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Chef AJ: The Imporatance of Sleep in Preventing Alzheimers | Interview with Dr Doug Lisle
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and we are live ladies and gentlemen coming to you from Sherman Oaks California dr. Doug live all right well I don't I don't have anything particularly planned so we have no idea where this is going so this is just QA it's as if we're it either True North health center or the new fasting escape trip down there now once a month near Southern California so questions about about anything yeah it doesn't doesn't matter what the topic if I can't answer it all just hide [Music] yes somebody else had started something you drove like four hours yes hello the pleasure trap had had several little roots that that went into it and the one was a sign arm that I went to and listened to a psychiatrist by the name of Alex talca who works with heroin addicts in in the East Bay San Francisco Bay and he had actually been for twenty years he had been the the staff doctor psychiatrist at the haight-ashbury clinic so he was he was a ground zero for heroin addiction and he was there that that he went through the the basic neuroscience what we would call the pleasure trap that the essentially the drugs are hyper activating either the dopamine pathway or the adore from pathway so that's where I learned that I don't I don't believe that before that I think I've a Glee knew that us a lot of psychologists or psychiatrists vaguely knew that by the early 90s but this was now the late 90s and I think it research had had gotten crisper and we had become more clear and so that's where I learned that I actually was thinking along the wall I think I was thinking along the lines of food at that time but then Alan Goldhamer and I went to to speak somewhere I can't remember where it was but it had to be a hygiene natural hygiene Society gig but it doesn't feel like it was it was some kind of a camp somewhere with a lake and we were in a cabin without air conditioning this I remember was very Spartan I wish I remember where this was because it's really lost my memory and it's uncomfortable and I mean it's bad enough to be an uncomfortable West with no air conditioning but worse yet when you're rooming with that one and so Alan I I believe I was explaining this to him and talking about this and and I can remember making the following comment because this is what had what had occurred to me was when I when I listened to Stalcup I remember thinking it's very strange to me that everybody is not addicted but that's what I came out of that seminar with I came out of that seminar with this huge question hanging over my head given the fact that we've got these supernormal stimuli that would hyper activate the pleasure pathway why isn't everybody addicted at it and that was an open loop that in my head that was bothering me and so I think it was probably soon after that that I had to go on this trip with Alan and and I was we were talking way late into the night and we were talking we're having one of our many arguments basically unless chip has been arguing we're having an argument about chocolate and Alan's course down basically if you like the taste of it it's not that you go as far as Alan's concern if you like it you shouldn't be eating it there's more or less how it yes and and so we were talking about this and I think it was then that I was realizing that chocolate was just supernormal stimuli I didn't have that term yet but I was realizing it was hyper activating the dopamine pathway or it probably was and so that that was when we got all that that principle together because it was Alan that said done everybody is addicted and I'm like no because people 20% of people smoking cigarettes and 5% of people or alcoholics so we can see that he says no they're all eating chocolate and it is really what Alan this is where he comes I'm like yeah well soon why so what's that big and then I can remember I can remember then something that happened not too long after that was that I had I had just come to California I had been in Texas working on the criminal justice system in the mid 90s and I had a girlfriend I loved in Texas and she she had she was all proud of the fact that she had a red war in peace which I had not read and incidentally I had heard that warm peace was a terrible book okay so I hadn't read it for a reason and the but she also she also knew that I liked Snickers bars and so on Valentine's Day she sent me two stacks of will Snickers bars and Warren peace cuz I like to eat and read so and I had actually been eating super clean for like three or four months and so that I can remember getting all caught up having everything done desk was clear and I had this sense of inner peace and what I wanted to do was I really wanted to read a good novel and and the only novel I had there was war on piece and then theoretically it was a great novel and theoretically it was a terrible novel and I didn't know which was which so I sat down and I thought and I had had these two stacks of Snickers bars in this little box and it had not I had me the dog bout it there was barely had my attention the fact that they were there and I thought it was after dinner and I was lately satiated and I I propped myself up in my bedroom and I got outworn piece got the lights at my thought might be nice to have two or three of those little things so I open up the sack there these little squares not not even not the big half once the little tiny squares and so I opened up the first little square and I can remember to this day what it tasted like it had been months since I had anything like that and it tasted like wax and it was such a surprise and I think the reason I remember it is the my anticipation of what it was going to taste like and what it actually tasted like was strikingly different and so it tasted like wax and it tasted like chemicals and it basically - didn't taste good at all this is bad taste and but then as I started to chew you get to the inside of it and you get different flavors in there and then I'm remembering the supernormal effect and I was it that great it still had this chemical issues thing but then within a couple seconds I'm open in a second month and then I'm opening the third one and then I'm open to the fourth month and by the time I was on page five warm piece ID and I actually have a second sack I'm looking at that second sack and I've already eaten probably 9 or 10 ounces chocolate on top of a completely full dinner so I'm actually feeling a little bit of physical pain from the distension and I'm looking at that second sack and I'm thinking I really don't want anymore I don't think I'm gonna have any more I don't actually remember if I open the second sack or not but if I did I only ate through four that's I know I didn't polish off the second sack but it was because I was in any and I looked at that stack the little stack of wrappers and and I thought there it is there's the addictive process and I and I hadn't quite identified it as such even though Alan had talked about it Alan's big thing not to yeah you could just beat some guy up when he's not here why not really he's really all about women and chocolate ok he's always about now all of these women they just can't stay out of the chocolate and Here I am like I'm not telling I looked at that stack of wrappers and the I thought that's interesting because there was a compulsion and that compulsion drove that behavior over about 5 to 10 minutes and it was it was like an avalanche it like it wasn't going to stop until there was some natural barrier and then natural barrier I think was the second sack which I actually don't think I opened so there was a natural barrier I think I had a feeling that if I open the second sack I might eat the whole second sack and I'm gonna really be sick the