[29] Exploring the Science of Sleep, Consciousness, and Lucid Dreaming

11:03PM Oct 10, 2023

Speakers:

Andrew Holecek

Ed O'Malley

Denise DeBaun

Keywords:

sleep

state

coherence

brain

gamma

studies

question

light

interesting

frequencies

happening

great

eeg

lucidity

data

spindle

put

rem sleep

alpha

hypnagogic

Oh, hey, this is the doctor Ed show. Remember Mr. Ed, that was such a great show. Really, they're really just

at least half a dozen years of therapy to get through that one.

But I love this one because I was able to do is introduce my dear friend, O'Malley and then get out of the way. This is where we get to talk about the science of medicine of sleep, which I really grew up on. So, Dr. Ed knows all yours I will definitely be in the background, spying on this whole situation. So thank you. All right.

Good, good. People are coming. All right. Well, welcome everyone. It's been a little while we missed last month, unfortunately. But there was a question that came in last month. That was one of those like, you know, you hate to see it on an exam because that part A B, C, D, qf T R. I mean, there are lots of different parts. So I have a whole presentation on that. And it's really interesting stuff. It's on HeartMath coherence, brain frequencies, various hypnotic states. Lucid dreaming, EEG. I mean, it was a big question. So and then a few more questions came in. So I put it all together. We'll see how far we get. And I may call for Andrew and a couple of responses to some of these really interesting questions, actually. All right. Let me see if I have the sheer power I do. And so this is the one for today. Everybody see that? Okay. Yeah, good. Go thumbs up somewhere. Let's see if I can get this now to advance and we'll be on our way. Share it make it even cleaner. There we go. Okay, so, so, so I'm gonna go through these questions first. And of course, if you have questions, put them in the chat or raise your hand and at some point, maybe we'll get to some live discussion, but let's get to these that were asked from last month. So I've got some questions related to Heart Math and EEG frequencies. I wonder if my mind produces gamma frequencies when I'm in a good heart math coherence. Now, just for the folks on Does everyone know about Heart Math? I know I've done a presentation too on it. No. Okay. So, Heart Math is basically there's a device and you can work it through your phone you work to through your computer, or nowadays through Bluetooth, and it basically has a little wire that clips onto your ear lobe and takes your pulse and the yellow and that pulse is connected into again, your phone and there's a free update download. There are a variety of ways of looking at it, but essentially, it is looking at your heart rate variability. Okay, and there are a number of different ways of looking at heart rate variability, and then feeding it back so you find a way to use it to help you change your state. But in addition to that, the Heart Math people It wasn't one of the first to come out with it. It's been around now for several decades. And what they came up with was coherence state and this coherent state. Very clearly different from relaxation, and I'll show you some of the data that demonstrates that. But essentially, when you get into heart rate or Heart Math, coherence, all of your systems are in a coherent state, your breathing rate, your heart rate, your HR V and your brain activity. They're all sort of firing on the same cylinders at the same time. And when you're in a state like that, it's a really nice place to be. It's not unlike a meditative state. Okay. Okay, so we're good to go. Okay with that now, so I'll go into some more detail. So she was wondering if her mind produces gamma frequencies when she's in HeartMath coherence, okay. And I've mentioned in prior presentations, that it creates a more relaxed alpha state. And so we don't necessarily produce gamma frequencies in this when we're in concentrative. Thought, single minded, highly focused task states. Then we see gamma, and gamma is very, this data is very broad right now because they can't even decide on what frequency constitutes gamma. So there's narrow, narrow there's a narrow range of gamma that's 30 to 42, or called the 40 hertz, gamma frequency that was sort of the first thing that came out and people who are recording brain states and on task, saw that it seemed to be several different areas of the brain generating gamma, when the brain put together the red color, the round shape, and the juicy flavor and said, Oh, Apple, so the different areas of the brain that you know transduce this information when it puts it all together, they've noticed gamma was coherent in those states, they're firing at the same place in the same frequency. And that's what gave you the, the image in a sense, or the concept of the item. And so that's one way of looking at gamma frequency. There's also a broad range from 60 to 80. That's called Wide Range gamma. And what does that mean? They're still trying to figure that out. But there are some relationships between when for instance, theta goes up in certain states. Gamma seems to go up too. But gamma is a very low amplitude, hard to see frequency at the scalp. So for the time being gamma isn't what we're going to look at mostly here. Most of the states we look at are or the frequencies associated with states like hypnosis, and even lucid dreaming, don't really show gamma frequencies at the scope of some of the intracranial studies that are being done like on people with epilepsy, and they have to look at where you know the language areas are and so they don't cut into them and that kind of thing. They can record these but they're very deep in the brain and they don't necessarily make it to the scalp. So anyway, and coherence and what has been shown pretty consistently is that when you get into the states and that is you're doing a meditation on appreciation or gratitude, essentially anything that's hard opening, okay, and that's going to have resonance across a lot of what we talk about a lot of what we try to do, are associated with high amplitude Alpha rhythm, centered around 10 Hertz. And that really reflects the state of aware alertness, but not directed towards anything in particular, almost like an open awareness state. Okay, we're going to see a lot of alpha, we're not going to be seeing much of anything else. So it's kind of a positive emotional state or at the, at the very least, emotional equipoise. Okay, so you're not going one way or the other. But if you are going in one way or the other, it's towards a positive state. All right. Everybody with me on this? So far? Okay, I'm seeing head nods. Great. So, what they've used to show this is that if you look at beats per minute, or pulse transit time that's looking at how fast the pulse goes from the heart to the periphery. Or I know this is a respiratory measure. At this point here, when you go into this coherence state, and there's a particular you know, really many meditation that you can do to get here, but essentially, you're pulling up something that you're appreciating your gratitude or something like that. You can see these variable rhythms in the body all sort of come into synchrony. And just curiously enough, it kind of looks like an alpha rhythm in the brain and the EEG activity. So that would actually show up here, but they didn't look at the brain activity early on, but it really brings them all into into coherence. And if they do a power spectral density, which is just basically looking at the power, like when we look at gamma, we're beta theta, we're looking at the amount of electrical activity in those frequency bands. So if we look at those what frequency bands are associated with these, when they go into coherence, there's a really sharp peak. And these these peaks all align, so the frequency of these peaks align. Okay, so we don't have to go much more than that. But it's really interesting when they look at coherence and relaxation, and they are different, okay. So when they look at, so, so, you can you can kind of look at this yourself. So, the heart rate itself can be low, it can be actually even higher in appreciation in the coherent state. So it's not heart rate we're looking at, we're looking at the alignment of all the body's rhythms. Okay. And when that happens, we get a very fine peak. Right? Here centered around, it's about point one hertz.

