Latest / The You Project / #1696 The Neuroscience Of Sleep - Prof. Russell Foster

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#1696 The Neuroscience Of Sleep - Prof. Russell Foster · The You Project

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I'll get a team. It's Harps and Melissa and it
• 0:02
  Speaker 1: is the prof. It is as I record as we
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: start right now, it's three minutes past seven Tuesday night.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Spent a big day and I mean listening to the
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: prof wax lyrical with another smart bloke and Melissa. I
• 0:16
  Speaker 1: was just wondering after listening to him whether or not
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: at seven three in the PM, my cognitive function is
• 0:22
  Speaker 1: somewhat less than seven o three in the am. What
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  Speaker 1: do you think? What do you think? You spoke to
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: me earlier and you're speaking to me late. Am I dumber?
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  Speaker 2: I do not think that is the case. But I
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: was intrigued before. And this goes to show what you've
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: been learning and doing over the last few years in
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: that your first thought is to turn to studying it.
• 0:44
  Speaker 2: So you did say maybe you should do an IQ
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  Speaker 2: test in the morning, in an IQ test in the evening,
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  Speaker 2: and see.
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  Speaker 1: Well, I know we don't hold a great deal of
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  Speaker 1: kind of you know, value in IQ tests. You know
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  Speaker 1: they have a place, I guess. But firstly, Professor russ
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  Speaker 1: All Foster, welcome to the You Project, sir.
• 1:03
  Speaker 3: Thank you, Craig. Really delighted to join you.
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  Speaker 1: I feel like you're a little bit too sophisticated and
• 1:08
  Speaker 1: smart for us. But we'll just hang in there.
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  Speaker 3: Do you think, no, No, it's just a thin veneer.
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  Speaker 3: You can pietrate that ven I don't.
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  Speaker 1: Worry, can't You can't bullshit A bullshit A good sir. Now,
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  Speaker 1: if I took a typically, if I took an IQ
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  Speaker 1: test at seven am and seven pm, would I be
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  Speaker 1: slightly dumber? Or does it depend on a few other variables?
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  Speaker 1: Or would I be about the same.
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  Speaker 3: It depends on many variables. I mean, Craig, are you
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  Speaker 3: a morning type or an evening tape?
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  Speaker 1: Oh, that's a good question. I'm probably Melissa. What do
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  Speaker 1: you I reckon not, I'm probably more mourning. But I'm like,
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  Speaker 1: I'm okay. But when I'm not okay, I hit the wall,
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  Speaker 1: like like after I get off this. So at seven
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  Speaker 1: o five, now I reckon. By eight point thirty, I'll
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  Speaker 1: be sliding into a coma.
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  Speaker 3: Well. On average, adults peak cognitive performance, you know, our
• 2:01
  Speaker 3: ability to process information and do mathematical tasks and all
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  Speaker 3: the rest of it, on average is between eleven am
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  Speaker 3: and twelve noon, and then it drops slowly throughout the
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  Speaker 3: afternoon to get to a really low point at around
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  Speaker 3: about four o'clock in the morning, four five o'clock in
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  Speaker 3: the morning. Now that will shift left or right depending
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  Speaker 3: whether you're a morning person or an evening person, but
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  Speaker 3: it's worth bearing in mind. Drew Dawson from Australia did
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  Speaker 3: a wonderful study comparing cognitive abilities at four o'clock in
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  Speaker 3: the morning and how bad you are at performing those
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  Speaker 3: tasks with the impact of alcohol. And he showed in
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  Speaker 3: this famous study that our ability to process information at
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  Speaker 3: four o'clock in the morning is worse than if we
• 2:45
  Speaker 3: consume sufficient alcohol to make us legally drunk. So I
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  Speaker 3: mean you know, to your listeners, you know, if you
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  Speaker 3: happen to be driving at four five o'clock in the morning,
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  Speaker 3: your ability to drive that car is worse than if
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  Speaker 3: you consumed sufficient alcohol to make you legally drunk. It's
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  Speaker 3: that's the level of impairment the morning. It really is remarkable.
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  Speaker 1: And also, listeners, if you're driving at four am and
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  Speaker 1: your ship faced double that because which is the case,
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  Speaker 1: you clearly know, my listeners, doc, that's really bad. But
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  Speaker 1: also like what other things that we wouldn't think of,
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  Speaker 1: so obviously sleep, you know, the time of day driving,
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  Speaker 1: as you said at four am, is going to be
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  Speaker 1: analogous to you know, having alcohol in our system. But
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  Speaker 1: also dehydration impacts cognitive like significant dehydration impacts cognition.
• 3:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, and brain glucose levels. I mean, if
• 3:43
  Speaker 3: you if you're really running on empty, then then memory
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  Speaker 3: formation and just processing information becomes really much worse. But
• 3:52
  Speaker 3: you know, it's a bit like it's a bit like
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  Speaker 3: not getting enough sleep. I mean, it's really incredible if
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  Speaker 3: you think about it. Poor sleep will produce fluctuation, fluctuations
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  Speaker 3: in mood. The tired brain actually remembers negative experiences but
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  Speaker 3: forgets the positive ones, So our whole worldview is changed.
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  Speaker 3: If you have a tired brain, you're more irritable, you
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  Speaker 3: show greater levels of anxiety. You've got lots of empathy,
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  Speaker 3: so picking up those social signals from your friend's, family,
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  Speaker 3: colleagues is reduced, and you know you can't interact as well.
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  Speaker 3: You much more inclined if you've if you're tired, to
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  Speaker 3: use stimulants and fueling the day with lots and lots
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  Speaker 3: of coffee and then in the evening thinking, goodness, I've
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  Speaker 3: got to get to sleep. What am I going to do,
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  Speaker 3: and then you start taking loads of alcohol or sedatives,
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  Speaker 3: which in fact disrupts some of the important things going
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  Speaker 3: on in the brain when we sleep. So yeah, there's
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  Speaker 3: a lack of sleep. Is not just the sort of
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  Speaker 3: the inconvenience of feeling tired at an inappropriate time. It
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  Speaker 3: has big impacts upon our ability to process information. And
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  Speaker 3: that's just just the short term stuff. We can get
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  Speaker 3: onto the long term stuff later on.
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  Speaker 1: I was amazed too. I should have known this, but
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  Speaker 1: I didn't know this, So I'm going to be honest.
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  Speaker 1: I was amazed to find out recently that the brain
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  Speaker 1: uses about twenty percent of our daily calorie expenditure and
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  Speaker 1: what is at one point two to one point four
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  Speaker 1: kilos or something.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, So you know, I suppose maybe no
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  Speaker 3: great surprise on the top of our head is the
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  Speaker 3: most complicated structure in the no universe, So using twenty
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  Speaker 3: percent of our calories isn't that bad. But yeah, you're
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  Speaker 3: quite right. And of course, you know, if you're in
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  Speaker 3: cold conditions, loss of heat from the head, because of
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  Speaker 3: course the blood flow to the breed could be quite serious.
• 5:43
  Speaker 1: The other day I went on the other day was
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  Speaker 1: probably a month ago I went to the gym to
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  Speaker 1: lift stuff because I'm massive. I'm just kidding. And I
• 5:51
  Speaker 1: went to the gym and outside the gym, on an
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  Speaker 1: aFrame proft was a sign that said excuses don't burn
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  Speaker 1: Making excuses doesn't burn calories. And I thought, that's actually
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  Speaker 1: not true, because it's a cognitive process. You've got to
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  Speaker 1: come up with some bullshit. So I went inside and
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  Speaker 1: told them, actually, making excuses does burn calories, so you
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  Speaker 1: might need a new message.
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  Speaker 3: And the more creative of the excuses, the more calories
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  Speaker 3: were burnt. I mean, certainly, that's what I find with
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  Speaker 3: my students. They come up with amazingly creative excuses.
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  Speaker 1: That's funny, big calorie burning excuses, you could call those.
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  Speaker 1: So I guess when we get onto the sleep more
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  Speaker 1: in a minute, but I guess so even people thinking
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  Speaker 1: about you know, the brain runs on glucose, right, so
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  Speaker 1: people who go I'm going to go paleo, their brain
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  Speaker 1: must almost be non functional for the first week or
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  Speaker 1: so until they start to adapt.
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  Speaker 3: Right. Well, I'm not sure about that. I mean, it
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  Speaker 3: depends if they're eating their protein. I mean, you know,
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  Speaker 3: if it isn't just a lot of meat and they're
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  Speaker 3: cooking that meat, they're releasing all of those calories, and
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  Speaker 3: of course what the body does, the energy currency of
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  Speaker 3: the brain is glucose, So no matter whether you're eating carbs, protein, fats,
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  Speaker 3: it's all converted into the basic currency of glucose. So yeah,
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  Speaker 3: it might take a few days, I guess, to adapt,
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  Speaker 3: but I think we'd adapt pretty quickly. I mean, one
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  Speaker 3: of the most extraordinary things you're talking about the brain
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  Speaker 3: is that the invention of fire, which allowed us to
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  Speaker 3: cook meat for the first time, which released so much
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  Speaker 3: more energy because you know, half the digestion, as it were,
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  Speaker 3: was done because the fire sort of cooked it and
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  Speaker 3: sort of made it easier to digest, is associated with
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  Speaker 3: a big leap in brain size. And so the invention
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  Speaker 3: of fire and cooking our meat has been associated with
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  Speaker 3: increasing brain size. And so you see a quite sharp
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  Speaker 3: rise in brain size in the fossil record on the
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  Speaker 3: basis of the size of the cranium where the brain
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  Speaker 3: sits in the skull.
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  Speaker 1: Any idea as to the mechanism behind and that duck.
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  Speaker 3: No, I mean, I guess you know, as we evolved
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  Speaker 3: and we became sort of bipedal running around on two
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  Speaker 3: legs and that freed up our hands and our arms
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  Speaker 3: to use tools. Of course, we could become more sophisticated.