anyway that that was when it started to click into place for me that Alan had a point and at this the food but food had never struck me as particularly that addicted because I had always been a healthy eater ever since Alan had shoved my nose in this in our early 20s I had always been pretty easy and naturally discipline and just not that reactive to fit and therefore it had never been a big problem for me and had never been a worry for me I'm naturally slender and so I was never worried about my weight that was never a concern so I was never monitoring my food intake or worried about it I just drifted towards healthy food ate it and didn't think anything about it so I worked a lot with addictions in my career so and the people that struggle with addiction yes it's the same kind of thing I think they're all I'm sure activating the dopamine pathway because it's it's it's going through the taste buds that are detecting sweet which makes it thinks that it's calories say so yeah so I'm sure that that's how it works even though I don't know for sure I have no doubt that that's how it works the so anyway working with addicts the one of the things that you you'll notice is that if you work with them SAS they go inpatient which I work inpatient for a couple years they do a lot of they're in psychological pain and they're doing some whining they're frustrated there's a level of frustration and angst about what their circumstances are and there are there ant you know sort of they're waiting to get to the break and they're they're angling forward and they're scheming and and there's when they were frustrated about it they they almost I would say this now that I would recognize they're slipping into an almost childlike mode when children get frustrated they whine and they cry ok and they get angry so what they what they really have is they have two basic strategies the the basic manipulative strategies for frustration and childhood are crying and anger and you'll see kids vacillate they have like a jukebox inside their head and they will vacillate between those two because those are two different methods for manipulating parents the reason the kids feel so frustrated oh it's City good you've wandered into a useful thing the reason is is that the children feel they cannot solve the problem themselves they can't do it and so they have to their only way of getting the problem solved is through the big bad tough adults that are much larger and more powerful and smarter than they are so there are way of doing it in the world is to is through manipulating parental circuits parental circuits are inherently altruistic so you have to sound childlike in order to activate parental circuits this is a I usually don't have a lot of good things to say about psychoanalytic thinking the reason is not that there hasn't been some intelligent cyclomatic insights in the last hundred years it's just that they're given massively too much credit okay so they're worse it's as if we're bowing down to engineers that built the first airplanes and crashed them all it's like hey they were good and they had interesting insights at the time good for them but they're not rocket scientists and we shouldn't be acting like they are and the same is how I feel about psychoanalytic thinking yes it's historically interesting and it was occasionally brilliant when we added up and look at it today it's lousy compared to what we have now we can replace it with massively superior information and insight however a nice insight came out of a psychoanalytic thinker in 1960s by the name of Erika Byrne was a I think he was Canadian might have been American I can't remember and he had this notion of parents adult and child and of course we get down to the issue avoid we mean inner child and it's like not exactly what we're talking about is communication role that that a human will take and so he would say if you listen carefully you're gonna find that people are slipping into one of these roles or they can change roles depending upon what it is that they need to do so everything that we will do tonight and everything that everybody said in this room tonight as you talk to each other was adult to adult but there was parent-child communication here and it wasn't between the Nelson said they loved the daughters no it was between the people and the animals okay and so that and these particular animals are extremely cute and vulnerable and so as a result if one of them was a big tough looking German Shepherd with its ears perked up you know you wouldn't be feeling that parental circuit but because they're vulnerable you feel the parental circuit because they're they're they're evidencing childlike behaviors and that they need your help and security and so you feel like shielding them and reassuring them okay and so that's what we'll see so communication winds up being either a dull to adult or it's parent-child communication and so in what would happen in treatment is that you would see adults trying to use childlike sounds whining crying complaining etc to try to activate parental circuits inside of staff so that the staff would do altruistic hustling to get them what they what they wanted you say that's what you would see and so I would I certainly I wasn't thinking this at the time but I was aware of it that it was just unconsciously working with a lot of addicts you start to see these patterns and we recognize them as manipulative and they do things called splitting staff and they're there you know oh this stuff is going on but it was later on that I recognized I had read Byrnes work and then I was like ah that's what's going on in the addiction world is that there's a great deal of forty five-year-old adults with an addiction slipping into child roles in order to communicate the childlike sounds and noises in order to get parental altruistic behavior on the part of people around them that makes sense the the now I started to hear it in the clients that I work with the TrueNorth that's got my attention they come in they sit down they say and it caught my attention it's like ah this is what I'm hearing okay I'm hearing a child I'm hearing an adult feeling boxed in by the constraints of what it is that needs to be done to get to them to their health goals and they don't like it they don't want to do it and so they're going to try to get a special dispensation from the Pope to try to get out of this mess okay here the peal cake for me so I started all these things are kind of coming together so we're starting I'm starting to see that people are feeling kind of helpless and they get manipulative and they're trying to get special dispensation and they're essentially and yet they're continuing to act in a way that takes them away from the goals that they want to achieve and now we start hearing the footprints of the obvious implication it's addiction so the answer to that my question is why isn't everybody addicted and we pan the camera back and we say oh they are they are I just haven't seen it okay so and so the pleasure trap then starts to be a examination of a of a wider problem and the wider problem is is that the the moderate environment has has created opportunities to stimulate the mind and alter alter the minds experience in ways that are really you know convenient easy essentially energy conserving and the problem is is that that mind the environment is a distortion of the of the of the universe that it was didn't evolve in and so yeah the mismatch between the mind that you have in the environment that it finds itself in and so now we started looking this is where we start putting the pieces together for what what you will see nor heard if you've heard the pleasure drop the bed that it's so it's not just a fit okay drugs is the most obvious so obviously you know we at all in neuroscience I'm all recognize that of course drugs are what I call the pleasure