THE ED MYLETT SHOW - The Sleep Doctor: What Bad Sleep Is Doing To Your Health with Dr. Guy Leschziner

Episode Date: September 24, 2024

In this enlightening episode, I sit down with Dr. Guy Leschziner, one of the world’s leading experts on sleep and neuroscience. We dive deep into the pivotal role sleep plays in every facet of our lives, from brain function to overall health. If you think you're getting enough sleep, you might want to think again after hearing this conversation. Dr. Leschziner sheds light on why sleep is so much more than just rest. In fact, it’s foundational to our neurological and physical well-being. He unpacks the science behind why sleep deprivation affects not only your mental performance but can also contribute to serious health risks like cardiovascular disease and cancer. Here's a deeper look at what you’ll discover in this discussion: The Sleep Spectrum: Learn why the average person needs 7–8 hours, but some may need more or less depending on genetics and lifestyle. Sleep Deprivation’s Silent Damage: Find out how lack of sleep can increase inflammation and raise risks for serious conditions like heart disease and cancer. Rewiring Your Sleep Patterns: Discover how cognitive behavioral therapy can help break the cycle of insomnia by changing your relationship with sleep. Sleep Hygiene Tips: From creating the perfect sleep environment to cutting out late-night caffeine, get expert tips on how to optimize your nightly routine for better rest. Why Sleep Apnea is Serious: Learn about the risks of undiagnosed sleep apnea and why getting tested could save your life. Whether you struggle with sleepless nights or feel perpetually tired despite long hours in bed, this episode offers practical advice. From understanding how brain wave states can impact your sleep cycles to the best practices for optimizing your sleep environment, you'll learn actionable steps to help you improve your sleep and your life. Get ready to unlock the power of sleep to transform your energy, focus, and health! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. This is the end of my show. Welcome back to the show everybody. So today we're gonna go out to sleep and by the way, if you don't get great sleep you're gonna listen very closely and if you do think you get great sleep, you may think otherwise after we talked to this man today. I think he's the foremost expert on the

planet in sleep. He's sort of, I don't know, I'd say his work sort of is the convergence of like neuroscience and sleep where it sort of intersects. And I know I need this interview and this conversation, this information as much as anybody on the planet. So I'm going to put him to work today. And my guest today, by the way, great book. He's got a new book out that I should tell you about that we're going to talk about at the very end called The Seven Deadly Sins, but we're going to focus on a previous book of his called The Nocturnal Brain, The Seven Deadly Sins, but we're going to focus on a previous book of his called The Nocturnal Brain, Nightmares Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep, which I need to know a lot about.

Dr. Guy Leshchynner, welcome to the show. Thanks very much for having me, although I think you may have oversold me a little. Well, let's find out. Let's do this and see. I don't think that's the case. So let's start out fundamentally, I think everybody knows this, but you know, health is such a huge topic online right now with everybody. You know, anti-aging, live longer, live stronger. And it's mainly focuses on nutrition, diet, exercise, and sort of this other guy sitting over there, almost nobody discusses or understands and thinks they have kind of wired is sleep. I'm just one of the people that admit I don't. So why does sleep matter so much from a neurological standpoint? Well, I think the obvious thing to say is that we spend

hopefully about seven or eight hours a night doing it. So it must have some importance. And actually if you add up all the hours that you would be expected to sleep over an 85-year period, it's probably about somewhere in the order of about 30 years. So given that we spend so much of our lives doing it, it really illustrates the fact that it is probably crucial to every aspect of our lives.

And certainly emerging evidence suggests that sleep is the, if not the cornerstone, then certainly a fundamental tenet of pretty much every aspect of our waking lives. So it's not just about sleep, it's about life itself. Do you, you said hopefully seven or eight hours. So is there a metric you used to indicate? I was just with somebody, I'll tell you who it was. There's an author named John Maxwell, one of the most prominent authors of all time. One of my dear friends. John's in his late seventies. I was on a speaking tour with him. He sleeps four hours a night and he said, so does his father and his brother.

