SciShow Tangents - SciShow Tangents Classics - Sleep

Episode Date: December 27, 2022

There are no two ways about it: winter is a great time to sleep. In fact, the Tangents crew all decided to sleep this entire week, which is what this episode is a rerun! See you next week/year!SciShow Tangents is on YouTube! Go to www.youtube.com/scishowtangents to check out this episode with the added bonus of seeing our faces! Head to www.patreon.com/SciShowTangents to find out how you can help support SciShow Tangents, and see all the cool perks you’ll get in return, like bonus episodes and a monthly newsletter!And go to https://store.dftba.com/collections/scishow-tangents to buy your very own, genuine SciShow Tangents sticker!A big thank you to Patreon subscribers Garth Riley and Tom Mosner for helping to make the show possible!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions! While you're at it, check out the Tangents crew on Twitter: Ceri: @ceriley Sam: @im_sam_schultz Hank: @hankgreen

Hey everybody, Sam here. The Tangents team is taking our annual winter break to catch up on some much-needed rest, so this week we have a rerun for you, and we're taking you all the way back to Season 1 for a classic episode about the science of sleep. Now curl up under a big blanket and get nice and cozy as we all go off into Slumberland. See you next week. As always, I'm joined by Stephan Chin. Hello. Are you still looking at metal bands on your computer there? Are you done with that? No, I'm done. I closed all the tabs. Thanks.

I appreciate your input, though. I needed some expertise. Stephan knows a lot about metal bands. I know a lot of metal band names. Stephan, what's your tagline? Brutal. Nice. Sam Schultz is? Brutal. Nice. Sam Schultz is also here.

Hello. Nice plaid shirt. I have only a few shirts. This is one of them. How many shirts do you have? Like five. You have five shirts? How many shirts do you have? Oh, I'd say maybe 20 or 30.

Okay. What's your tagline? Fatality. Sari Riley is also here. Hello. Good green sweater. Thank you. Yeah, this is also in the realm of...

How many green sweaters do you have? I actually have two green sweaters. Oh, okay. Yeah, because they're both comfy. Yeah. It's like a blanket on my body. Do you have the same one? No, I don't have the same one.

I have like a bigger one and a slightly smaller one. What's your tagline? Help. Is that my metal voice? Great. I'm not going to give you another chance. That's the one we're sticking with. Because I'm in charge and I'm Hank Green.

And my tagline today is bougainvillea. What is that? That was pretty metal. It's a flower. Oh. Well, it sounded very metal. None of you know what a Boogenvea is? No, it sounded vaguely.

I'm the only person in the room that knows about Boogenvea. Anyway, every week here on SciShow Tangents, we all get together to try to one-up and amaze and to delight each other with science facts. We're playing for glory, but we're also keeping score and awarding Hank bucks. We do everything we can to stay on topic, but judging from our previous conversations,

we won't be great at that. So if the rest of the team deems a tangent unworthy, we will force you to give up one of your Hank Bucks. Now, as always, we introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. This week from me. I like to sleep so much. It's really nice.

I like to sleep so much. It's really nice. It's warm inside my bed. And I get real mad when I'm awake instead. Do-do-do-do-do-do. When I'm awake instead But I think it's kinda weird actually That I spend so much time asleep A whole unconscious life inside my head Oh no, no, no

I'm a sleepy man Oh sleepy man I'm purging man Oh sleepy man I'm purging toxins from my brain Sleepy man If I don't do it I will go insane And I think it's kind of weird actually And I think it's kind of weird Actually

Yes, it's pretty freaking weird Actually Oh, yeah. At first I was like, you're just filling up all this time with music so you don't have to have as many lines. But then it picked up. No, my thought was no one's ever going to be able to do a poem that good.

It's like a two Hank Buck kind of poem. And all of our poems are in it. Whoa, whoa, don't. No, no, no. Hey, now. Hey, all right. I feel like. There's a proposal on the table.

One for you, one for the guitar. I think it makes sense. Yeah. Wow. There are two voices. This opens the door, though. I've been thinking about a rap poem. Oh, no.

I'm going to bring my boom box. Oh, no. Okay. I'm in. So the topic for the day is sleep. That was so good. Oh, thanks. So sleep, Sari, what is it? What the topic for the day is sleep. That was so good. Oh, thanks. So sleep, Sari, what is it?