trap of course supernormal stimuli is causing finally ineffective and disruptive behavior this is a mess we all recognize that but what if we start looking at other places where the mine is getting disturbed okay so it's getting disturbed also in the food supply well what are we gonna look out there well it turns out that a few people actually find out what direction they ought to go with respect to their food and they can't go there they pay money to Alan Goldhamer and John McDougall joel Fuhrman Neal Barnard and Colin Campbell Caldwell Esselstyn they they you know read they learn there they're there Jeff Nelson as you tried to educate hundreds of thousands of people or more in house and yet they fight it okay why do they fight it because their brain wasn't designed for these options wasn't designed to actually live in the universe with these opportunities so now we see aha it's a trap okay that the pleasure signals are a stone-age signal biological success and what are we getting instead we're getting a relentless march towards moderate intermediate level self-destruction that's at a different level of intensity than when we come after kind of come out for with heroin or methamphetamine or something like that it's the same process but it's a different degree of intensity and a different degree of damage right is what it is so then when we bring the camera back we find out up twenty percent of the country is still smoking we have five percent of the country is addicted alcohol that's some there's an overlap between those but there's at least 20 something percent and now we look at the wider issues how many people are struggling with their health the answer is a lot okay you don't see it so much in young people but by the time we're 50 we see it all over the place and now why is that and the reason is because the fit it's beyond that also energy conservation circuits are also going to incentivize the organism to not exercise okay of course it's designed by nature to be as efficient as possible and trying to get the calories in order to to locomote the organism around its environment to try to take advantage of what other opportunities there are but it's designed by a nature to minimize those things oops there's another trap okay so the we finally get down to then I mean there's there's more the next trap that caught our attention was the electric light bulb yeah about that time it was the late 90s they one of the co discoverers of the REM cycle it's a guy by the name of William demin professor at Stanford he'd been long the long-standing grand old man of the Stanford Sleep Lab and world famous and and so demin wrote a book kind of asuma of his career it's called the promise to sleep at about the same time one of his colleagues longtime colleague of his corn album James Maas wrote a nicer sweeter more pop version called powerslam so Maas had with the better publicity people by far way smarter sold a lot more books and was about about a tenth of the depth I read both of them and the promise to sleep was magnificent it was it was the opus of of a great man's career and by the time I read that book I realized this is a pretty big deal and this is a big part of what we're gonna call the pleasure trap which is the mismatch between the the mind that you have and the environment that you find yourself in and the inexorable mistakes that are going to take place because of that mismatch and so we wrote about that and we made a pretty big deal about it and now 20 years later I just read another book recently that revisits the issue of sleep I have to tell you folks it's huge it's way bigger than I thought the book is called why we sleep I think the author's Walker and he say he's now the head honcho at the Berkeley Sleep Lab and so the I'm thinking about talking about this in Las Vegas by the way AJ I'm no I mean switch up when I talk about yes yeah the anyway it turns out that that us in the plant world are well aware of how important food is and what a fight it is to do it right but right next to this my friend Rip Esselstyn has a that's a way that he describes how it says food is the king and exercises the point and that always made sense to me and I felt like that that was a good eyeballing of the evidence and now I don't think so okay I think exercise is a bishop and I think sleep is the queen and it looks from the evidence so let me give you a few facts that come come to light now in the last twenty years it appears that if you get six hours of sleep a night in your lifetime you've got at least two 200% double-doubles the chance of you dying of a heart attack two to one that's a big deal if you if you have six hours of sleep as opposed to eight hours sleep I have a 40% increase like the dying of cancer pretty big deal if you have a single night of sleep where you slept for hours it will reduce the amount of anti cancer cells helper killer cells by 70% overnight wait are you saying that it's better to get four hours no no that or words you will reduce your reduce those cells if you infect people with a cold virus and they have six hours to sleep versus a it could be five against seven I can't remember the exact study but it's a two-hour differential the difference of likelihood of having that fulminate into an infection is 50% versus 18% pretty big difference okay so you start to see it turns out similar numbers for diabetes fascinating is also calories eaten and choices of food it turns out that if you're short of sleep you're more likely or you will likely eat 300 more calories that day and the choices of the food that you eat are are more pleasurable okay so I didn't know that there was that many dots connected to this and so now I do know and so this is this another little thing that we need to share with the vegan world also I my mother is suffering from Alzheimer's and has been for a long time and I've known and been thinking that the main thing that we need to be doing is being worried about her food okay so she's pretty unhealthy and so so but I've been watching this deterioration for years and thinking well you know I can clean up a food some more but I'm still watching the deterioration and she does some other things that that as people age and they get older you just feel like well what am I really going to be the police here you know I don't really want to be the police I don't want it adversarial you know I love her tremendously so I want to see her enjoy herself two things three things mom likes very much in the world she likes wine she likes coffee and she likes to read romance novels deep into the night sort of like herself that's what she's been doing so so my dad was always too cheap when they got too into restaurants he would never ever order any wine in a restaurant because he's just considered it like why do that when you can buy a whole bottle for $8 why would we spent you know so so she never got to do that but as soon as he passed away a number of years ago when I take her out to dinner very often and I would indulge that it's like a mom now you can live how you want to live and then in the mornings I told her you know she'd be drinking coffee okay long drink decaf so number of years ago she I had her starting to drink decaf and I didn't I didn't know this I knew there was some caffeine in decaf but I didn't know how much and it turns out it's about 25 percent of what there is some regular coffee so it's quite a bit and it turns out that the half-life the caffeine is about 7 hours so by the time you're looking at 14 hours later there's still a substantial dose and it turns out but we now know things about sleep but they just didn't know 20 years ago so let me tell you I'll hack this up a little bit but but I'd get it mostly right so it turns out that you've got sort of two major kinds of sleep that we're gonna call REM and non-rem and non REM is gonna dominate your sleep for the