The Infinite Monkey Cage - Science of Sleep

Episode Date: July 11, 2016

Brian Cox and Robin Ince are joined on stage by Professor Russell Foster, Professor Richard Wiseman and comedian Katy Brand as they attempt to get to grips with the science behind Robin's insomnia. They'll be asking why we sleep, is 8 hours really enough, and why has every creature on the planet evolved with some period of inactivity? They'll also be investigating the purpose of dreams and whether analysing them has any useful purpose? Was Freud right with his symbolic interpretation of dreams, or if we dream about aggressive courgettes, does this reveal our inner most anxieties about.... aggressive courgettes? Producer: Alexandra Feachem.

In our new podcast, Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet, we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcast. Hello, I'm Robin Ince. And I'm Brian Cox. And welcome to the podcast version of the Infinite Monkey Cage, which contains extra material that wasn't considered good enough for the radio. Enjoy it. Hello and welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage. I'm Brian Cox. And I'm Robin Ince. And I

should say that we try to be proactive with this show and make shows that react to our audience's scientific questions, such as, why does Saturn have rings? What is consciousness? And I had a lovely dream about Brian Cox last night. What does it mean? Annoyingly, because of lazy science, we don't have answers to the first two questions.

Therefore, tonight's show is about what does it mean to have a lovely dream about Brian Cox? Well, it's also about sleep, but sleep and having lovely dreams about Brian Cox. Why do animals need sleep? What are the ramifications of not sleeping? How can we improve our sleep? And what is the purpose of dreaming?

For instance, this is the sound of Brian's dreams. And this is the sound of Robin's dreams. I don't sleep much. So, in fact, one of the main reasons we're doing this show is because I do actually have insomnia a lot of the time, though I didn't until I started working with Brian, which makes me believe that Brian is actually stealing my sleep to keep his boyish, replicant good looks. To aid us in our exploration of sleep, dreams and circadian rhythms,

we are joined by a panel of the wise, and they are... Russell Foster, I'm Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. And my worst night of sleep is very recent. I was in Denver, Colorado, a week ago, and I was jet-lagged, and the next morning I had to speak to 3,500 delegates at the sleep meeting, and I had the most appalling night's sleep for years. Richard Wiseman, Professor of Psychology at University of Hertfordshire.

I'm a psychologist, and my worst night's sleep was when I was developing a smartphone sleep app, and I was beta-testing it. The programming was off, and so the alarm went off at 4am, 5am and 6am, which was delightful. My name's Katie Brand. I am a comedian and writer,

and my worst night of sleep was my 19-hour labour. Followed by my second worst night of sleep, which was spent just staring at the cot going, it's a baby! And this is our panel. APPLAUSE which was spent just staring at the cot going, it's a baby! And this is our panel. APPLAUSE Russell, the first question must be, why do we sleep? I think the scientific community has been a bit naughty about that one

because you read these endless papers of the reason we sleep and there is no single overarching explanation for sleep. What happens during this period of immobility is a whole mass of stuff. So there's memory consolidation, there's the processing of information, there's the clearance of toxins, there's the rebuilding of metabolic pathways.

You name it, so much of the important stuff that makes us function during the daytime is going on whilst we're asleep so there's multiple reasons why we sleep and what's going on in the brain during this period of physical inactivity so sort of housekeeping yeah exactly that's it there's a bunch of essential housekeeping functions and during evolution what's happened is that those essential sort of housekeeping functions have been allocated to the appropriate phase of the rest activity cycle and that's what we call sleep why do you say the scientific community has been a bit naughty about this

well you know you read endless papers um and i will not name any but saying the reason for sleep is memory consolidation or the clearance of toxins from the brain and i think it's it's it's we should be a little bit more flexible about the broader understanding of sleep. So something like one of the ones that I've commonly read was the advantage of avoiding predators in that period of time. Yeah. I mean, it could well be that if you're an animal that's been adapted to run around during the day, then your ability to function at night, in terms of sensory processing, all the other things,

will be hugely impaired, so it makes sense to get out of the way. And so it could well be to avoid predation all the other things, will be hugely impaired. So it makes sense to get out of the way. And so it could well be to avoid predation as part of this sort of general platform of critical stuff that's going on. Does that suggest that there may be the primary... You say that the initial evolutionary reason, you say that maybe animals just make sense to go and sleep at night, and then other things have been sort of shuffled in by evolution afterwards. And then they reinforce.