And what is it? Just what is it? It's very hard to define. Even sleep scientists have a lot of trouble defining it. I found four bullet points on a medical Harvard website that says, sleep is a period of reduced activity. Sleep is associated with a typical posture, such as lying down with eyes closed in humans.

Sleep results in a decreased responsiveness to external stimuli, but there's still brain activity. And sleep is a state that is relatively easy to reverse, which distinguishes it from hibernation or coma or things like that. Other than that, what is sleep? These are the characteristics of it. But as far as like what's actually happening in your brain, we're not including that in the definition. Yeah, because we have no idea. I found a very good quote from a sleep scientist, William Dement, who co-discovered REM sleep and had spent more than 50. He spent his whole life studying sleep.

He said, as far as I know, the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy. So am I purging toxins from my brain? Maybe, yeah. Probably. Maybe, yeah. Don't look at me. That's what we think. Yeah, maybe purging toxins,

maybe consolidating memory, maybe, I don't know, all kinds of things. Like giving your brain a time to reset in some way because it's not inactive. And during certain kinds, I think REM sleep,

it's like even more active than you're awake in some cases. Oh, yeah. And now it's time for Triggered Fail. One of our panelists has prepared three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real. The rest of us have to guess or determine through the fact that we already know things, which is the true fact. If we do, we get a Hank Buck. If we get tricked, then the presenter gets the Hank Buck. And this week, it's Sam.

All right. Let me sleep on it is a common idiom, basically meaning that you'll think about something overnight and have an answer the next day. But could sleep actually help you solve problems? Science says, maybe. A 2018 study from Cardiff University proposes a theory that non-REM and REM sleep might work together to reorganize your thoughts and memories and allow you to wake up with a new

perspective on things. Non-REM sleep, they say, strengthens memories and extracts patterns from context. And REM sleep creates new, seemingly random connections in your brain. And that these two things together might be the thing that makes you wake up and be like i got it because you're just thinking about stuff in a new way but this research might be new but many scientific breakthroughs have been attributed to particularly revelatory dreams so which one of these was allegedly discovered in a dream good i'm glad that that first thing wasn't a fact because i was like that's very true yeah it's true also too long so number one dimitri mandalayev saw the periodic table assemble itself before his very eyes in a dream he then woke up and wrote it down and found it to be pretty much basically correct number two thomas edison had a

dream where he was fishing in a stream with a bamboo pole and then woke up and decided to try bamboo as the filament for his new light bulb, which ended up being able to burn long enough to make his light bulb commercially sustainable. Or number three, Dr. James Watson had a dream where he was pulled in half by two horses and then woke up and had the idea for the double helix in his head. I feel like I'd have heard that. He talks so much. Was bamboo the filament?

I think that there may have been a time when bamboo was the filament before tungsten. It was the early filament. And it's in a vacuum, so it doesn't burn. It just, like, blows. And so I could see me not knowing about any of these. I can see, but I feel like I'd know about the James Watson thing. But here I am getting myself in trouble.

But I feel like Thomas Edison would totally tell that story. Just because that's what he does, tells stories. So we've got Dmitry Mendeleev, Dreaming of the Periodic Table. We've got Thomas Edison, Bam filaments after a fishing dream. And we've got number three, Dr. James Watson getting torn in half by horses in an unpleasant dream, but realizing I am DNA or something. Yeah. Yeah. To me, the connection there is very strange, which makes me think it's true.

Because maybe the other ones are too neat. Yeah. Too neatly connected. Well, yeah, Mendeleev's is just like, I thought of it. Yeah. But that makes me think

that might be the real one. I don't know. That one seems the most plausible, but it also seems like the easiest one that Sam would make up is like, of course,

blocks coming together as a periodic table. Right. Seems rude somehow. Well, I wasn't trying to dunk on you. Yes. Wouldn't be the first time you dunked on somebody today. I know.