And when someone's fairly relaxed, you can see these various frequencies. There are a couple of components to it. And what they're actually looking at when you look at these coming into alignment, you're looking at the autonomic nervous system coming into complete balance between sympathetic activation and parasympathetic, relaxation. Okay, but it's just deeper than relaxation by itself. Okay, so I figured that was important to understand what we're talking about here, because this is not just relaxation. But just like hypnosis is not just relaxation. Just like being in a meditative state isn't just relaxation. Okay. Relaxation gets you on the way you're moving. You're moving from the sympathetic activation down into parasympathetic. But there's the sweet spot in which you're fully balanced. All right. And you know, I forget who actually have to question the webinar she's even on but we'll see. Okay, yeah, that's something all right. So let's continue. But if I want to maintain a high coherence and on the device it's in green. By the way, the feedback in the Heart Math device and I didn't realize people wouldn't have been so familiar with it. I would have brought mine along with sometimes I carry it along with me in my bag. Or a moment's notice, but you know what? I actually happen to have one. Yeah, I have this one. So this is an older one. It's not a USB. Sorry, not a Bluetooth, but you can see here, this is the clip and it clips onto your ear lobe. And then this will plug into my iPhone. They have one for the droids Okay, and now they have Bluetooth where you have this thing just clipped to your ear and Bluetooth to your device. And when you're looking at the the app, it's probably not going to show this but yeah, my Childers.

The app will show you it'll move from Red meaning you're still in your work state and you haven't you know, gotten rid of the guy who cut you off on the way home yet. You still carry that anger or whatever stress to blue, which is you're well on your way to relaxing you're not quite there yet to green. And so when the green comes on, you can be watching it or you can attach a tone to it so you can close your eyes and just, you know, get down into the state and when you get down into the state, you'll hear tones that feed back to you. You're now in that ordinary state. Okay, so that's the green is anyway. So for her it works best when she imagined being in a lucid dream state and that's where we come to why we're on this call, right? So as far as I know, in a lucid dream state there are gamma waves involved. Well, that's a really interesting there's been a lot of noise about that. But the latest studies by Steven Lubbers and Ben Baird, who Andrew has interviewed in his interviews and Tonini, he's a great great neuroscientist. They examined the difference between lucid and non lucid dream EEG. And, importantly, the reason they wanted to answer this is because the argument was that lucid dreaming was a hybrid state of wake and sleep. It was an awakened dream. It wasn't an independent state by itself. And so they set out to because they really feel like it's these are separate states is a separate state of consciousness that they wanted to show this. The folks who were arguing that to hybrid stay, we're showing gamma saying look gammas there, there's wake activity going on. And so and they had shown some gamma activity when they looked there, when they did their study these other folks, but there were a number of reasons and if you really want to get into it, I have the link down here you can read the paper and how they argue against this being a hybrid state. But what the other researchers were seeing were these micro stochastic eye movement artifacts. So when you're in REM sleep, right, rapid eye movements, they're going back and forth. But remember and Andrews talked about this a lot too. When we're looking at something, we're not staring straight ahead without any movement over our eyes. Our eyes are always doing this rapid back and forth. And the rapid back and forth of these two cards. They're called and during the dream state, there are microbicides psychiatry, and they're moving at the 40 hertz frequency. So when you take those artifacts out, there's no longer any gamma activity, difference between lucid dreaming and non lucid dreaming. And what they did find was that compared to the entire REM sleep period, REM sleep showed small reductions in low frequencies, small reductions a little bit in like for instance, some theta and reduction in beta. And if anything again in the wake state, we have a lot of beta activity that's low amplitude fast activity. But there was an increase in signal complexity, which I think is really interesting because there is something going on that's beyond sleep and beyond. Dreaming. And there is an awareness there that isn't necessarily wake awareness. And so this really supports that pretty strongly that there's complexity in the signal, not reflected necessarily directly in the EEG. So there might be some gamma going on the background, but you can't see it when you have eye movements. Okay, that part of the issue. All right. So really interesting, but I'm really shooting down the gamma and sleep argument right now. We're going to continue on. And this is the same question or here's some more parts to the question. And what about sleep yoga or even Bartow yoga? Are there even more higher gamma waves involved? Well, you're gonna have to stay tuned. We don't know yet. I know he was involved in this with Richie Davidson's lab and a bunch of like, the top people in the world studying consciousness are trying to answer this question. And they're trying to figure out how you can see in deep sleep, when we have these really deep slow waves how you can see any other frequencies because they kind of washed out okay. And there's also she's asking about his their high HeartMath coherence, and I'm assuming probably not energy you might want to kick in on this this level of awareness has very little emotional content. I mean, you can have emotions like we do in dreams. You can get worried you can have this you can have fear and all these things that we deal with, but it's not like this typical emotional content we would have in a typical in deep sleep get Andrew, what do you got to say about this? Yeah, I