So those essential functions, like memory consolidation, would feed back and say, yeah, there's a really good reason why you need that period of immobility so that you can process information without being overloaded by all the new stuff coming in. So, Richard, for a human being, what's the sleep cycle now? What stages do we go through?

Well, again, we're not 100% certain. The generally accepted sleep cycle is we start off in what's called light sleep, which is if you have a nap in the afternoon, that feels a lot like light sleep. Then we move down into deep sleep, and if you were to wake up from deep sleep, you really wouldn't feel very well for quite a long while. You might vomit over the person you're sleeping next to. No, they wouldn't feel very well. No, so we have light sleep, we have deep sleep.

Then you come up from there into almost wakefulness and you have the first dream of the night. And that dream will last around about five minutes. So you have light sleep, deep sleep, up into what's called REM or dream state, roughly. roughly I mean not all dreamies in REM and so on but roughly speaking and that's the sleep cycle it lasts about 90 minutes you go through it again and again with the periods of dreaming getting longer and longer as the last dream before you wake up is around about 45 minutes 30 45, something like that. Can you explain why some people are morning people?

It disgusts me. I could explain that, but I wouldn't want to because one of the experts on that topic is sitting opposite me. There's two reasons for morningness and eveningness, and it really does exist. One is genetics. There's a genetic predisposition to be a morning person or an evening person,

but also development. From about the age of 10, there's a tendency to get up later and later and later. Boys get later and later and later and peak at around about 21 and a half. Women peak at around about 19, and then we start to get earlier and earlier and earlier. And by the time we're 55, 60, we're getting up and going to bed at about the age of when we were 10. So there's probably a major hormonal influence influencing sleep timing. But on average, there's about a two-hour difference in somebody in their late teens, they want to go to bed two hours later,

than somebody in their late 50s, early 60s. But that's tied to the... The stimulus is light presumably yeah light will lock on this internal clock to the to the external world and certainly if you get morning light then it can advance the clock and make you get up a bit earlier yeah i went to a wedding once right up in northern sweden around this time of, and everyone was there for about four or five days, and everybody went completely nuts because it never got dark and people were eating their dinner at midnight. No-one had any idea what time to have meals.

I mean, it was really odd because I thought, well, we're all grown-ups. We all roughly know, we can all read our watches. We'll just do it when the watch says it, not when the sun or the moon says it. But everyone, even me, we all just went completely berserk. In shift work, for example, 20 years on the night shift, you do not adapt to the demands of working at night because the body clock is locked onto the light-dark cycle.

And so on the journey home, you're exposed to light, and that provides the key. Now, if you take night shift workers, you hide them from natural light during the day and increase the amount of light in the workplace, they will shift, just like you can get over jet lag. But that's, of course, not practical. What reason... Sorry.

I was going to say, in terms of being an owl and a lark, so owls obviously go to bed late and wake up late, and larks the opposite, there's some psychological work suggesting that is linked to personality traits. And so owls tend to be a little bit more intelligent. I'm an owl. A little bit more intelligent, certainly more creative,

more gullible about personality traits which are positive towards themselves, and also more likely to be psychopaths. So it's an interesting arts people into the mix there. Katie, I was talking about that kind of morning-evening thing and whether it's an interesting arts people into the mix there. Katie, I was thinking, talking about that kind of morning-evening thing, whether it's genetic or not, I never, even though I get up at 7.30 every morning, I go to bed very, very late, and I think,

I must go to bed earlier, and then it just gets... And I presume that was merely due to the inevitability of death and the finite nature of existence. Yeah. What do you think, as a religious scholar? Ah, good, yes, as your resident theologian. It's just, yeah, fear of judgment, Robin, is what's keeping you up at night.

What kind of personality? I think my worries do keep us up at night, don't they? And they are that sort of sense of obsessive anxiety at night. Why does that... The thing that I don't understand is why is it that you can be exhausted all day, but as soon as you lie down to go to sleep at night, everything that's been worrying you all day suddenly comes into your mind

and you're unable to sleep for another four hours. It just seems, that seems evolutionarily ridiculous. Have you ever been an insomniac? Myself? Yeah. Only when I was a teenager. I'm not, not as an adult. I'm alright, I'm quite alright as an adult. I'm sort of like, I'm sort of like a toddler again. I don't quite know why. I think I'm just as an adult. I'm quite all right as an adult. I'm sort of like a toddler again.

