that's another reason why you should try to learn to manipulate them, you know, how do you choose what you dream? That's one of the another very cool things about dreaming being a behavior, you can choose what you want to dream, it's pretty much your it's up to you, you know, you're not they don't come from anything else except for your own brain and your own choices. Right, and so okay that this actually is a great thing that I want to actually get to is how do we improve our sleep hygiene, how do you learn to sleep better, and one thing is you know learn sort of it's not necessarily lucid dreaming which is which is the phenomenon of knowing your dreaming while you're dreaming, but it is a taking control of your dreams, it's a learning how to how to dream well, right? That's certainly one part, there's certainly something about very regular sleep cycles that's also pretty important to sleeping and dreaming well, right? Absolutely, and since we saw there on that graphic where you see that the dream stage is really only about 25 percent of the total time in that you're asleep, so if you if you're good at math you know that well 25 percent of the time you're in in RAM, the likelihood of your alarm clock going off at the right time is pretty low, you got like a 75 percent chance that it's going to go off when you're in a in a deeper sleep stage which will you know make you feel groggy all day long, so part of the idea is helping people understand and learn how to wake up naturally out of the dream state, and there are believe it or not these days there's an app for everything isn't there, so there are things on your on your phone because your phone has a microphone it can detect your own sleep stage, so when you're dreaming you tend to be moving around, right, and and very you know active for when you're asleep, but when you go out of dreaming you go into deep sleep and that's the time where you barely you don't move at all and like somebody tries to wake you up and you you don't move, right, so your telephone, this app Sleepcycle basically figures out your sleep stage by measuring those sound waves and you just say you know the latest I can wake up tomorrow is 6 a.m. and so what does the app do it sets your alarm for as close to the natural moment you're finishing the dream stage before you go down into deep sleep again so basically you you wake up right out of a dream stage which would be the most natural way to wake up in any case yeah yeah it's great I mean I recently I haven't now for last year or two I haven't set an alarm at all I just wake up it I wake up pretty much at the same time every every morning I go to bed at the same time each night wake up at the same time each morning and you know works well and it's because of the regularity of you you feel that you've given yourself a pattern a good time a normal time to go to sleep and normal time to wake up yeah yeah exactly and I've plenty of time and I have about nine hour period in which I figure probably eight hours or probably sleeping but yeah it's it's works for me and anyhow um and yes of course people try to take sleeping pills and other things too which of course are going to disrupt these cycles and push you in the wrong place and not be helpful in the long run drugs and alcohol do that yeah for sure and we could go on forever and everyone this conversation and put our audiences to sleep I'm sure but I'm told our time is basically up Tracey it's been wonderful having you here I want to get you back on the show again and we can discuss more sleep or we could go into other areas of your expertise of which there are many so thank you very much for joining thank you very much for the invitation Ethan okay and thank you for joining us on likable science here on think tech Hawaii I'll I hope to see you again next week until then