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  Speaker 3: We were faster on two feet, so we became more flexible,
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  Speaker 3: and we could then capture meat for the first time
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  Speaker 3: rather than just scavenge. And then of course by cooking
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  Speaker 3: that we released all of those incredible calories, and that
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  Speaker 3: may be one of the really important steps in human evolution.
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  Speaker 3: But Crane, I'm talking about evolution, not sleeping Cicadian rhythms.
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  Speaker 3: So now I have a comfort zone here.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I know that's what I'm doing. I'm just trying
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  Speaker 1: to stretch it because I've heard you on other shows.
• 8:45
  Speaker 1: You get a little comfy, You're a little familiar with
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  Speaker 1: the subject matter. I just want you to keep learning
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  Speaker 1: and evolving. Profits You're welcome. So now lifetime your body
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  Speaker 1: clock and its essential roles in good health and sleep.
• 9:00
  Speaker 1: When did you write this?
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: During lockdown? So I was I wrote a few articles
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  Speaker 3: for one of the newspapers in the UK, and a
• 9:10
  Speaker 3: bunch of people said, oh, you should write a book,
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  Speaker 3: and I thought, well, you know, I'm never going to
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  Speaker 3: have time. And then COVID hit and so I thought, well,
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  Speaker 3: I'm never going to have you know, this this opportunity.
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  Speaker 3: So I used the time constructively and so really enjoyed it.
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  Speaker 3: And I worked with Penguin and it's interesting, I've written
• 9:29
  Speaker 3: previous books, but what they allowed me to do was
• 9:32
  Speaker 3: was they said, we want to hear your voice. And
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  Speaker 3: of course, as a scientist, that's exactly what you suppress.
• 9:38
  Speaker 3: You know, you don't have anecdotes, you don't have the stories.
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  Speaker 3: And they said, no, no, that's great, and I sort
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: of threw a few in and they said more of that,
• 9:45
  Speaker 3: and so the feedback I got was make it as
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  Speaker 3: accessible as possible. So each of the chapters starts with
• 9:51
  Speaker 3: a sort of a little story about whether it's Einstein
• 9:54
  Speaker 3: and Salvador Daly and their cognitive abilities and their sleep more,
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  Speaker 3: whether it's you know, the chapter on metabolism introduces the
• 10:03
  Speaker 3: sugar trade and slavery. Yeah, so it was fun to
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  Speaker 3: go outside with my comfort zone. So yeah, it was
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: a lockdown project.
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  Speaker 1: I love that. You know. It's like, we've had a
• 10:13
  Speaker 1: lot of academics on the show, and I'm a shudo academic.
• 10:17
  Speaker 1: I'm more a pro academic, but that it's like, and
• 10:20
  Speaker 1: I mean this in a loving and caring way, because
• 10:22
  Speaker 1: my proper Well, this is my proper job these days,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: but also my other half of my proper job is
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: corporate speaking. And you know, you've got to obviously, whatever
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: idea or message or piece of data or truth or
• 10:37
  Speaker 1: insight you want to share, it needs to be consumer
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: friendly listener friendly. And there are not how do I
• 10:44
  Speaker 1: say this about getting in trouble, there's not a huge
• 10:47
  Speaker 1: percentage of academics that can stand in front of a
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: non academic audience and create connection. And I'm not pissing
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: in your pocket. That's an Australian term, prof But you're
• 10:58
  Speaker 1: very good at it. That you're very good, and so
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: you know that ability to go. This is the model
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: that I use with would be speakers or even academics.
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: I say, all right, what's the thing that you want
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  Speaker 1: to tell them? What's the idea? What's the piece of information?
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  Speaker 1: You know what? Firstly, what's that? Now? Secondly how do
• 11:17
  Speaker 1: you share that in a story? And then thirdly why
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  Speaker 1: does this matter? And lastly how do we apply it
• 11:24
  Speaker 1: or how do we integrate it into our operating system?
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  Speaker 1: And when I tell them that, they're like, oh, I go,
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: so what do you want to talk about? Subjective reality? Cool? Well,
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: tell them, give them an example, a practical example, or
• 11:38
  Speaker 1: whatever it is. And it just because all the knowledge
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: is there, it's just finding the language of the audience
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  Speaker 1: or the reader.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, but you have to understand most of us
• 11:49
  Speaker 3: are trained from the word go to suppress all of that.
• 11:53
  Speaker 3: You know, we write in a very formal way and
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  Speaker 3: a formal language, and so maybe it's very kind of
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  Speaker 3: your say, so, perhaps I'm just a little bit disinhibited,
• 12:02
  Speaker 3: and so I feel as though I can indulge that
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: other other dimension of my personality.
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: Well, you can step out of one world. And it's
• 12:10
  Speaker 1: the opposite for me because I've written seven books and
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: none of them are academic, right, They're just all, you know, conversational.
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: I've also published with Penguin like you, but now I'm
• 12:20
  Speaker 1: writing academic papers and it's a steep learner. I need
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: to ring you up. It's a steep learning curve. Anyway,
• 12:26
  Speaker 1: let's get into the topic at hands. I've got some
• 12:29
  Speaker 1: really specific questions. I'm going to start with a question
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: that I literally have only asked one other time in
• 12:35
  Speaker 1: nine hundred and seventy five episodes, and it was yesterday,
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: and I'm going to ask it again. Today, Why are
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  Speaker 1: we so crap at sleeping?
• 12:46
  Speaker 3: Well, it's an interesting question. So if we think about
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: the way we've viewed sleep, if we go back to
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: the nineteen eighties, not getting sleep was a badge of honor.
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  Speaker 3: People used to come into work and see, I've I've
• 13:00
  Speaker 3: done another or nightem people say, oh, yeah, fantastic, and yeah,
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: well done, you know, pat on the back. And it
• 13:07
  Speaker 3: was part of the fact that we didn't understand the
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: value of sleep. We didn't appreciate that whilst asleep we
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: consolidate memory and it's not just laying down the facts.
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: I think the most awesome thing is that when we're asleep,
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: we're actually asking questions of ourselves. We're processing information. A
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: night of sleep has been shown scientifically to allow us
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: to come up with innovative solutions to complex problems. So
• 13:32
  Speaker 3: from the nineteen eighties we've kind of learnt that sleep
• 13:35
  Speaker 3: is really important. So by the turn of the century
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: people are thinking, yeah, you know, maybe I should start
• 13:41
  Speaker 3: to pay a bit more attention about sleep. And then
• 13:44
  Speaker 3: in the last twenty years and particularly the last five years,
• 13:48
  Speaker 3: we've become incredibly anxious about our sleep, you know, and
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: there's actually a condition called sleep anxiety, where people are
• 13:54
  Speaker 3: so anxious they can't get to sleep and if they
• 13:57
  Speaker 3: wake up, they can't get back to sleep. And I
• 14:00
  Speaker 3: think that's been driven by several factors. APPS which are
• 14:06
  Speaker 3: really bad at at telling us what our sleep is. So,
• 14:09
  Speaker 3: for example, they're okay for telling us roughly when we
• 14:11
  Speaker 3: went to sleep, roughly when we got up, and how
• 14:13
  Speaker 3: many times you work up at night, But when they
• 14:15
  Speaker 3: start telling you, oh, you had a good night's sleep
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: or you didn't get enough for m sleep, that's just nonsense.
• 14:21
  Speaker 3: But people get really anxious about it. Oh yeah, and
• 14:25
  Speaker 3: we're also the sergeant majors asleep are screaming you must
• 14:28
  Speaker 3: get eight hours. Well, that's also complete nonsense. The healthy
• 14:33
  Speaker 3: the healthy range for sleep in adults is between six
• 14:36
  Speaker 3: hours and ten to eleven APPS. And the key thing
• 14:40
  Speaker 3: for all of us is that we define the sleep
• 14:42
  Speaker 3: that we need and then adopt behaviors that defend that sleep,
• 14:47
  Speaker 3: and you know, stop being frightened of sleep, embrace the
• 14:50
  Speaker 3: sleep that we get. Sleep is very different between individuals,
• 14:53
  Speaker 3: and of course it changes as we age. I mean,
• 14:56
  Speaker 3: so many you know, people in there sort of post
• 15:00
  Speaker 3: retirements will say, oh God, I wish I had the
• 15:02
  Speaker 3: sleep that I had when I was sort of in
• 15:04
  Speaker 3: my twenties. Well, it's going to change. And I know
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: lots of elderly people who say, oh, no, it's fantastic,
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: best sleep I've ever had. I don't have to worry
• 15:12
  Speaker 3: about the kids, I don't have to worry about getting
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: out for work, I don't have to worry about anything.
• 15:16
  Speaker 3: And certain family members make it very clear that we're
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: not to call before eleven o'clock in the morning. And
• 15:22
  Speaker 3: I think that's it. You know, you adopt the sleep
• 15:25
  Speaker 3: that works best for you. I mean. The serious point is,
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: of course, that we've never taken sleep seriously up until
• 15:30
  Speaker 3: very recently, because it's not part of a medical curriculum.
• 15:33
  Speaker 3: In a five year training, a medic may get one
• 15:36
  Speaker 3: or two lectures on sleep. And of course, you know,
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: if you're a general practitioner, it's been estimated that thirty
• 15:42
  Speaker 3: percent of the questions you're asked, thirty percent of the
• 15:46
  Speaker 3: health issues are either directly or indirectly related to sleep.
• 15:51
  Speaker 3: And the problem is, of course, what's the response, Well,
• 15:53
  Speaker 3: here's a sleeping tablet, and that that is often not
• 15:57
  Speaker 3: the best way forward. We've got to ap sort of
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: measures which and they're very simple. I mean, the thing
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: is the great thing about this whole area is there's
• 16:05
  Speaker 3: a whole bunch of stuff we can do to make
• 16:08
  Speaker 3: ours sleep better. It's not you know, so many people think, oh,
• 16:11
  Speaker 3: you get the seat that you get. That's not true.