I'm just snarky for some reason. So the thing about that one is that, like, Mendeleev knew a lot about chemical elements, and he was thinking about, like, periodicity and was like, that could be something that would actually happen in a sleeping brain like oh!

and you wake up and you're like I don't even want to pee first I gotta write this down Stefan pick I'm gonna go with the double helix DNA dream oh I'm gonna go with Mendeleev I'm gonna go with Mendeleev

the correct answer is Mendeleev so he was gonna go with Mendeleev. Okay the correct answer is Mendeleev. So he was already studying this stuff like all the time. Yeah. And he was writing a textbook and thinking about it extra hard I guess and then he went to bed and he said he saw the whole thing just come together and it was just the first draft there was things wrong with it otherwise but like as far as it went he said that his first draft basically came out of his head to the paper basically yeah perfect and there were a lot of like things we didn't know like he didn't like he wasn't able to put the whole table together because there were elements we haven't discovered right but he knew that those elements some of them at least would have existed yeah that's the coolest thing about the table he was like there's something missing yeah go find it

okay so but also i have a confession to make that I realized as I was reading them, Stefan gets a point too. What? Because my question turned out to be not correct to what all the choices were. So he actually did, James Watson did discover the double helix in a dream. I miswrote the question. Oh.

He discovered it in a dream, but it was a dream about walking up a staircase with another staircase intertwining it. Yeah, that's don't bullshit so hard on that also a lot of people don't believe that is horseshit like that is textbook james watson horseshit and thomas edison so you get a point yeah i'm sorry thank you very much i was missing so then uh thomas edison didn't have a dream but he actually just went fishing with a bamboo pole and was like,

ah, I'll use this. Oh, it was. That's amazing. I was in real life inspiration. Yeah, I would have been very surprised

because that's the kind of lie that like, if I came up with that and I was like, I'm creating this lie. The horse got split in half and he came up with DNA. That's like,

no, no one's going to believe that. So if that had been a lie, you would have out-thought me. And I would have been sad about my own existence. But one more thing I thought was cool that somebody said that they thought of in a dream. I don't really believe any of these that much, but

Albert Einstein said that he thought of relativity because he had a dream where he was watching cows jump over a fence. And a farmer was on the other side. And after the cows jumped over the fence, he went to talk to the farmer. And he said, all the cows jumped over the fence at the same time. And the farmer said, ah, I saw all the cows jump over the fence one by one.

And then he woke up and he had relativity in his brain. I mean, he was inspired by it. I could see that. Like, you know, you're playing around with ideas and you're like, oh, what if? Yeah. I don't know. I'm not, like, I'm much more sympathetic to believing Einstein's bullshit than James Watson's. Next up, the fact off.

But first, a word from our sponsor. Welcome back. Hank Book Totals are... Sam, you have nothing because you gave away one of your points. That's fine. You also... I'm fine with that. Gave me an extra one along with Sari. I feel like you're just spreading the love around.

It's lonely at the top. I need somebody to catch up to me. Stefan, you got one point. Sari, you got one point. I'm at three. Oh, God. That's a lot. Well, you gave me two.

It was a good poll. I defend that choice even though it sets me farther behind. I guess I do, too. The biggest problem is that I'm never not bringing the guitar to a Science Couch poem ever again. Now, get ready for the fact-off. Two of our panelists bring science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. We each, me and Sam, have a Hank Buck to award to the fact that we like the most. And we're going to choose who goes first by the person who dreamed most recently, by which I mean the person who woke up last. Oh, I set my alarm for 6.50 because I had to wake up and start editing the script. Dedication.

I got up at 8.26. Nice. All right. So Stefan dreamed most recently and will go first. Still tired, though. So you've got a little part in your brain called the basal ganglia. Of course I do. Which is...

We assume. Yes, no, of course. But that's associated with a variety of things like controlling voluntary movements and like selecting an action out of multiple possible actions to take but damage to both sides of the basal ganglia can cause a thing called auto activation deficit which is like intense apathy and an absence of self-initiated behavior so like you don't have thoughts yourself but if if i I asked you a question or asked you to go do something, you're perfectly functional and able to do that. They described it as total mental blank,

no thoughts except when an external stimulus or interrogator provokes. Ooh, that sounds very bad. Yeah, it does not sound pleasant. And it mostly just happens when there's brain damage in some way, like a lack of oxygen or blood flow or from surgery causing damage to that area. But so the people who have this are sort of failing to be able to trigger thoughts and actions when it's internally motivated.

And because everything that's happening during sleep is internal, these researchers wanted to see if people with that syndrome still experienced dreams um so they had 13 patients who have the syndrome and 13 who didn't and they observed them over a couple nights to see what was going on so they monitored them over two nights like videotaping eeg they like put belts around them to measure their like breathing nasal pressure had microphones like all kinds of stuff. And then on the second night, they woke them up during non-REM sleep and during REM sleep. And then like I think they also had them keep like a dream journal outside of those two nights to like get sort of a baseline or something. But so it turned out that 12 out of the 13 people without the condition had mental activity when they were awakened from REM sleep.