first several hours a night it will be almost exclusively non REM sleep at the end of the night the very last sleep cycle or to sleep goes in an hour and a half or so cycles so the last cycle or two you'll have increasing amounts of rent and they call it RAM for rapid eye movement so if you look at the person's if you shine a light on a person when they're sleeping and Ram you're gonna watch their eyes going back and forth all of it it's just a thing of what happens in REM whatever is going on or logically but it turns out now we know what's happening in the brain basically the a major part of sleep is to clean the brain so the brain is full of metabolic debris from the work all day long and so there's breasts morphological changes take place in the brain during sleep where channels open up and the trash is washed out and so it cleans the system out the but then once it's cleaned out and it will take hours to clean it out but once it's cleaned out then the new memories or new information that was gained from the previous day's consciousness will be organized into memory circuits to put the person's new information in context so let's suppose that everything about your life is the same except you went house shopping yesterday and you just found a new subdivision and that subdivision thinks we're about you know 10% cheaper than you thought that there was anything else and you're like wait a second we were planning on doing this and doing that and maybe buying over there but now I have to have a whole new perspective and maybe when we live on that side of town and then but that's going to take us away from Grandma and so suddenly you have to integrate the new information with everything else about how your life is built that's what has to happen and so that's what happens in rent but what happens if you don't spend much time in room if you don't spend much time in ramen then you won't remember what happened to previous day okay and that's my mom waking up you know eight months ago saying something's weird I'm like what she goes where am I like well you're in your house shows this is my house okay so you've got a system it's not laying down those new memories and keeping these things integrated you say now I could talk her through and then reorient her then the circuits have come back online and belong some long-term memories that are still in there then she's okay okay but I started noticing this happening but meanwhile I didn't know enough about this new understanding of sleep to be doing anything different well now I do so now guess she doesn't get any wine anymore like talking take the dog treat out of the dog cage they're not gonna be that bad and guess he doesn't have decaf anymore so we're gonna have to drink post himself like that instead and the other thing is I have a young man who's a family friend who lives with her now looks after her said lights out of 10 hey no more reading romance novels alright why because we don't have that much of those circuits left it turns out that just with everything else in our bodies we are we are undergoing a slow relentless deterioration that's what happens in that influence the brain includes everything yes turns out they're vastly more likely to get Alzheimer's okay so it turns out that we we believe that probably the chief cause of Alzheimer's is probably sleep deprivation yes by not getting the brain watched properly yeah we're getting it's just like not changing the oil in your car if you don't change the oil in your car you can go longer but the point is is that there will be particles of dirt and debris in the engine and it will wear its way through the engine and cause damage that's in fact irreversible what's that that's better well yeah you're integrating the new information into a wider context okay the it's actually extraordinary another experiment that was done this is an amazing experiment they've now now I'm watching a Renaissance now in sleep science it's clearly taking place when I wasn't looking the turns out that if you do motor skill development that before you go to bed and then you sleep on it you'll wake up with massive increased abilities whereas if you do that same amount of drilling early in the day it won't happen so the the the REM sleep will if it just took place just a few hours ago the REM sleep will now integrate that new information much better so professional and serious athletes or dancers and everything else under the Sun would be wise all professional practices should be at night they don't know that yet but don't incidentally the Golden State Warriors know this just as a matter of fact so [Music] yeah I don't yeah I think it I don't think it matters so much how that all goes down what matters is the total amount of sleep that you get the but it's going to turn out that if we're going to bed really late it's going to usually be the case that there's enough light in the morning that it's going to disturb our ability to stay down and sleep and therefore we're not going to get a full complement of rain so we're gonna be entering the next day usually somewhat tired and not all put together this is where coffee comes in so it turns out there's a specific chemical I forget what it is adeno song I mean somebody knows the that anyway what this thing does is it it's a it's a signaling chemical that as soon as you're awake it starts to build up in concentration it's a it's a it's an analog or the result of the metabolic processes of neurons firing and what happens is is as it builds and builds and builds and builds you finally get sleepy okay that's what it does it causes you to feel sleepy as your brain is becoming more toxic and this concentration is chemical Rises caffeine blocks that action that's how it works it's essentially an anesthetic for that action and as a result people feel better like their brain has been washed but their brain is still polluted and they are continuing to work it so it's precisely like an athlete with a very serious injury and we put cortisone in their me and they can't feel the pain that's what coffee is and so this sets up a cycle where and incidentally then the coffee is still in you 14 hours later wine also by the way is a major alcohol is a major disrupter of REM sleep so now we see why my mom has Alzheimer's because you've got a lifetime of using coffee not not not huge amounts of coffee or wine but this is now along with her late night nighttime reading and night owl psychology this has been bombarded sensually keeping the brain from being clean and that's we need people to understand this yes yeah it doesn't matter you know what city it's still gonna be Josie it's disrupting room yeah psycho farm meds I think it's gonna be rare for anybody to benefit from them I'm not gonna say that they won't because there's going to be there's going to be an occasional bizarre situation where somebody's better off with something usually not used as it's commonly used so somebody uses some strange thing because it helps restless leg syndrome and they sleep better or some damn thing okay it's not going to be that I'm depressed I took an antidepressant I'm better off of it now people will have the experience that that's true and that's because their depression for example is very dynamic oh I would also say that anxiety medications will work but the problem is is they set up a trap because the brain habituates very quickly around these medications in order to restore its the original neural chemistry so yes psycho farm is to me a huge loser I'm not I'm not going to say categorically that that it's a hundred percent that I'm just going to say it's like 99 or 98 percent essentially they should for all intents and purposes never to use and and there may be a rare occasion when god knows how we know who would profit from it I don't know how we would know I don't discount the fact that in the future we may have a