The Neuroscience of Sleep
[Music]
hello everyone
i um it’s kind of funny because if you
think about what i’m going to be talking
today it’s mostly related to
stress relief and being stressed anxious
about different things
and i was so stressed that i actually
forgot my water bottle coming up to the
stage and all these other different
things that
make me realize that there’s so many
parts of our lives
that we kind of just go through and as
soon as we get through something we get
through a big test
or we get over something that we were
really nervous about
there’s this huge moment in which
there’s this huge relief
so obviously you know even leading up to
this i was so excited to come and talk
to people some people that i know some
people that weren’t here when i was a
student here
and i think to myself i really wanted to
come and stand on the carpet but i was
planning on standing at the podium
because i have all these notes
but i hope you guys don’t mind and i
just want to tell you a little about
one of my hobbies so i talked about
being interested in the neuroscience of
sleep
and the reason that i didn’t want to
prepare any slides for today is because
i think one of the most important
aspects of sleep and important aspects
of dreams
is that there’s this component of
creativity
and when you’re in your own mind and
you’re trying to be imaginative
i’d like you guys to join me and in some
of the things that i’ll tell you i might
tell you to close your eyes and think
about a certain situation
uh because a lot of times the thing that
i like doing which is
lucid dreaming as you can see from my
title um
it’s kind of something that you need to
be creative about and i’m gonna teach
you guys
how to become lucid dreamers yourselves
so i hope you guys enjoy
and if you guys have any questions i’ll
say my email at the end and you can
email me
and i’d love to stay in touch especially
with some people that here at bca
because
i mean i don’t know the school is
changing so much these blue lights are
really cool
in the auditorium but i still feel like
i have such a strong connection with all
of you and i love coming back and
talking to everyone
so to start off there’s a huge industry
that’s growing today
with stress relief obviously you’ve seen
the advertisements for whether it’s yoga
classes or stress relief candles
there’s all sorts of things that are
going on but one of the biggest things
is meditation and so meditation is
kind of has a proposed connection to
being able to benefit specifically
western society because there’s this
obsession in western society with
individualism and trying to be a leader
on your own
and not really necessarily working as
part of a team
and this is different in other cultures
where i remember once i actually visited
japan
with bergen academies and we watched
them
set up an auditorium in minutes all
these chairs in perfect rows
because everyone was working to blend
together and work as a team
and so there’s this aspect of when
you’re here
and everyone is told to like do your own
individual best be your best person
and there’s kind of this competitive
aspect of competing against everyone
else
there’s this weird feeling of kind of
being alone in that sometimes
and so meditation is specifically a time
or a practice
in which you can kind of sit alone
there’s lots of versions of it
so you could just be sitting breathing
and breathing and now
slowly you can have guided meditations
you guys have probably heard of
headspace as an app
you can have a membership a lot of
people at school do it
it’s pretty cool actually i’ve never
done it mostly because
last semester i was privileged enough to
take a class on mindfulness meditation
and we had guided meditations once a
week
um and so i actually found through this
class that there’s this really weird
connection
between mindfulness meditation and
something that i have been doing
my entire life which is lucid dreaming
so
um the definition of mindfulness is
really debated in the scientific
community it’s kind of like one of those
things where
you know what something is but no one
really knows how to categorize it
this happens a lot in science because
specifically in psychology
if any of you guys are taking ap
psychology i remember there were so many
definitions
where i was always kind of like wouldn’t
it just be easier
if we talked about this in a practical
experiential term
but instead there needs to be this
scientific definition that’s given to it
the way that it is framed
and so interestingly um there’s a
scholar called
named scott bishop and he was the lead
offer on a paper that had this awkward
operational definition for mindfulness
and he said that it was composed of two
components which was one
self-regulation of attention and so like
i’m saying there’s these words they’re
kind of inaccessible when you think
about it
because when you hear me say
self-regulation of attention
you don’t think of what it actually is
which is being aware
of your surroundings and being aware
that you are aware which is the main
thing
and so the second component is
orientation to experience
and so when you are practicing
mindfulness one of the biggest
components is actually you need to be
open to being curious
and this is really important because
there’s kind of this
idea that it’s has something to do with
being non-biased
in terms of interpreting your
surroundings and you know if you hear
things that you’re used to hearing
usually you would just not notice them
but when you’re practicing mindfulness
you’re supposed to take that into
account and say
this is a stimulus that i get and i’m
going to recognize that it’s there and
kind of not think about it but focus on
it and that’s supposed to allow you to
just
become one with yourself and kind of get
away from the stresses that are
constantly going through your head
it’s kind of called the laundry mind
which is definitely a thing
i found out i thought that oh my
wandering isn’t that relevant
and my professor sent out a survey where
randomly each day for a week we would
get an email and we had to click on it
and immediately say whether when we
received the email
were we thinking about what we were
doing or were we thinking about
something else
and this is really relevant because i
think that when i was younger
i was constantly thinking about what i
was doing but
