Rem Sleep Quotes

More specifically, the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night. (If your mind immediately jumped to particular colleagues, friends, and public figures who lack these traits, you may well wonder about how much sleep, especially late-morning REM-rich sleep, they are getting.)

Sleeping Atlantis Silent cool waters dancing upon her skin ~ silent cool water ushering dreams within...

REM sleep has also been shown to be particularly important for enhancing our ability to retain emotional memories and for allowing the hippocampus to turn short-term memories of the day before into long-term ones (i.e., it helps make memories more permanent, leading to structural change in the brain).

I can see the scene down in Mission Control right now: a man in a white shirt and black tie checking my vitals on a readout, his chief inquiring if I’ve hit REM sleep yet. “Affirmative, sir. Sleeping like a baby.” “Excellent. Queue up the machine that goes bing!

The second evolutionary contribution that the REM-sleep dreaming state fuels is creativity. NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information. Sleep cycle by sleep cycle, REM sleep helps construct vast associative networks of information within the brain. REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts. We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems

Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule.

To actually make you believe that your problems were spiritual and mental but absolutely not boozical. Good Christ, just the alcohol-related loss of the REM sleep was enough to screw you up righteously, but somehow you never thought of that while you were active. Booze turned your thought-processes into something akin to that circus routine where all the clowns come piling out of the little car.

His normal pattern of sleeping was problematic at best. He would fall asleep for an hour and then be jarred awake for absolutely no reason. Falling back asleep wasn’t a problem. All he had to do was read a book or watch TV and he would eventually drift off. But as soon as the next hour of REM clicked by, bang, back awake again. The pattern would repeat and repeat and repeat again until he was tired of the farce and got up and went on with another day of living.

Dreams are associated with a state called REM sleep, the abbreviation standing for rapid eye movement. The REM state is strongly correlated with sexual arousal. Experiments have been performed in which sleeping subjects are awakened whenever REM state emerges, while members of a control group are awakened just as often each night but not when they're dreaming. After some days, the control group is a little groggy, but the experimental group - the ones who are prevented from dreaming - is hallucinating in daytime. It's not that a few people with a particular abnormality can be made to hallucinate in this way; anyone is capable of hallucinations.

REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical themes.

during REM sleep, the brain paralyzes the body to keep you from acting out your dreams.

REM sleep can help us process emotional stress.

If we spend little time in REM sleep one night, our brain will compensate by prolonging that stage of sleep the next night. It doesn’t take a huge leap to assume that the brain considers this time important.

We try to recover one (NREM) a little sooner than the other (REM), but make no mistake, the brain will attempt to recoup both, trying to salvage some of the losses incurred. It is important to note, however, that regardless of the amount of recovery opportunity, the brain never comes close to getting back all the sleep it has lost. This is true for total sleep time, just as it is for NREM sleep and for REM sleep. That humans (and all other species) can never “sleep back” that which we have previously lost is one of the most important take-homes of this book, the saddening consequences of which I will describe in chapters 7 and 8.

Visual tasks, emotionally laden experiences, and procedural memories (for example, hard-to-describe skills like riding a bike) tend to be consolidated during REM sleep, while declarative memories (things like lists of words) are consolidated during slow-wave sleep.

There is some evidence that dreaming is necessary. When people or other mammals are deprived of REM sleep (by awakening them as soon as the characteristic REM and EEG dream patterns emerge), the number of initiations of the dream state per night goes up, and, in severe cases, daytime hallucinations-that is, waking dreams-occur.

Normally, it takes people about 60 to 90 minutes to reach REM sleep, so they wouldn’t enter this stage during a 20 minute nap. People with narcolepsy often enter REM sleep soon after falling asleep. If a person enters REM sleep in two or more of the five naps in eight minutes or less during the study, it’s highly suggestive of narcolepsy.

According to Dr. Henner, the hospital’s sleep expert, that particular REM pattern indicates nightmares … horrific nightmares.

From the REM-sleep dreaming state, almost anything goes—and the more bizarre the better, the results suggested.

Angelo," he said, and felt the bed rock as Angelo shuddered, caught halfway between REM atonia - the inhibition of movement caused by the shutdown of monoamines in the brain - and waking.