I don't quite know why. I think I'm just in deep denial. Like, I just refuse to address any of the horrific problems that I am encountering in day-to-day life, so I'll just go to sleep and hope they're not there when I wake up. Richard, do you have an answer for that? Why is it that you get this? Because everybody probably has this from time to time where you're absolutely, totally tired

and you cannot go to sleep. We all have worries and concerns and during the day we're pretty good at pushing those outside of our conscious awareness. Also, there's other stuff going on so we're distracted. You lay down in a dark room and you're physically tired and you haven't

got those distractions and you haven't got maybe the mental energy as it were to sort of push them away, and they start to come and then feed on themselves. Now you start not to sleep, so you get even more anxious, and so the whole thing feeds on itself. So it is an issue, and there are things that, I mean, if you, for example, deal with those anxieties in all sorts of ways, you actually sleep better.

There's a very strong relationship between being a very anxious person, having worries and concerns, and the quality of your sleep. Actually, Russell, in your talk that I saw, your TED talk, you also suggested there's research that says that actually poor sleep, where's the causal relationship is the point? Because poor sleep can also lead you to poorer mental health. As Richard said, the other way around, if you're very worried, then you can't sleep.

Where's the causal relationship? So there's a very interesting relationship that's emerging between mental illness mental health problems and sleep disruption and part of it seems to be that there are neural circuits within the brain that overlap those circuits that give rise to normal mental health and normal sleep probably share neurotransmitter pathways so if you have a defect in a neurotransmitter pathway that predisposes you to mental health, you're almost certainly going to have an impact upon sleep. So there's the overlap bit. Then, of course, the sleep disruption could exacerbate the mental illness, and then the mental

illness could exacerbate the sleep disruption. And in fact, a colleague of mine, Dan Freeman, has been able to partially consolidate sleep in patients with schizophrenia and reduce the levels of delusional paranoia by 50%. So there's a very interesting set of interactions, which you're only really just beginning to understand. I mean, Kraepelin, the father of psychology, was talking about disruptive sleep in schizophrenia in the 1880s, but it's been dismissed as, well, the antipsychotics

or the fact of a lack of a job. In fact, there's probably a really interesting route in neuroscience for the problem. So there's a genetic... Sorry. An identified genetic marker that makes you predisposed. Well, what's fascinating is to test the hypothesis of an overlap, we've taken genes that were originally associated with human schizophrenia, mutated those in the mouse

and see that the mouse sleep-wake patterns have been severely disrupted. So empirical evidence for that sort of genetic overlap, yeah. Can sleep disruption, repeated sleep disruption in children or young people, can that go on to cause mental health issues later in life, like depression or things like that? It's a really interesting issue. What we're finding in high-risk versus low-risk children, young adults who are at high risk of developing bipolar, for example,

versus low-risk, the high-risk individuals have already developed an abnormality in their sleep prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. So there is, again, I think... What would you do, what would happen, for example, if you could consolidate sleep in kids at high risk of bipolar? Would you pull back from developing

full-blown bipolar? Would you delay onset? Would you knock the brain into a different developmental trajectory? We don't know, because it's such a new area of research. Katie, you recently become a parent, not that long ago. That bit where you have disrupted

sleep, that moment where you think that you'll never eat any hot food again, the warmest thing you'll eat will have fallen out of your baby's mouth. I was going to say, fallen out of my own breath. Yeah. But how do you... I don't know if you experienced disrupted sleep.

I wondered whether you felt that that had affected you, how that affected your mental state. Oh, yeah, no. At one point, I was just crawling around the house crying because I needed to have some sleep. But I go crazy when I don't have enough sleep, definitely. It has a huge impact on... The impact of two or three nights of very badly disrupted sleep in a row

can have a massive impact on my general outlook, my positivity, optimism. Everything's a catastrophe. I can't cope with anything. Everything makes me sit down and have a cry on the kitchen floor. And, yeah, obviously, I mean, we'll all have experienced it in terms of being a new parent, especially if you are breastfeeding or so on. You know, you're literally trying to sleep every hour, every two hours. hours and I I mean I always believed in the impact of a lack of sleep but when I was young I survived on very little sleep and I didn't really need it but now I need a lot and I just noticed that I mean I I would be deranged within a week if I didn't have uh sort of better do we