mean, if we're talking specifically, I mean, Bardo yoga. I mean, geez, the science on that, right? I mean, if you're lucky to have someone in fMRI when they're lucky isn't the right word, but if somebody is in an fMRI, and they happen to die while they're in fMRI, or an EEG, maybe you can collect some of this data. So let's take that off the table for now. Sleep yoga is is what the term is. I think it was Jennifer wint coined it Tom messing around with it. He these are two people, especially Metzinger, who's who's doing quite a bit of research on this in conjunction with Ben Baird and Melanie bully, but they're studying what's called minimal phenomenal experience, and it's exactly like you're saying so if you're talking about about legit pure sleep, yoga, fundamentally, what's going out there as its content was there, you're not going to have any effect. You're not going to have any content. And so just like you're saying, this is really cutting edge stuff. The labs, two or three of them are working on it. And the jury's definitely still out on this. So stay tuned on that it's in the works and some of the implications around this are pretty revolutionary if they in fact can be reproduced substantiated. This is no small thing, but it's the jury's still out. In the barter yoga thing. I think we have to wait even longer on that even though Richie Richie is doing some stuff. I think I mentioned this with took down which is somewhat connected, but not quite. We don't need to go that far. Post that meditative absorption thing. So if we just stay with yoga nidra sleep yoga. It's like you're saying we just have to wait until more data is collected. Yep.

Great. Thank you. And the question continues, as in daydreams, a light hypnotic trance is a Heart Math coherence important. So since they're correlated mostly with alpha rhythm, and hypnosis is mostly I'll talk about that in a second mostly correlated with data activity. And HeartMath coherence is mostly Alpha. I don't think so. But if we begin having some, you know, in daydreams, we might have whole, you know, a hypnagogic imagery happening. Then we may start seeing some data waves to, but probably, the heartbeat coherence, you know, it's kind of like a focused emotional tone. That isn't going one way or another. So once we start having thoughts introduced, you probably won't stay in coherence. What happens if I try a wild in the morning and you will know right wild is wake Induced Lucid Dream. So from the weight state, moving consciously, from the wake to lucid dream, to be able to deduce more theta and gamma ways. So what about coherence? Probably more theta and alpha, right? Because we've been saying this over and over now that in the coherence, the HeartMath coherence state, you're going to see more Alpha. Probably some data then as you move into more than lucid dream, no gamma, and then is a lucid dream deeper or maybe the deepest hypnotic trance state, and therefore even a better place for healing than hypnosis alone. So that's a really interesting grant. She goes sorry for my curiosity, right 15 questions later and thanks in advance for your answers. So no apologies for curiosity ever needed. You know, we want curiosity where we're trying to understand these things. We don't know and don't have all the answers. But this question really intrigued me at least. Because in my experience, the my my typical waking ego is curiously absent during lucidity. And that may be because there's decreased beta, you know, that waking beta, which is mostly your ego, you know, deciding where to go in the world and what to do and telling you about how all the things you're doing are wrong, and you should do something else, right. So this would be a great question. If people want to kick in on this. Even though there may be some directive still present in the service of Dream Yoga practices, right? When when we're trying to remember to, you know, conjure up a deity or become the deity or put our hand through a wall or what have you, you would think there would be some thinking going on. But my sense is it is qualitatively different than thinking that occurs in the waking state. Comments, questions? No, I draw him back in here.

I think it depends on on on the spectrum and the depth of the lucidity thing. Yeah, this is a super rich question. I mean, if you're if you're really in a hyper lucid state, in my experiences there, my my reflectivity, my capacity to actually think and reflect is is almost as clear as it is in the waking state. In fact, sometimes it seems it seems even stronger. So I think it depends on the depth of lucidity. I also would wonder I wouldn't use the languaging here. The deepest hypnotic trance I would think that real lucidity is more de hypnosis. You know, because you're you're working. Ghana depends on partly Hi, how you define that term, but you're working in a state where you're actually being extracted from entanglement with appearances. So there's a lot to be teased out here. I mean, that's just shooting from the hip, but when it comes immediately to mind, for me, I've noticed in the spectrum of lucidity, when I'm my lucidity is really really strong, borderline hyper lucid, that my reflective self referential capacities thinking is really just as strong as it is in the waking state. That's just my experience. Yeah, and

I definitely agree with that. And I think it's a qualitatively different thinking that's taking place because we don't have that sort of emotional. Is this right? Is this wrong? Uh, you know, to me the ego thinking carries a lot more of the default mode network. And in the lucid dream, I don't think the default mode network is active. I don't think it's active. So that's a great question. That's self referential stuff isn't necessarily happening like you know, so you almost left that self behind and now you can really do something. I don't know. That's it's an interesting place to conjure.