Neurons on the two ends of the log-normal distribution of activity organize themselves differently. Fast-firing neurons are better connected with each other and burst more than slow-firing neurons. The more strongly connected faster firing neurons form a “rich club” with better access to the entire neuronal population, share such information among themselves, and, therefore, generalize across situations. In contrast, slow firing neurons keep their independent solitude and elevate their activity only in unique situations. The two tails of the distribution are maintained by a homeostatic process during non-REM sleep. The emerging picture is that a simple measure, such as the baseline firing frequency, can reveal a lot about a neuron’s role in computation and its wiring properties. The

I never sleep. Like the dolphin and the spiny anteater, I don't experience REM. Unlike the dreamless mammals, I'm a construct. I am a living program inside a vast network of electronic impulses known as the LINK. In that datastream I've uncovered the meaning of another kind of dreaming--that of a fond hope or aspiration, a yearning, a desire, or a passion. This much I have. When I dream, I dream of Mecca.

The pent-up REM-sleep pressure erupts forcefully into waking consciousness, causing hallucinations, delusions, and gross disorientation. The technical term for this terrifying psychotic state is “delirium tremens.

It is sleep that builds connections between distantly related informational elements that are not obvious in the light of the waking day. Our participants went to bed with disparate pieces of the jigsaw and woke up with the puzzle complete. It is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts) and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). Or, said more simply, learning versus comprehension. REM sleep allows your brain to move beyond the former to truly grasp the latter.

The noise from outside is now almost unbearable; neighbours in the street are waking up in their beds. Paul stirs once more. He is now out of the REM sleep stage and is in the next stage of waking up. His conscious mind is aware of the external environment and he is now awake enough to work out what the noise is: it’s a car alarm; the same one that goes off every time a strong enough wind current passes it, triggering its ultra-sensitive setting. Paul curses the car alarm for waking him up out of his slumber. For all the noise they create, he wonders if there is any point to car alarms. Thieves intentionally trip them to mask the sound of breaking glass and can disable them in seconds, and alarms go off so often these days that most people ignore them when they hear them, assuming the owner has accidentally triggered the alarm and will switch it off any second; in reality the owner is normally the last one to realise it is, in fact, their car alarm that is going off annoying everyone, so what is really the point of them?

Cartwright had shown that it was not enough to have REM sleep, or even generic dreaming, when it comes to resolving our emotional past. Her patients required REM sleep with dreaming, but dreaming of a very specific kind: that which expressly involved dreaming about the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma. It was only that content-specific form of dreaming that was able to accomplish clinical remission and offer emotional closure in these patients, allowing them to move forward into a new emotional future, and not be enslaved by a traumatic past.

Our REM sleep in 90-minute bursts, in a 24 hour cycle "digests" trauma that is experienced on a daily basis. In dreaming, the brain compares the trauma with early memory traces of similar experience, and files the memories of the day's events according to an affect-based associative system for further use and potential survival value. Comforting figures may appear in the dream to give care, advice, counsel, and relief, if necessary. The nightly dream process helps the dreamer receive positive resolution of his or her experience, and the dreamer moves on to the next day's activities restored, refreshed, and prepared for survival-based action.

Napping is sleep, too. In a series of experiments over the past decade, Sara Mednick of the University of California, San Diego, has found that naps of an hour to an hour and half often contain slow-wave deep sleep and REM. People who study in the morning—whether it’s words or pattern recognition games, straight retention or comprehension of deeper structure—do about 30 percent better on an evening test if they’ve had an hour-long nap than if they haven’t. “It’s changed the way I work, doing these studies,” Mednick told me. “It’s changed the way I live. With naps of an hour to an hour and half, we’ve found in some experiments that you get close to the same benefits in learning consolidation that you would from a full eighthour night’s sleep.

My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate. The seven stages of sleep (according to my body) STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don’t work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, “You lying bastards.” STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you’ve missed a semester of classes and don’t know where you’re supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in sleep you’re fucking your life up. STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it’s been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you’ve lost time and were probably abducted by aliens. STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you’re too busy looking up “Symptoms of Alien Abduction” on your phone. STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn’t actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you. STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you’re trying to stay under but someone is touching your nose and you think it’s a dream but now someone is touching your mouth and you open your eyes and your cat’s face is an inch from yours and he’s like, “BOOP. I got your nose.” STAGE 7: You finally fall into the deep sleep you desperately need. Sadly, this sleep only comes after you’re supposed to be awake, and you feel guilty about getting it because you should have been up hours ago but you’ve been up all night and now your arms are missing.