know Richard what's enough sleep is uh it really varies you know, there's a sort of normal distribution. Some people are naturally short sleepers. You had Margaret Thatcher who could sleep on... Survive, allegedly, on four hours sleep. And stay entirely sane. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. She's a great advert for short sleep. I've never understood why people hold her up

as the model for lack of sleep. It's just absolutely baffling. It's like saying, well, yes, you know, Mussolini could get through one three-hour sleep a night. No, he couldn't. So you have naturally short sleepers, you have naturally long sleepers. In general, eight hours is seen as the sort of

adult marker in terms of where that normal distribution lies. And does it matter where you have it? As Katie said, you could get two hours, two hours, two hours, two hours. Does it have to be continuous to be... It's better if it is. So it's not the sort of thing where you have it, as Katie said, that you could get two hours, two hours, two hours, two hours. Does it have to be continuous to be... It's better if it is. So it's not the sort of thing where you go, I'll get four hours at night and then I'll sleep four hours during the afternoon. That four hour sleep in the afternoon, first of all, will disrupt the evening sleep. And second, it won't be such good quality as the night's sleep. So you're much better off trying to get it pretty

much in one single block, except for that 20 minute period when the circadian rhythm naturally drops in the early afternoon when you really should be taking a nap, if that's what your body's telling you to do. Ooh, I might disagree slightly on that one. You have to be slightly careful with napping because a nap in the middle of the afternoon, particularly for most of us, is maybe not such a good thing.

What it represents is that the sleep pressure has built up faster than the clock can sort of counteract that. And so you have that mid-afternoon dip. Now, a 20-minute nap can be sort of okay. It makes the second half of the day sort of a little bit easier. Anything more than that, and you go to deeper sleep, and then recovery from that is completely counterproductive. The big problem about napping is that it pushes back the sleep pressure, delays sleep onset at night, so you go to bed later, the alarm clock drives you out of bed at the same time,

so you've had shortened sleep, you wake with less efficient sleep, and therefore you're more likely to need a nap the next day. So it's best avoided unless you really need it. This is a proper Radio 4 feud, isn't it? These people on there, they really did not agree on the benefit of napping. I think you should nap. No napping before four! No-one agreed on the napping by the end of it. I think we did agree. I think the key is nap.

It's a 15, 20-minute nap. What you should not be doing is sleeping for an hour in the middle of the day. That's bad news. I think we did agree. Katie, could you then argue for the long nap? Because at the moment we haven't got enough antagonism for this to be... We really want this to be pick of the week. I'm a huge advocate of the long nap.

Getting up and going back to bed an hour later, I like, and then sleeping until four o'clock in the afternoon. I don't think we've even started to cover drinking at lunchtime. Which I think is a really key thing that we're all missing now. So the idea that 20 minutes might be OK, but if you go into deep sleep, it's worse. So when you wake up from the different phases of sleep, does that have a very large effect on how long it takes you to recover,

how your body clock may recover to that is it different if you're working up by your alarm so you're dreaming or you're in deep sleep or you're but that's the interesting point if you're woken up by your alarm your body is telling you you need to sleep and some outside force is telling you to wake up so actually really you shouldn't be woken up by your alarm you should be waking up normally because your body's saying actually you had enough sleep now and now it's time to wake up. So if you are relying on your alarm, that's not good news. The other problem, as you say, with alarms is that if it wakes you up out of dream state, for example, you're very close to waking state. It's not going to make you feel too upset,

and you're going to remember your dream and so on. Even light sleep is like waking up from a nap. Deep sleep, you're not going to feel great. And so the sleep cycle really does impact on the sort of waking time, because even the quality of the last dream you have before you wake up, if it's a very positive dream and you remember it, you get out of bed in a good mood. If it's not so good, you get out of bed in a bad mood. So sleep is not separate to the daytime. The two are intertwined. And what's happened in the last 20, 30 years is we've been pushing the night into a smaller and smaller segment of time and we've been valuing the daytime and i think we really do need to celebrate the night and go hold on a second there's a reason why almost every animal sleeps

