 Good morning everyone. This is the live broadcast of a special edition of the twist podcast And I am very excited to be here today as always Remember that you can subscribe to us on Twitch YouTube Facebook Instagram Twitter all the places that podcasts are found Look for this week in science our website is twist org. I'm Dr. Kiki and This next half hour it may be edited for the podcast But what you're gonna see is the full unfiltered unedited live stream. So I'm glad that you might be here with us live now without any further to do this is Twist with a special science interview recorded on Friday, October 22nd, 2021 Happy day of science everyone. Welcome to this week in science. Thank you for joining us. We have a wonderful show ahead Today, I am speaking with Dr. Siddhartha Ribeiro who is a Brazilian neuroscientist science communicator and deputy director of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal de Rio Grande da Norte I do not speak Portuguese and I know I am probably not pronouncing any of this correctly My accents my accents are atrocious Dr. Ribeiro has written one of the most comprehensive books on the history and science of dreams Oracle of night and without any further ado, I'd love to Welcome him to the show. Dr. Ribeiro. Thank you for joining me this morning Thank you for having me. Good morning to everyone at home at home at office. It's a pleasure to be here Right off the bat we're talking about the science the culture the history of dreams What did you dream last night anything interesting? It's interesting. I had a dream of a little metal car that was Going through my over my body And this is because of an experience I had with my younger son a few days ago So I could recognize this element now what it really means. I haven't had the time to interpret it today And as a neuroscientist, how do you approach The interpretation of dreams. I know that historically we have Approached them and in your book you cover this Very comprehensively the the history of how we have but how do you come to interpret dreams at this point in time? huh So well, so for you know in the antiquity and throughout the middle ages and to this day among Several indigenous populations people believe and believed in the past The dreams can predict the future And science has come to see this as superstition. So in the past hundred years This has fallen in this grace and people have focused on the physiological properties of sleep and what it does to your body And then we started to learn in the past 20 years that in fact Well, actually we started to learn over the past hundred years But with a lot of good evidence in the past 20 years that in fact the brain is really processing a lot of memories And and changing the way that we represent the world and changing the way in which we can cope with the world And actually giving a good reason to believe that our ancestors Evolved an oracle an oracle but not a deterministic oracle that really could predict the future Rather a probabilistic oracle So a simulation of possible futures of counterfactuals of things that may happen And will and the simulation gives you some Insights into how to behave in order to be more more fit in the environment to adapt to the to the environment This is a notion that converges a lot of data from neuroscience and psychology Uh and agrees is aligned with knowledge from from from several traditions from That that have roots in the prehistory of of men and women So I think we need to and I think we need to to look into dreaming as something very important for our evolution And something that needs to be rescued What do you mean by rescued? Well sleep and dreaming are uh in peril Are we talking about yeah, are we talking about all the people who through coveted were have have said I can't sleep I'm stressed out. I have anxiety people who are taking Sleep aids to help them sleep. Is this what you mean? Yes, we're living a very unhealthy life We we pay no attention to sleep and dreaming. We pay little attention to nutrition and exercise most people And when those things are not aligned It's almost impossible to stabilize and people start taking drugs to to go to sleep and then to wake up And then to do this and then to do that and they're not doing the basics They're not doing the homework and the a good night of sleep is is the main first thing you should do right if you have a good night of sleep you'll You know, basically clean your body of all those toxins that we generate during the waking life and also build a lot of Molecules that we need proteins and release hormones many important things We'll do the this triage of memories the separation of what's to be kept what's to be forgotten what's to be Changed and restructured to create to generate creativity and then on top of that we have this more complex level of of simulation of behaviors And and we have a lot of social implications So yes, I think especially in the because of the pandemic we're dealing with collective trauma And and dreams have been away and shared dreams and shared dreams of for the common good have been You know something that we our ancestors relied upon Over ages and ages and ages and this worked for them and it worked for us therefore Right, otherwise we wouldn't be here and somehow we are we are in need of going back to this to those basics If we are to heal as a as a society as a planet What does neuroscience and the research that you've done tell us about those shared dreams? There were reports of very common threads For the dreams that people have had throughout the pandemic, especially during lockdown And then historically we also have the you know flying dreams or falling dreams or you know waking up in front of Your your class having to give a presentation and you're not wearing any clothes, you know, these are common elements To dreams that people have reported Is this something that we can match in any way to activity in the brain? well dreams evolved for purpose dreams evolved with a function and perhaps with many functions related to survival The pandemic put us in a situation in which everybody was Reminded of the fear of death of impending