Yeah. Her territory for future studies. There's your next research to her right.

But actually what happened, Wagner has, you know, he did right. He published a few things about healing, you know, proposed, you know, incubating healing dreams, healing lucid dreams, becoming lucid, and then trying to heal something. And he seems to have reported that there have been some really great hills or healings that have taken place. All right. Lots of good questions. There. Let's anyone coming in awake. There's one popped in the chat. Okay, Tim, I'll get to that one. Let's finish with the things while we can. And what about hypnotic trance states? There are more low theta waves and no gamma rays. Right? There's not much change in alpha beta is the most reliably noted frequency, EEG frequency in fact, those with high versus low baseline data are more hypnotizable. And those responding with a data increase become more hypnotizable when they see data go up. So again, gamma data is still not clear both in definition and recording as I mentioned earlier, though, told it's possible it's going on beneath the surface. And there is some evidence to suggest gamma can couple with data to increase data but it's not clear lots of research still needs to be done. And I'm not aware of any looking at actually heart coherence and it states Default Mode Network, okay, relevant question for where we just were. Default Mode Network is several areas of the brain that light up when we're self referential, but we could have the ego self at least in EG terms, and a lot of work is being looked at. Not so much what particular areas of the brain are activated in any at any one time. But what are the networks that are talking to each other? During different tasks and different states and during that state of talking to yourself? You would see this network light up or it's kind of when you're not activated or acted acting in any particular task. State, but you're not sitting there in quiet awareness, you know, ready for anything. You're sort of having that inner dialogue, that inner self that inner of Hawking self is the default mode network. Okay. And so that's why I think you know, in really hyper lucidity, I don't believe that's activated because that self referential is left behind when we become lucid. My thoughts anyway, and again, right before lots of research. Okay, so this was a question back a little bit, but I want to answer Tim's right at the moment. Tim, type game Doctor, I have heard that continual REM sleep deprivation may actually lead to waking hallucinations and insanity. Is that true? And if so, why is dreaming so vital to our health and life? Tim, you've been on all these calls, haven't you? You know why it's so important. But clearly RAM deprivation can lead to waking hallucinations that can lead to I don't know if I go so far as to say and Saturday because really, we can really eliminate REM sleep that long in order to see if somebody's gone and leastly. The Institutional Review Boards these days don't kind of smile kindly on that kind of research. They used to do REM selective REM sleep depth of course. They did sleep deprivation for intractable depression. And they found it actually helped. And then they did selective REM sleep or non or slow wave sleep deprivation to port parse out what was actually improving the depression and they found that it was REM sleep deprivation improves depression, but it only lasts for a few days. And then as soon as you go back to sleep, and you get your REM rebound, which is what happens when you deprive yourself selectively of REM sleep, which happens to a lot of us in the modern world who get up too early and don't get their full REM periods in. But in anyway, they found that what was happening was something something goes awry with REM sleep and people with depression. That's when we do a lot of our emotional processing. That's when we find a place to put all the worries stresses and you know, why is the world beating me up today? How we deal with that how we find a place for our brains to be okay with it, our minds to be okay with it. And when something doesn't work, right and we don't find a place to deal with this or we're overwhelmed by you know, things like PTSD, right? Those kinds of experiences, trauma and so forth. That can break down and so most antidepressants, take a couple of weeks to work because what they're doing in those first couple of weeks is suppressing REM sleep selectively. And then once it's been sort of shut down, it kind of reboots and comes back and it takes a couple of weeks for it to come back and when it comes back, it now works again. And that's when you get positive response. And then hopefully you know, the other issues are dealt with in question lists. So it's really interesting, so I would I would, I would leave that as the answer. Okay, great. Tim concurs with that what he's heard so so there was a question about him to guided imagery that was from a ways back that we didn't really fully get to is increased melatonin a prerequisite for these hallucinations to occur? I noticed that in regard to imagery tends to happen more at night when taking a nap than when taking a nap during the day. I find it also easier to experience wake Induced Lucid dreaming when I can focus on my hypnagogic hallucinations. So these are those little dream words that occur at sleep onset. Right. And Cory and I had mentioned this at the end of Gosh, it's been it was August or did this last presentation. And I mentioned there was a paper in which we described all these different stages. Oh, the hypnagogic sleep onset period as you go through all these so he actually mapped them out. And what's really interesting is so this gets to be a busy slide, but we're going to walk through it because it's a lot of fun to see what's happening here. So Horry described these nine different stages he really came up with the subcategories of sleep onset. And what he sees is that, you know when we're when we're first going to sleep, okay, and we close our eyes. And if we're not too stressed out about life and all of that, we begin to generate alpha waves. Okay, and that's a brain that's still awake, still alert, but isn't busying itself with anything in particular. It's not really daydreaming yet. There's no data activity. It's just hanging out waiting for, you know, the next the next concert to start, okay. And then there's some alpha waves begin to drop out. And as the alpha waves begin to drop out, that's a separate stage from these ongoing alpha waves and when they drop out, and again, I should preface this by saying that for some people, for most people, in fact, you don't just drop into sleep, there's this oscillation that's occurring. So you may be drifting between stage one and three and then back to one and then up to five and in fact that two and then finally go in. But if you were just going to parse these out and look at look at these and how they repeat in different people who are going through the sleep stages into sleep, and even have them report I'll show you that in a minute. As they fall into sleep. You see these changes in the EEG, okay, so there's alpha, alpha begins dropping out. And then alpha is less than half of the wave. And what's happening here is alphas mostly gone. data isn't well formed yet. Here's a little bit of a theta burst starting to happen here, but it's nothing is really well formed yet. Okay, and you may be losing awareness to the outside world at this point. And then in fact, it drops out completely and you may or may not be having any images at this point. But following that point stage one of his his