it really matters to us no i was just wondering whether broadly speaking in an ideal world without work and alarm clocks and things like that, should we be trying to force a schedule on our sleep patterns or really should we just sleep whenever the mood takes us? Going back to Richard's point, I think how much sleep do we need? And I think we have to be really sensitive to our own individual demands. So if you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, you're not getting enough sleep. If you sustain the waking day with lots of caffeinated drinks and nicotine and cigarettes and things then you know chances

are you're not getting enough sleep at night and then what those stimulants will do particularly caffeine which can have a half-life of you know five nine hours is you then need to sort of reverse that at night and so then there's a tendency to take alcohol and sleeping tablets and they are sedatives they're not biological mimics of sleep and so they will actually interfere with some of the the important things going on in the brain whilst we sleep so should you force yourself to go to bed earlier no you shouldn't force yourself you should just try and have a wind in thinking right i need let's say eight hours so at least half an hour maybe even 60 minutes before you want to go to bed, your desired bedtime,

you're winding down, you're minimising light exposure, you're doing the sorts of things that relax you, you're turning off the telly, you're turning off the email, all those sorts of things. Should you have really furious rows with strangers on Twitter? That's better. Never do those emails late at night. But I think somewhere you'd said that also one of the things

that we all do that is counterproductive is then walk into a very bright bathroom to clean our teeth. Absolutely, the last thing we do. We stand in the most brightly lit room in the house looking into an illuminated mirror. And, of course, light, in addition to locking the body clock onto the external world, has an acute effect on alertness. Bright light makes us more alert.

And so what that increase in alertness. Bright light makes us more alert. And so what that increase in alertness will do is delay sleep onset, delay sleep. So it's good to minimise... To clean your teeth in the dark, basically. I've had this fantasy that somebody should devise sort of a bathroom mirror with sort of low, red-enriched light at night and then in the morning, bright, blue-enriched light.

So you get your photon shower to set the clock in the morning. I think you have just invented it. Why don't you make it and make a lot of money? Yeah. There you are. What are you doing here? Go! Don't cut that out of the edit.

It's not a copyrighted... No-one's saying anything. I like the fact you're making people believe you clean your own teeth. They get sent into the BBC teeth cleaner, don't they? So, you've written a book

also about insomnia as well and trouble with sleep. Just before we move on, there's one thing I wanted to talk about, which was why do you think so many people, apart from what has been mentioned, what are the other problems? When I've done shows and I've mentioned insomnia, the number of people in the audience who say,

I experience insomnia as well, and it is such a ridiculous thing. It's been mentioned before, this idea of you're exhausted all day and then you go to sleep and another part of your brain just kind of goes, ha-ha, think you're going to sleep? I don't think so. And then my brain used to sing me Serge Gainsbourg songs over and over again to keep me awake. That's entirely true, Ballad of Bonnie and Clyde. So what is causing that?

Well... LAUGHTER How much time and money do you have? In your particular instance, God knows. LAUGHTER So, why are people in slum weeks? For many different reasons. And part of it is worries and concerns,

which are then going over to the night time. Part of it is, as we're saying, we don't value the night, and so you go into this bright bathroom and you're seeing stimulating material before you go to bed. Part of it is when you're in bed, you don't know what you need to do in order to fall asleep and manage your sleep. So, for example, there's a technique called paradoxical sleep, which is that if you are struggling to get to sleep, you try and stay awake. You have to keep your eyes open. You can

blink, but you have to keep your eyes open and keep yourself awake. That's very tiring to do, and you end up falling asleep. Now, that's not a well-known technique, but there's a fair amount of evidence for it. If you wake up during the night, lots of people lay in bed getting more and more anxious about the fact they're awake, they start to associate their bed with being awake. If you get out of bed for about 15 minutes or so, do something in low light, such as a colouring book or a jigsaw or something like that, then get back into bed,

then, again, that all helps. So I think we just don't understand and we don't value sleep and the night, and we just need to educate people about how to sleep and how important sleep is. Is there anything to the... I suppose culturally, historically, dreams have been given terrific significance. So beyond what we know about the processes

and sorting of information or whatever they are, is there anything to this Freudian idea, I suppose, of your dreams? Can you interpret them? Can you read them? Can they tell you something about yourself, your mental state? Well, there are two questions in there. One is, are they meaningful? I think they are. The other question is, is it Freudian? And because to Freud, everything is about repressed sexual thoughts and aggression.