better understanding of individual neuro neuro neurophysiology and neuroanatomy benefit from psycho farm agents but right now the track record is horrendous and the the honest accounting of that can be seen in robert whittaker spoke anatomy of an epidemic that really tore the lid off of that story for me years ago good question yes we have a lot of questions from just online viewers which they keep increasing thanks to you or sharing so we have a nurse Angie who's a night night you know night shift yes her question is what about us that work at night are we are we do change it around she's a nurse she has options okay yeah so in other words I would absolutely recommend that people don't be working night shift when you look at the data on that is bad so you know I don't care that you can work two in a row and get three days off and I really like whatever the act like you're right it's in her best interest to take her degree and take her knowledge and skills and negotiate how it is that you can and how the life was right side up it's really not a good idea because otherwise there'd be nobody at the hospital yeah well let those I can't save the world no you're actually not the it's gonna turn out that those sleep aids are gonna go right in and disrupt the very sleep that's going to be useful okay so that's that's a losing proposition the what we want to do is we want to attack the underlying imbalance in your existence that's causing the fact that we're having a hard time getting to sleep so let's look at what those things would be what about excuse me what about not falling asleep but wait like 1:00 in the morning I'm not being able to go back to sleep right are you better off just laying there or you know yeah there's just there's like I said we're gonna back the camera and try to figure out why we even have that problem in the first place the there's a first of all all we have to understand that almost always the the reason is because the person's life isn't being lived consistent with them history so a lot of people don't get nearly enough physical exercise relative to how it is that we were designed to be designed to be built and also so I'm not speaking about you specifically if this question specifically about you but when I hear I'm insomniac I have a hard time with this without asleep it's like okay let's get this straight is there any coffee is there any alcohol what's your diet like yeah are you exercising fairly vigorously everyday and now under those conditions now do you once we've done all those things do we have a sleep problem okay and the answer is almost never and that's so that's where we begin we also begin with a notion of how enticing do we find the media because remember you weren't you you were designed at the end of the day to come back and talk to the village and find out what's new in the village so people want to come at the end of their day and they want to watch some TV and they want to go on the internet and find out what's going on in the village it's natural this is sort of an absolutely natural process that we would go through the problem is it can be unbelievably interesting why because it's a competitive media market that's paid by the dollar per eyeball that goes on their stuff so of course they're gonna make it as interesting and attractive as possible and so as a result your nervous system is going to get yanked towards these exciting exciting light driven attention getting you know stream of data and as a result of that people gonna stay up too late okay so now they stay up too late and now what happens now we're in the trap and we're in the cycle so some of the things that you're talking about are they do happen in and sometimes people even with very good sleep hygiene will have these things happen and when they do happen usually we don't catastrophize over them because it just means that you may be struggling the next day and then it writes itself okay it's also true that this species was not designed to actually sleep in one big stretch and then be up sixteen hours it was actually designed nature to sleep twice so it's designed to sleep in sometime in the afternoon and so so it's a perfectly good strategy to if you if your life in any way allow for it to find a time in the afternoon where you can knock off for half an hour sometimes you just can't do it because if your work standard hours you just can't do this so we're we're gonna have to be stuck with the way it is that we do things one thing that we don't want to do is you don't want to be nodding off in front of the TV at 7:30 or 8:00 o'clock going to sleep for an hour and a half then waking up because then we got a problem because now we've actually washed the brain too much we're really are gonna have a hard time going to sleep at 10:00 so these are some little sleep hygiene things that are worth paying attention to question there's Matt oh no we're not we're not trying to we're not trying to set some world record for how much new information we can get in our head we're trying to draw our lives and so for my mom those things have always been really interesting and so they all I think they will be she even to this you know to this day she's still reading the same 30 novels it's better the authors georgette Heyer by the way so or georgette Heyer was sort of the second coming of Jane Austen in England in the early 20th century and it was a very talented writer and my mom keeps reading same ones yes you know I don't think it really matters I mean if we if we talk to a sleek guy they would tell you don't do it within a couple three hours of going to bed because you're gonna stir up some adrenaline etc which is probably true the so I probably wouldn't be I probably wouldn't be running vigorously an hour before you go to bed but I wouldn't otherwise sweat it the truth is is that we we let we let the evidence come to us we don't have to worry about following rules so carefully that somebody else is laid down we have to discover what it is it actually works for us and so so that that's how I would look at that problem you might not because of the adrenaline there was very hard physical work it's going to be [Music] [Laughter] the yeah there was sex obviously will cause a neurochemical cascade that will help people get the sleep so that's that's part parcel that's also probably how people got back to sleep turns out something uh the it turns out that something that that we became aware of about twenty years ago which is that that early birds and night owls are that its genetic and I was actually relieved to find this out because I'm a night owl and my dad was an early bird and my sister's an early bird and I was always viewed as the lazy flake okay and it turns out that's a that's a cultural widespread feeling is that early birds are these responsible conscientious fine upstanding citizens that get to work on time and been to the DA and the late the night owls are you know I don't know closing bars flaking out coming in way calling in sick and our worthless for him okay just you know other than the bars that's pretty well sums up my career right in their world and in fact to be completely honest I won't be pleased about everything but I'll be pretty honest and the truth is one of the reasons I want to become a psychologist is I want to be in private practice and I want to be a private practice cuz I didn't want to be working for the man I wouldn't have to do that so I was like I'm going to start my work we get I start my work day at 10:00 that was actually I had that in mind when I was 23 and exciting on this career the and I am I'm a night owl and its genetic and now I in this in this new book they actually have an explanation for it is fantastic and I had no idea it's just a thing of beauty it turns out that if you look at a bell curve people's sleeping actually he didn't talk about this as a bell curve and