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: I mean, clearly it's guided by our genes and our
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: behavior and all the rest of it. But we can
• 16:18
  Speaker 3: also modify that behavior.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, it's so interesting. As you said, eight hours
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: sleep and you know, eight glasses of water a day,
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: and how tall are you and how much do youigh? Oh,
• 16:29
  Speaker 1: you should have twenty eight hundred and forty three calories
• 16:32
  Speaker 1: a day. I'm like, well, what if one day I'm
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: chopping down trees and running up mountains and the next
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: day I'm writing my book and sitting for fourteen hours
• 16:40
  Speaker 1: at might what about then? You know, it's like it
• 16:44
  Speaker 1: just these kind of dogmatic, arbitrary numbers that get wheeled
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: out that people use as rather than a very vague guideline,
• 16:54
  Speaker 1: perhaps they use as some kind of gospel that needs
• 16:57
  Speaker 1: to be followed despite all the variability of their behavior
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: and their lifestyle and the weather and calories in and out.
• 17:05
  Speaker 1: Like it's so it's so I would. I would posit
• 17:09
  Speaker 1: professor that not only do sleep requirements Do you like that, Melissa?
• 17:14
  Speaker 1: I did, thank you.
• 17:17
  Speaker 3: I'm looking at looking up as we speak. What does
• 17:19
  Speaker 3: it mean, Melnissa, Yeah, don't be ridiculous.
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: You know what it means. You know what it means.
• 17:25
  Speaker 1: I would posit Professor. I'm going to say it again, Comma,
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: that not only do sleep requirements vary from person to person,
• 17:31
  Speaker 1: but would they not vary from us day to day
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: a little bit depending on what we've done in the day.
• 17:37
  Speaker 1: Like if I have a massive day of energy expenditure
• 17:41
  Speaker 1: and I'm physically working hard all day, would I need
• 17:44
  Speaker 1: the same amount of sleep as a normal day or.
• 17:47
  Speaker 3: It's pretty much. It is fairly similar, even even after
• 17:50
  Speaker 3: vigorous exercise. But you're right, it is very dynamic, and
• 17:57
  Speaker 3: the key thing is not to get anxious about it.
• 17:59
  Speaker 3: If pre lockdown, I gave a talk and somebody came
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: up to him and said, I don't get eight hours
• 18:04
  Speaker 3: of sleep every night. Am I going to die?
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: Ah?
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: I said, well, well, I said, yeah, you're going to die.
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: But it may have nothing to do with the fact
• 18:11
  Speaker 3: that you're not getting eight hours of sleep. I mean,
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: you know this is the kind of anxiety that we're
• 18:15
  Speaker 3: finding at the moment rather than you know, embracing the
• 18:18
  Speaker 3: sleep that we get.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: You know, what you should have done when they said
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: am I going to die? You should have said yes
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: and then just finished there and as they walked away dejectedly,
• 18:29
  Speaker 1: you should have gone.
• 18:30
  Speaker 3: But not from that, Craig, that would have been mean
• 18:34
  Speaker 3: as well.
• 18:34
  Speaker 1: You know, all right, I've got some specific questions, and
• 18:39
  Speaker 1: some of these are very fundamental, but bear with me.
• 18:42
  Speaker 1: What's a circadian rhythm? Or talk to us about you know,
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: the different rhythms or body clocks, like what does what
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: does that mean?
• 18:51
  Speaker 3: Yeah, a Cicadian rhythm you can think of as an
• 18:54
  Speaker 3: internal biological day. It really is one of the great
• 18:59
  Speaker 3: I think advance is in science of biological science over
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: the past twenty years of actually understanding that we have
• 19:07
  Speaker 3: an internal clock. In fact, we have a master clock
• 19:11
  Speaker 3: within the brain, which is about fifty thousand cells called
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: the supra chismatic nuclei or the SCN, which is this
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: master Then it's coordinating essentially billions of individual clocks in
• 19:25
  Speaker 3: the cells of the body, which you're organized of course
• 19:28
  Speaker 3: in the organ systems. So we've got this whole hierarchy
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: of time, and what's it for. Well, what it does
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: is fine tune our biology to the very varied and
• 19:37
  Speaker 3: complicated demands of rest and activity. So if you think
• 19:41
  Speaker 3: about consciousness versus sleep, it's a completely different physiological state,
• 19:46
  Speaker 3: and that's all underpinned by changes driven by this internal clock.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: So if you know that in three hours time you're
• 19:54
  Speaker 3: going to be up, walking around and active, then in
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: anticipation of that, blood glucose levels rise, blood pressure rises,
• 20:02
  Speaker 3: metabolum metabolism starts to increase, cortisols starts to go up.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: So but the time we actually wake up, we have
• 20:10
  Speaker 3: a body that is physiologically prepared for activity. And in
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: the same way, at the end of the day we
• 20:16
  Speaker 3: start to change our physiology in preparation for sleep. So
• 20:20
  Speaker 3: there's a drop in core body temperature, and indeed that
• 20:23
  Speaker 3: small dropping core body temperature is associated with going to sleep.
• 20:27
  Speaker 3: If you block that dropping core body temperature, it's more
• 20:30
  Speaker 3: difficult to get off to sleep. So we've got this
• 20:32
  Speaker 3: internal time structure which is fine tuning everything that we
• 20:36
  Speaker 3: do to the varied and complicated demands of the twenty
• 20:40
  Speaker 3: four hour revolution of the Earth and the light dark cycle.
• 20:43
  Speaker 3: And we know at a fundamental level what makes us tick.
• 20:47
  Speaker 3: So a bunch of genes have been identified which are
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: turned on. They then make proteins. Those proteins then interact
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: go into the nucleus of the cell and then turn off.
• 20:59
  Speaker 3: Those genes are those clock chins, and then those proteins
• 21:03
  Speaker 3: are degraded, and so the clock genes can then turn
• 21:06
  Speaker 3: on once again. So you have this twenty four hour
• 21:08
  Speaker 3: cycle of protein production and then degradation, and that's fundamentally
• 21:13
  Speaker 3: the nature of the biological clock. It truly is an
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: awesome process. And I think you know, in the past
• 21:21
  Speaker 3: twenty twenty five years. I've been in a business really
• 21:23
  Speaker 3: in this area in biological time for almost forty years,
• 21:26
  Speaker 3: but it's over the past twenty years where we've seen
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: this extraordinary revolution. And of course in twenty seventeen, the
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: Nobel Prize was given to russ bash Hall and Young
• 21:36
  Speaker 3: who identified in flies, not humans, not even in mice,
• 21:41
  Speaker 3: but how this clock ticks in flies one of the
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: great I think achievements of sort of biological endeavor. And
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: I was privileged enough when I worked in the States
• 21:50
  Speaker 3: to work to know these guys, and they are extraordinary.
• 21:55
  Speaker 3: I talk about a bit of eyebat in the book.
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: No Pressure, but I expect a Nobel prize from you
• 21:59
  Speaker 1: and the five to ten. So if you can lift
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: your game a little bit.
• 22:04
  Speaker 3: It won't be in clocks. But the thing that we've
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: been doing has been trying to understand how those internal
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: clocks are set to the external world. So there's no
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: good having this sort of ability to anticipate and fine
• 22:18
  Speaker 3: tune unless the internal day and the external day are aligned.
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: Classic mismatches jetlag. We actually get over jetlag primarily as
• 22:26
  Speaker 3: a result of exposure to the environmental light dark cycle.
• 22:31
  Speaker 3: And what we discovered is that, of course you need
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: the eyes. If you have no eyes, the clock keeps
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: on ticking. And we work on individuals who've lost their eyes,
• 22:39
  Speaker 3: so they're completely blind and they essentially have unremitting jet
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: lack for the rest of their lives. But we're working
• 22:45
  Speaker 3: on that. But what we discovered is that the eye
• 22:48
  Speaker 3: is not using the cells which we use for vision,
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: the visual cells, the rods and the colors, but there's
• 22:54
  Speaker 3: a third there's a third light sensor within the eye,
• 22:57
  Speaker 3: so you can be visually blind if you've still got
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: these other light sensors. Within the eye, you can regulate
• 23:03
  Speaker 3: the clock. So the eye is this It's just amazing.
• 23:05
  Speaker 3: The eye is this organ of space vision, but it's
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: also the organ of time because of the way it
• 23:11
  Speaker 3: sets the internal clock to the external world. And so
• 23:15
  Speaker 3: this is a big chunk of what we're doing. I mean,
• 23:18
  Speaker 3: you know, if you think about it, we've discovered a
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: completely new light sensing system within the eye. And certainly
• 23:25
  Speaker 3: when we proposed this in the nineties and around about
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: the turn of the century, I remember I was at
• 23:31
  Speaker 3: a seminar and said, you know, these data are consistent
• 23:33
  Speaker 3: with the discovery of a new receptor system within the eye,
• 23:37
  Speaker 3: and somebody at the back of the auditorium stood up
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: and looked at me and just shouted bullshit and then
• 23:42
  Speaker 3: walked out. I mean, the idea that we have been
• 23:45
  Speaker 3: studying the eye for one hundred and fifty years and
• 23:48
  Speaker 3: then missed an entire light sensing system was so insulting
• 23:52
  Speaker 3: to this community that, you know, it was a tough decade.
• 23:56
  Speaker 1: Well, academics, we know academics are very open minded.