You put them into the unconscious and they bubble up. And a lot of your ideas are completely untesticle. But, so... No-one tell him. It's awkward, isn't it? So, Freud's idea, and he wrote The Interpretation of Dreams, which is one of the dullest books ever. If you're trying to get to sleep, it's quite a good book to read,

second only to his book on jokes, which is really quite something. So I don't think there's anything Freudian. I don't think all of our dreams have a sort of latent sexual meaning. However, there's some evidence that what we're doing is working through our concerns and worries, and the dreams reflect those concerns and worries. And so in a sense, you can gain some insight into your own worries and concerns and to those of your friends

by looking at your dreams. And only reflect them? Or is there any evidence that they're part of your process of dealing with them, coming up with solutions to them? So there's many instances where musicians and playwrights and others have woken up with a complete tune or play in their minds and the theory is they're kind of working on the problem during the night and there's some evidence that if you write down whatever you're trying to, the problem you're trying to solve before you go to bed in the

morning increases the chances of waking up with a solution which suggests there's quite a lot going on and it may be that that's to do with dreaming. The other piece of data is that dreams start off, the first dream of the night, and we all dream about five times, the first dream very negatively, the first dream very negative in terms of emotional tone, and then they become more positive as the night goes on, which is another piece of evidence

that maybe we're working through our problems in the dreams. But dreaming, very important. Katie, are you the kind of person who enjoys the company of, or is indeed one of those people who goes, I had the funniest dream last night, or not? Do you like sharing your dreams? I love sharing my dreams.

Everyone loves sharing their own dreams. I hate hearing about other people's dreams, because other people's dreams are literally the most boring thing on earth. But my dreams are fascinating, and I'm more than happy to share them to whoever will listen. So you're ideal, really. I mean, I'm happy to buy dinner later

if I could just tell you about my dreams for three hours. That's not going to happen, but... In your dreams. I have to say, I have a slightly less romantic view of dreams. And the first point would be that if they were so biologically important, then we'd remember more of them. And I just feel it's the brain, it's an artefact of the brain trying to make sense of its world.

So the analogy would be, you've got all this information coming in during the day, you don't have time to process it, because you've got to make an immediate response to the world in which you're in. So it's like bits of a jigsaw puzzle that are parked. And then those bits of a jigsaw puzzle, when you're asleep, they're trying to be slotted into a half-made jigsaw puzzle.

Now, sometimes it fits, and you've come up with an innovative solution to a complex problem. But sometimes you're forcing that bit of the jigsaw puzzle into some weird place, and you get these bizarre and strange associations. So I have to say i don't feel quite so romantically inclined towards dreams so you think that they're an artifact of our model building basically so when you remove some of the stimulus yeah yeah and of course that's that's critical because there's so much information coming in the brain can't deal with the processing as well as the receiving as

particularly effectively that's why um sleep is so critically important are you suggesting that the sleep itself is primarily biological in function and and the the conscious artifacts that happen things like dreams are really a side effect it's really it's mechanical in a sense in a sense yeah i think that's right Isn't that the whole of being human? Yes. The rest of it. We're mainly biological and then there's a little bit at the top of us going, I'm in charge and we're not at all. It's a disaster. You're right,

I suppose. I'm drawing this. I'm being a bit of a dualist. I'm not trying to be. I don't want to do that. But I'm just wondering whether... I love it when you get philosophical. I'm not being Cartesian about this. But the idea that sleep is really the things that are going on, the body patching things up, it's a necessary part. And it's remarkable how we intuitively,

in the pre-industrial era, embraced sleep. If you think so much of Shakespeare, the honey-heavy dew of slumber, you know, sleep, sleep, nature's softness, how have I frighted thee? All this amazing stuff. And yet, with the invention of the light bulb and the invasion of the night,

sleep has been this first victim. And because we can occupy the night, we've marginalised sleep. And talking about sleepiness, how much sleep do you need? It's really quite dangerous. Many people who've said, oh, I need a few hours of sleep. The tired brain is so incapacitated

it doesn't perceive how incapacitated it is. So it does really stupid and unreflective things without realising it. And that's why lack of sleep is so very dangerous. It's nothing to do with your stuff then. It's entirely mechanical. And all this stuff,