Octopuses and their relatives have what Woods Hole researcher Roger Hanlon calls electric skin. For its color palette, the octopus uses three layers of three different types of cells near the skin’s surface—all controlled in different ways. The deepest layer, containing the white leucophores, passively reflects background light. This process appears to involve no muscles or nerves. The middle layer contains the tiny iridophores, each 100 microns across. These also reflect light, including polarized light (which humans can’t see, but a number of octopuses’ predators, including birds, do). The iridophores create an array of glittering greens, blues, golds, and pinks. Some of these little organs seem to be passive, but other iridophores appear to be controlled by the nervous system. They are associated with the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, the first neurotransmitter to be identified in any animal. Acetylcholine helps with contraction of muscles; in humans, it is also important in memory, learning, and REM sleep. In octopuses, more of it “turns on” the greens and blues; less creates pinks and golds. The topmost layer of the octopus’s skin contains chromatophores, tiny sacks of yellow, red, brown, and black pigment, each in an elastic container that can be opened or closed to reveal more or less color. Camouflaging the eye alone—with a variety of patterns including a bar, a bandit’s mask, and a starburst pattern—can involve as many as 5 million chromatophores. Each chromatophore is regulated via an array of nerves and muscles, all under the octopus’s voluntary control.

A clearer picture of what is happening in the brain during non-REM sleep,14 during sleepwalking,15 and during confused arousals16 has been achieved through neuroimaging and EEG. It appears that the brain is half awake and half asleep: the cerebellum and brainstem are active, while the cerebrum and cerebral cortex have minimal activity. The pathways involved with control of complex motor behavior and emotion generation are buzzing, while those pathways projecting to the frontal lobe, involved in planning, attention, judgment, emotional face recognition, and emotional regulation are zoned out. Sleepwalkers don’t remember their escapades, nor can they be awakened by noise or shouts, because the parts of the cortex that contribute to sensory processing and the formation of new memories are snoozing, temporarily turned off, disconnected, and not contributing any input to the flow of consciousness.

Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones,

I made an appointment with a sleep doctor, who explained that during the sleep study people would be watching me sleep and monitoring my brain waves to see how I reacted during the four stages of sleep. I'd explain those stages if I could spell all the complicated words but they basically range from "Wide awake" to "Just barely not dead." My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate. The seven stages of sleep (according to my body) STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don't work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, "You lying bastards." STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you've missed a semester of classes and don't know where you're supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in your sleep you're fucking your life up. STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it's been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you've lost time and were probably abducted by aliens. STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you're too busy looking up "Symptoms of Alien Abduction" on your phone. STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn't actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you. STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you're trying to stay under but someone is touching your nose and you think it's a dream but now someone is touching your mouth and you open your eyes and your cat's face is an inch from yours and he's like, "BOOP. I got your nose." STAGE 7: You finally fall into the deep sleep you desperately need. Sadly, this sleep only comes after you're suppose to be awake, and you feel guilty about getting it because you should have been up hours ago but you've been up all night and now your arms are missing. I suspected that the only stage of sleep I'd have during the sleep study would be the sleep you don't get because strangers are watching you.

Sleepwalking is a parasomnia, a strange behavior that occurs during sleep. Over the years, sleep experts have identified two main stages of sleep by recording brain waves—rapid eye movement (REM) and non–rapid eye movement (non-REM) sleep. Sleepwalking usually occurs after an abrupt and incomplete spontaneous arousal from the non-REM sleep that occurs in the first couple of hours of the night, turning one into a mobile sleeper. Trying to waken sleepwalkers is fruitless and can be dangerous, since the sleepwalker may feel threatened by physical contact and respond violently. Normally, non-REM sleep shifts into REM sleep, during which there is a loss of muscle tone, preventing motor behavior during REM sleep. The majority of sleepwalking episodes tend to be relatively harmless and usually make for a good story as told by the witness, often beginning with “You won’t believe what you did last night!” And if you are the sleepwalker you don’t believe it, because you will have no memory of your midnight shenanigans. Most parasomniac behaviors appear

aspects of health; even if we manage a full night’s sleep, unless enough of that sleep is in a deep state, we’ll suffer from sleep deprivation. Unlike in rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, in the deep sleep stage, your body and brain waves slow down. This is the stage where information is stored in long-term memory, learning and emotions are processed, the immune system is energized, and the body recovers. Healthy adults spend an average of 13 to 23 percent of their night in deep sleep. So if you sleep for seven hours, that translates to just fifty to one hundred minutes in a deep state. Each minute, in other words, is precious.