That's what he was telling me. And I was with him. He's 78 years old. I'm gonna tell you. He kicked my tail energetically on this tour. Is he sort of a freak? Is there a body type, a type of person who can get away with four or five hours? But yet that wouldn't be your advice to most people. I'd love to know about time of sleep since you said hopefully seven or eight hours. Yeah, so we kind of use the ballpark of seven or eight hours as the average sleep requirement for people. But of course, as with any aspect of humanity, there's a spectrum. And there are individuals who fall outside of that seven or eight hours and don't necessarily have

any pathological consequences to that. I think what your friend is describing is we know that there are a few rare families who have extremely short sleep times, extremely short sleep requirements and don't seem to have any negative consequences. But I think that is very, very rare. And for the majority of individuals, they probably sit somewhere between six and a half to eight and a half hours. So for the average individual, you are probably going to have some negative consequences, be that with regard to psychological health or cognition or performance or physical health, if you're sleeping much less than that. And if you're sleeping much more than that, then we know that there are issues.

So for example, when we look at mortality, all-cause mortality or things like cardiovascular disease rates, stroke rates, those increase when people are sleeping more than about nine hours. Now that doesn't mean that sleep is toxic for you, but it certainly implies that there are reasons as to why people might sleep for excessive periods of time, be that through other diseases, be that through drugs that might make them particularly sleepy, or be that through some sleep pathology that seem to incur increased risk of death. So there is this sort of characteristic U-shaped curve

when it comes to things like mortality and sleep duration. So sleep aids, I'll throw them out to you and then I'll let you tell me what you think about them. So nighttime teas that people drink, melatonin, So, nighttime teas that people drink, melatonin, all the way to, you know, a lot of war fighters with PTSD, I know are prescribed Trezadone, which is, and what I've been told, I should be very careful.

I won't even say it. I was gonna say it's non-addictive, but I don't know that that's actually accurate. All the way to something like Ambien, which I'm told can become addictive. And if I'm wrong about all of that, correct me. But how do you feel about those things? And can you blow out a receptor?

Like if you take too much melatonin, can you just blow out the receptor where it doesn't work on you anymore? Will you need more sleep aids if you take medication to sleep over time that your brain requires more of it to shut down. How do you feel about all of those things? Well, I think your question illustrates the significant difference in practice between the US and the UK. Firstly, here in the UK, melatonin is by prescription only. And the reason for that, well, first of all, it illustrates that we do think it works because we wouldn't bother prescribing it. It works for a range of conditions. And I use melatonin very frequently for people who've got issues with their circadian clock, for people with poor quality sleep, for people who act out their dreams or for people who sleepwalk.

So melatonin does work. It doesn't work for everyone. Drugs like trazodone and other sedative drugs have their role for certain individuals. They should be used cautiously and they shouldn't be prescribed to everyone who has a sleep disorder. Most people who have insomnia should really undergo CBT for insomnia first before being prescribed medications. But it would be wrong of me to say that I don't use these drugs very widely. I just use them a bit more cautiously because they all have pros and cons. Drugs like Ambien, like Still Knocked, yes, they are potentially addictive. They are potentially habit forming and really should not be used in a long-term setting for the vast majority of individuals

because they can create issues. And one of the things that you've alluded to, which is this sort of, I think you used the term blowing out receptors, is we know that a lot of people habituate to these drugs. By habituate, I mean that they develop a tolerance for them. They require ever increasing doses in order to get the same effect. And that's essentially what you're doing.

You are getting the system used to having these circulating drugs in it. And as a result, the receptors tend to be downgraded. They tend to be reduced. So you need never increasing dose in order to get the same effect. That's not the case for all of these drugs, but certainly for drugs like Zopaclone and Zolpidem, that can be a major issue. So, Hey guys, I want to jump in here for a second and talk about change and growth. And you know, by the way, it's no secret how people get ahead in life or how they major issue. things and you're around other people that are growth oriented, you're much more likely to do that yourself. And that's why I love Growth Day.