thought, business... No mind. Side effect. Um, no. So, clearly, sleep and dreaming is biological, of course, but I would argue there's also psychological functions involved in that, and if you take dreaming, often dreams are meaningful to people, they're not random in that sense,

but it's amazing how complicated all of this is, and all going on outside of consciousness, of course. So if you take, say, dreaming, you can influence someone's dream by playing in music very quietly when they're in dream state. And so the classic one is, say, the alarm clock goes off and you hear it as church bells or something like that in dream state. And some of the research we've done has involved increasing or making

more positive the emotional tone of the dream by playing in certain nature sounds. It makes people have more pleasant dreams. And as part of that research we had to collect a lot of dreams, so people waking up in the morning and sending in their dreams. And what I hadn't realised... Are you the BFG? People send them in in jars.

Yeah, they were small jars that arrived and we kept them in in jars. Yeah, they were small jars that arrived, and we kept them in the lab. Yes, exactly. But what I hadn't realised, we don't do that. What I hadn't realised is that some dreams, and this isn't true of mine, but some dreams, like soap operas, they carry on from night to night. And so we had one woman who had met George Clooney in boots

when she'd gone in to buy some aspirin. And she'd fallen in love and the two of them started dating. In her dreams, I should say. And then night after night, they were going on this very long-term sort of affair they were having. So it was quite fascinating to realise that other people's dreams often carried on from one night to the next. It's funny you say that, because ever since I started doing this show,

I've been tormented by a nightmare of being attacked by a giant zombie strawberry. And I don't know if it's dead or alive. The strawberry's dream, Russell. The strawberry's dream? No. Actually, it's a good question. Do other animals... Is there any evidence that other animals dream? So it's likely that everything with a

sizeable cortex, so mammals and birds, have some sort of dream experiences. They certainly have rapid eye movement sleep, which is when dreaming occurs. Whether they have the same sort of representation of dreams that we have, we simply can't know. When dogs kind of run in it.

And in fact it's really interesting because when we're in REM sleep and when we're dreaming most vividly, in fact, the brain is paralysing the rest of the body. And so we're actually not able to act out our dreams. There's a condition called REM behavioural disorder where that paralysis doesn't occur. And so people have acted out their dreams,

they've murdered their partners, they've done obscene things. And if they've gone to trial, it's a perfectly legitimate defence. So that... This is true. That's a gleeful response, isn't it? Who knew how many of our audience were unhappy?

And the other side of the sleep paralysis that Russ was talking about there is because you're paralysed, as we were saying, when you're dreaming, if you drift into waking state and you're still paralysed, as we're saying, when you're dreaming, if you drift into waking state and you're still paralysed, you can have sleep paralysis, which is that you think, well, I can't move, there must be something holding me down. And if some of that dream imagery comes across as well, that something is then interpreted within whatever cultural beliefs you have. So for some people, it's aliens, for some people, it's an old hag, and so on.

For some people, it's aliens. For some people, it's an old hag and so on. For some people, it's their partner. And so what's interesting is it gives rise to these really strange phenomena, which then we start to understand, once we understand a little bit more about the biology of it. I guess that goes to the point I was making, because here's the brain trying to make sense of its world. There's a perfectly sensible explanation.

The paralysis, you know, is out of sync with when you've woken up, and therefore the brain is saying, well this must be an old hag sitting on my chest or whatever, but clearly it isn't. So here's a good example of an artefact, which is again the brain trying to make sense. And it's extremely common because this is the

usual explanation for alien abduction stories. Absolutely, around about a quarter of the population have experienced sleep paralysis and it's just the paralysis being out of phase with the sleep essentially and the other thing about dreams is so many people after 9-11 for example said i predicted this and this this is and so many people think that dreams are genuinely predictive but if you look across the billions of people who are sleeping every night and the billions of dreams some people will probably you know dream of a ofoplane going into a tower.

So there's no evidence at all that dreams can be predictive of ghastly events. It would violate special and general relativity. Indeed. And you would not like that! Which again, I think, supports the argument that these are artefacts.

