How Science Changed Sleep Forever

[music playing] OK, Craig, what am I looking at here?

Oh, that's me.

I'm just getting ready for bed.

It's bedtime.

Uh, so then what's with all the wires?

Oh, that's how I sleep.

What you talking about?

I've never seen you sleep that way.

We used to be roommates, you know, and I watched you sleep a lot.

I'm just going to pretend you didn't say that.

I'm just kidding.

I'm at Stanford University.

They're hooking those wires up to measure my brain waves while I sleep.

Oh, so you're doing, like, a sleep study?

Yes, I'm doing a sleep study.

You'll find that my head is abnormally larger than most.

It's not abnormally large, but it is on the larger side, yes.

Is this going to hurt in the morning when I have to pull it off?

We're monitoring various things that can be causing any type of sleep disorder, whether that's sporadic leg movements at night, or increased respiratory effort, or somebody is having to work harder to breathe.

Then it's usually disruptive to the sleep.

You have always had trouble sleeping, right?

I have.

I've always had trouble falling asleep throughout my life.

My mom even tells me when I was a little kid, I was a bad sleeper.

I was bad at a lot of things, but I was a bad sleeper.

So in this playlist of "The Good Stuff," we're going to bring you four videos, all about the gloriousness of sleep.

And hopefully, we'll find out why you're such a terrible sleeper.

But first, we're going to hear about the amazing discovery that launched the entire field of sleep science, from one of the guys that started it all.

Me.

Nope.

Him.

Yes.

Why is sleep so hard?

You know, isn't it just lying there and shutting your brain off?

That's what people used to think.

Most people viewed sleep as one philosopher put it.

Sleep is a short death.

Death is the long sleep.

The brain simply, quote, "turned off," end quote, whatever that means.

Well, we know now that it's more than that.

Sure.

We dream.

I do.

We have to sleep.

We've been sleeping for millions of years.

We can't not do it.

It's just that before the 1950s, there wasn't an established field of sleep study.

What happened in the 1950s?

Enter William C. Dement.

The C stands for Charles, although I occasionally say it stands for crusader, because I am crusading for sleep disorders.

Wait.

That's actually his name, Dr. Dement?

People call him that?

Yes, he's also known as the father of sleep medicine.

In addition to founding the world's first sleep lab at Stanford, he also coined the term, sleep debt, and the catch phrase, drowsiness is red alert, in his crusade to bring the dangers of sleep deprivation to the public's attention.

Hi, I'm Oprah Winfrey.

This is Senator Tom Daschle.

I'm Ray Romano.

Drowsiness-- Drowsiness-- Drowsiness-- Drowsiness is a red alert.

Is a red alert.

Hi, I'm Matt Weber, and I'm here to say, drowsiness is a red alert.

His sleep and dreams course at Stanford was very popular.

His last lecture was attended by over 1,000 students, and it's probably the only class in history you were allowed to fall asleep during.

Wow, I would have aced that class.

But before all that, he went to the University of Chicago.

And as it turned out, the only man on the planet who was studying sleep was there as a professor in the Department of Physiology.

His name was Nathaniel Kleitman.

When I heard that he was studying sleep, I asked if I could work with him, and then he immediately went on sabbatical so that I was then the only man on the planet studying sleep.

And it was just at that time that he had decided to study eye movements as a potential measure of depth of sleep.

During his sleep experiments, Dr. Kleitman noticed-- here.

Close your eyes.

Close your eyes, and move your eyes around.

He noticed that the eyes would move periodically during sleep.

Can you see them?

Yeah, I can, but I don't know if they can.

Keep doing it, though, for a while.

I made 126 all-night sleep recordings, and every single person had these very impressive rapid eye movements.

And no one had noticed this before?

Nope, it's surprising how recent this discovery was.

We developed the nuclear bomb before we noticed people's eyes were moving while they slept?

Well, one of my colleagues said, if anyone was interested enough in sleep, you know, five dozen years ago to stay up all night and watch somebody sleeping, they probably would have seen the eyes move because they are very easy to see.

You don't need to record them electrically, and there just wasn't that much interest in sleep.

He ordered his grad students to focus more on this period of time where the eyes were moving around, and so they did more experiments.

And they woke people up during that time, and guess what the subjects told them?

They were dreaming.

Yeah, that's what I-- how did you know that?

That's-- that's right, but that's not the only thing they discovered.

The brain wave patterns were indistinguishable from waking-state patterns.

So when we're asleep and dreaming, our brain looks awake?

Yeah, not only did they discover that our brain doesn't turn off, it turns.

Something's happening.

There was no question that they were the kind of activity that would not be expected in the older view of sleep as a resting state.

OK, REM sleep is when dreams happen.

That's pretty common knowledge now.

Yeah, but before this time, when people dreamed, it was seen as this sort of mystical, magical thing that happened when you were asleep.

But giving dreams a physiological basis, it opened up the field of sleep to scientific study.

This was revolutionary.

This was unbelievable at the time.

Scientific journals did not believe it.

And journals just couldn't believe it, this coming from some callow medical student, trying to publish a paper that was clearly a fabrication, they thought.

I sent it off to the first 155, that paper, and I think it finally got published in 1957.

That just goes to show you how groundbreaking these findings were.

It took him two years to publish his findings.

He tried to publish nine times.

That only happens if it's groundbreaking or if the idea is really crazy.

Then finally, a man named Herb Jasper, who was the editor of a very important journal, accepted it without revision, and I've been in love with Herb Jasper ever since.

Not only is it a story of scientific discovery, it's a love story, Craig.

Sure, the discovery of REM sleep made sleep interesting, and it led Dr. Dement to discovering the other stages of sleep.

Oh, there's more?

You bet ya.

Let's watch.

Let's do it.

Oh, are we gonna go there right now?

Let's stage them out.

Let's stage them out.

Stage 1 is the lightest stage of sleep.

Here, you drift in and out of consciousness and can be easily awakened.

People often experience muscle contractions, which can make us feel like we're falling, then it's on to stage 2.

During stage 2, your body temperature and heart rate decrease, and distinct brain wave patterns begin to appear.

Then we get into slow wave sleep, which is stage 3 sleep, characterized by-- MATT: Slow, large-amplitude brain waves.

CRAIG: Just like we rehearsed, Matt, good job, this is when growth hormones are released.

And the theory is that's why children get more slow wave sleep than adults, then we gone into REM sleep, where most of the dreaming occurs.

And that's the final stage of sleep.

MATT: The stage that started it all.

CRAIG: That's right, good, old rapid eye movement, and you cycle through the stages multiple times throughout the night.

And REM sleep gradually gets longer and longer.

So sleep science is a very young science, but sleep has been around for quite a while.

Tomorrow in our next video, we're going to take a look at the evolution and purpose of sleep.

There's a link right there to go watch.

If today is already tomorrow, you can click there.

The next day, we'll delve into the mysteries of dreams, and finally we'll take a look at the results of Craig's sleep study and see how he did.

And if you like this video, you can click Like right down there, or you can subscribe.

There's a button up there.

We also have a Patreon page if you want to go click and go give our show some support.

[snoring] Craig, are you really asleep?

We've got a whole episode, Craig.

Stay tuned.

Shh, I'm trying to sleep.

I'm in, like, slow wave sleep right.

Sorry.

Oh, here comes REM, woo.

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