• 24:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, well, yes, it's a it's a real it's very
• 24:03
  Speaker 3: complicated because you know, being conservative with a with a
• 24:07
  Speaker 3: small C is good because you know, a whole bunch
• 24:10
  Speaker 3: of nonsense, you know, keep on changing, so they're very
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: resistant to change. And what we had to do, and
• 24:15
  Speaker 3: the scientific approach is you just carry on doing better
• 24:19
  Speaker 3: and better experiments to overwhelm the skeptics with the data
• 24:23
  Speaker 3: set that you know makes it completely incontrovertible.
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: So even if someone is blind, as in they can't see,
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: they can't make out, they can't read, they can't make out,
• 24:35
  Speaker 1: they can't define things, but they they can open their
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: eyelids and sense light or dark, then their internal clocks
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: will function as normal.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah. We we studied two individuals, one in one in
• 24:48
  Speaker 3: the UK, one in the States, and the subject I
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: know best. She she said she had no conscious light
• 24:55
  Speaker 3: detection at all, right, and so but we we asked
• 24:59
  Speaker 3: it to to perform a test when the lights are
• 25:02
  Speaker 3: on or off. And we said, look, we're going to
• 25:03
  Speaker 3: force you to give us an answer to tell us
• 25:05
  Speaker 3: if the lights are on or off. And she said,
• 25:07
  Speaker 3: no point in doing this because I can't see. I
• 25:09
  Speaker 3: absolutely have no light detection. When we forced her to
• 25:13
  Speaker 3: make a decision, she got it right every time, and
• 25:17
  Speaker 3: that is really cool. And what it shows is, of
• 25:19
  Speaker 3: course these receptors are not only regulating the clock, and
• 25:22
  Speaker 3: we've discovered that they're regulating part of our pupil constriction,
• 25:26
  Speaker 3: they're regulating sleep, but they're also providing an unconscious awareness
• 25:31
  Speaker 3: of light. And you know, we're just finding out really
• 25:34
  Speaker 3: what all the roles of this receptor is new receptor
• 25:37
  Speaker 3: in the eye doing so, for example, it looks as
• 25:40
  Speaker 3: though they're important in alertness. So you know, the brighter
• 25:43
  Speaker 3: the light, the more alert we are, and it's probably
• 25:46
  Speaker 3: via these receptors. So yeah, it's a new and unexplored
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: receptor system which we're appealing. We're trying to understand, feeling
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: back information on it.
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: How did that lady respond prof when she realized she
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: could detect light and dark?
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: She was really quite shocked and surprised because of course
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: she'd been told and she you know, had adapted to
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: the fact that she has no light detection. She is
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: completely by and it raises a really important issue, of course,
• 26:13
  Speaker 3: because there has been a tendency in ophthalmology departments, and
• 26:17
  Speaker 3: I'm head of the Nuffold Laboratory of Ophthalmology in Oxford
• 26:20
  Speaker 3: and that you know, when I talk to my clinical colleagues,
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: I think, God, we never really thought of that before,
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: and so if eyes are very badly damaged, there's a
• 26:30
  Speaker 3: tendency to say, well, do you know that you can't see,
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: you've lost your vision. There are going to be a
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: source of infection you can't see to look after them.
• 26:39
  Speaker 3: It will be much simpler if we remove them, but
• 26:41
  Speaker 3: a proesthetic in and then you know, it'll be easy
• 26:45
  Speaker 3: for everybody. And of course in the process they've already
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: lost a sense of space, but inadvertently you could take
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: away their sense of time. And so you know, I've
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: been working very closely with my clinical colleagues to try
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: and find out, you know, how severe particular eye diseases are,
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: and what's their impact. Obviously on vision, that's their job,
• 27:05
  Speaker 3: but mine is to assess, you know, what's their impact
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: on their cicadian regulation and their sleepwake regulation, because if
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: that's still intact, then those eyes have to be saved
• 27:16
  Speaker 3: at all costs. Otherwise, as I said, you'll have unremitting
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: jet lag for the rest of your life. And when
• 27:21
  Speaker 3: you talk to individuals who lost their eyes, it's really poignant.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: I mean, we work with blind veterans UK and these
• 27:28
  Speaker 3: are extremely robust individuals. You know, they're dealing with this
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: traumatic loss of their eyes. And you know, I remember
• 27:35
  Speaker 3: chatting to one chat and he said, well, do you
• 27:37
  Speaker 3: know I'm determined. I know I cut the lawn on
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: a Friday, and so he woke up and he went
• 27:44
  Speaker 3: downstead and he worked out a way of getting this
• 27:47
  Speaker 3: the moa out of the shed and how it was
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: going to work and all the rest of it. And
• 27:52
  Speaker 3: he was cutting the lawn and his wife came down
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: and said, it's three o'clock in the morning. Disturbing. You're
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: disturbing the navy. And you know what they say is, look,
• 28:02
  Speaker 3: I feel constantly tricked by my body clock. And that's
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: the problem because it's ticking, it's drifting through time, but
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: it's not aligned with the external world. And so, you know,
• 28:12
  Speaker 3: a lot of the work that we're doing at the
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: moment is on the basis of our understanding of how
• 28:16
  Speaker 3: those new receptors are regulating the masterclock in the brain.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: Can we fool the clock that it's seen light by
• 28:23
  Speaker 3: mimicking that pathway with drugs? And it's we're at a
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: really exciting stage. We've done all the mousework. We've now
• 28:31
  Speaker 3: got a drug that can fool the clock that it's
• 28:34
  Speaker 3: seen light and we're now going into In fact, our
• 28:36
  Speaker 3: first in human trials took place in Melbourne over Lockdown,
• 28:42
  Speaker 3: and we're now ready to do the full blown clinical trials.
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: I mean, if I can end my career by giving
• 28:46
  Speaker 3: back a sense of time to people who have radical
• 28:49
  Speaker 3: eye disease, I'll die happy. Man.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's bloody brilliant, Melissa. Can I ask you a question?
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: If ten out of ten is I'm a brilliant sleeper,
• 28:59
  Speaker 1: I have no problem, I sleep great, and one is
• 29:02
  Speaker 1: extremely troubled sleeping. What number are you typically?
• 29:07
  Speaker 2: We have spoken about this before, and I'm not talented
• 29:10
  Speaker 2: at many things, but sleeping would have to be up there.
• 29:14
  Speaker 1: That's something I could actually do pretty well.
• 29:16
  Speaker 2: So probably seven or eight in general, I would say.
• 29:21
  Speaker 1: Now, okay, So I want to ask you something. Melissa
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: works a long day. She starts early and works late,
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: and spends most of her days correct me if I
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: get any of this wrong in a chair looking. She
• 29:35
  Speaker 1: goes to the gym every day. She's active, but spends
• 29:38
  Speaker 1: a lot of time looking at screens as do I now,
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: and obviously has fluoro lights over her head most of
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: her life. If we put her in the bush in
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: some alternate reality, and she had no fluorescent lights and
• 29:53
  Speaker 1: no TV, no computer, no iPhone. We took her out
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: of modernity and we put her in wherever what would
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: and so she had to get up when the sun
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: came up and go to bed or do whatever when
• 30:06
  Speaker 1: the sun went down. What would happen to her body clocks?
• 30:11
  Speaker 3: Well, those experiments have actually been done not by us,
• 30:14
  Speaker 3: but by a chap called ken Wright in Colorado, and
• 30:18
  Speaker 3: he monitored the sleepwaate timing of a bunch of students
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: in their normal environment, you know, basically what Melissa was doing.
• 30:26
  Speaker 3: And then he took them out camping to the Rocky
• 30:28
  Speaker 3: Mountains for a week. And what was extraordinary is that
• 30:33
  Speaker 3: their whole body clock advanced in time. When they were
• 30:37
  Speaker 3: tuned into the natural light dark cycle. They ended up,
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: on average getting up two hours earlier and going to
• 30:44
  Speaker 3: bed two hours earlier than when they were experiencing artificial
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: light in their home environment. So it's very likely that
• 30:53
  Speaker 3: Melissa would probably get up a bed earlier and go
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: to bed earlier.
• 30:58
  Speaker 1: What's the relationship or what's the comparison between the clock
• 31:04
  Speaker 1: on the wall hanging in the kitchen and our biological
• 31:07
  Speaker 1: clock is it how close they related?
• 31:10
  Speaker 3: Well, it's so we talked about the importance of light
• 31:13
  Speaker 3: in these new receptors and light intensity. How much light
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: you need is important, but also when you get it.
• 31:21
  Speaker 3: So morning light makes you get up earlier, it advances
• 31:25
  Speaker 3: the clock. Dust light delays the clock makes you get
• 31:29
  Speaker 3: up later. We did a study all actually with students
• 31:33
  Speaker 3: all over the world, Western Australia, Melbourne, Auckland, Oxford, Munich
• 31:41
  Speaker 3: and Groningen in the Netherlands, and we found that the
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: later the chronotype, the later the body clock type, the
• 31:49
  Speaker 3: less morning light people got eye that would make them
• 31:52
  Speaker 3: get up earlier, but they got lots of evening light
• 31:55
  Speaker 3: which would make them get up later. So whilst our
• 31:57
  Speaker 3: genetics and our will influence when we get up and
• 32:01
  Speaker 3: go to bed are really critical and often forgotten about,
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: is when we see light. So if you're a real
• 32:08
  Speaker 3: late type and you've got to get up earlier, then
• 32:11
  Speaker 3: you can set the alarm and then force yourself out
• 32:15
  Speaker 3: of bed. And in Australia, of course you've got bright light.
• 32:18
  Speaker 3: It's all fine, so you get outside, you get your
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: bright morning light. In the northern Hemisphere in the winter
• 32:24
  Speaker 3: you probably need a light box and that will advance
• 32:27
  Speaker 3: the clock, shift it forward, and then make it easier
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: to get up. And that, of course, behave yourself is
• 32:32
  Speaker 3: self reinforcing. You get up earlier, you get the morning light,
• 32:36
  Speaker 3: and you start to get up earlier. So when we're
• 32:38
  Speaker 3: all agricultural workers, we got sort of symmetrical exposure to
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: morning and dusk light, and we sort of more or
• 32:44
  Speaker 3: less stayed on que. Now, because of industrialization we live
• 32:48
  Speaker 3: most of our lives inside. That's become distorted. But we
• 32:51
  Speaker 3: can regain that timing by you set as I say,
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: setting a long clock and then exposing ourselves to natural light.