as i grew older there’s things that i
need to focus on in the future i’m
trying to think
what am i going to talk about in the
next portion of this talk things like
that
but when you’re actually in the moment
uh you can kind of get a lot more from
certain experiences the whole
stereotypical
live in the moment thing is kind of a
way to freeze it
but more differently you can think of it
as not allowing yourself to get stressed
out and anxious about these upcoming
things
and obviously that’s hard because
i myself am not very good at living by
that rule
but i’ve found that mindfulness really
did help me
when we did practices every week and i
tried to do it every day i found myself
kind of becoming
uh surprisingly less scared of sleeping
before my homework was done
and this was because i would you know i
would try to work around my schedule and
put myself first
um i obviously understand that this is
hard and i remember being in bca and
staying up late and doing homework and
um it’s the same way now i just say that
now having this concept of trying to
live in the moment um and trying to
not focus too much on what’s making me
anxious in the future even though this
will happen in the most stressful
situations
i think it’s really good to see wow
you know i can go to bed now and when
you tell yourself you can go to bed like
it’s very nice because i personally like
i said my hobby is sleep
so i enjoy sleeping quite a lot so i
love to tell myself it’s okay to go to
bed
and just wake up early in the morning
and do my homework then it doesn’t work
for everyone and i often do sleep
through my alarm and so it doesn’t
always work for me either
but this was a new perspective that i
brought after practicing mindfulness
also it’s important to mention the
origins of mindfulness and some debates
that are also happening about that
uh mindfulness comes from buddhist
tradition and so it was uh founded in
southeast asia
it’s really important to keep in mind
that mindfulness was kind of taken by
many western companies
and just plucked away from an entire
spiritual
convention uh there’s many things in
buddhism about morality
and uh you probably have learned about
the eightfold path and all these things
that you need to follow alongside
mindfulness practice
in order to attain basically moral
righteousness and escape the cycle of
reincarnation
and so many people have debated that you
should not take mindfulness the practice
away from its roots which is
things like being a good person
basically simplified
i could talk about this all day and we
talked about it a lot in my class um but
when we were talking about these things
in class i realized that
my own version of this and kind of my
way of like
spiritualizing this being in the moment
type experience was
for me lucid dreaming and this is weird
because many people say well i’ve heard
of lucid dreaming that’s when you’re
aware of your sleep
and it is and weirdly when i was a kid i
did not think
that you were not aware that you were in
a dream
so my friends would say oh i had a
nightmare and i’d be like
why not just tell yourself to wake up
and they’re like
you’re weird you should know that you’re
asleep and
you shouldn’t be aware of the fact that
you’re dreaming and so
i don’t really know why this was the
case with me i was
kind of creative and loved to just like
make up stories so maybe that had
something to do with it
i do want to research it which is why
i’m interested in neuroscience of sleep
but i’ve found that as i’ve grown older
and stresses and anxieties have been
added to my life i no longer lucid dream
just naturally and so i realized this
and
when i was at vca i decided that i
wanted to figure out how to start doing
it again on my own
and the reason for this and the reason i
relate it and i’ve been talking about
mindfulness for so long
is because mindfulness specifically the
practice
of it before talking about the operation
you can do like i mentioned these guided
meditations
which sometimes there’s things called
the body scan which is when you think
about all the different parts of your
body and you kind of bring them
up to a relaxed state by focusing on
them
and then there’s also compassion
meditation once which
you send love and you send happy
thoughts to people
you know people that you don’t know
people that you love and people that you
might have problems with
which is another great version but if
you’re not guided the most common form
of
mindfulness meditation practice is
actually just called
mindfulness of the breath and so
mindfulness of the breath
is when you do a controlled breathing in
and out it’s kind of like if you really
stress out someone tells you to just
breathe
um you’re supposed to focus on one thing
whether that be like the actual motion
of breathing and you’re supposed to be
open to any things
sounds noises or things that you see if
you’re looking out a window
while you’re doing this some people
close their eyes but
you can also do this while walking we
did when we were walking through a park
and i realized that when you’re doing
this form of meditation it’s this
focus on breath and when you’re asleep
you have
constant breath it’s the same connection
there’s this
connection that’s actually really
important you have this constant breath
and that is why i realized that when i
was lucid dreaming i was getting the
same feeling
that i got through mindfulness
meditation and it actually became a
really great stress reliever for me
when i figured out how to do it so um
just some examples of studies that have
been done
on lucid dreaming injuries in general so
um
dr martin chun who is the dean of yale
he actually published a study where he
was able to
recreate the faces of people’s dreams
just because of using an mri and that
was
incredible i mean it was a functional
mri so um
it took a lot of work but the fact that
we are able to somehow connect
thoughts to creating images that people
are thinking about
this is the imagination aspect that i’m
talking about we can create
images with our minds once we have the
technology to do it and we’re getting
there
um another thing that’s interesting is
that
lucid dreamers have been involved in a
study where
they do a functional mri and they
basically are able to signal by moving
their eyes around
when they’re asleep and that means that
they are lucid and they’re aware that