death and and then the death of people that we love So it's really a tragedy and it's something that happened before Many many times in the past of humankind, but of course it never happened With such a global scale So so the fact that dreams Appeared the nightmares for example appeared all over the world with similar motives Is not surprising at all if we know something about archetypes and about common motives and culture It's it's easy to understand how a common fear will elicit common images Um Now what this does to your brain? Is something that we know indirectly mostly from from animal models Right, we know that when you have a very a very strong negative memory That can generate a trauma Nightmares recursive nightmares will will ensue And in the brain this will mean the creation of a very strong memory that at the beginning in the beginning will be Basically an electrical memory reverberating through several brain circuits It looks such as the hippocampus the cerebral cortex the amygdala and eventually this will this activity will subside and will give rise to Morphological changes changes at the level of synapses changes in in the way they are modeled and remodeled And and then we can keep memories for a long period of time in the case of those memories that are acquired with Acquired with such strong emotional value We we tend to not get rid of them without some help Right and in the book you talk a lot about uh the difference between slow wave and rapid slow slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement and these different Different parts of sleep that and how they contribute not just to dreams but also to that remodeling process Can you talk about what we understand now? Absolutely Well across the night we go through several sleep cycles that comprise different sleep stages The main stages are slow wave sleep and rem sleep rapid eye movement sleep Right slow wave sleep as name says is dominated by brain waves and the cerebral cortex that have very large amplitude And very very low frequency. So they're very just very big waves that will promote A periodic activation and inactivation of neurons so neurons will burst but in between the bursts the bursts there'll be silence and in the silence There's no opportunity for for a cohesive conscious experience to occur So if you wake people up during this stage people will say well, I'm not dreaming of anything Perhaps they have some thoughts related to like regular chores, but but nothing like a movie Or or cinematic cinematographic experience. So this is the first half of the night The second half of the night though is dominated by REM sleep when the cortex becomes super active And and and then dreams can can occur But these dreams will not just be the the product of the reactivation of neurons Therefore the reactivation of memories But also they will be the product or will be guided or oriented by specific desires and fears Which are signaled Among many other mechanisms through dopamine So basically depending on what you are aiming in your life and depending on what your problems are This is what will set the direction for the dream Now if you have many different problems, which is the case for most of us in contemporary societies Your dream will become a mix of things and often not not really easily easy to be interpreted But if you have a very clear concern A very serious thing going on in your life Then your dreams if you pay attention to your dreams, they will really really condense In images sometimes metaphorical sometimes very literal. What is going on in your life? And does the this activation of the different neurons its dopamine is is triggering all this what happens to The a standard mantra of neuroscience is neurons that Fire together wire together. So is it during this rapid the fast eye movement? That we have the increased firing and so increased Wiring and so hardening of memories within our neural architecture. Yeah, this is this is a very good question It is doing rm sleep that many molecular mechanisms Uh of long-term memory consolidation will be triggered such as the phosphorylation of kinases and then immediate early gene expression And then late genes being expressed hours and days later that will transform those short lived memories into long-term memories So this is yes, correct And also it is during rm sleep That's uh the process of migration of memories within the brain will be promoted So so memories do not stay in the same place. They're constantly moving. You you may remember the same person over decades, but you Probably not using the same neurons at all, right? So you're using different networks that keep changing Uh and and rm sleep has a lot to do with that now more recent studies such as the work of when be all gone at nyu Showing that uh during slow wave sleep. There is the addition of many small synaptic connections So basically like a wiring everybody And then during some rm sleep Most of those get eliminated and some of those get enriched. So this is more like a selection Step so so at the beginning you you basically mutate everything connect everything and then later select and by doing that and implementing those uh heavy and uh principles of of Of that govern plasticity then basically what the system is doing is looking for optimal solutions Which is what adaptation is all about and this uh this this process it really mirrors a lot of like the brain development that occurs in individuals where We start out with all sorts of neurons and then Things get pruned back. So you have the optimal uh neural connections to allow you to respond to situations Effectively it seems like it really mirrors that process Yes, yes, and and I think now this is really inspiring people doing computation This is inspiring this is inspiring machine learning It it strikes me the idea that you that you mentioned about uh the long-term memory aspect of remembering somebody over several decades and Back when I started grad school in a in a neuroscience neurophysiology program. It was The the idea we didn't understand how nmda receptors were involved in long-term memory We didn't understand how long-term