his information talks about ripples of low voltage data waves. So now we're seeing the See these are slower these peaks are occurring many less peaks per given time than the alpha right, alpha is 10 Hertz. Data is four to six hertz, okay, 48 hertz. So these are much slow wave so data wave kicking in you probably will now we have a hypnagogic hallucinations. This would most likely be the place where they'd be occurring in full onset right here. And then in the sleep lab, when we're when we're scoring, stage one sleep, so this is all just still happening and you haven't fully fallen asleep yet. The first sign that we're actually seeing you going into sleep is a vertex sharp wave that's what this is right here. So there's some data kind of we're not well formed, but there's the shockwave, very distinct, okay, and that says, Okay, this guy is about three seconds away from sleep. And then there's vertex sharp wave transit or birth. So here's now a number of them happening. And then if this doesn't change, these can drop out but we don't see any return to beta or alpha. We would score this leap. Okay. And then finally, there's an incomplete spindle. So we think that these vertex sharp waves are actually heralding a que complex. really getting into it. Now. I love this stuff. Looking at these brainwaves. The K complex is unequivocally occurring in stage two sleep so not only are you already asleep, but now your brain is pushing you deeper. That's what a que complex is. It looks a little bit like the difference between a slow wave and this vertex sharp wave so it's a much wider wave. You're not seeing it here is not showing you here but it almost always comes alongside a spindle and a spindle is this sharp burst 12 to 14 Hertz. Okay, faster than alpha. And you can see why I mean first of all the peaks are closer together. Everybody see that? So the spindles are unequivocally stage to sleep. And when we're doing drug studies, for instance, to see if this drug is better than that drug and producing sleep onset, they record watch the time to this first spindle as unequivocal sleep don't even mess around with these Burrtec shockwaves because you can kind of drift in and out of them. You can drift in and out of data, but you can get directly once you've had a spindle. It's the sign that the thalamus has now closed the barn door. That's it. Nobody from outside getting in. We're only going to talk internally, the brain is now talking to itself and that's going to create whatever stories it creates. But all the outside stimulation, all the sounds have been blocked from coming in. Unless of course they're really salient or really loud or that kind of stuff it's going to break through. But for the most part, this is a sign that the thalamus is taken over. And thalamus is in the middle of the brain it's where everything all of our outside stimulation comes in first, all the visual information all the feeling all the sound wall that goes through the thalamus and then gets parsed to the right areas of the cortex. And so when the thalamus shuts down that stuff, only internally generated information is now available. So once you're here, you're now fully asleep. It might just keep you awake thinking about all that stuff tonight, right? Okay, and then we're going to move this over here on my way. Here's where the imagery is highest. Remember I said when those data waves come in. So if you've asking people to report is this stage five when we have a lot of data activity when most of your imagery is going to occur? So that's what causes the hypnagogic hallucinations. And answer to that last question. I can continue for a minute and Andrew, where did you want to kick in on something? Yeah, a

couple of nerdy questions. So what what's the end here? I mean, how many people were participating in the study? And how reproducible is this? Is this not considered state of the art nine stages of hypnagogia

Oh, yeah. This is this is the thing. It's, it's been shown in, in this particular study, I think they did something like 30 very young adults. But this has been shown in pretty much all of the ensuing research. It's just that we don't look at these particular stages. We're saying, Oh, he's awake, or he's asleep. And so in sleep plans that they look at, but if you go back and look at these, you can see you can certainly pull them out, and they're not clinically useful. In any great way of thinking about things. So there isn't a lot more research on it. But any research that's done has corroborated these various stages. The reason

I find this stuff so cool because it's a great contribution of the West. This increase granularity of understanding what's happening with a neural correlates to the deceptive sleep. Has there. Has there been anything that also conjoined this with fMRI because I'm curious how this would be related to different aspects of the brain. You know, like we talked earlier about this, this new, more refined, granular assessment of different types of brain activity associated with different states of consciousness. There's like when we're awake, it's rare to have the entire brain humming along. Part of our brain can be asleep part of our brain can be awake part of our brain can be dreaming. And so but I mean, I'm not sure how much of this you could actually assess versus EEG, or whether how much you'd have to bring in things like fMRI and others. So just a little bit of a nerdy question again, but since we're talking about

real good questions, the problem with fMRI is the resolution time resolution. Nothing is as fast as EEG. And so by the time you have one spindle, you're not going to see it in your fMRI. It's going to take about 20 seconds of data. And so by the time you had, you know, this can all occur in less than 10 seconds. So parsing those out might be difficult, but there are some studies that can look at spindles and average what the brain is doing over a bunch of spindles and begin to get a sense because these occur a lot in sleep. They're they're occurring mostly in stage two sleep, which usually is about 50% of the night and it actually comprises more of the sleep at night as we get older, so you'll see a lot of spindles but the shockwaves they're only occurring in those first few 32nd pages, couple of 32nd Epics and then you're into the spindles. So you're not going to get a lot of data around those.