But only four out of the 13 did who have the brain damage. So some of them still had dreams, but the ones who did, they were shorter and less bizarre. They had like a team of people like independently, blindly, like assessing the dream journals. Bizarreness. Yeah, the bizarreness of the dreams. And that there's not as much emotional

or narrative content to it. This result seems to support, I guess there's multiple ideas, as we've talked about, but we know very little about sleep and dreams and things like that, and brains. There's a couple ideas about how dreams form or where they start.

It was described as sort of bottom-up or top down um and so like when we're imagining things when we're awake that's top down where you have like thoughts that are in your higher level thinking areas and then those stimulate feelings in the more like primitive or brain stemmy regions um i say primitive with quotes yeah and that sort of like goes with like how Freud would view dreams, like sort of revealing your higher thoughts or your subconscious thoughts in the dream. But these results would suggest that it's more bottom up, that like there are areas in the brainstem that are initiating REM sleep. And those may also be creating these like sensory perceptions.

And then your higher level brain is sort of interpreting that and creating narratives around it. So even with this brain damage, they can still have dreams, but because they don't have the higher level or access to the higher level thinking, they can't have like the full dreaming experience, I guess. That's fascinating to use, you know, using damage that has already happened to patients to be like, well, we can discover a little bit about this tremendous mystery. Yeah. Because like a lot of the ways that we understand how things work in our body is by looking at what happens when they break.

And so with the brain, it's very difficult to do that because everything is so vital. But when it's something small like this this how does one small change in biology affect how you process whole things and dream and total mental blank yeah um yeah but cool that we get an insight into some of how dreaming is working because like that's exactly when we say like this it's a mystery but like knowing some level of like where like how we we are doing this interpretation and that we are being sort of fed signals to create a narrative around. I feel like that's only in the last, like, 30 years that we've kind of gotten our head around that. And now it seems pretty understood that this is what dreams are made of. Some people think that there's no reason that we dream, that it's just like biochemical

side effect of like what happens in our brains when we're sleeping. And that I hate. I hate that thought. That seems completely possible. It seems possible. That seems very, yeah. That's how everything else in your body works. I don't like it.

Chance. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I feel okay about that with food where it's just like this is a biochemical side effect of needing to be alive like yeah i have to take energy into me and like having a dream it's just a biological side effect of yeah but like with the things that my brain is doing to do its work when it's a process that's happening in the the seat of consciousness yeah it feels

like it should at least be influenced by that yeah get used to it buddy oh no all right sari you dreamed recently so long ago um okay So narcolepsy is a really unique and intense sleep disorder. If you haven't heard of it before, the main symptoms are too much sleepiness and something called cataplexy, which is like muscle weakness that gets triggered when you experience intense excitement or other strong emotions like fear or laughter or anything that's intense. And so narcolepsy was first described in medical literature in Germany and France around the 1870s and 1880s. But the definition was really hand wavy and incomplete. As far as I can tell, part of the problem was not having like a group of people to study. It was just like, there's this person who falls asleep. What do we do with that? And there wasn't a good

enough understanding of the nervous system and daytime sleepiness and stuff. So it wasn't pinpointed to a particular phenomenon. And the research was sort of frozen for a century until the 1970s when Dr. William Dement and Dr. Christian Guilleminot were studying sleep and specifically narcolepsy at Stanford. And they started working with an animal model to do this and when i think of animal models like my brain jumps to mice or rats or killifish or maybe like monkeys if you're trying to approach something human but the key to understanding narcolepsy is having an animal that demonstrates clear emotions because those are what trigger cataplexy what animal demonstrates emotions do you want to guess dolphins no dogs yeah so that's how the stanford canine narcolepsy colony was born the stanford sleepy dog yeah the sleepy dogs uh so basically dement was going around and like trying to find people with narcolepsy and someone someone, as far as I can tell the story, was like someone said that their poodle had narcolepsy.

Hey, I got a sleepy dog. Yeah, I got a sleepy dog. Want to look at this sleepy dog? I clap my hands at its face and it falls over. Or like when they get excited, like it's time for food. And they get really excited and they start wagging their tails. They get excited all the time. I know.