Sharp wave ripples: this peculiar and unique brain pattern is viewed today as a subconscious mechanism to explore the organisms's options, searching for stored items of the past in the disengaged brain in order to extrapolate and predict possible future outcomes. It embodies a brain mechanism that compresses the discrete concepts of the past and future into a continuous stream. There is no trigger for the occurrence of sharp wave ripples. They are not caused by anything. Instead, they are released, so to speak when subcortical neurotransmitters reduce their grip on hippocampal networks, as routinely happens during nonaroused or idle waking states, such as sitting still, drinking, eating, grooming, and non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep.

In 2021 the respected journal Nature Medicine published a peer-reviewed, placebo-controlled trial on psychedelic assisted treatment of trauma. The results were impressive. With just three, medically supervised sessions using MDMA, 67 per cent no longer had PTSD – more than double the placebo group. There was no increased risk of abuse and, crucially, those with dissociation responded as well as those without.3 Given the special skills otherwise required to navigate dissociation, this latter finding was a big deal. There are currently over a hundred psychedelic-assisted therapy trials being conducted worldwide. It would appear that these drugs allow a resetting of a part of the brain known as the ‘Default Mode Network’ (DMN) that otherwise holds on to recurring, distressing thoughts – especially around guilt and shame. During REM/dreaming sleep the DMN fires up, but the normal resetting process fails with overwhelming trauma.

One of the earliest studies found that using an iPad—an electronic tablet enriched with blue LED light—for two hours prior to bed blocked the otherwise rising levels of melatonin by a significant 23 percent. A more recent report took the story several concerning steps further. Healthy adults lived for a two-week period in a tightly controlled laboratory environment. The two-week period was split in half, containing two different experimental arms that everyone passed through: (1) five nights of reading a book on an iPad for several hours before bed (no other iPad uses, such as email or Internet, were allowed), and (2) five nights of reading a printed paper book for several hours before bed, with the two conditions randomized in terms of which the participants experienced as first or second. Compared to reading a printed book, reading on an iPad suppressed melatonin release by over 50 percent at night. Indeed, iPad reading delayed the rise of melatonin by up to three hours, relative to the natural rise in these same individuals when reading a printed book. When reading on the iPad, their melatonin peak, and thus instruction to sleep, did not occur until the early-morning hours, rather than before midnight. Unsurprisingly, individuals took longer to fall asleep after iPad reading relative to print-copy reading. But did reading on the iPad actually change sleep quantity/quality above and beyond the timing of melatonin? It did, in three concerning ways. First, individuals lost significant amounts of REM sleep following iPad reading. Second, the research subjects felt less rested and sleepier throughout the day following iPad use at night. Third was a lingering aftereffect, with participants suffering a ninety-minute lag in their evening rising melatonin levels for several days after iPad use ceased—almost like a digital hangover effect. Using LED devices at night impacts our natural sleep rhythms, the quality of our sleep, and how alert we feel during the day.

To wit, researchers recruited a large group of college students for a seven-day study. The participants were assigned to one of three experimental conditions. On day 1, all the participants learned a novel, artificial grammar, rather like learning a new computer coding language or a new form of algebra. It was just the type of memory task that REM sleep is known to promote. Everyone learned the new material to a high degree of proficiency on that first day—around 90 percent accuracy. Then, a week later, the participants were tested to see how much of that information had been solidified by the six nights of intervening sleep. What distinguished the three groups was the type of sleep they had. In the first group—the control condition—participants were allowed to sleep naturally and fully for all intervening nights. In the second group, the experimenters got the students a little drunk just before bed on the first night after daytime learning. They loaded up the participants with two to three shots of vodka mixed with orange juice, standardizing the specific blood alcohol amount on the basis of gender and body weight. In the third group, they allowed the participants to sleep naturally on the first and even the second night after learning, and then got them similarly drunk before bed on night 3. Note that all three groups learned the material on day 1 while sober, and were tested while sober on day 7. This way, any difference in memory among the three groups could not be explained by the direct effects of alcohol on memory formation or later recall, but must be due to the disruption of the memory facilitation that occurred in between. On day 7, participants in the control condition remembered everything they had originally learned, even showing an enhancement of abstraction and retention of knowledge relative to initial levels of learning, just as we’d expect from good sleep. In contrast, those who had their sleep laced with alcohol on the first night after learning suffered what can conservatively be described as partial amnesia seven days later, forgetting more than 50 percent of all that original knowledge. This fits well with evidence we discussed earlier: that of the brain’s non-negotiable requirement for sleep the first night after learning for the purposes of memory processing. The real surprise came in the results of the third group of participants. Despite getting two full nights of natural sleep after initial learning, having their sleep doused with alcohol on the third night still resulted in almost the same degree of amnesia—40 percent of the knowledge they had worked so hard to establish on day 1 was forgotten.