they’re dreaming
and then when that happens um they then
are told to hold their breath
while they’re lucid drinking and uh the
study found
that when people did this they actually
held their breath so
that means that you do have somewhat
control over your body
you don’t have control over your
emotions when you’re lucid dreaming
obviously that would be very dangerous
if you were constantly sleepwalking
um but you do have this control over the
breath
nonetheless it usually stays constant
which is why i find it to be
similar to mindfulness practice so
another study
is that the part of your brain used to
read
is not active when you’re dreaming and
so
people would say oh why can’t you read
things in your dreams
and uh this was really interesting to me
because
i thought that i could read things in my
dreams and i’ve actually found in my own
experience that through practicing lucid
dreaming
i have found whenever i’m encountered
with something to read
i then become lucid because i’ll just be
dreaming and not be aware that i’m
dreaming
and then i’ll suddenly be like hey i
can’t read this and then i’ll be like oh
i’m in a dream
and then i can read it because that
activates the part of your brain
that’s able to read so i always thought
that was really awesome
so my own experiences i kind of used
that
as a way to kind of like figure out that
i was dreaming in the middle of a dream
um but usually what happens for me is
i’m able to start lucid dreaming after i
wake up suddenly
or i’m in a room with lots of light when
i fall asleep if i’m napping during the
day
usually if you were like doing a lot of
activity like doing your homework right
before going to sleep that’s usually the
best kind of thing
to reduce lucid dreaming and so um
you guys have probably heard of this
phenomenon called sleep paralysis
and that’s when when you wake up there’s
actually
two neurotransmitters in your brain it’s
gaba and glycine if anyone
here is taking ap site because i
remember learning about them
they’re actually really interesting in
that they cause you to be paralyzed
um because you can’t act out your dreams
or else you’d be sleepwalking all the
time
and so when this occurs this sleep
paralysis
is really interesting because it uh
makes it so that sometimes when people
wake up they can see their surroundings
but they might start having
hallucinations and they can’t move and
this is really scary for a lot of people
um but what has happened to me
personally is
the exact opposite so i once was
awoken by someone walking into my suite
when i had just fallen asleep on the
couch last year
and someone was hugging me in a dream
and i opened my eyes and i could still
feel as if i was moving in the dream and
i could still feel someone hugging me
but i was aware of the fact that like my
eyes were open i couldn’t move
but it was so cool because i closed my
eyes and i was back in the dream
so i found this just incredible this is
something that i think should be studied
and i think it’s something that’s also
cool because a lot of people want to
lose a dream because the coolest part of
it
is you can control your dreams once you
get good enough at it so you can kind of
just like make your own imaginative
realities when you’re asleep
um so that was some of my own
experiences
when i first started trying to lucid
dream interestingly
i had a bit of a problem that being that
i was able to figure out that i was
dreaming but
i was not able to control it and so one
time i was in a room i figured out i was
dreaming i said okay
so i’m gonna just start trying to
control my dreams and i said
i want a hot tub in the middle of the
room and the hot tub appeared but it
didn’t have water
i was like why on earth is my brain so
mean to me
it’s my own conscious kind of stopping
me from fulfilling this goal i have of
creating this
really cool experience in my own head
and
so that’s another thing that i think
needs to be studied and all of these
things really are not studied it’s kind
of a new
territory and neural science there’s
limited studies on lucid dreaming
um really when i did a paper on it last
year it was really only about that
breathing example i gave so with these
last few minutes i’m going to tell you
guys
how you guys can start to lucid dream so
if you draw on your hand
anywhere um you could just put a dot on
your hand this is the first step
i call it um checking is everything
normal
and so the way this works is whenever
you see that dot on your hand you just
look down at your fingers and you say
do my hands look normal do i have ten
fingers just quickly count off
um i did this for weeks and it wasn’t
working and i thought didn’t work
and then i stopped doing it and about a
week after i stopped i was in a dream
i looked down at my hands went to count
if i had 10 fingers
and my hands were like this big
so the thing is whenever you check
something and you try to be aware of
your surroundings as you would in
mindfulness
um in a dream uh it’s not normal
so it’s almost as if your brain wants
you to become aware
to relate this to mindfulness because
it’s an awareness of
being aware right so you kind of already
are aware of your dreams you just have
to pay attention to it
and this is what i find really
interesting so step two after you’re
doing that for a while
i’d say make a dream journal so
immediately when you wake up
the chemicals that are in your brain
during sleep
they’re trying to prevent you from
forming memories so you need to
immediately write down
dreams that you remember and then you’ll
start to become better at remembering
them and you’ll become more lucid
um that’s something i find really
interesting it’s kind of hard to do
especially if you’re usually waking up
in a rush to get to class
but i’ve had a lot of fun doing it
nonetheless and then finally find what
works for you
for me what works is reading things like
i said
um it works out really nicely and then i
figure oh i’m asleep and then i
start to lose stream so there’s some
pretty cool benefits
with lucid dreaming you can return to
dreams after you’ve already woken up
you’ll be able to not wake up if you
hear noises and incorporate noises into
your dreams
and then you’ll feel more well rested i
find and you can also experience
mindfulness
while also getting some sleep so
remember guys you’re already aware
you just haven’t realized it yet thank
you