Last question, the back end do they do they do have similar data coming out on the hypnopompic end of things?

Um, that's another good question. That's a little more difficult to parse because the REM periods are so long in the morning, they're qualitatively it's a qualitatively different even though I mean, we have two different terms. We think they're pretty much the same, but they're actually very different. And so I don't know that any of this work. has been done on hypnopompic state. But again, following REM, you probably have a lot more eye movements, like you're not what's not being shown here. This just the EEG is not showing any of the eye movements that are also used. And during the sleep onset period, you have the slow rolling eye movements. And then if you do go right into REM, you'd have the faster rapid eye movements, but you don't have any of those slow rolling movements going out of sleep. So you don't see you have a different transition. Yeah, good question. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, that's why wait, I know you want to be around for this one. I wanted to be around with everybody else is probably half asleep. Sorry, guys. Yeah, so here so one last little piece no matter if there's nowhere to but this is what really worked. Here is a micro sleep and or micro hypnagogic. Hallucination and what's really interesting here is so now here's where we have. We have occipital o one and O two. So we have sensors put back here, and we have left occipital channel, which is the left eye channel so there you should put one here and one here, CIN EMG. So they have a couple on the chin, which is measuring muscle tone. So this is eye movement, muscle tone. And this is brain activity from the back of the brain where you get really good because you're close to the occipital lobe. You get really good Alpha activity. It's, it's just, it just is okay. And you can see as the Alpha drops out here, right, and, you know, this is one of those other stages of horrors. It'd be really hard to say which one but right at that moment, he started having eye movements. And then he presses the button that they gave him to press when he felt he was getting a hypnagogic hallucination. So it was really cool at where they were able to parse out some of this data. And, you know, so this is all his brain actually, or the muscle tone returning, as he says, oh, man, a dream click, you know, because it takes so long for him to finally press that he's already had the event by the time he presses the button. So I just thought that was a pretty interesting study they did. All right. And now these questions are actually they do say EDA, but these are the these questions going forward. I didn't change that slide today. They came in today. So I quickly put them together. So they're from today, but they're questions that came in between last month and now or, again, in the last few days. Changes in light come quickly in Montana. I noticed the shift from July to September particularly I sleep more in the morning with the later sunrise. Okay. I also seem to sleep more deeply less hypnopompic dreaming left this past week. In the studio, is this idiosyncratic or simply transitional, something that will even out now there's someone with a dream practice that's just over a year old and doing well I'm 76. So maybe what I'm seeing is also a function of age. So no, I don't think it's a function of age at all because she is just sensitive to light and what happens if we were living outdoors and we're all living in tents. As we move from the summer to the fall to the winter, light begins. It gets darker, longer. Right, we crossed just you know, a month ago now, the equinox, right when we have pretty much equal light and dark and now we're moving into more dark and less light. Okay. And there are people who are very sensitive to this. So someone who's older, probably doesn't you know, is retired, doesn't have a work schedule, and is more able to just go with the light. She's following what her brain is being told to do by the natural world, which is how we evolved. Okay. And so we will sleep more and this has been shown you know, throughout research as well. We will sleep more in the winter than we do in the summer. And the two seasons in between, you know, there's a transition from one to the other. Okay, and Daylight Savings Time is a terrible thing. We've done to our brains, and hopefully, well, if Congress get anything done ever again. They may eventually pass. They tried to pass a law the Senate did last year trying to make Daylight Savings Time permanent, which would be absolutely terrible for biology. And I'm not going to get into all that right now. But standard time is really that gives us closer to what the natural world is doing. And us being up during the day. Long story short, that's what's happening. So that's what I think is happening with her. What's going on here. And then my question, my follow up question to this person will be well, do you sleep as long as you need to? And are you functionally alert throughout the daytime? That's, if that's the case. Sleep away. Okay. Sleep with the darkness. Be up in the light you'll be just fine. When does a primary care physician refer to a sleep doctor? Wow, how and I feel for this person already right? How bad is something like insomnia have to get before seeing a specialist so unfortunately, you know most primary care Doc's they're not trained in Sleep Medicine. And you know, I know when I came through 30 years ago and I did my I did clinical clinical medical training with a with the medical students at Cornell because that's how they had the graduate program in clinical sciences at the time. And they get one hour of sleep information and their entire four years of medical school and one to two years of internship and maybe specialty so they don't really get much about sleep at all. So they really depends on your dark, they will most likely keep trying different medications like to do for other things, to see if they can get you to sleep. best bet would be that if it's becoming chronic, and that means, you know, three times a week or more and lasted for at least a month. It's time to get to American Academy of Sleep Medicine accredited Sleep Center. And I have links on this and you know you guys get a copy of the PDF of this when it's done. So if you need that. You can find the sleep center in your area. You want an accredited Senator center in order to make sure you're getting appropriate treatment. There's a lot of really good behavioral sleep medicine out there to help you to get to sleep. Most don't use medications but sometimes medications are useful to get you over the hump and then to allow the other strategies to take hold. Okay, and I also put one for European guests. I don't know if anyone is on from your peer will be pretty late for you. But for European sleep centers, they also have something equivalent for you to find accredited centers. So I would take myself to it. I wouldn't wait for your doctor to refer you and if you need a referral then I would ask for it. Don't ask for more treatment from the doc say, you know, I'd really like to see a sleep specialist. And then they're usually fine. You know, if you don't ask for it, though, they'll keep trying to treat you. Alright, and final question, I think this is the final one. My wife goes to sleep pretty easily after a glass or two of wine. Okay, notice I'm pausing here, but then often gets out four to six hours later and has a hard time falling back asleep. Any advice? Okay, the glass to a wine maybe the issue? How long after the wine is she trying to go to bed? If you don't have at least several hours for the alcohol to be metabolized before asleep? It will wake you up and look for more. And if it doesn't just wake you up, make it harder to go back to sleep and if you do go back to sleep, it will fragment you're asleep the rest of the night saying Yep, ship had done that. And that's just the way alcohol works unfortunately. So I mean, you know if you have a glass of wine with dinner, a glass or two a beer or two with wine with dinner, not a problem as long as you have several hours you know we give it three hours okay to metabolize away and