Dr. Hobson (with Dr. Robert McCarley) made history by proposing the first serious challenge to Freud’s theory of dreams, called the “activation synthesis theory.” In 1977, they proposed the idea that dreams originate from random neural firings in the brain stem, which travel up to the cortex, which then tries to make sense of these random signals. The key to dreams lies in nodes found in the brain stem, the oldest part of the brain, which squirts out special chemicals, called adrenergics, that keep us alert. As we go to sleep, the brain stem activates another system, the cholinergic, which emits chemicals that put us in a dream state. As we dream, cholinergic neurons in the brain stem begin to fire, setting off erratic pulses of electrical energy called PGO (pontine-geniculate-occipital) waves. These waves travel up the brain stem into the visual cortex, stimulating it to create dreams. Cells in the visual cortex begin to resonate hundreds of times per second in an irregular fashion, which is perhaps responsible for the sometimes incoherent nature of dreams. This system also emits chemicals that decouple parts of the brain involved with reason and logic. The lack of checks coming from the prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortices, along with the brain becoming extremely sensitive to stray thoughts, may account for the bizarre, erratic nature of dreams. Studies have shown that it is possible to enter the cholinergic state without sleep. Dr. Edgar Garcia-Rill of the University of Arkansas claims that meditation, worrying, or being placed in an isolation tank can induce this cholinergic state. Pilots and drivers facing the monotony of a blank windshield for many hours may also enter this state. In his research, he has found that schizophrenics have an unusually large number of cholinergic neurons in their brain stem, which may explain some of their hallucinations. To make his studies more efficient, Dr. Allan Hobson had his subjects put on a special nightcap that can automatically record data during a dream. One sensor connected to the nightcap registers the movements of a person’s head (because head movements usually occur when dreams end). Another sensor measures movements of the eyelids (because REM sleep causes eyelids to move). When his subjects wake up, they immediately record what they dreamed about, and the information from the nightcap is fed into a computer. In this way, Dr. Hobson has accumulated a vast amount of information about dreams. So what is the meaning of dreams? I asked him. He dismisses what he calls the “mystique of fortune-cookie dream interpretation.” He does not see any hidden message from the cosmos in dreams. Instead, he believes that after the PGO waves surge from the brain stem into the cortical areas, the cortex is trying to make sense of these erratic signals and winds up creating a narrative out of them: a dream.

Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning. Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep. If there is only one piece of advice you remember and take from these twelve tips, this should be it. Exercise is great, but not too late in the day. Try to exercise at least thirty minutes on most days but not later than two to three hours before your bedtime. Avoid caffeine and nicotine. Coffee, colas, certain teas, and chocolate contain the stimulant caffeine, and its effects can take as long as eight hours to wear off fully. Therefore, a cup of coffee in the late afternoon can make it hard for you to fall asleep at night. Nicotine is also a stimulant, often causing smokers to sleep only very lightly. In addition, smokers often wake up too early in the morning because of nicotine withdrawal. Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off. Avoid large meals and beverages late at night. A light snack is okay, but a large meal can cause indigestion, which interferes with sleep. Drinking too many fluids at night can cause frequent awakenings to urinate. If possible, avoid medicines that delay or disrupt your sleep. Some commonly prescribed heart, blood pressure, or asthma medications, as well as some over-the-counter and herbal remedies for coughs, colds, or allergies, can disrupt sleep patterns. If you have trouble sleeping, talk to your health care provider or pharmacist to see whether any drugs you’re taking might be contributing to your insomnia and ask whether they can be taken at other times during the day or early in the evening. Don’t take naps after 3 p.m. Naps can help make up for lost sleep, but late afternoon naps can make it harder to fall asleep at night. Relax before bed. Don’t overschedule your day so that no time is left for unwinding. A relaxing activity, such as reading or listening to music, should be part of your bedtime ritual. Take a hot bath before bed. The drop in body temperature after getting out of the bath may help you feel sleepy, and the bath can help you relax and slow down so you’re more ready to sleep. Dark bedroom, cool bedroom, gadget-free bedroom. Get rid of anything in your bedroom that might distract you from sleep, such as noises, bright lights, an uncomfortable bed, or warm temperatures. You sleep better if the temperature in the room is kept on the cool side. A TV, cell phone, or computer in the bedroom can be a distraction and deprive you of needed sleep. Having a comfortable mattress and pillow can help promote a good night’s sleep. Individuals who have insomnia often watch the clock. Turn the clock’s face out of view so you don’t worry about the time while trying to fall asleep. Have the right sunlight exposure. Daylight is key to regulating daily sleep patterns. Try to get outside in natural sunlight for at least thirty minutes each day. If possible, wake up with the sun or use very bright lights in the morning. Sleep experts recommend that, if you have problems falling asleep, you should get an hour of exposure to morning sunlight and turn down the lights before bedtime. Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy.