Well, our final questions, we have run out of time, which is, what are, from all of your perspectives, the best way for those people who are having problems sleeping or being abducted by aliens on a reasonably regular basis, what are the best solutions that you have come across? Well, lock the doors if you're getting abducted. Yeah, but if they're working in a kind of multidimensional model

that allows them to get through the doors, you idiot. No, they're rubbish at opening doors. What would I do? So my tricks would be winding down at least half an hour to an hour before I go to bed. Minimising light exposure. I don't read scientific papers, I don't do work stuff, I turn off the email, and I enjoy reading novels,

and I don't get through many pages and I fall asleep. So it's just embracing sleep. Katie? I would say pay outstanding bills, go for a small jog, have a bottle of red wine and engage in some adult night-time activity. There's that too, yeah. And if you just had to cut it down to one, red wine?

Yeah, a bottle of red wine. Richard? I would say if it's your worries and concerns keeping you awake, then making a list of those can be helpful before you go to bed. Laying there, as I say, occupying your brain with something else. So, you know, coming up with an animal for each letter of the alphabet can help. And as I said before, if you wake up in the middle of the night, don't get anxious about it.

If you're laying there for about ten minutes or so get out of bed do something else and then get back into bed so these very sort of simple ideas these very simple psychological ideas I think can have a big impact on people well thank you very much to the panel we've also before we end the show we do also have the answers of our audience to a question we asked them, which is, we asked them, what keeps you awake at night? This is always the kind of light bit at the end where we see what you've come up with, and our answers have included heartburn and acid indigestion, headaches and being too warm.

So... Which I like. I like the fact that... Yeah, I should probably... So Richard will cover what those issues are. But we also have had... Worrying about whether my strawberry is dead. This is the thought that if I'm asleep, I can't observe myself sleeping,

therefore I may or may not be asleep. What can that person do? It's sad, isn't it? It's John Bevan. Don't make it personal. Yes, he is. Stand up, John. He could have said anonymous. The picture of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson

kissing near my tube station. Nightmares! This is a very similar one. Nightmares of Robin with Brian's hair. of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson kissing near my tube station. Nightmares! This is a very similar one. Nightmares of Robin with Brian's hair. Oh, yeah, I've seen that movie, so that's quite frightening. It's very close. Not as sad as if it was you, because, I mean, that won't destroy my career on radio,

but if you had my hair, well, that's telly over, isn't it? So, um... The constant concern about the cats plotting to take over the world. They are only two opposable thumbs away from complete domination. Are the astronauts on the ISS watching me? Thank you. Actually, there is a thing called dream suppression, which is you ask someone not to dream about something,

they're more likely to dream about it. So if you say to your partner, whatever you do tonight, don't have a horrible, really violent difficult dream, you can fall asleep with a little smile on your face knowing it's far more likely. What professional bodies are you a member of?

What keeps you awake at night? My husband, I wish. I'm not going to read that name out. The final one is bad D. Reams. As well as three Brian Cox gazing at me through my bedroom window, putting on my Brian Cox mask. Hopefully Professor Brian Cox. That's from me, that's from Bob.

That's what Bob does, that's Sam! So thank you to our panel, Russell Foster, Richard Wiseman and Katie Brand. Next week, we are looking at the differences between males and females, which was originally going to be called Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, but Brian took it very literally and started talking about the melting point of women.

So... It's very hot on Venus. It's 460 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric pressure is 90 times atmospheric pressure. I just think it makes no sense. Thank you very much for listening. We'll be dealing with that next week. Thank you and goodbye. APPLAUSE In the infinite monkey cage

In the infinite monkey cage In the infinite monkey cage Without your trousers In the Infinite Monkey Cage. Without your trousers. In the Infinite Monkey Cage. You're now nice again. That was the Infinite Monkey Cage podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. Did you spot the 15 minutes that was cut out for radio?

Hmm. Anyway, there's a competition in itself. What, you think it's to be more than 15 minutes? Shut up, it's your fault. You downloaded it. Anyway, there's other scientific programmes also that you can listen to. Yeah, there's that one with Jimmy Alka-Seltzer. Life Scientific. There's Adam Rutherford, his dad discovered

the atomic nucleus. Inside Science All in the Mind with Claudia Hammond. Richard Hammond's sister. Richard Hammond's sister, thank you very much Brian. These are some of the science programmes that you can listen to. In our new podcast Nature Answers, rural stories from a changing planet,

we are traveling with you to Uganda and Ghana to meet the people on the front lines of climate change. We will share stories of how they are thriving using lessons learned from nature. And good news, it is working. Learn more by listening to Nature Answers wherever you get your podcasts.