memories continued to be propagated. So how do these neurons exist? How long And this idea that you said That long-term memories don't necessarily exist within a single neural network for 10 years for your entire life that they're getting shifted between networks That to me is An amazing advancement in our understanding When when did we come to start understanding this idea? Well, we know since the 1940s That parts of the brain that are necessary for us to learn something new say in the declarative realm the name of a person Or or the recollection of an event so Namely the hippocampus that if if you lack a hippocampus you cannot learn new things right to become a music from them from them on At the time it was noted that uh, so the first the famous patient hm That became the the the most famous example of this kind of of condition um Was also a person that was they had lost the memories that preceded the the surgery So the memories that had just been acquired Were erased as well, but not the memories from childhood or adolescence. So it became uh Understood over several decades that declarative memories require the hippocampus in order to be Installed in the brain but then over the the course of days and weeks and months and years They they move to the cerebral cortex whether they move or they migrate or they propagate Or they get anchored that several different words have been used and they're all metaphors We don't know exactly what's going on Some research suggests that they always keep a foot in the hippocampus that they always have a connection to the hippocampus But it's no longer necessary to retrieve the memory Okay, um, and and we so so we know that there's this Overall disengagement of the hippocampus over time and overall engagement of the cortex over time Uh, the first evidence that r.m's leap could be related to that was published by myself in 2002 Uh in the journal of neuroscience showing that There were waves of immediate ilegine expression related to as you said before an indie receptor Causing entry and so on that these these Waves would progress from the hippocampus to the cortex Over time and then over the years different studies from my own group and from other groups Started to establish that indeed there there is a sleep dependent process there that relates to memory migration If you want to maybe it's a good word for it. Um, but I think that What is remarkable? I think uh, if we if we take a A distance and we think of what we learned in the past hundred years Is how neuroscience with all the molecular and neurophysiological Investigations that really characterized its advancements in the past decades has converged on many things that were well understood At the end of the 19th the beginning of the 20th century by people like Freud and Jung So there's a convergence between neuroscience and depth psychology Which is remarkable and I make a point in my book of of going over them and giving the references and again Show you know sharing with people what neuroscience and and cognitive psychology have have learned knowingly or unknowingly about those links I think yeah, there is there is some amount of synchronicity in you know looking at I mean we've seen this in science over and over again talking with uh paleontologists who looked at morphology of fossils to To place animals within the animal kingdom and now they're looking at genetic evidence and they're digging deeper and the genetic evidence is often Mapping to what these relationships. We previously thought they were Although now we're getting new information and so it seems like this is kind of what's happening between cognitive science and psycho psychotherapy and modern neuroscience with these molecular molecular techniques that we're using today So yes, yeah That's fascinating. So to keep going on this. Um, I wanted to know also about the animal aspect of this we uh You've done animal research, but we're also we're talking about this from a very human perspective and our understanding of hippocampal involvement and brain activation very often is from these animal studies So do we think that animals dream the same way that humans do that perhaps they have these You know if they are cognitively consciously aware of certain things, you know, they're visually A puma a large cat is a predator who potentially is after a deer They're going to have these images in their in their head is Do we imagine that this is what they're dreaming as they dream? Yes, yes, but let's qualify that answer. Okay All animals pretty much all animals From sponges up Have some sort of quiet sleep Some sort of quiescent states in which they don't move their bodies are if they have color changes They are not changing their colors if they have whatever they they normally do. They're not doing that they're just very quiet with eyes closed and and and And not unresponsive to the environment. Okay, so this is sleep is a very general thing in the animal Kingdom Active sleep a form of sleep in which the nervous system is very active, but the body is quiescent Is restricted to a few groups, but but this is increasing in the beginning. We thought it was only in mammals then birds Then reptiles when they are within a particular temperature range But this is all vertebrates And but then recently it's hard to measure a fish Yes, yes, but well the people have shown that they To the extent that we know they they lack it, but we may be surprised soon I mean, of course. Yes, there's so much to do and so much. We don't know In among invertebrates though It has been shown in the cuttlefish recently my lab showed it in the octopus And then also there was a recent demonstration Of of active sleep in drosophila in the fruit fly For what we know these groups evolved They're so distant in evolution that it is possible that active sleep evolved separately, perhaps twice or or even three times In those groups independently probably reflecting a very strong selective pressure Right, but but to answer your question If we assume that these states are actually Analogous and that they are concurrent with with some subjective experience such as what we consider dreaming It's