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tell you, I get tired of staying at hotels. I travel a lot in hotels, no offense, but they're getting noisier and noisier and noisier and a lot of things that used to come with the hotel rooms, like room service and other benefits like that, they just don't do it anymore or not like they used to. So my last couple of trips, I told my team, let's just stay at an Airbnb. We stayed at an Airbnb and I'll probably never go back again. It was the coolest experience ever. Privacy, luxurious, the space was great. All of it.

I loved it. And then when I'm there, I was like, wait a minute. I have a home that simply sits a lot. I could be generating revenue on these places. I wonder how this works. So when I looked into it, I'm like, I'm going to Airbnb my place. So now I'm only staying at Airbnbs when I travel, but other people are staying at my house as well.

When I'm gone, it's awesome. I'm generating revenue when I'm not there. So, Hey, I'm telling you, your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much more at airbnb.ca slash post. And what I want to ask you about is I'm asking this, we have a couple friends. Is there a difference between a nightmare and a dream? Number one. And number two, is there something to repetitive nightmares with somebody? So I have friends who, and I have had these two when I was younger, where it's the same nightmare over and over again, you know, you almost realize you're in

the nightmare again, because you've had it so many times, is there something happening in the brain? Is that trauma floating up now in our lives that makes a nightmare slightly different than a dream or a different type of dream and what does a repetitive one potentially mean? So on a neurological basis I think a dream is the same as a nightmare. The difference is really that a nightmare is a dream with negative emotional content and undoubtedly the emotional content of our dreams is affected by our psychological status. So, you know, people who are anxious will often have dreams that have negative emotional content. Anxiety is often a trigger for nightmares, for example.

The second question which you asked is, is there anything to that recurring dream, that recurring nightmare? Well, this goes back to the answer that I gave with regard to post-traumatic stress disorder. So, you know, if you envisage that dreaming is some sort of emotional cleansing of certain memories or certain experiences. And that dream needs to be completed in order for that emotional cleansing to be properly worked through. Then if you wake up from that dream or that nightmare on a regular basis, that process is never finished. And so it's much more likely for you to then have that dream again or that nightmare again because you're waking up because of that very strong emotional content of that memory, be

that a real memory or be that a dream memory, you're never going to complete that process. There is one other aspect to nightmares, which is that people tend to think that all nightmares arise from REM sleep. But we know that a lot of people experience night terrors or other types of dreams because we've learned in recent years that dreaming doesn't only occur in REM sleep, it also occurs in non-REM sleep. So people who have their non-REM sleep disrupted will often have visions of spiders on the wall or rats on the bed or being crushed by the ceiling coming in. Those are rather characteristic of non-REM dreaming. So the difference is that in REM sleep, in what we usually term dreaming sleep, those dreams are typically of a narrative structure.

They're like a plot evolving in our minds. Whereas in non REM sleep, it's much more snippets, visual snippets, often associated with very strong emotions. And that's what causes sleep terrors or night terrors. It's not the same thing as nightmare disorder. Okay. By the way, everybody, we're gonna get to dreams. So if sleep isn't part of your jam, we're about to talk about dreams in a minute. But I want to go to this. You're concerning me.

I'll tell you why. I have some form of heart disease. I'm just curious. I want you to go a little deeper on this. I have struggled with sleep most of my life. Recently, the last year, I've been many nights getting nine and 10 hours and still waking up tired. If there's someone like me listening to this, I just want to go back

to what you just said. Could that be an indicator of something more serious? Well, I think there are really three determinants of how much sleep you need in order to wake up feeling refreshed. The first is genetics. And I think your friend illustrates the importance of genetics in defining your sleep duration, your required sleep. The second is your age. So we know that as we go through life, our sleep requirements are a little bit different. So somebody who is in their 50s is going to have a different sleep requirement to when they were in their 20s and have a different sleep requirement to when they were in their 20s and certainly a different sleep requirement to when they were an infant. The