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: It's really really important to do that. Interestingly, we need
• 33:02
  Speaker 3: a lot of light, and I guess we'll come onto this, Craig,
• 33:05
  Speaker 3: because there's been a lot of stuff in the literature
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: about and in the media, Oh, if you look at
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: a screen before you go to bed, you're gonna shift
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: your body clock. Well, actually the evidence for that is
• 33:15
  Speaker 3: really poor. We need bright light for a long duration.
• 33:20
  Speaker 3: So there was a study from the States which got
• 33:23
  Speaker 3: people to look at a kindle for four hours on
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: its brightest intensity for four hours immediately built before bedtime,
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: on five consecutive nights that delayed sleep on set just
• 33:36
  Speaker 3: statistically by ten minutes, so it's a really minor effect.
• 33:42
  Speaker 3: So yeah, I think we need to be quite careful. Clearly,
• 33:46
  Speaker 3: the brighter the light before we go to bed, the
• 33:48
  Speaker 3: more chance we're going to delay the clock. But under
• 33:52
  Speaker 3: normal circumstances, and particularly if we're seeing bright morning light,
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: its internal light is not going to have a huge
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: impact upon us. Certainly, screens and all the rest of it.
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: The big problem with iPhones and smartphones and stuff is
• 34:08
  Speaker 3: that we're doing social media, we're doing our emails, and
• 34:11
  Speaker 3: it's all that stuff that's increasing alertness and then delaying
• 34:15
  Speaker 3: sleep on set. So it is good not to use
• 34:18
  Speaker 3: them before we go to bed. Not so much the
• 34:20
  Speaker 3: light issue, but it's because of the alerting effect it's
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: having on the brain.
• 34:24
  Speaker 1: That's so interesting and so contrary to what we've been told.
• 34:30
  Speaker 1: All Right, I've got a million more questions and we
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: don't have I don't know how long you have, but
• 34:34
  Speaker 1: oh my god, how good is Emilissa? I know, amazing,
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: I know, I know, I'm excited. All right, tell me
• 34:41
  Speaker 1: about why you and Andrew Huberman, I'm sure you know
• 34:44
  Speaker 1: who he is. Yeah, Professor Andrew Huberman, and you both
• 34:48
  Speaker 1: kind of bang on about the importance of bang on
• 34:51
  Speaker 1: in a nice way about the importance of early morning light,
• 34:55
  Speaker 1: why we need it, and why it's good for us.
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: One of them, it would tell us about that.
• 35:00
  Speaker 3: We've touched on it briefly, but for about ninety percent
• 35:04
  Speaker 3: of us, the human body clock is a little bit
• 35:06
  Speaker 3: longer than twenty four hours, so under constant conditions, we
• 35:10
  Speaker 3: get up later and later and later each day. So
• 35:13
  Speaker 3: what we need to do to stay on track is
• 35:15
  Speaker 3: to get that morning light exposure, to advance the clock,
• 35:18
  Speaker 3: to nudge just forward in time so that that slightly
• 35:22
  Speaker 3: longer clock is forced to be exactly twenty four hours.
• 35:25
  Speaker 3: And that's why morning light is so important. And you
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: know it's a no brainer. The data are absolutely clear,
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: and and you know that's something that we can actually
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: take possession of our light exposure parenthetically, which I think
• 35:39
  Speaker 3: is absolutely fascinating. There was a study a few years
• 35:42
  Speaker 3: ago saying that dog owners got better sleep for non
• 35:46
  Speaker 3: dog owners, and I've always wondered whether it's because, of course,
• 35:50
  Speaker 3: it's not so much the companionship, although it may be
• 35:53
  Speaker 3: it's the fact you have to get up and take
• 35:55
  Speaker 3: your dog out outside. First thing in the morning, you
• 35:58
  Speaker 3: get your phone tom shower, which then gives you that
• 36:03
  Speaker 3: morning light that keeps the clock on queue.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: That's hilarious. There's been other research done on longevity and
• 36:09
  Speaker 1: pet owners. They seem to live a year or two longer.
• 36:12
  Speaker 1: Melita will live till she's two hundred because she loves animals.
• 36:17
  Speaker 1: When I was thinking about talking to you, and I
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: was just I think I was making a cup of tea,
• 36:22
  Speaker 1: and I was thinking about sleep in general, of which
• 36:24
  Speaker 1: I know very little about the science. But it dawned
• 36:28
  Speaker 1: on me that knowing the bit that I do about
• 36:33
  Speaker 1: what inadequate, consistently inadequate sleep can do to a brain
• 36:37
  Speaker 1: and a person and moods and mental health and all
• 36:40
  Speaker 1: of that, it's a little wonder that they used, and
• 36:44
  Speaker 1: have used sadly, sleep deprivation as a form of torture
• 36:48
  Speaker 1: in the Wars.
• 36:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And in some sense we're using sleep
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: as a form of torture today. I mean that's perhaps
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: a bit exaggerated, but you know, it's worth bearing in mind.
• 37:02
  Speaker 3: Who in society is not getting the sleep that they need. Well,
• 37:06
  Speaker 3: it's poor people who are forced to work night shift work,
• 37:11
  Speaker 3: and you know, we did a study in the UK
• 37:14
  Speaker 3: a few years ago and we were looking at kids
• 37:17
  Speaker 3: and we ask them, does anybody share your sleeping space? Thinking,
• 37:20
  Speaker 3: you know, do you share your bedroom with anything? What
• 37:22
  Speaker 3: we didn't ask is do you have a bed? And
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: as a result of you know, these studies, we discovered
• 37:27
  Speaker 3: that these kids, many of them, didn't have a bed.
• 37:30
  Speaker 3: They were sleeping on the family sofa and so, you know,
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: so they get screwed up sleep. They go to school,
• 37:37
  Speaker 3: they're tired, they can't fully appreciate, you know, education. So
• 37:42
  Speaker 3: without sleep, you know, you're on that track of being
• 37:47
  Speaker 3: marginalized because of your educational attainment, and therefore you're on
• 37:52
  Speaker 3: this still track. And I think that that in a sense,
• 37:55
  Speaker 3: poverty and low as socioeconomic groups are aligned with poor sleep,
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: and it's something that we haven't done anything about. And
• 38:03
  Speaker 3: we've got to prioritize this because we're then sort of
• 38:06
  Speaker 3: marginalizing a whole group of individuals, and this is wrong
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: in my view.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: Do you think that I don't know the way that
• 38:14
  Speaker 1: we live now, modernity and technology and the fact that
• 38:18
  Speaker 1: we've got everything at our fingertips all the time, including
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: bright light twenty four hours a day, if we want.
• 38:26
  Speaker 1: It has that kind of disconnected us a little bit
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: from our biology. You know that internal I call it
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: biological sat nav. You know that that biological guidance system
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: that we've all got but we seem not to pay
• 38:40
  Speaker 1: attention to yet.
• 38:42
  Speaker 3: No, you're completely right, and we have a sense divorced.
• 38:45
  Speaker 3: You know. It's humans. We are such an incredibly arrogant
• 38:49
  Speaker 3: species and it's been part of our success. But also
• 38:53
  Speaker 3: you know, we've also created problems for ourselves. We think
• 38:57
  Speaker 3: we can do whatever we want at what a time
• 39:00
  Speaker 3: we choose, ignoring the fact that we are part of
• 39:03
  Speaker 3: a biological evolution which is timestamped, literally timestamped our entire biology,
• 39:09
  Speaker 3: and we can't do whatever we like whenever we choose.
• 39:11
  Speaker 3: And we've got to embrace this again now having said
• 39:14
  Speaker 3: that we are in a twenty four to seven society,
• 39:17
  Speaker 3: it's no good saying, you know, we're going to stop that,
• 39:19
  Speaker 3: it's not going to stop. But what we've got to
• 39:22
  Speaker 3: do is use the science that we have at the
• 39:24
  Speaker 3: moment to mitigate some of the problems. And of course
• 39:27
  Speaker 3: those problems are the most acute in night shift workers
• 39:30
  Speaker 3: and so for example of the study from the UK
• 39:33
  Speaker 3: showing that fifty seven percent of junior doctors had either
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: had a crash or a near miss driving home after
• 39:40
  Speaker 3: the night shift. So why the heck are we not
• 39:43
  Speaker 3: providing vigilance devices on the dashboard, you know, either on
• 39:46
  Speaker 3: an app or some other sub clip on which can
• 39:50
  Speaker 3: detect head roll or the fact that car is moving
• 39:53
  Speaker 3: laterally set off an alarm and wakes you up. Now
• 39:55
  Speaker 3: there's that's load loads of technology that could actually make
• 40:00
  Speaker 3: or difference. It's been estimated that in the States at
• 40:03
  Speaker 3: least between one hundred thousand and three hundred thousand crashes
• 40:08
  Speaker 3: on the freeway are people falling asleep at the wheel
• 40:11
  Speaker 3: in the early hours of the morning. Knowing that night
• 40:13
  Speaker 3: shift workers have greater levels of obesity, diabetes to culinary
• 40:18
  Speaker 3: heart disease, what type of food do we make available
• 40:21
  Speaker 3: to our night shift workers. Well, it's high fat, it's
• 40:24
  Speaker 3: high sugar, and what we should be providing is rich protein,
• 40:29
  Speaker 3: easy to digest snacks throughout the night. To my knowledge,
• 40:32
  Speaker 3: no employer anywhere is making provision for the appropriate sort
• 40:36
  Speaker 3: of nutrition for those night shift workers. Knowing again that
• 40:40
  Speaker 3: in some sectors the divorce rate is six times higher
• 40:44
  Speaker 3: for night shift workers, compared to day shift workers. What
• 40:48
  Speaker 3: are we doing about that? Why aren't we providing the
• 40:50
  Speaker 3: education to those workers saying this is the risk that
• 40:54
  Speaker 3: you've got to you know, you've got to be aware of.