It's so sad. and so like that happened and then soon after they found some dobermans that were narcoleptic and when they bred these dobermans together i don't think it was doberman plus poodle but they noticed that narcolepsy was hereditary it was autosomal recessive, so both parents had to be narcoleptic for the puppies to be narcoleptic. But from breeding them from around 1976 to 1995, nearly 500 narcoleptic dogs that were mostly Dobermans were raised to study narcolepsy. And it's just like very cool that they had all these dogs to do this with. And to give sort of a highlight reel, this is when Dr. Emmanuel Mignot came into the picture and through lots of studies on these dogs, the team found the key hormone involved in narcolepsy called orexin or hypocretin, plus genes in dogs and then genes in humans that are linked

to the disorder. At this point, we've learned even more like how narcolepsy is probably an autoimmune disorder in humans. So there's a region of the brain that produces compounds like orexin, and your body's attacking that region of the brain, so you're not producing enough to be able to stay wakeful enough. So all very complicated, all very interesting. But to return to the dogs, it's a happy story, which I also really liked, which you don't always hear in animal testing. No, never.

These researchers loved the dogs, and they took really good care of you don't always hear in animal testing. No, never. These researchers loved the dogs, and they took really good care of them, and they were just observing them. They all had names. They were all treated really well. After the experiments, they were all pretty much adopted as far as I can tell. Dr. Minow is still involved in narcolepsy

research and treatment today with a narcoleptic chihuahua named Watson by his side. He has all these really nice quotes about like learning from having adopted several narcoleptic dogs over the course of his research how to empathize better with patients because he can see how his dog gets really excited to play or really excited to have food and then all of a sudden has a cataplexy episode and it interrupts their life and so it's given

him a lot of insight into how to help patients, especially kids with narcolepsy who just don't know how to handle it. When you're seeing the kid, you can be like, look, I know what you're going through. My chihuahua's got narcolepsy. That's it. I stand by my guess I think dolphins

have emotions dolphins are more obvious they're made of plastic you can't tell what they're singing ever they smile they're always smiling

they always smile that's the thing about dolphins they look happy even when they're not yes always happy dolphins it's a band

always happy dolphins I love them, yeah. No, I hate you guys. If you just said, like, Always Dolphins, that would sound more like a band name for some reason. Yeah, Always Dolphins. It's like Imagine Dragons. Yeah, that's our Imagine Dragons cover band, Always Dolphins.

I don't know any Imagine Dragons songs. I mean, I know one. That's an Imagine Dragons song? I think so. I must just not know that it any Imagine Dragons songs. I mean, I know one. That's an Imagine Dragons song? I think so. I must just not know that it's Imagine Dragons. Because before music starts, it doesn't say, we're Imagine Dragons. But it should.

I mean, a lot of, like... At the end, it does. Hip-hop often, they do that. Jason Derulo, he puts it in all of his songs. Jason Derulo. I love that. Anyway, that's not going in the... Oh, shoot. It's not going in the episode.

Yeah, because that's a Jason Derulo tangent. Okay, I accept my fate. So we have Stefan with auto-activation deficit sufferers being used to understand dreams better. And from Sari, narcolepsy research being done with sleepy dogs at Stanford. Gosh. Happy sleepy dog story. Happy sleepy dogs, yeah. You had to find a happy animal.

I don't know. I'm going with Stefan. I think I might too. Whoa! He said, in the seat of consciousness. That blew my mind. That's the thing that's been at first place. Yes. Yes. The the seat of consciousness. That blew my mind. That's it. Yes.

Yes. The iron throne of consciousness. I'm going to say that every time. I mean, you can think about dogs where dogs sit in your consciousness and in your heart. Terry, it's too late. I already did. I know. And now it's time for Ask the Science Couch. We had so many this week.

People are very curious about sleep, where we ask listener questions to our couch of finely honed scientific minds. This week's going to be read by Stefan. At L. Hodnefield and at CinnamonPizza8 ask, are there genetic factors that cause people to sleep better than others? Are there genetic factors that cause people to want cinnamon pizza right now? Yeah, I think that would be good. Yeah, it's whatever makes you want sugar.

Because I have that one. I don't know about cinnamon pizza. It would be the crust, maybe. It would be cinnamon. Yeah. Okay. Recently on the SciShow YouTube channel, we talked about night owls versus morning larks. Chronotypes.

Morning people and chronotypes and how that affects. And that's like a genetic thing that affects when you like to sleep. But because society is set up for morning people more so than for night owls, night owls tend to have worse sleep. So I guess that's kind of a genetic thing that leads to that, but it's also societal. I hope there's also like insomnia probably also. Like, I would not be surprised if insomnia had genetic factors. But I don't know that for sure. But I'm saying 90%, I bet.