In REM sleep the body is paralyzed, except for shallow breathing and eye movements.

The company has recently made a push into the activity-tracking space — competing with Fitbit, Jawbone, Garmin, and others — with two devices: the Activité, a step-and-sleep tracker that looks like a regular mechanical watch, and the Pulse O2, a fitness monitor that can also check a user’s heart rate. I thought that I would find the activity trackers indispensable. But within a month I discovered that I didn’t have a particularly strong commitment to wanting to keep track of my daily activity levels, and I stopped using them. To my surprise in the end the product I now use most regularly is the one I was most hesitant to try: the Aura sleep-tracking system. The Aura is a futuristic-looking alarm clock-like device that connects to Wi-Fi and includes a sensitive, wire-connected monitoring pad that goes underneath a user’s mattress. The system keeps track of heart rate, time spent in REM sleep and deep sleep (based, in part, on body motion and breathing cycle), and room temperature (a recent update allows it to connect with Nest smart thermostats to adjust temperature for maximum sleep comfort).

Numerous functions of the brain are restored by, and depend upon, sleep. No one type of sleep accomplishes all. Each stage of sleep—light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, and REM sleep—offer different brain benefits at different times of night. Thus, no one type of sleep is more essential than another. Losing out on any one of these types of sleep will cause brain impairment.

By boosting the electrical quality of deep-sleep brainwave activity, the researchers almost doubled the number of facts that individuals were able to recall the following day, relative to those participants who received no stimulation. Applying stimulation during REM sleep, or during wakefulness across the day, did not offer similar memory advantages. Only stimulation during NREM sleep, in synchronous time with the brain’s own slow mantra rhythm, leveraged a memory improvement. Other methods for amplifying the brainwaves of sleep are fast being developed. One technology involves quiet auditory tones being played over speakers next to the sleeper. Like a metronome in rhythmic stride with the individual slow waves, the tick-tock tones are precisely synchronized with the individual’s sleeping brainwaves to help entrain their rhythm and produce even deeper sleep.

The total amount of time we spend asleep is markedly shorter than all other primates (eight hours, relative to the ten to fifteen hours of sleep observed in all other primates), yet we have a disproportionate amount of REM sleep, the stage in which we dream. Between 20 and 25 percent of our sleep time is dedicated to REM sleep dreaming, compared to an average of only 9 percent across all other primates! We are the anomalous data point when it comes to sleep time and dream time, relative to all other monkeys and apes.

This is especially true for the stage of REM sleep, in which the brain completely paralyzes all voluntary muscles of the body, leaving you utterly limp—a literal bag of bones with no tension in your muscles.

Our sleep therefore became “concentrated”: shorter and more consolidated in duration, packed aplenty with high-quality sleep. And not just any type of sleep, but REM sleep that bathed a brain rapidly accelerating in complexity and connectivity. There are species that have more total REM time than hominids, but there are none who power up and lavish such vast proportions of REM sleep onto such a complex, richly interconnected brain as we Homo sapiens do.

To the first of these points, we have discovered that REM sleep exquisitely recalibrates and fine-tunes the emotional circuits of the human brain (discussed in detail in part 3 of the book).

NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information.

Our shift from tree to ground sleeping instigated an ever more bountiful amount of relative REM sleep compared with other primates, and from this bounty emerged a steep increase in cognitive creativity, emotional intelligence, and thus social complexity.

Adults do not—or at least should not—throw out similar nighttime kicks and movements, since they are held back by the body-paralyzing mechanism of REM sleep. But in utero, the immature fetus’s brain has yet to construct the REM-sleep muscle-inhibiting system adults have in place.

Moreover, rats deprived of REM sleep during infancy go on to become socially withdrawn and isolated as adolescents and adults.V

The recording electrodes went on to point out an even more concerning physiological story. Newborns of heavy-drinking mothers did not have the same electrical quality of REM sleep. You will remember from chapter 3 that REM sleep is exemplified by delightfully chaotic—or desynchronized—brainwaves: a vivacious and healthy form of electrical activity. However, the infants of heavy-drinking mothers emitted a brainwave pattern that was more sedentary in this regard.VI

The cerebral war between the two is won and lost every ninety minutes,II ruled first by NREM sleep, followed by the comeback of REM sleep. No sooner has the battle finished than it starts anew, replaying every ninety minutes.