only among mammals that it lasts more than let's say a couple of minutes In the octopus for example the episodes will last about 30 seconds 40 seconds Yeah, and then the yeah and the octopus though. It's amazing to watch because they change colors and the cuttlefish as well Don't think they're extra they move their eyes, but they are unresponsive to stimulation This is what we showed in this paper Uh early this year. Um, so so for so answering your question What we call dreaming is probably something specific of mammals because it's only in mammals that you'll see episodes lasting Above half an hour 40 minutes up to an hour in the platypus above an hour And then within one hour you can really tell a story You can really enact complex social behaviors and and come and see the consequences of the the actions that people that the dreamer undertakes Does the neural activity during this active state? During REM sleep. Does it occur faster? Are we experiencing dreams at real time or in a? a faster Synthesized brain time This was a question that people Started to ask many decades ago in the 70s people believed that it was it was There was time compression some evidence in the 90s and and and in 2000s suggested some changes in In in in temporal processing even data coming from animal models I don't think we we we have an answer to that studies with lucid dreaming So when people so when you become aware that you're dreaming right and and then you you acquire some control over your own actions in the dream and and sometimes over the entire setting um When people do experiments under lucid dreaming doing lucid dreaming Uh, and they try to to to perform some tasks If the tasks are easy, they seem to use the same amount of time That they would use in in in the waking life, but when the tasks are difficult, they seem to be slower So it's probably It's if I based on the evidence that we have now I think it there's probably a continuity there and and and and and there's a continuity also in the imagination We know for example from the work of uh, steven coslin In harvard that when you try to imagine something in detail It you you have more uh activation of the brain, but it's also Harder to do right so Just like in in waking life. What you do is the effort is proportional to the work That makes sense it absolutely does As we're getting to the end here. I just want to I want to come back to The book itself and Your reason for writing it it is this is is this is your this is like your life's work This is everything from the science to the history to the art, you know our exploring our Our life through dreams and our brain through dreams. Why was it important for you to write this book? ha um Well, I I didn't know I was going to be a sleep and dream researcher when I began phd But then after a few months because of what happened to me and I describe it in the book I'm not going to give a spoiler I decided to go in that direction and this is my main thing to this day I investigate things that are related to it like psychedelics Uh and schizophrenia and so on but but this is my main thing Um, and I have personal reasons which I also include in the group in the book that come from my childhood um But the book is really it came from uh a vision that I had When I was in between the phd and the postdoc I was I finished my phd uh in new york and I had six months to begin my postdoc in in north carolina And and I had this feeling Because I had just written my thesis I had this feeling that if I could just assemble all the information that existed that was already available That I could find in libraries, uh on the internet Uh About the different aspects of different biological psychological anthropological anthropological mythological historical aspects regarding dreaming I would be able to sort of tell the history of Of the human mind the evolution of the human mind using this this threat But I needed to put things to assemble things in the right order order and I didn't have this knowledge But I had this vision that I should that I would be able to do it And I decided to do it as a very As a very relaxed project. So over the years I every time I stumbled upon something that Belonged to this very long Uh narrative that I wanted to build I I got it. I got that book. I got that That video I got that that thoughts I got that paper I got so I started to and of course I my my laboratory I I went from being a postdoc to being Uh ahead of a laboratory and I started doing my own Uh to conduct to coordinate my own research in the directions that I wanted Uh, and so it took 19 years to do that. But I Of course in the in at the very end in the past three years Then it was it became a problem in my life You know, it was something that I needed to do on a constant basis Otherwise it wouldn't finish ever because it's it's long right at a certain point. You're like, okay This needs to actually happen. I need to go from data collecting to synthesizing. Yes. Yes. Yeah But it was a pleasure and and and it was very emotional for me because it of course You're talking about dreaming you're talking about Very introspective things. So I talked about myself as well But in a way, I mean it's it's centered in in the science It's centered in it's actually a whole book to explain to give a materialist explanation for this For our relationship to dreams in in in history Which is I think a very important Place to put it because going back to where you started its dreams have played a part in our cultures Throughout history and affected human history. And so it's this relationship between mind and culture and the the The reality that we construct through our actions Maybe because of our dreams sometimes Yes, absolutely. This is the point. Yeah. Yeah, I get it. I really get it We do have a question if you have a moment. There's a question from the chat room What's the difference between acting on a dream or controlling a dream? You mentioned lucid dreaming How I'm supposed to Supposed to how can I train for it? How can you how can you actually get into a mode? To do the lucid dreaming? Okay so in in several eastern traditions such as in yoga in in