• 40:58
  Speaker 3: But also not you, but your family. They need to
• 41:00
  Speaker 3: know that the job is going to make you less empathetic,
• 41:04
  Speaker 3: more irritable, less lovable and reducing a sense of humor.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: We've got to get education in that area. And finally,
• 41:12
  Speaker 3: I'm sorry I'm granting out, but this is this is
• 41:16
  Speaker 3: easy to do stuff. Knowing that there's people with shortened sleep,
• 41:21
  Speaker 3: primarily night shift workers. Our frontline staff often have high
• 41:26
  Speaker 3: rates of heart disease, you know, diabetes, to all these
• 41:29
  Speaker 3: cancer as well, Why aren't we doing high frequency health
• 41:32
  Speaker 3: checks to catch these conditions in this sector before they
• 41:36
  Speaker 3: become chronic. So yeah, I would. It would be absurd
• 41:40
  Speaker 3: to say we're going to put the twenty four seven
• 41:42
  Speaker 3: genie back in its bottle. But what we can do
• 41:45
  Speaker 3: is mitigate some of the problems instead of burying our
• 41:48
  Speaker 3: head on the sand and ignoring it. And that's what
• 41:50
  Speaker 3: we I think all of us need to do up
• 41:53
  Speaker 3: through our governments and hopefully well intentioned employers, towards their
• 41:58
  Speaker 3: employees love it.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: All right, A few quick quikies, well, although take your time,
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, from me, a few quickies. Number one, alarm
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: clocks good bed indifferent.
• 42:12
  Speaker 3: If you need an alarm clock to get you out
• 42:14
  Speaker 3: of bed, you're probably not getting the sleep you need. However,
• 42:17
  Speaker 3: realistically yeah, I mean, many of us need them, but
• 42:21
  Speaker 3: be aware you're probably not getting the sleep need. The
• 42:23
  Speaker 3: big thing about these alarm clocks is that if they're
• 42:26
  Speaker 3: these digital ones with a lighted dial. Now, what happens
• 42:30
  Speaker 3: is that you wake up in the middle of the night,
• 42:32
  Speaker 3: and that's the norm. Incidentally, the normal human sleeping pattern
• 42:36
  Speaker 3: is to wake up, probably fall back to sleep immediately.
• 42:39
  Speaker 3: And if you don't fall back to sleep immediately, then
• 42:42
  Speaker 3: you'll get back to sleep fairly, fairly quickly. That is
• 42:44
  Speaker 3: the normal pattern of human sleep. Problem is most people
• 42:47
  Speaker 3: don't know that, so they wake up and they think,
• 42:49
  Speaker 3: oh my god, that's it. I'm never going to get
• 42:51
  Speaker 3: back to sleep again. Start doing the email, start drinking coffee.
• 42:54
  Speaker 3: Whereas if you stay calm, keep the lights low, do
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: something relaxing, you will fall back to sleep again. The
• 43:00
  Speaker 3: problem is people wake up, they see their illuminated dial thing,
• 43:04
  Speaker 3: oh my goodness, I've only got an hour and a
• 43:05
  Speaker 3: half before I've got the alarm goes off. They get
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: all anxious, stressed, and then they can't get back to
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: sleep again. So many people, you know, the important information
• 43:13
  Speaker 3: is when the alarm goes off, not how many hours
• 43:15
  Speaker 3: or minutes you've got before it goes off. So cover
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: up the dial are those illuminated alarms.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: And the irony is that you wake up and then
• 43:24
  Speaker 1: you think I've only got an hour and a half
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: to go, and you get anxious and which you know
• 43:30
  Speaker 1: all of the things that happen with that, and then
• 43:33
  Speaker 1: you don't sleep well. But also the other side of
• 43:36
  Speaker 1: that is when you don't sleep adequately, that increases anxiety
• 43:39
  Speaker 1: through the day.
• 43:41
  Speaker 3: Yeah, exactly. And in fact most people don't have a
• 43:44
  Speaker 3: sleep problem, they have a stress and an anxiety problem.
• 43:47
  Speaker 3: And so that's why it's really important towards the end
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: of the day to step back and do something relaxing,
• 43:52
  Speaker 3: whether it be it's interesting. I was very rude about
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: mindfulness when it first surfaced. I sort of had it
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: in the same box as crystal, But actually that was wrong,
• 44:01
  Speaker 3: and I regret my arrogance over that, because in fact
• 44:05
  Speaker 3: it's a great way of it's a relaxation technique and
• 44:08
  Speaker 3: it's one of those things that many people find useful
• 44:11
  Speaker 3: to wind down at the end of the end of
• 44:13
  Speaker 3: the day. And those are the sorts of things we've
• 44:15
  Speaker 3: got to be doing. It's been really difficult during lockdown because,
• 44:18
  Speaker 3: of course the sleeping space has also been in many
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: cases the office as well. So you've got stuffed in
• 44:24
  Speaker 3: your bedroom all of those detracted you know, those things
• 44:27
  Speaker 3: that will keep you awake, the computer. You know, I
• 44:30
  Speaker 3: just checked my meme as before I go to bed,
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: and all of that stuff. And really what we should
• 44:34
  Speaker 3: be having is the bedroom is this wonderful haven where
• 44:37
  Speaker 3: we can retreat to and embrace. Sleep has this wonderful
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: enhancing behavior. I don't know about Australians, but the Brits
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: are kind of a bit mean where it comes to
• 44:48
  Speaker 3: bedding and pillows and all that sort of stuff. And
• 44:51
  Speaker 3: you know, for a third of our lives we should
• 44:52
  Speaker 3: indulge in a good rap, not indulge. We should buy
• 44:55
  Speaker 3: a good mattress, good pillows, good douvet, and so make
• 44:59
  Speaker 3: sure that the se sleeping space is optimized. You know,
• 45:02
  Speaker 3: you feel comfortable and it's a wonderful place to be.
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: All right, that makes sense, you know what you said
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: about I mean, all of it makes sense. But I
• 45:10
  Speaker 1: was just thinking then about stress and anxiety are the
• 45:12
  Speaker 1: problem and likes. It's almost like sleep is the symptom.
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: But if you treat the problem stress and anxiety, then
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: the sleep will take care of itself.
• 45:21
  Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, absolutely, And we've got to be very careful
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: about distinguishing between sleep, sleepiness, and fatigue. So given the
• 45:29
  Speaker 3: opportunity we can get rid of sleepiness by sleeping more,
• 45:35
  Speaker 3: fatigue is something different. Fatigue is this lethargy, this again sleepiness,
• 45:42
  Speaker 3: But given an extended opportunity to sleep, the fatigue doesn't
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: go away. Classic, of course is long COVID people are
• 45:49
  Speaker 3: incredibly fatigued even though they're sleeping more. And you've got
• 45:53
  Speaker 3: to distinguish between sleepiness and fatigue because fatigue is usually
• 45:57
  Speaker 3: some indication of an underlying health problem. And see got
• 46:01
  Speaker 3: to see your general practitioner to make sure that there's
• 46:04
  Speaker 3: no there's no sort of illness that you're aware of,
• 46:08
  Speaker 3: that you're unaware of that's causing the fatigue. It's such
• 46:11
  Speaker 3: an important issue.
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: We spoke broadly before about the relationship between sleep and
• 46:17
  Speaker 1: cognitive function. What about more specifically proft between sleep and dementia.
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: Do we know anything about that?
• 46:24
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really interesting question, and it's one of
• 46:27
  Speaker 3: those areas that's that's bloomed in the past past ten
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: years or so. Whilst we sleep, there's a thing in
• 46:34
  Speaker 3: the in the brain, in the central nervous system called
• 46:36
  Speaker 3: the glymphatic system. It's like a waste disposal unit, and
• 46:41
  Speaker 3: what it does is get rid of some misfolded proteins
• 46:45
  Speaker 3: and other rubbish. But these misfolded proteins are the beta amyloids,
• 46:49
  Speaker 3: and the beta amorloids have been associated with building up
• 46:52
  Speaker 3: in the brain and causing dementia and Alzheimer's. And you know,
• 46:57
  Speaker 3: one night of no sleep can you can statistically see
• 47:01
  Speaker 3: an increased in beta amyloid within the cerebral spinal fluid
• 47:05
  Speaker 3: and deposited within the brain. So another really important element
• 47:09
  Speaker 3: of sleep is to get rid of these toxic compounds. However,
• 47:14
  Speaker 3: what this may explain is the fact that poor sleep
• 47:17
  Speaker 3: in the middle years increases your risk for Alzheimer's and
• 47:20
  Speaker 3: dementia in the later years. So you know it's we
• 47:25
  Speaker 3: are if by not taking our sleep seriously during the
• 47:28
  Speaker 3: middle years and not defending it. We are sort of
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: potentially in not everybody, it's going to be those individuals
• 47:34
  Speaker 3: who are vulnerable are increasing their chances of these appalling,
• 47:38
  Speaker 3: debilitating conditions later on. Interestingly, the generation coming through I
• 47:43
  Speaker 3: always forget the numbers, whether the XYZ or whatever, but
• 47:47
  Speaker 3: the thirty year olds are actually getting on average twenty
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: to thirty minutes small sleep every night than the forty
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: and fifty year olds. It looks as though the generation
• 47:57
  Speaker 3: coming through are not prepared to put the same old
• 48:01
  Speaker 3: sure and actually indulging, you know, not indulging, but they're
• 48:07
  Speaker 3: actually embracing sleep sensibly. Good on you, youngsters.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, good on you youngsters. Now, I did hear with
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: you chatting with I forget his name, he's British MD.