I believe it is but might not be probably at this long story he's talking about it as if it's as if it's three types but I don't believe that that's how human genetics is probably built so I believe actually the distribution is a developer and what he shows is that about 30 percent of humanity is early birds about 40 percent is in the middle and about 30 percent of these or night outs okay and he says the reasons why what's true is that when human beings came out of trees and started sleeping on the ground they were exposed to predators and so they had to have a fire to ward off the Predators but fires are not reliable so it turns out that game theory analysis would say we're gonna split this up we're gonna have some you go to bed early but then you're gonna wake up early in other words you get to go to bed late and your wake up late and so by having this group having a distribution of characteristics on this dimension we cover the group for predators so that I believe this trope that makes complete sense to me that that's true and yes but we're like really smart our brains do work slightly differently in very modest ways but actually most most left are a good deal of left handedness it's a percentage of it I believe is actually caused by problems in development so so not mine so but anyway it's it's just they're very subtle little dominance issues dominance when you say dominance with respect to what how the brain is working what's controlling what but it doesn't work much differently it's just very subtle yeah it's an interesting idea and I believe there's utility in it but not for the reasons the exact reasons that it's it's being thought through my friend and colleague Jennifer Morano Alan Goldhamer wife I was pretty excited about this and so she will talk a lot about that even terminal now the I look at this and I have I have a natural rebellion against some of these kinds of ideas because I try to stand back and look at the human in its natural habitat and try to figure out why would there have been a natural selective advantage ever to try to propose a control and in a conscious in addition on your eating behavior it doesn't make any sense no animal in nature proposes a conscious ambition on its eating behavior so why would this be valuable well I came up with a reason why it is that this can be a useful idea but I would I would not i don't want it i wouldn't want to promote it per se i want to promote the eye the problem that it's addressing the problem that's addressing is a it's a problem that I call the condition cramp and that is the following the following is true about humans I'll just take people through this kind of quickly and be able to be the last that the human beings are an omnivore by nature the original Chelsey's was vegetarian and then 2 million years ago it started to morph into an omnivore and omnivores carnivores typically will eat fairly different than than vegans and the difference is is that vegetarian food is a lot much lower calorie density so it requires a great deal more eating and chewing behavior it's basically a longer process because of the amount of vegetation that has to be digested so chimpanzees for example chew for 6 hours a day that's what they do humans when you put them on the clock will shoot for about an hour a day so that difference is pretty striking and the difference is because of the chloric density of the food that's being needed the a big cat in Africa will typically make one kill a week so them know when they eat that kill they're going to cram it in they're going to get as much in there as they possibly can when you look at an herbivore on the African savannah they're not cramming in anything they are asleep in their food they walk all day on their food and they eat their food at their leisure for hours and hours a day yeah AJ it's more or less what you do so what we're gonna see is that to an herbivore there isn't typically of food deficiency they're surrounded by their food the food is not that exciting it's of low calorie density and they methodically go through the process of acquiring and digesting it so a carnivore the world looks very different though the world is it has a food scarcity and there they're going to have to it's very hiddenness and when they hit they have to get it all that they can before competitors come and get it so in in Africa when you watch like if a cheetah makes a kill they have to eat as fast as they can because a bigger cat is very soon to come on top of that and I believe I could have this wrong but it goes like if a cheetah makes a kill the next thing that made either might be like a Jaguar or or whatever the equivalent is of the Jaguar in Africa Panther or whatever and then the next thing that comes with the Lions so God everybody keeps getting bumped out of the food wall depending upon how big and strong you are so the so as a result you're designed to Cramer high calorie density cream that's what you're gonna do and human beings have that same tendency so it's going to be the case that human beings would have typically been interested in their food and eating their food to natural satiety but once in a while when a kill was made and they have usually when it killed was made it's a modest amount of meat that's distributed throughout the village but when a big killers made there's a lot and it's the right move is going to be eat all that you can stuff in because this is 800 or 900 calories a pound food and the baseline food of the village is 3 or 400 calorie pounds starches and fruit and things like that so it's very rich and very important to cram it in before it rots and get all that you can and even it competitively against your neighbor potentially right so when you see that you see what I call a cram circuit and so you're like okay well that's interesting so be it so why should this be a problem the problem is is that the system was not only designed to cram once in a while once a month twice a month once every six weeks it's not designed to have access to high calorie dense foods on a daily basis not only isn't isn't designed to have access to high calorie dense foods on a daily basis the highest calorie dense foods that would have typically been the object of cramming would have been meat at 800 calories a pound a peanut butter sandwich is 2,000 calories a pound it's two and a half times the calorie density so as a result you can imagine a well-meaning vegan keeping the animal food out of their their life and yet they've got peanut butter sandwich equivalent things and now at night what do they do they eat to satiation on a really healthy meal and they feel fine but there's room for more okay so now what happens is they cram so now they cram in an extra three four five six seven hundred calories it's concentrated enough so they can fit it in there well built to do this and they're motivated to do it because of the high calorie density of the food now if they do that what's going to happen is that if they do it repeatedly the nervous system is actually going to engineer an expectation that it's going to happen okay so it's going to turn out the bad engineering it's going to this is gonna be what we're going to call Pavlovian condition so if you ring a bell every time that you feed the dog then after you do that about ten times pretty soon you ring the bell the dog starts salivating even though there's no food around well if the bell that you're ringing is that every night after you sit you're satiated you're about to head for the concentrated food then guess what the Bell is it's a full stock a full stomach of whole natural food literally rings the dinner bell to a person who is classically conditioned to cramming rich foods after they're already full when you ring the dinner bell ie the classical conditioning cue winds up not being an external bell book literally the stretch receptors of the stomach