third thing is whether or not you've got anything that's disrupting your sleep. And one of the most common conditions that disrupt sleep is obstructive sleep apnea, which is when people snore and their airway collapses. And we know that conditions like sleep apnea, first of when people snore and their airway collapses. And we know that conditions like sleep apnea, first of all, they make sleep less refreshing than it otherwise should be. It results in people feeling more sleepy than they should with the sleep that they're getting, but it also confers risk. And those risks include things like diabetes and more broadly metabolic syndrome. So this is the association of diabetes with obesity and high blood pressure. But it also seems to confer a risk of cardiovascular disease and stroke.

Yeah. So if you... I want to interject there. Sorry. I didn't know you were on Zoom everybody. But I want everyone to know, most people in my audience know I'm kind of on a break right now for my health and The reason I wanted to have you on was both of my doctors are obsessed I would say borderline obsession with a couple different markers in my blood but one of the things they're obsessed with is my sleep and sleep apnea and Put me through a bunch of different sleep tests

and sleep apnea and put me through a bunch of different sleep tests. Any of you that live with someone who snores or has any struggle with their breathing when they sleep, that's a very serious thing. And that you should do a sleep reading in my opinion. I'm not a doctor. I'm just telling you, you know, every doctor I've had that's treated me recently is worried about that one thing. I'm going to ask you a controversial question. I don't know if you've ever been asked this before, but my friends that have passed away young and many of them have had

cancer and I know this is a reach, but I want to ask it anyway. One thing most of them had in common was a problem with deep sleep and I'm wondering if you think or no, suspect whatever, that potentially a lack of deep sleep could even, because you said neurology, could even affect gene expression of some type at all. Could the fact that a long-term challenge with sleep affect the way your genes turn on these different things we don't want such as cancer, et cetera.

Do you think there's a possibility of that? Is there any evidence of it? Or would you speculate that that's true? Yeah, I mean, I think that undoubtedly what happens when we don't sleep enough is that there are hormonal changes within our bodies. So in particular, things like cortisol. So cortisol is often raised in response to sleep restriction or insufficient sleep.

Another thing that happens is that there is evidence of increased inflammation within the body. And obviously increased inflammation is a risk factor for things like cardiovascular disease and potentially also cancer. What's interesting is that there is some evidence that circadian rhythm disruption, so people who are sleeping out of rhythm with their internal body clock, so shift workers, for example, is associated with an increased risk of certain cancers. And that evidence has resulted, for example, in certain countries in Northern Europe, in Scandinavia, actually having compensation schemes for government shift workers who develop

certain forms of cancer. And the World Health Organization has added shift work onto its list of possible carcinogens. So certainly there is some evidence to support sleep as being, if not causative, potentially contributory to the development of certain cancers amongst a whole host of other conditions. Is that incredible, everybody? So it's not good to not have deep sleep. We've established that. So what should somebody do?

What hacks or tips do you have that could help somebody who's struggling with sleep, sleep better? Are there routines, methods, you know, I hear often about the cold in the room or a cold blanket or a cold pad, total darkness in a room, anything like that you believe in or you'd add to? Yeah, I mean, I think that what you're describing really is what we would broadly term sleep hygiene. So these are the behaviors surrounding sleep that are conducive to sleep. Certainly a dark room is really quite important. In fact, there was a recent paper that came out of China that used a very big patient

resource in the UK called the UK Biobank that looked at light exposure and risk of diabetes. And they found that actually light exposure in the bedroom at night was associated with an increased risk of diabetes. So, light exposure is really important. I think it's very difficult to be didactic because for example, different temperatures in the room very much depend on your own physiology and your own anatomy and people prefer to sleep at different temperatures. Certainly, cutting out caffeine at an appropriate time, it's important to understand that caffeine can hang around for a long time. And if you drink enough of it, it can hang around for an awfully long time. So making sure that your caffeine intake is relatively moderate,

making sure that you're not doing lots of stimulating activities like scrolling on the internet or watching these kinds of interviews late at night in bed, is all very conducive to good night's sleep. It's important to stress that sleep hygiene, which is a horrible term, but it's something that a lot of people recognize, is not going to suddenly transform you from being a chronic insomniac into sleeping like a baby.