• 48:22
  Speaker 1: I think do you remember him anyway, It doesn't matter.
• 48:24
  Speaker 1: It was a podcast. He was great, you were great anyway,
• 48:28
  Speaker 1: So clearly he made an.
• 48:31
  Speaker 3: I never listened to them. It just whatever, I don't know.
• 48:34
  Speaker 3: It just I feel cringe when I hear my own
• 48:36
  Speaker 3: voice on the reader. So I the only when I
• 48:39
  Speaker 3: did a Ted talk. It took me half about two
• 48:42
  Speaker 3: weeks for I have the courage to watch this thing.
• 48:45
  Speaker 1: I'm with you. I'm with you. I've done about nine
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: hundred and seventy of these and I have not listened
• 48:51
  Speaker 1: to one whole episode. I've listened to bits, but have
• 48:55
  Speaker 1: I sat and listened start finished to me and I haven't.
• 48:58
  Speaker 1: Now I did re coil with a modicum of alarm
• 49:03
  Speaker 1: when I heard you say people who take blood pressure
• 49:10
  Speaker 1: medication and maybe something else need to take it out right.
• 49:14
  Speaker 1: Not in the morning now, thanks to my mum and dad.
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: Shout out to Ron and Mary. Not because I drink
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: or smoke, because I don't, or not because of any
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: lifestyle behavior, but because of my genetics. I have to
• 49:24
  Speaker 1: take blood pressure medication and forever I've been taking in
• 49:28
  Speaker 1: the morning until tomorrow when I start or tonight. Well
• 49:33
  Speaker 1: I can't take it tonight because they already taken Tell
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: me about that. Why do people with was it just
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: blood pressure or any other medication as well?
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: Well, it's other medications as well, so aspirin for example,
• 49:44
  Speaker 3: your proton pump inhibitors, your startings, these will all have
• 49:48
  Speaker 3: a time of day effect and it's called chronopharmacology. And
• 49:52
  Speaker 3: it can't and it makes sense, you know, we have
• 49:54
  Speaker 3: this dynamic biology. So no surprise. Different drugs have different
• 49:59
  Speaker 3: effects different times. Perhaps, you know. One of the early
• 50:03
  Speaker 3: pioneers in this was Bill Hereski from the States, who
• 50:06
  Speaker 3: was looking at anti cancer medications, and he showed that
• 50:10
  Speaker 3: the same cocktail of chema therapy given at two different
• 50:14
  Speaker 3: times resulted in over five years forty five percent survival
• 50:20
  Speaker 3: from ovarian cancer in one group and ten percent ten
• 50:25
  Speaker 3: percent survival in another group. So this is same drug,
• 50:29
  Speaker 3: same concentration, different time, big effects. So cancer is a
• 50:33
  Speaker 3: really interesting one. Childhood leukemia, for example, an old study
• 50:37
  Speaker 3: showed that late afternoon early evening was much more effective
• 50:42
  Speaker 3: than morning therapy, you know, and I think the fact
• 50:45
  Speaker 3: was something like four point six Those kids having their
• 50:49
  Speaker 3: chemo in the morning were four point six times greater
• 50:52
  Speaker 3: risk than those that have it in the late afternoon
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: early evening. If you invented a drug that changed those
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: odds in that way you're talking about your Nobel price,
• 51:01
  Speaker 3: you'd be off to Stockholm to get it. We can
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: do that by timing, and so there's been over one
• 51:07
  Speaker 3: hundred drugs with a shown time of day effect. Now,
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: the anti hypertensis that you talk about, the data had
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: a huge impact. So this study suggested that over. I
• 51:21
  Speaker 3: think it was a twenty year period. Taking the drug
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: before you went to bed rather than first thing in
• 51:29
  Speaker 3: the morning, halved your chances of a stroke or heart attack. Now,
• 51:34
  Speaker 3: what's really important and what is uncontrab what is absolutely
• 51:38
  Speaker 3: shown by every group that studied it, is that there's
• 51:41
  Speaker 3: a fifty percent greater chance of having a stroke between
• 51:44
  Speaker 3: six am and twelve noon, and that's associated with a
• 51:47
  Speaker 3: sharp rise in blood pressure driven by the clock and
• 51:49
  Speaker 3: then activity, you know, to get all those nutrients and
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: add oxygen to the tissues, but also plateleot stickiness. Blood
• 51:57
  Speaker 3: stickiness is also at its peak at that time in
• 52:00
  Speaker 3: the morning. So why taking a drug before you go
• 52:04
  Speaker 3: to bed has it has a better effect than first
• 52:07
  Speaker 3: thing in the morning when you know when it's the
• 52:09
  Speaker 3: critical time? And of course it's called the pharmokinetics as
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: it were, of the drug. Essentially the time you know
• 52:17
  Speaker 3: you've taken it, the time it's got into the system,
• 52:20
  Speaker 3: the time it's you know, become active, and it's half
• 52:23
  Speaker 3: life how long it hangs around other critical agents. Now,
• 52:26
  Speaker 3: if you take it in the morning, you're already halfway
• 52:29
  Speaker 3: through that risk zone of stroke, and the drug with
• 52:33
  Speaker 3: the time it gets the full efficacy is actually going
• 52:36
  Speaker 3: to be several hours after the peak of the danger zone.
• 52:41
  Speaker 3: So the argument is you take it and before you
• 52:43
  Speaker 3: go to bed. The drug has a long half life
• 52:47
  Speaker 3: and therefore is around when it intersects with that dangerous
• 52:50
  Speaker 3: six am to twelve noon window. Now, I should say
• 52:54
  Speaker 3: there's a study that's either just published or about to
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: be published which suggests that that difference is not as
• 53:00
  Speaker 3: as profound as the original study said. So I think
• 53:04
  Speaker 3: it still makes sense if I were taking anti hypertensives,
• 53:06
  Speaker 3: I take them before going to bed the first thing
• 53:10
  Speaker 3: in the morning. One of the interesting thing ones is
• 53:13
  Speaker 3: aspirin though, because aspirin is very good at reducing the stickiness.
• 53:17
  Speaker 3: It's a blood thinner and many people take it, but
• 53:20
  Speaker 3: it it lasts in the body for a relative short
• 53:23
  Speaker 3: period of time. Only you know, peak concentration is just
• 53:26
  Speaker 3: a few hours. So again, how can taking aspirin before
• 53:29
  Speaker 3: you go to bed be effective in reducing that dangerous
• 53:33
  Speaker 3: six am twelve noon window. Well, the really cool live
• 53:36
  Speaker 3: information is that the platelets which are causing this stickiness
• 53:40
  Speaker 3: are made at night. When they encounter aspirin, their stickiness
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: is eliminated, so that the drag is around when the
• 53:47
  Speaker 3: new platelets are being made, so by next morning the
• 53:50
  Speaker 3: blood is already less less sticky because the platelets have
• 53:54
  Speaker 3: been effectively turned off. So there's lots of ways in
• 53:57
  Speaker 3: which we're discovering that the timing of drugs is so
• 54:00
  Speaker 3: important vaccination. I think this is a really interesting one.
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: So for the flu vaccine, again, this is a twenty
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: sixteen study. It showed that morning vaccination in a group
• 54:12
  Speaker 3: of sixty five to seventy year olds was three times
• 54:16
  Speaker 3: more effective than afternoon vaccination in generating an antibody response.
• 54:21
  Speaker 3: And that's for the flu. People are looking at COVID
• 54:24
  Speaker 3: now there's been a few studies. They're not randomized control trials,
• 54:29
  Speaker 3: so it's a bit messy, so we don't really know
• 54:31
  Speaker 3: what's going on with COVID. But there's a whole range
• 54:34
  Speaker 3: of studies, you know, showing that our immune system is
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: turn up during the day, and then towards the late afternoon,
• 54:42
  Speaker 3: early evening it gets turned down and it is lower
• 54:45
  Speaker 3: at night. And again that makes sense. It's turned up
• 54:49
  Speaker 3: when we're encountering other encountering other people and most likely
• 54:53
  Speaker 3: to encounter bugs. It's turned down when we're less likely
• 54:58
  Speaker 3: to encounter people and bugs. So you could say, well,
• 55:01
  Speaker 3: why isn't the immune system turned on at full throttle
• 55:04
  Speaker 3: all the time. The problem, of course is autoimmune diseases,
• 55:08
  Speaker 3: so it's probably we don't know the answer, but it's
• 55:10
  Speaker 3: probably showing the circadian timing because it's turned up when
• 55:14
  Speaker 3: it's needed and it's turned down when it's not needed
• 55:17
  Speaker 3: quite so much to avoid the problems of autoimmune responses.
• 55:22
  Speaker 4: Wow, I've never even i mean other than when they
• 55:25
  Speaker 4: say take you know, take an anti in flame twice
• 55:29
  Speaker 4: a day with food or something right, which is you know,
• 55:31
  Speaker 4: indicative of when to take it.
• 55:33
  Speaker 1: But that am versus PM versus afternoon. I've never even
• 55:40
  Speaker 1: have you considered that, Melissa, not once?
• 55:42
  Speaker 4: No, it's amazing, and like, that's excuse my language, that's
• 55:47
  Speaker 4: fucking profound.
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: Why is everybody not shouting this from the rooftops?
• 55:52
  Speaker 3: Well, I think that's the really interesting issue. I mean,
• 55:54
  Speaker 3: it's we've we in some cases we need more studies,
• 55:57
  Speaker 3: but in other cases, and I've talked to my friends
• 56:00
  Speaker 3: about this and they say, look, our healthcare services are
• 56:04
  Speaker 3: running as fast as we can to stay where we are.