I'd go, I'd do a double down on that. Can you bet some on us? The science couch is now gambling. Can you bet some on us? The science catch is now gambling. It's hard to look up specific genetic mutations that cause these things because, like we mentioned maybe in the definition section, that there are so many things that influence sleep. So regarding like chronotypes and things like that, there are things, there's advanced sleep phase syndrome, which are morning larks larks i guess people who go to bed very early and then wake up early and then there's delayed sleep phase syndrome which is late bedtime late wake time so what are you some people don't have one or the other though right yeah people are

in the middle most people are in the middle but then they're skewed to either side um and i think with the dsps so the late the late night owls there's a mutation in a gene called cry one which yeah that's how i feel maybe sometimes um and it encodes a protein that is involved in circadian rhythm proteins like clock uh which is very good name clock yeah it's a gene uh it's all caps it's not a gene probably a protein i just googled clock okay usually do uh i think it just is part of like the circadian pacemaker type stuff so like your cells have internal clocks and and things that are keeping time and so it is involved in regulating that um there's a clock inside of you many of them yeah so cry one normally suppresses circadian rhythm stuff uh and so the mutation causes it to suppress clock and other related

proteins even more which means that they let that led to later bedtime so probably like you're more shifted from like matching your bodily cycle to the sun and like a more average daytime cycle and you're pushed later so So what I found was interesting is there are studies about naturally short sleepers that has to do with orexin, which is the hormone I mentioned earlier that has to do is involved in narcolepsy. But like orexin is linked to wakefulness. So it's something that your body produces to help you stay awake. Can I take a pill of it? that your body produces to help you stay awake.

Can I take a pill of it? What I've read about narcolepsy is that we don't have a chemical or a prescription that someone can take to help with narcolepsy. So we haven't found a way to bottle up orexin in a way that your body can biologically process or in a meaningful amount. So no. But there is a gene called DEC2. So DEC2 is a repressor for orexin expression normally. So like it helps you fall asleep. And so when it's broken, it results in increased expression. And so you're awake more. And so people who sleep like four hours a night and

wake up perfectly fine, a lot of them have been found with this particular gene mutation that has made it like their bodies are just naturally more wakeful and they feel rested after that period of time, which is also part of the mystery of sleep because they can sleep for fewer hours. If someone can do it, why can't everyone do it? Yeah. Seems like this would confer an advantage.

And they do not eventually have necessarily drawbacks from not sleeping. No. Okay. So there's an interview with one person who just like, I wake up at 4 a.m. and I use that time to read or go for a run. And then I love to start my day before everyone else. And they're completely rested. That'd be great. Nice.

If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShowTangents. my day before everyone else. And they're completely rested. That'd be great. Nice. Yeah. If you want to ask the Science Couch your questions, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents where we will tweet

about topics for upcoming episodes every week. Thank you to at KatieDoesntFTBA at ColorMeTrash2 and at BloodyLemonade and everybody else

who tweeted us your questions. We got like 124. Thank you. Yes, it was great. Final Hank Buck scores. Sarah, you have one. Sam, you have a negative one. Stefan came back

with three, tying me up for the lead. I'm on top of the world. If you like this show and you want to help us out, that's really easy to do. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. That helps us know what you like about the show and other people get to see that too. Second, you can tweet about your favorite moment from this episode.

And finally, if you want to show your love for tangents, just tell people about us. Thank you for joining us. I have been Hank Green. I've been Sari Riley. I've been Stefan Shin. And I've been Sam Schultz.

SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz and Caitlin Hoffmeister. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno, and we couldn't make any of this stuff without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you! And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be

lighted. But one more thing. There's a condition called sleeping butt syndrome or dormant butt syndrome that is usually caused by sitting too much, sleeping curled up like a baby or exercising wrong. It's where your butt muscles are too weak. So your other muscles overexert. Oh, I definitely don't have that. Strong butt, Stephan. I just think my butt muscles are so strong that they just squeeze all the veins, and then there's no circulation, and it falls asleep.

Wow, your butt muscles are squeezing their food out. Interesting. Maybe your whole body is just controlled by your butt. It's like forcing your other muscles to do stuff, like the opposite of that. That's what I call a basal ganglia. Butt brain. Yeah, you're a butt brain.