And there are other techniques or other treatments that are perhaps more appropriate. If you've tried making these changes to your behavior surrounding sleep and you're still sleeping very badly. A lot of people tell me everyone that alcohol contributes to their lack of being able to sleep, which is ironic to me because it's a depressant. I would have thought that, you know, it help people sleep, but so many of my friends say, well, if I drink alcohol, especially as they get older, they have a hard time with deep sleep. By the way, I appreciate you saying they shouldn't be watching the show late at night, but I have been accused of putting people to sleep, so maybe they should listen to me. If you listen to the show for a while, you've heard me and my guests talk a lot about how critical it is to have your wellness goals in order, especially lately with me.

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to get free shipping and a 365 day return policy. Quince dot com slash ed. I want to ask you this question. So this is from my producer. I've never done this before on the show. Ever had my producers ask a question. But this is such a topic and we're going to talk about dreams in a minute everybody. But here's what Steven's asking. He says, I go to bed around 1030 or 11. question, but this is such a topic and we're going to talk about dreams in a minute everybody, but here's what Stevens asked him. He says, I go to bed around 10 30 or 11, but I don't fall asleep

until about 12 or 1 a.m. and when I do fall asleep, I'm waking up around 3 or 4 a.m. I'm struggling to get good sleep constantly thinking in bed but not stressed, why would that be or what would your recommendation be? Why would that be if he's not stressed? He's just, he can't stop thinking. Yeah. So, so, um, one of the key aspects of people who develop insomnia is that they develop on a, sometimes on a conscious level, but sometimes on an unconscious level, altered associations between bed and sleep. So what I mean by that is that for most of us, the bed is an environment that is associated with a diminishment of brain activity, a relaxation.

But in individuals who have spent an awful lot of time in bed awake, that association is broken. And instead they begin to associate either on a conscious or an unconscious basis, an association between bed and wake. And so what a lot of people experience is a term that we use quite frequently, which is hyperarousal. So this is where your brain is activated. The hormonal systems within your brain is activated, the hormonal systems within your

body are activated, all of which precipitate an awakening and elevation of wakefulness in bed. And that is crucial to the development and the persistence of chronic insomnia, because we need to try and break that association between bed and wake and rebuild the association between bed and sleep. So what Stephen is describing is a really characteristic feature, which is termed hyper arousal associated with the sleeping environment. Should he, I mean this may be as extreme, should he switch rooms? Should he go to sleep in a different room to change the association short term and then come back when the association's been broken?

Yeah, so one of the ways in which we try and treat this is through a technique which is termed cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. And this has really become the gold standard treatment for people with insomnia. It's a structured program during which we try and break that negative association and rebuild it. And there are some tenets to it that I think very much are in keeping with what you're saying. So we tend to suggest that if people are awake in bed for more than about 20 minutes, they actually remove themselves entirely from the sleeping environment, go and do something relaxing like listening to music or reading a book,

not exposing yourself to bright light, not consuming caffeine. And then when they start feeling sleepy again, to go back into the bedroom environment and try and go to sleep again. One of the other tenants of that is really to try and limit the amount of time that you are spending in bed awake. And the way that that is done within the umbrella of cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is a protocol which is called sleep compression

or sleep restriction. So say for example, Steven is only spending six hours a night in total in bed asleep, yet he's spending nine or 10 hours in bed, then what we would say within that context is, okay, for a period of time, we want you just to stay in bed for six hours, whether you sleep or not. And in the first few days, he will still have that insomnia. He'll still have that difficulty getting off to sleep. But as time goes on, he will become more and more sleep deprived. And the sleep deprived brain, when it's really sleep deprived, will go to bed. And eventually,