best idea would be not to use it at all find other ways of winding down at night okay like meditation, like music or reading like yoga. If you can't sit on the cushion just chatting you need to move. There are meditative movements you can do that help the body wind down, we'll get a HeartMath device that will help you get into coherence. Gratitude prayers, lots of ways to slow down and quiet yourself rather than alcohol if at all possible. Okay, great. I got to all of the questions, except for the last big question that came from and she's on Denise which came in today. A Denise we've been emailing back and forth. She has some interesting data on red light exposure before bed, which I wasn't aware of. So I've done a lot of digging into some of this research and looks pretty solid. So we're gonna you're going to hear more about red light therapy for getting to sleep and staying asleep. And I want to see like I said a few more studies I did. I looked at all that you sent me but I want you know me I'm a heart. I did all my studies on sleep. lab studies and PSDs give me some npsd Show me it's working as well as you're saying it's work. Plus I want to see how long it lasts throughout the night. People reporting deeper sleep and so forth. So yeah,

it sounds to me at creating a red light district right before you go to sleep.

Well as another way of relaxing unless performance is an issue for you. I used to put that in my talks too. But then I kind of got some side with classes and decided to pull those out but we're a fun group. Yeah. Oh wait, and it's not just Halloween coming. This is. What was really striking was there were some great articles on the International Space Station. And what they've done is they've revamped all the lighting to improve sleep of the astronauts. And what they have is three, three levels of light. They have blue light for that morning alertness, waking up in sharp. They have white light for standard tasks during the day, and then red light for biting down and sleeping. I was really impressed with that. I mean, like the government actually, you know, made something happen and did well maybe it's because it's a pseudo government organization, but they actually did something good for sleep. Yeah. And what we didn't realize and one of the things about this is what we didn't realize is that a lot of the early studies that we were looking at, like you know, we know for instance, you know, the blue light really wakes up the brain delay sleep onset delays melatonin onset, and the way they did a lot of little studies was very competitive placebo of red light. And they didn't realize that the intensity of the red light could actually matter. So I think your study showed less than 10 Lux is okay, you won't affect melatonin, but above 10. Lux, that very little light exposure. That's a nightlight exposure above 10. Lux can actually improve sleep. So some of those studies that show blue light worse and sleep will probably be even more dramatic. pageviews less red light as their placebo.

No, I heard something interesting and also decent if there's any data on or what is anecdotal but there could be data on it. Where we're putting disturbed people into pink holding cells. They I believe they found that help. kind of chill them out. So I can't remember where I heard that. So I can't substantiate it. But it seemed was such a curious bit of data that I remembered it and I was curious if you'd ever come across something like that because it kind of makes sense. Yeah, it

does no know I haven't although there's a lot of full body photo bio modulation they call it which apparently helps healing in other ways other healing throughout the body right and recovery from athletic activity. The body heals quicker the muscles recover faster, like after marathons and so forth in full length. Red light. So, yeah, I think you know, Denise, did you want to you want to say a couple words. She sent the you have to Can you unmute yourself now? No, we can hear you go.

Is it muted? Yes, you Thank you. Thank you. No, I just want to say thank you for mentioning it. I'm new to this. I just joined the company in August and it's called tea light. And basically two founders in France and Canada started working on red light technology in around 2015, mostly for anti aging. And what they found out was that people that were coming in, were reporting better sleep. And if you look at all the studies, and you look at all the red light technologies and the walls and panels, etc. There's always a line at the bottom, better sleep and improved sleep, you know, inflammation, cell renewal, et cetera, et cetera. wrinkles, and then better sleep. And they were getting all of these reports and they decided and people were coming in more because they were sleeping better than for their skin. So they decided to start to investigate whether or not they could actually create a device that people could have at home for sleep. And then several and they got a physicist and a scientist and a sleep disorder person and none of this is my fault. I'm just reporting and anyway and they develop this. He liked sleep and press the button. You go to sleep and basically it's a calibrated protocol of wavelength, timing, intensity from one point, you know, scientific things that are above my paygrade that make it work and it goes off 14 minutes and then it fades out for 14 minutes. So it doesn't disturb you when it goes off. And they've reported they've sold almost 100,000 And I've only been involved for a short period of time and people are falling. I used it the first night. So my record is this. My sleep issues have been I don't fall asleep easily, mainly. So and then after COVID And I think I told you the said you know binge watching it overnight and somebody that used to wake up at 6am 630 alarm clock, and after the first night I fell asleep. I woke up between 6am 630 and it's so it reports to sort of adjust your circadian rhythm so then I started investigating it and getting it for friends and a lot of people the aura ring, as you know are saying that they're sleeping deeper. REM sleep, they're getting another half hour. So we're hoping to help as many people as we can. And you know if this really works, it seems to be working. I don't have any clinical trials or anything like that yet and we can sort of look into it. Are