• 56:07
  Speaker 3: You know, it's the whole Red Queen thing. If you
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: then impose an additional layer of complexity on our treatment regimes,
• 56:14
  Speaker 3: which is time, then we're going to be completely We
• 56:18
  Speaker 3: just don't have the bandwidth, the capacity to deal with it.
• 56:21
  Speaker 3: And so I spoke to a young trainee medic. I said, okay,
• 56:26
  Speaker 3: you know, we did a three week intensive module and
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: at the end of it we did the debrief and
• 56:30
  Speaker 3: I said, you know, okay, so you guys, you know
• 56:33
  Speaker 3: you've seen the data. Are you signed up to this?
• 56:35
  Speaker 3: Do you think it's important? And they everybody said yes.
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: I said, well, how are we going to introduce it?
• 56:41
  Speaker 3: You know, for the reason that we said the state
• 56:43
  Speaker 3: healthcare systems overwhelmed it's just too much. And this kid
• 56:46
  Speaker 3: said to me, well, it's obvious. You introduce it in
• 56:49
  Speaker 3: the private healthcare sector, you show its efficacy and that
• 56:53
  Speaker 3: provides the database which will then force the state health
• 56:57
  Speaker 3: systems to take attempt to pay attention to this. So
• 57:00
  Speaker 3: a very pragmatic view, I'm not sure. I mean, I
• 57:04
  Speaker 3: think what we need is education throughout the sector, but
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: both from the patients talking to their doctors and saying
• 57:11
  Speaker 3: well what time of day should I take this medication?
• 57:14
  Speaker 3: And that will also encourage the doctors to try and
• 57:17
  Speaker 3: make the time to be aware of this stuff. Part
• 57:21
  Speaker 3: of the problem, of course, is that, as we've touched on,
• 57:23
  Speaker 3: in a five year training a medic may only have
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: two three lectures on sleeping clocks. And so that's why
• 57:29
  Speaker 3: we've adopted within the Sleep in Cicadian Neuroscience Institute here
• 57:33
  Speaker 3: in Oxford, the first, you know, fully online master's degree
• 57:37
  Speaker 3: in sleep Medicine. We've got a lot of people in
• 57:39
  Speaker 3: Australia taking it, They're taking it all over the world
• 57:42
  Speaker 3: where healthcare professionals can become aware of this data, the
• 57:45
  Speaker 3: importance of sleep, how to achieve better sleep, what sleeps about,
• 57:49
  Speaker 3: what are Cicadian rims about, and then use this science
• 57:54
  Speaker 3: to advise individuals and deliver better medications.
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: So when some it comes out and they've got their degree,
• 58:02
  Speaker 1: their master's in sleep health, what are they? Are they
• 58:06
  Speaker 1: a sleep health expert?
• 58:08
  Speaker 3: What will I guess? Yeah, I guess you could. We
• 58:11
  Speaker 3: haven't been thinking of it in that way. Essentially, we've
• 58:13
  Speaker 3: just tried to sort of compensate for the lack of
• 58:17
  Speaker 3: education in this space. And the people that are signing
• 58:19
  Speaker 3: up to this course are saying, well, cracky, that's making
• 58:23
  Speaker 3: I am now better as a healthcare professional because I
• 58:26
  Speaker 3: know this stuff, and so that's the being the logic,
• 58:30
  Speaker 3: and I think that's the motivation for most people. I'm
• 58:32
  Speaker 3: not I'm not aware of people setting up after this
• 58:35
  Speaker 3: master's degree a sort of sleep advisors other than within
• 58:39
  Speaker 3: their sort of normal day job. And I think that's
• 58:42
  Speaker 3: that's the exciting thing for us, us because it's providing
• 58:44
  Speaker 3: that the framework for this this education that is lacking
• 58:48
  Speaker 3: across most most medical education programs. It's just one last thing.
• 58:56
  Speaker 3: It's worth bearing in mind that our drug test so
• 59:01
  Speaker 3: quite rightly, we test our drugs first of all on mice,
• 59:04
  Speaker 3: you know, to make sure that there's nothing really bad
• 59:06
  Speaker 3: going on, and then we go to humans. But of
• 59:10
  Speaker 3: course mice are night active animals and we are day
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: active animals, and so our time biology is completely different.
• 59:18
  Speaker 3: And there was a study done fairly recently showing that
• 59:21
  Speaker 3: you know, people had gone in research has gone in
• 59:24
  Speaker 3: in the morning given an anti stroke medication to mice
• 59:27
  Speaker 3: who had an induced stroke, and this was given first
• 59:31
  Speaker 3: thing in the morning, and it really improved the outcomes
• 59:34
  Speaker 3: of that induced stroke. So they then took it to
• 59:38
  Speaker 3: humans and they went in gave it to humans first
• 59:41
  Speaker 3: thing in the morning and it had no effect at all.
• 59:45
  Speaker 3: And so if you think about it, the mice were
• 59:48
  Speaker 3: a beginning of their sleep phase, humans were beginning of
• 59:51
  Speaker 3: their active phase, went back, gave it to mice in
• 59:56
  Speaker 3: the beginning of their active phase. It didn't work. So
• 59:59
  Speaker 3: there's a an argument that we may have sitting on
• 1:00:02
  Speaker 3: the shelves around the world some incredibly powerful drugs for
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 3: health which when they were initially screened in mice, were
• 1:00:11
  Speaker 3: done at the wrong time, and therefore we've missed some
• 1:00:15
  Speaker 3: incredible opportunities. There's an argument that, you know, we should
• 1:00:19
  Speaker 3: go back and test these drugs, retest these drugs at
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 3: different times and see if there's an important time of
• 1:00:26
  Speaker 3: day effect.
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 1: Oh wow, right. The last question is courtesy of my mother.
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 1: She's eighty three. Her name's Mary Harper. Mary asks, oh,
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: how I professor, She says, My mum used to say
• 1:00:42
  Speaker 1: to me, I don't know if this is bullshit, so
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 1: I need I need it's bullshit, it's true or it's
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 1: kind of true. The sleep that we get before midnight
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: is like like an hour before midnight is worth two
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 1: hours after midnight or something like that, Like the sleeper
• 1:00:59
  Speaker 1: is more valuable or something. Is that bullshit?
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 3: I can't answer that, but what I can say is
• 1:01:05
  Speaker 3: that there may be a basis for it, because, as
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 3: you know, sleep is divided up into these deep sleep,
• 1:01:11
  Speaker 3: slow wave sleep, and then sleep, and we have a
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 3: series of these cycles depending on seventy to ninety minutes
• 1:01:18
  Speaker 3: throughout the night. Now we have more deeper slow wave
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 3: sleep during the first half of the night compared to
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 3: the second half of the night. And it's been argued
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 3: that deeper sleep is associated with memory consolidation and the
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 3: processing of information. So it may not be completely daft,
• 1:01:37
  Speaker 3: and there is you can think about it having some
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 3: some relevance. I mean, but the studies haven't really been
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 3: done right, all right.
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 1: Well you're a gun. That's a good thing. You're a gun.
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: The name of the Proft's book is called a Lifetime's
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: written a bunch of Have you written a bunch of books, now,
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 1: haven't you?
• 1:01:55
  Speaker 3: I have? Yes, But this is the first sole author
• 1:01:58
  Speaker 3: one and the first one which is truly I think,
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 3: accessible for everybody.
• 1:02:02
  Speaker 1: So this is a user friendly book. This is not
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: your academic tomb that's going to blow your head off.
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: It's called Lifetime. Your body clock and its essential roles
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: in good Health and sleep, Professor Russell Foster. Where else
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: do you want to steer people, sir, Anything any website,
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: any social media platform, or any anything that you want
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: to point our audience towards.
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 3: I mean, clearly, what I'd like to do is read
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 3: Lifetime and really come away with the fact that there's
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 3: a lot of really good science that they can use
• 1:02:38
  Speaker 3: to improve their individual health and happiness. You know, as
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 3: I sort of say at the end of the book,
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 3: the stupid and the wise will die. In the end
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 3: Circadian wise, you know, on average, will live, live better,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 3: live longer, be healthier, and actually enjoy the company of
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 3: others and the world and all the opportunities the world
• 1:02:59
  Speaker 3: has to offer. So I just think I want people
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 3: to embrace this area of science and not get frightened
• 1:03:06
  Speaker 3: of it, and to use it to their best advantage.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: Was it liberating? Last question or promise? Was it liberating
• 1:03:12
  Speaker 1: writing without having to be so bloody particular about referencing
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 1: everything and bit like, just to be able to tell
• 1:03:21
  Speaker 1: stories and speak from your own experience and observation. Was
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 1: it liberating?
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 3: Well, there's two parts to that, Craig, Because in fact,
• 1:03:30
  Speaker 3: every bit of science is referenced, and what was interesting
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 3: is that Penguin didn't kick back on the fact that
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 3: there are nine hundred and twenty one references. So the
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 3: key thing for me was that people could look up
• 1:03:42
  Speaker 3: the science for themselves, but the text itself was accessible,
• 1:03:46
  Speaker 3: and as soon as I began to feel comfortable writing
• 1:03:50
  Speaker 3: in a different way, then it was great. It was
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 3: a bit liberating. But for me, it's okay being accessible,
• 1:03:57
  Speaker 3: but the science has got to be as rigorous as possible,
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 3: and as I say, all of those scientific facts are
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 3: referenced within the book.
• 1:04:05
  Speaker 1: I'd expect nothing less. We will say goodbye to you
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 1: officially off air, but for the moment, thanks so much.
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 1: You're bloody brilliant. We think you're asin Thanks for being
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: part of the You project for an hour.
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 3: Well thanks Craig and Melissa. I really enjoyed it.
• 1:04:21
  Speaker 1: Thank you sir, Thank you Melissa, Thank you everyone.