what will happen is when he gets into bed at say midnight, because he's very sleep deprived, he'll fall asleep very quickly. And the brain is an adaptive creature. If you're very sleep deprived, it will try and compensate for that. Gradually, what that does is it reduces the amount of time you're in bed awake and is the first step in the process of breaking that association between bed and wake and rebuilding the association between bed and sleep. That is so good. I have to anecdotally tell you that because I have struggled with this, I have decided that that is the place I sleep and that's it. And so that means guys like you shouldn't be watching TV

before you go to sleep at night. But if you do, I don't watch it in bed because it's trained me that I'm awake in that bed for two or three hours. I don't get up in the morning and scroll my phone while I'm still sitting in bed because it's training me to be awake in that bed. So little things like that are, they're significant

and they can impact your health, your performance. Of course, we already talked about this, but you know, weight gain, obviously with cortisol levels, there's all kinds of impacts on not getting the sleep that you need. Hey guys, you've been hearing about Mint Mobile probably everywhere and I'm super excited that you're hearing about them now on the Ed Mylet Show because I just switched my daughter's long-distance service over to Mint Mobile because these the same 5G service everybody else is using but it's so much less money. So with big network providers, the big wireless ones, what you see is what you get. Somewhere between the store and your first month's bill, the price you thought you were paying magically skyrockets. So you can say bye-bye to your overpriced wireless plans

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on an unlimited plan. Additional taxes, fees and restrictions apply. See Mintmobile.com for detail. What happens when we dream and why do some people recall dreams more vividly than others? What, why do we dream? Well, that's a very important question that I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to fully answer. I think we have some indications as to why we dream. We think that it is important for memory consolidation. There are, there is some evidence that dreaming is also about emotional processing. So for example, cleansing our experiences, our daytime experiences of their emotional content. There's quite a lot of evidence, for example, when you look at people who've got post-traumatic stress disorder, one of the reasons why they repeatedly dream the event that they experienced that was traumatic

is because the dream when they have it is so rich in emotional content that they fully wake up and that dream is never played through fully. And this has led some people like, for example, Matthew Walker, who wrote the book, Why We Sleep to describe dreaming as overnight therapy. Now, why some people will recall their dreams and others won't, for the most part, people who recall their dreams are people who have had awakenings during the stage of sleep that we most associate with dreaming, which is called REM sleep. And so anything that destabilizes your sleep, particularly your REM sleep, is more likely to give you very vivid dream recall. The kind of conditions that cause that are things like obstructive

sleep apnea, because that is often worse in REM sleep and causes people to wake up. Anxiety and other psychological conditions can destabilize sleep. And then the other thing that I often see is individuals with narcolepsy, which is a brain disorder during which REM sleep is unstable as a result of the loss of a particular chemical in the brain. And people with narcolepsy can have absolutely amazing dreams with lots of lucid dreaming so that they're aware of the fact that they're dreaming or can sometimes even control their dreams. And they can even dream before they're fully asleep so they can have dream experiences whilst they're awake as well. on you talk about REM sleep of the different brainwave states, the alpha, beta, theta brainwave states and what each of them do for us. Maybe you could share a little bit of that.

Yeah. So I think there are a couple of things to say about the brainwaves and sleep. So we use the brainwaves actually to define the stages of sleep. And during wakefulness, particularly with our eyes closed, we see a very rapid rhythm, which is called alpha rhythm, which is very, very small in amplitude. And then as we become more drowsy, the brainwaves slow down. And as we go into the deeper stages of sleep, they slow down even more and you start getting something called delta waves, which are really a hallmark of very deep sleep. Those are very slow, very big waves. When we go into REM sleep, actually the brain waves look rather similar to wakefulness, which is perhaps not that surprising because our brains are very active, but we're attending to our internal environment rather than our external environment. So there are some similarities in