Many studies have found that people suffering from depression show unique symptoms in their bodies.9 These symptoms include too low amounts of various brain chemicals (norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine), a too high amount of a stress hormone (cortisol), and disturbance of deep dream-related (REM) sleep. Furthermore, new technologies allowing researchers to image the brain have revealed that severely depressed patients have abnormalities in the prefrontal cortex (the region of the brain responsible for thinking and managing emotions) as well as in the limbic regions (i.e., areas involved in sleep, eating, sex, motivation, memory, and responses to stress), including the mysterious-sounding Area 25.10 In sum, there is now a great deal of evidence that depression is partly rooted in those parts of our physical bodies over which we have minimal control.

Man needs dreams, as recent sleep research has well-documented. If you wake people up each time they start to dream (which is revealed by their rapid eye movements, which has led scientists to speak of REM sleep, meaning sleep with rapid eye movements and dreams), they will, within a few nights, become neurotic, irritable and slightly paranoid. No reputable researcher has continued this experiment for more than a few nights, because the evidence indicates real risk that the subjects might actually go totally mad. It doesn’t matter how much sleep they have had; if they aren’t able to dream, the same neurotic and near-psychotic behavior will appear.

Nobody is exactly sure why EMDR works, which makes it easy to discredit. One theory is that EMDR mimics the way the brain processes memories during REM sleep. Other research suggests that these eye movements tax our short-term memory, dimming the painful vibrancy of past experiences and making them easier to revisit with a sense of clarity. Whether or not either of these theories is true, many studies keep showing real results: Somehow, this weird process is surprisingly effective in helping patients recover from trauma. In the years since Shapiro invented EMDR, technology has improved beyond the finger-waving. There are now EMDR light units that kind of look like the scrolling LED light-up signs advertising beer at corner stores. And for people like me—people who feel more comfortable keeping their eyes closed throughout the EMDR process—there are now little machines that hook up to vibrating bullets that you hold in your hands, with headphones that play sounds in one ear, then the other.

that REM sleep, in which brain activity was almost identical to that when we are awake, was intimately connected to the experience we call dreaming, and is often described as dream sleep.

As is the case when you are awake, the sensory gate of the thalamus once again swings open during REM sleep. But the nature of the gate is different. It is not sensations from the outside that are allowed to journey to the cortex during REM sleep. Rather, signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are all played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices in the brain. Each and every night, REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical

Mere seconds before the dreaming phase begins, and for as long as that REM-sleep period lasts, you are completely paralyzed. There is no tone in the voluntary muscles of your body. None whatsoever. If I were to quietly come into the room and gently lift up your body without waking you, it would be completely limp, like a rag doll. Rest assured that your involuntary muscles—those that control automatic operations such as breathing—continue to operate and maintain life during sleep. But all other muscles become lax.

Instead, the eye movements are intimately linked with the physiological creation of REM sleep, and reflect something even more extraordinary than the passive apprehension of moving objects within dream space.

Aside from being a stoic sentinel that guards your sanity and emotional well-being, REM sleep and the act of dreaming have another distinct benefit: intelligent information processing that inspires creativity and promotes problem solving.

The second evolutionary contribution that the REM-sleep dreaming state fuels is creativity. NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain. But it is REM sleep that takes these freshly minted memories and begins colliding them with the entire back catalog of your life’s autobiography. These mnemonic collisions during REM sleep spark new creative insights as novel links are forged between unrelated pieces of information. Sleep cycle by sleep cycle, REM sleep helps construct vast associative networks of information within the brain. REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts.

Which sleep period would confer a greater memory savings benefit—that filled with deep NREM, or that packed with abundant REM sleep? For fact-based, textbook-like memory, the result was clear. It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.

At the heart of the theory was an astonishing change in the chemical cocktail of your brain that takes place during REM sleep. Concentrations of a key stress-related chemical called noradrenaline are completely shut off within your brain when you enter this dreaming sleep state. In fact, REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of this anxiety-triggering molecule. Noradrenaline, also known as norepinephrine, is the brain equivalent to a body chemical you already know and have felt the effects of: adrenaline (epinephrine).