itself what happens is is that that now activates digestive enzymes being released because it's anticipating that we're going to eat and when you feel those digestive enzymes being released that's called breathing so literally you can be craving food after you full because you've classically conditioned the systems that it's expecting to get it ok so I've had colleagues you know tearing their hair out trying to figure this out for years so joel fuhrman has scratched his head raw saying hunger is in the throat or it's this or that or that's not real hunger I know what he's been trying to say but he didn't couldn't couldn't get it formulated he's watching people continuing to eat past satiety and he's saying you guys don't know what satiety is and he was right but he didn't understand that what he was actually watching was classical conditioning in the cram circuit see that's what's going on Alan also didn't know nobody knew so now we know that's what this is and so it's going to turn out but that's once you set up a classical conditioning process like this it's hard to break it effectively or addicted to that process wanting to take that long it's what your thank you for a friend that's right possible conditioning this is a classical conditioning curve from Pavlov so this is the amount of salivation that the dog has this is a trial one we ring the bell and give food this is trial to trial 3 etc up to trial 10 this is now fully conditioned organism or we're bringing the bell we get to full salvation this by the way is called the learning curve okay you've all heard that term but but we didn't realize it was invented by Ivan Pavlov now so this is the learning curve that he discovered in classical conditioning it's gonna turn out that there's a corresponding curve that incidentally learning sometimes people are sort of terrified of learning and conditioning and what my kids learn when they saw this your dad but a terrible thing this is hey you can unlearn too it doesn't actually do an organism any good to learn if it doesn't know how to unlearn it it would be useless to learn and not be able to unlearn learning is the process of updating your understanding of what nature is and therefore the neuro circuits must be able to be re-engineered once new information comes in otherwise I'm gonna be worthless okay the system itself would be worthless so instead the system is actually quite flexible in what it can learn it can generally unlearn as well and it does so now when we ring the bell and we and we do not present the dog with food so this is now the second curve where the first curve learned now we're gonna watch it unlearn as we ring the bell and don't give it food so the very first time that we do this what we're gonna find is that it's going to have a very high elevation because it just came out of the learning process the second time that we give it to ring the bell and we do not feed it it goes up okay the third time it goes up even higher okay then it starts to come again and this is extinction no it's conceptual there was this first several trials so I don't know every different drug in every different nervous system is gonna be different so I don't know what the cigarette extinction curve looks like as opposed to heroin and methamphetamine or anything else okay but it is about like this so it's gonna turn out that the cram circuit is not going to be more tenacious than methamphetamine okay and or cigarettes so cigarettes we can we can see that curve pretty well but if people can keep their paws off the cigarettes for a couple of weeks they're a pretty good shape the first week is really hard the system actually fights you tooth and nail and does not want to give up the addiction there's a reason why this is true all of these things were actually designed by nature to make sure that animals remained fed if there was conditions in nature or where food was available and there was a reliable queue like for example the chirping of some birds told you that there's some worms that just got released by the river and you're some little muskrat that eats those worms and you can hear it then you're going to get classically conditioned to that sound right now you're if the birds are chirping one day and there's no worms you shouldn't just say oh well no worms I guess that's no longer reliable cue well instead you're going to say is those worms are probably pretty close by if I scratch a little harder in the dirt I'll bet I can find them I don't see them but they can't be far see that would be the correct cost-benefit analysis for the nervous system to run in order to optimize this behavior for survival and it does so whenever you pull a resource away that was expected the animal fights harder with more energy to get it this is the intensity of withdrawal symptoms with any drug okay they are gonna go crazy when you pull it away they're gonna be incredibly upset this is actually called the extinction burst and this is the organisms defense against the loss of an expected reward okay after a while it stops turning that weight that that that much energy it realizes it looks like it's gone so like a brake works yes that's exactly right this is very much like a bit okay the and so then we go down into extinction it turns out that we'll have these little blips and these little blips are kind of dangerous with addiction this is called a spontaneous recovery it was first noted by Pavlov more than 100 years ago that even after we had gone into extinction every once in a while the dogs would spontaneously start salivating thinking that they were going to get dead what's that yeah they go back to that's called check sleeping with your ex back saying it is a problem because you know with an addictive process one if it's reinforced we go right back up pretty high Malloy yes yes it's really good so she's asking a really interesting question in learning theory and that is that if we occasionally reinforce this do we do we make it do we then make it really tenacious to get rid of it yeah yeah yeah you've got a point there okay and so that that I don't think that food in general is only moderately intense stimulus even processed food it's only moderately intense its intense enough to cause this this is the whining that I heard it through North Health Center right there that's what it is that's what they're in what's wrong that's what's going on but it wasn't like the degree of the whining that I've heard in drug rehab okay you don't go through I mean the order of magnitude I mean people can be pretty upset they're not so upset about the pulling this away they're more upset with themselves because they've got very important personal goals and they're so frustrated that they're that they continue to be self-indulgent but the point is is that they're not literally crying in their suit shaking over the lack of a doughnut okay so it's different it has a different tone and feel it's a self frustration where with addicts it's different this extinction burst is literally the neurochemical defense against the drug that it's anticipating and when they don't get it it's extremely uncomfortable and that's what cravings are okay cravings will you have a cigarette and you're getting rid of cigarettes your brain is on a timing clock that expects to get cigarette in the next hour because of that the brain engineers in nicotine defense it literally wants to keep you in a healthy neuro chemical equilibrium and it knows it's about to get knocked out of that equilibrium and so it literally engineers the defense to get ready for the nicotine if you don't give it the nicotine the defense sits in the nervous system and is uncomfortable that uncomfortable sensation is what we call craving if you then smoke they neutralize each other and you feel relieved okay the same thing happens with the cram circuit if you have a condition crown circuit and