 Hi, my name is Tracy de Carame Espinoza and this is a video on sleep and dreaming and the influence it has on our ability To learn and to maximize our performance in life Sleep is fascinating and there's lots of important facts Things that we now know after about a hundred good years of excellent research in this field for example We know we spent about 25 percent of sleeping dreaming in a REM state This was first hinted at back in the 1950s and actually proven more recently Thanks to better technology and basically we go through several cycles Maybe about three four or five of these cycles every night, which is around a 90 minute cycle Some people have very short cycles and others have hundred minute cycles, but the average is around 90 minutes So as we fall into sleep we go down into deep sleep Then we come up and we have a dream and then we go back down into deep sleep and we dream and just before we wake up Again, we go back down to sleep and then we have extended dreaming time There are different areas of the brain the reason we can distinguish dreaming from sleep is because they actually are different Neuromechanisms in the brain and different hubs are used as well as a different balance for Neurotransmitters now it's not fair to say that all dreaming occurs in REM We know that actually dreaming can occur in just about any state of sleep But most dreams occur in this REM or rapid eye movement stage of sleep, which is jazz before you wake up So while you can have dreaming present in non REM sleep It's not as common as we mentioned before there are very different chemical and electrical changes that occur in sleep and in dreaming Which are distinct from wakefulness and a lot of the measurement has been done looking at a neural adrenaline and serotonin and the different changes That they experience from waking to sleep to dreaming stages We know that dream states are very similar at least in description to hallucinations But also in neural networks that are involved So somebody in an active dream state actually looks like somebody who's doing a lot of heavy hallucination and Literally since humans have kept records We have wondered what is the purpose of sleep and there are some societies and cultures that look into this much better than we do in the West but the thought is that we need to sleep to take care of the body and the general correlation here is that only Mammals have thermoregulation and only mammals have REM sleep So there's this idea that those two things must somehow be related But we know that sleep isn't just of the body We know that it serves the brain and the mind and so consolidation of memory, which is only recently discovered is a key element Of the dreaming phase so sleep and dreaming are incredibly important for human learning because Attention and memory are incredibly important for human learning and memory is consolidated through the dreaming state And you are able to refresh your body and be able to pay attention After you've slept some of you might be interested in this idea of productive sleep or this idea of lucid dreaming Can you solve problems in your sleep and there's a lot of very good evidence that yes You can different people can do that it's mainly based on the premise that sleep is a behavior and like any behavior You can get better at it if you just practice it So this is why the new terminology of sleep hygiene comes into play How do you take care of yourself so that you sleep better so that you dream better so that you can resolve problems in your sleep? So by setting the different characteristics of sleep and dreaming there have been many theories over the years about what dreams are for Well Alan J. Hobson is to me one of these geniuses in this area who's done nothing but study sleep for 3540 years And he looks at sleep on a continuum of consciousness. He does not think that when you're asleep you're unconscious He basically thinks that that's a level of consciousness And they only vary thanks to the different levels of neurotransmitters and electricity that you can measure So as we said before sleep onset or in light the sleep This is to where you can give yourself that idea to have that productive sleep and solve your problems, right? Then you go down in a non-rim sleep then REM when your eyes are moving around you're having your dreams So you have about four or five of these a night if you sleep the average eight hours now We know that it's normal to sleep between four and a half hours and twelve hours So the average might be eight, but the normal curve shows that most people at least aim for those eight hours of sleep There are however people and this should be taken almost anthropologically speaking Who sleep on a four hour rather than eight hour pattern? Now what's so interesting is that Hobson's earlier words work actually showed that if you were in a sensory Deprivation tank if you didn't have any sound coming from outside anything like that and you were told sleep eat at work When you want to most of us would actually be on a four-hour pattern What he speculates on is that it's more likely that we have fallen into an eight-hour pattern of sleep because of society norms you can't you know go off to work for four hours and then Oh sleep for four more hours and then oh work again for four hours Basically, we've divided up the day into these eight hours of sleep of work and of playtime to have this eight at eight eight Division which is not necessarily what your brain would do on its own now What happens if you don't get a normal amount of sleep now what your normal is might not be my normal Okay, so but the idea is if you say oh, I'm sleepy. I have not slept my norm Actually high motivational activities can keep you going for a good couple of days However, nobody functions past three days and most of us will really mess up about even after a single day You begin to have Crazy intense dreams you open yourself up to infection your body because you're not sleeping and dreaming does not know How to internally manage itself as far as thermal regulation is concerned So pushing yourself not sleeping your norm for multiple days has dire consequences and most especially within a school context You're not really learning because if you're not sleeping and dreaming you're not consolidating the memory Which means you're not really getting information in your head. Anyways, so what's the point? I would always tell my kids sleeping is just as important as studying So another interesting fact about sleep is that people start to sleep less and less and less as they get older and older and older During gestation babies will sleep almost 24 hours a day and then when you get to be older You actually sleep a lot less now what's so interesting about that though is remember those people who only sleep four hours a day I would say that those older people because they are now retired and don't have to be on anybody else's schedule are actually going back To what would be their normal cycle of sleep So last point big ideas about sleep hygiene. It sounds a little bit funny, right? We know about you know bathing and hygiene and washing yourself and all the rest of it. Well, what is good sleep hygiene? There's some really important ideas that I hope you get to watch by Dr. In Canada who speaks about the importance of sleep hygiene? It's one of the most highly reported national health disasters that we have most people say they don't get enough sleep But as we said before sleep is a behavior so you can learn to do it better One of the things he points out in the video, you know, don't go to sleep with devices Your bed is meant for two things and two things only limit the technology there He also suggests limiting substance intake at night now having a glass of wine at night Induces asleep, but then a couple hours later You're like totally awake because you did not fall asleep because your body was asking you to but because you have the alcohol in your system So that was depressing your system So you go to sleep, but then that means that later on then you need that cup of coffee to get you back up So he said we rely on too many external stimulants to get us asleep and to get us awake Which is actually poor sleep hygiene. Okay, so those are some of the big ideas about sleep We talked a bit about how sleep occurs. We talked about sleep hygiene We talked about the importance of sleep and of dreaming Well, we did not talk about which I hope we get to talk about when we're together is about power napping Is a good nap as refreshing as a full night's sleep. We'll talk about that when we see each other Looking forward to it. Thanks