you doing lucid dreaming too, right? Are you yes and so what I want to hear is what your reports on that are going to be I know I'm gonna try it out and see what kind of, you know again. Yeah, yeah, we'll see. We'll see

what brought me to the group. So group so that's absolutely I joined the group. And then last week when I was listening to there was a sleep question was my first week on it. There was a sleep question and you told the person or suggested that they come tonight. And then I looked at one of Ed's last videos, and he was recommending a light. So I said, Maybe I should just let him know about it. And if it could be helpful, it could be helpful. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. So that's all I have to say. But it's really a privilege to be here with all of you. And I'm learning so much more about sleep scientifically than I've ever known before. So thank you.

So Denise, what does it cost? And can you put up can you put in the chat column a possible link to it so we can track down some data?

Well, it's, can I put a link to it so it's, you can find it up

so that's the website and it costs $139 So it's not that I mean when you compare it to you know, melatonin or the juices and the beverages or whatever, it's $139 and did that work that I just put in the he liked.com Yeah, and, you know, I can send anybody information you could reach out to me, I'm Denise to bond at Gmail or Denise at he light I'll put it in here.

But I also found interesting was the data shows an increase into an increase of melatonin. Yes. That night.

Yeah. So very exciting. I do this now. I have a dear many friends who have sleep issues but one who started working with asleep or was planning on working with a famous let's just say republished, sleep doctor out on the West Coast. Lot problem problem problem. So she tried it for two nights, and improved rem and an extra half hour just after two nights. And this was someone who was working up at four o'clock and you know, they were going to test her for sleep apnea and breathing and whatever. So I'm just hoping it helps people because having joined this area of life, so many people have so many issues and I think the aura ring has created a lot of additional stress surround numbers and things like that. So there's so much anxiety if we can help I'm thrilled. Great. I love mine. Okay, puts pets to sleep. So that's the other thing in terms of placebo. We have dogs and cats sleeping with their owners wired up, whatever just falling out so they don't know about placebos. So when there is some kind of effect happening, at least for some people?

Yeah, no, it's yeah, it's really interesting. New. Yeah, because they've rewired the space station. that got my attention. You know,

there were no scientific studies for sleep and red light. Most of it is around inflammation, anti aging. There was one study done with female athletes. Again, the byproduct was improved sleep, and they published that as a red light sleep study. It's not really but it's the closest thing. Yeah, totally.

Heads up. And PSG show me with a placebo less than 10 Lux red live greater than 10. And let's see what we get. Yeah. Okay.

Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Thank you.

Any questions from the group here? Seeing any we presented a lot of information tonight. Yeah, yeah. Cool. All right.

Great stuff. Great. So he just said we are going to be at starting next what is it next Tuesday night. Next Tuesday. Elon mentioned I'm flying out to spend a week with Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche he invited me out is going to be there. I'm gonna see if I can draft him up for a possible presentation but there's going to be a neuroscientist who I know Gabriela out of 10 Pallars lab in Northwestern University of Tibetan volition, Elise, Alyssa, if you're here, and can tag ping up that link to the link Mincha thing that would be really great. It's a it's a retreat. So it's a full blown Dream Yoga Retreat. With there's a Tibetan Dr. Day there's a union guy there's gonna be doing some dream stuff me.

Allowing will be there. Yeah. 100 will be there. Yeah.

He's great. He has a lot of body work kind of thing. It is online. It's a hybrid event. So it's instant and online. you can you can still sign up for the online end of it, but I thought I forgot to mention that at the outset. But add great stuff i It's like I gave a listen to the to the interview I did with Lama Surya das about three years ago, this guy you know, Jubu he's great because he's got all these amazing one liners. And I was I was doing one of my blind him with bullshit science. thing. And after I read in all these things, there was a pause and he just said, Andrew, I love it when you talk nerdy to me. And so, thanks for talking nerdy to us. I really appreciate it. The data to me is so cool. So thank you for doing and I can see I mean in terms of what the needs are saying I could see all kinds of interesting potentialities where you could do some kind of solace, big light therapy with people that are dreaming. And because of that communication between internal and outer, maybe when people got really tuned in with with their sleep patterns, that external light sources could somehow be used to help with lucidity and whatnot. I mean, who knows? It's it's all just complete conjecture. But really interesting. potentiality here, so appreciate it, man. Always a pleasure. Thanks, everyone. I'll see you next week. And otherwise, everybody, we'll see you all next month, same time. Same place.

All right. Thank you. Recordings. Stopped