terms of brain activity between wakefulness and REM sleep. There is something crucial to add here though, which is that actually different parts of the brain can exist in different stages of sleep or wake at the same time. So in conditions like, for example, sleepwalking, we know that there are certain areas of the brain that exhibit electrical activity that's in keeping with very deep sleep, but then there are other parts of the brain that actually look to be at least electrically awake. And there's a whole host of different experiences of different sleep conditions that really represent the brain's ability to exist in more than one stage of sleep or wake at the same time. Someone says right now, this is a lot of info, info overload.

I need to sleep better. I got the world's expert on the show right now. And he says, all right, I'm going to cast a wand. This is a general statement, but do this and you're gonna sleep better yeah if only life were so easy I I think the key thing is to try and recognize what is going on with your sleep so if you are spending a lot of time in bed and you're tired and you want to sleep but can't sleep, then that suggests you've got insomnia.

If you are sleeping as much as you want and you still wake up feeling unrefreshed and sleepy, then it suggests that you may have a sleep disorder. And that's the time to go and see your physician because it's important to distinguish insomnia from a sleep disorder because the treatments are sometimes very different indeed. If you are sleeping whenever you can when you're in bed, but you're getting less than about seven or eight hours sleep a night, then consider whether or not you are sleep deprived for you. And therefore try and give yourself an increased sleep opportunity and see if you feel better. So I think those are the three major pictures. Once you've recognized that you've got a sleep disorder, a biological sleep disorder or insomnia, or whether you're just chronically

sleep deprived, that is the key to really making progress in terms of improving your sleep. So good. What is a local sleep? So I talked a little bit about the fact that different parts of the brain can exist in different stages of sleep or wake already. But actually there is now emerging evidence over the last few years that if you look at the cerebral cortex, the outer lining of the brain, and you look at the single neurons or collections of neurons within the cerebral cortex, there are constantly little islands of diminished electrical activity within the cerebral cortex.

So even whilst we're wide awake, little areas of the cerebral cortex appear to be entering into a form of sleep. And as we get more and more tired, as we get more and more fatigued, those little islands become bigger and the periods of electrical silence, the periods of electrical sleep get bigger and bigger, which perhaps is one explanation for why when we are tired, when we are sleep deprived, our performance diminishes because less of our cerebral cortex is able to function normally at that given time. So not only are we aware of the fact that different parts of the brain can exist in different stages of sleep at the same time, but we're now understanding that the cerebral cortex, the outer lining of the brain, the bit of the brain that is responsible for complex tasks like thinking, like cognition, also exhibits these small islands of electrical silence that are akin to sleep. So while you and I are talking, probably a hundredth of

our cerebral cortex is asleep, probably slightly more so in my case, because it's later on in the day here in the UK. But as we get more and more sleep deprived, as we get more and more tired, perhaps it's a 50th of our cerebral cortex, perhaps even a 10th of our cerebral cortex. This has been really enlightening, like really, really good. And I appreciate you having us switch rooms to get us, those of you that are watching this on YouTube, you've seen the room change a couple of times throughout the interview, because we've had some reception issues. Dr. Leshner has been a very, very good sport and I'm very grateful. I learned a lot today. Now, by the way, if you learned a lot, that book that we're referring to that he wrote is called Nocturnal Brain, but he's got another book out right now.

Completely different book that we'll have him back on to talk about called The Seven Deadly Sins that you ought to go grab. It's just a very different book. It's got a lot to do with biology and your health, your behavior, society. I think you'd enjoy that as well. So, Guy, thank you for being here today. I really, really appreciate you all the way from London, taking the time late over there and moving rooms to accommodate the conversation because it was really informative. So, thank you. Great chatting with you Ed. Okay, God bless you. Thank you. Max chatting with you Ed. Okay God bless you thank you. Max out everybody, share the episode.

This is the Ed Mylan Show.