india so Called nidra yoga nidra or in the case of tibet yoga milan. These are different names for For the practice of controlling your dreams Uh, and this can be be achieved From within the dream or from the from the waking state towards the dream These things can be achieved in both ways even though most people go from the dream towards that state So so they're they're they're like very old traditions of how to attain that and then you have the new age approach The the the science of lucid dreaming Really began in the late 70s and to a large extent because of the work of steven laberj Then working with william william dements in in ucla and and and since then this this was something that was in the fringe of neuroscience In the 80s, but now is at the very center. It's very hot and people are studying it in different labs and important labs Such as julio tononi's lab and and many others in the world If you want to achieve lucid dreaming you can do a variety of things you can go towards Uh Waking up in the middle of the night say 4 a.m And then mentalizing that you want to have a lucid dream and then going towards your last Rem episode of the night with this intention. You can have exercises during the day in which you ask yourself Am i dreaming am i dreaming if you just create the habit of asking that This will prompt the same question when you are dreaming and then if you answer yes Then you need to control your excitement. Otherwise you wake up So it's about it's like riding a bike need to equilibrate yourself balance yourself between waking and going back to To the oblivion of regular r.m. Sleep. So if once you find the balance, then then there's a path of of Of testing your limits of of pushing the envelope of finding what you can do And it's one of the most exhilarating experiences in life in my opinion I mean when when I dream of flying and when I dream of getting out of out of the earth Environments and into the universe. These these are things that have been described Described many times in the human history from from Acadia in in ancient mesopotamia to the writings of giordano bruno This is a very important experience that people should have and should pursue to expand their minds to to learn more about their own minds And in the book you also propose keeping a dream journal and uh, that this is a good practice. Um, does that work I mean, obviously would work very well with lucid dreaming, but um, what can keeping a dream? How can keeping a dream journal be beneficial? I think it helps with lucid dreaming But but it actually helps with much more because it will give you like a map of your own situation it will give you A variety of descriptions from several points of view Of what's going on in your life It may bring to the conscious mind What are our true desires or true fears or challenges things that we are afraid of and that limit our perspectives And we can also offer us Very good insight into what not to do and what to to pursue when when I When i'm in a period in which I keep a dream diary in a consistent manner I realize that it's not just that one dream can be interpreted and make sense But when I have them all together like a series of dreams It's like really having many many pieces of the puzzle and then you start to say Ah, so these things that are so difficult for me, whatever in my life and my family or my my work or whatever whatever it is Uh, they there is a solution or there's something I shouldn't definitely not do Because because it's coming from within it's sort of it's a it's a very sophisticated form of intuition And what do you hope people take from this book and that if people who who read it what they what they learn and gain from it Well, I hope that people That read this book will be inspired to protect their sleep To guard their sleep to protect their dream to to cherish it to to to make it A topic of conversation in your family to bring the concentration of your dreams into Into your own life into the into Give importance to it because this is something that all our ancestors did With the exception of those in the past 500 years in the Eurocentric world and One thing I've been contending. I have a piece that was just published in Time magazine in which I just make this point that Perhaps the problems that we are facing in the 21st century In which there's the paradox of having so much technological advancement so many technological means And so little hope of really solving the problems of the majority of the people in the world Perhaps this is coming from the abandonment of dreaming and if we look into the example of our ancestors They were able to dream collectively and share Their dreams and shared their desires and shared their fears and built communities I think we it's we are in in in urgent need of A collective dream of shared common good If we can find that balance then we the 21st century may end With a very beautiful garden full of happy people You know performing what they want to perform doing what they want to do and you know Enjoying the benefits of the accumulation of culture of capital of of of all sorts of technological capital of Of cultural capital that we produced right now the situation is 800 million people starving and counting increasing and Less than 30,000 billionaires in the world getting richer and richer and richer. This must be a misunderstanding. This must be some sort of We are not imagining properly the consequences of our actions and dreaming may help us to just that Thank you so much for your time today. It's just been a joy speaking with you I really appreciate it. Thank you very much Everyone the book is oracle of night sedato ribiero And I do hope that you head out to I guess your local bookstore or your kindle whichever works for you There's also an audiobook How many languages is this book in it's now in portuguese, spanish, italian, english and soon French and russian and so on Wonderful, so it it will hopefully have an effect on Everyone around the world. Thank you so much everyone for joining us for this episode of this week in science We back again wednesday night 8 p.m. Pacific time for more science discussion