you're putting away five or six or seven hundred calories after dinner after satiated every night and it's almost always concentrated healthy food I mean help but if you're one of us it's concentrated reasonably healthy food if you do that what's gonna happen is once you have a condition crab circuit the night you don't do it the extinction verse is gonna hit you you're gonna be like well I just kind of deserve it and I oh I've been pretty good really what are we talking about I mean really I'm supposed to be some heroes here in your head it's a it's a g-rated version of addiction that's what it is okay and so second night you're gonna have it third night you're gonna have it tenth night it's going to be pretty quiet that's what I've observed okay so it takes a week or two to quiet that down and to get it into a nice it's not going away forever folks you can remember what rich food tastes like and here's what's worse if you smell it because smelling it isn't a memory that's actually a direct indication of what that's going to taste like so that's a different thing that's why we want to do things shoved a J's and my rule number one is you can't have the junk in the house you know you can't get yourself in situations repeatedly where you're getting tempted because that's that's pushing it too far yes that you're Snickers does that play into this at all or was that just an isolated event that Snickers was a that was just a supernormal stimuli that you know how to be cascaded on me that wasn't this thing that wasn't this because I didn't get conditioned to it okay now it would still I know that it would still taste like wax I mean oh no I can tell that my disgust with it got doled out very quickly okay in other words I take it he's got better and it got better fast like sex with an ex I have the same experience by the way where I went to replaced and [Music] [Applause] why do I see in the freezer is Swiss Amun haagen-dazs okay which is something that I need yours before on occasion so just happened that she had the Swiss almond organized and I thought well I'll just try a spoon for this and actually I didn't and I had the same sensation as the Snickers bar wax that artificial high fat whatever yes like wax and that one I didn't have I didn't polish that one off I just took one spoonful with somebody else's food so I haven't had I haven't had a spoonful sentence that was that was in I could tell you was 1997 this is the last time I had a spoonful haagen-dazs and that was yeah that waxy feeling yes thank you that's somebody pay attention yes the time restricted eating can be a nice rule because what the person needs to establish what I've been telling people is once you need dissociation you walk out of that kitchen and you don't go back you don't go back you know you've had enough food oh if you're a little hungry an hour later don't worry about it there's breakfast tomorrow okay you're not going to starve you were sated at 7:30 at the end of dinner leave don't go back to the kitchens that's how I'm telling people to tame the cram circuit because this is what you have to go through now somebody who says do it eating in windows is doing the same thing by accident they're saying don't eat after 6:30 okay they're accomplishing the same thing but with a with a different vision in mind and that's why I think those are have been helpful for some people is why I think it's been allowing them to counter condition a cram circuit people will tell you if they do that that they got you soon and they're fine and it's like a kind of a surprise to them it's like hey this really works I really I'm starting to lose some weight I feel fine I have no problem and I just I got this habit and I did it I eat in these windows and I'm not going to tell them you don't need to worry about eating the windows you just don't want to indulge the crammed circuit okay so so that that's the truth the truth has nothing to do with the windows it has to do with this an insidious little problem that would could only have been created by humans in the modern environment where they would have consistent access to rich food every day that's the only way you get that happening okay [Music] yeah in other words you could you could facilitate that thing by closing the window I just assume people don't close the window keep the window open but then once you're once you're reasonably done with dinner or whatever it is dad said you're done don't go back to the kitchen you've had plenty of food that's that's how I try to get people out about who knows so it's a new problem for us to try to figure out engineer but that's my basic idea at this point okay couple three more questions oh good question I don't know that anybody knows I think probably the best deal is to sleep dissociation okay so you want to probably be conceivably consistent with your sleep behavior so that you say so that you have plenty of time to sleep plenty but I wouldn't be trying to religiously wake up a Timex if I had the ability to sleep longer and I could sleep longer okay yeah the the reason why I say this is the following the and that appears to be that when you are short of sleep on a single night you will pay back that debt to some degree over the next couple three days if you do but you will never fully pay back other words it appears that any yourself of sleep you have done brain damage that is permanent [Applause] like all this is a bad idea a terrible idea yeah so obviously I had spent many nights where I was up too late and was short of sleep that I've done I've dinged my circuits a little bit so what are we talking about what's that yeah we're talking about like somebody open in their car door into your car door and they just made a little scratch right and then they do it again and they do it again then they do it again then they do it again it's like we come back six years later and we our car doors still there but it's got some dings in it and it's not as good as it once was there and this is this is what's happening and this is why we in in the name of trying to set a circadian rhythm we don't or keep one we don't want to chop ourselves up sleep to satiation any chance you get I think it's the to me I got a lot of good smart friends in this arena they're very worried about making sure everybody has nutritional adequacy but they make sure that they've got enough vitamins and minerals and you know everything all the phytochemicals etc but we're not focused on actually the most critical deficiency that there is which is sleep there you go [Music] because it sounded subject to sleep what do you think of melatonin and CBD oil for sleep and as cocoa is bad for creating Alzheimer's as coffee I don't know about some of these fact that question I know that in general we would never use any agent to mess around with brain chemistry okay so the answer is no now there there may be exceptions like if you're someone that does a lot of coast to coast travel it turns out that melatonin can actually be a useful trick to actually help you stay in a rhythm I don't even know how that's done and I'd have to get a little chart out to do it I don't do it but then I'm not some international travel or that's doing all this kind of thing very often if someone were then you might use that melatonin actually doesn't cause people to get to sleep it does something else it's a I just I've learned too many new facts about this and I was short of sleep when I was reading it ya know that's up but we're not going to it was clear that we don't for example quote take a bunch of melatonin so that we can get to sleep that's a mistake and so is any other sleep aid alright last question or two you know oh god that's a great question so I dutifully slugged my way through one piece and I got to about a hundred pages to go and it was so boring [Applause]
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