Dreams keep replaying, recombining, and reintegrating pieces of old memories for months and even years.14 They constantly update the subterranean realities that determine what our waking minds pay attention to. And perhaps most relevant to EMDR, in REM sleep we activate more distant associations than in either non-REM sleep or the normal waking state.

Higher-carbohydrate diets tend to shift slow-wave (deep) sleep toward REM and reduce the amount of time it takes to fall asleep each night. Higher-protein diets tend to reduce nightly awakenings.

Deep NREM sleep strengthens individual memories, as we now know. But it is REM sleep that offers the masterful and complementary benefit of fusing and blending those elemental ingredients together, in abstract and highly novel ways.

Mendeleev was provided a dream-inspired formulation of the periodic table. It was his dreaming brain, not his waking brain, that was able to perceive an organized arrangement of all known chemical elements. Leave it to REM-sleep dreaming to solve the baffling puzzle of how all constituents of the known universe fit together—an inspired revelation of cosmic magnitude.

I mentioned that during REM sleep we experience our most complex and vivid dreams. It is during this time that projections from the mid-brain to the spinal cord cause paralysis (also called ‘atonia’), from the neck down. This is thought to prevent us from acting out our dreams. Support for this idea comes from a condition known as REM sleep behaviour disorder (RBD), where there is no or little atonia during REM sleep. I will discuss this in more detail later, but RBD is an early sign of the future development of Parkinson’s disease.40 At one end of the severity scale of RBD, individuals just move

This was the theory of overnight therapy. It postulated that the process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. If true, it would suggest that the dream state supports a form of introspective life review, to therapeutic ends.

Last night, you became flagrantly psychotic. It will happen again tonight. Before you reject this diagnosis, allow me to offer five justifying reasons. First, when you were dreaming last night, you started to see things that were not there—you were hallucinating. Second, you believed things that could not possibly be true—you were delusional. Third, you became confused about time, place, and person—you were disoriented. Fourth, you had extreme swings in your emotions—something psychiatrists call being affectively labile. Fifth (and how delightful!), you woke up this morning and forgot most, if not all, of this bizarre dream experience—you were suffering from amnesia. If you were to experience any of these symptoms while awake, you’d be seeking immediate psychological treatment. Yet for reasons that are only now becoming clear, the brain state called REM sleep and the mental experience that goes along with it, dreaming, are normal biological and psychological processes, and truly essential ones, as we shall learn.

Sleep, and specifically REM sleep, was clearly needed in order for us to heal emotional wounds.

When we sleep, our brains go offline. We drift away from consciousness. The noise and the static quiet. Our brains shift in and out of the frontal lobe. We enter into something called slow-wave sleep, and beyond that, REM sleep—the deepest level of sleep, the state in which we dream. Ironically, our brains are nearly as active during REM sleep as they are during waking life, with remarkable bursts of electrical activity.

The REM-sleep dreaming brain [is] utterly uninterested in bland, commonsense links [...] The logic guards [have] left the REM-sleep dreaming brain. Wonderfully eclectic lunatics [are] now running the associative memory asylum.

We dream in both REM and non-REM sleep, but the most bizarre, emotional, and unlikely dreams—and arguably those that seem most meaningful to us—occur in REM sleep.

What’s interesting is that REM sleep appeared relatively late in the game of evolution; all animals display NREM sleep, but only birds and nonaquatic mammals experience REM, although recent studies suggest that a REM sleep–like state may exist in nonavian reptiles.

Once put in place, the postural body muscles, such as the biceps of your arms and the quadriceps of your legs, lose all tension and strength. No longer will they respond to commands from your brain. You have, in effect, become an embodied prisoner, incarcerated by REM sleep.

During REM sleep, there is a nonstop barrage of motor commands swirling around the brain, and they underlie the movement-rich experience of dreams. Wise, then, of Mother Nature to have tailored a physiological straitjacket that forbids these fictional movements from becoming reality, especially considering that you’ve stopped consciously perceiving your surroundings.

signals of emotions, motivations, and memories (past and present) are all played out on the big screens of our visual, auditory, and kinesthetic sensory cortices in the brain. Each and every night, REM sleep ushers you into a preposterous theater wherein you are treated to a bizarre, highly associative carnival of autobiographical themes.

the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night.

Let’s say that you go to bed this evening at midnight. But instead of waking up at eight a.m., getting a full eight hours of sleep, you must wake up at six a.m. because of an early-morning meeting or because you are an athlete whose coach demands early-morning practices. What percent of sleep will you lose? The logical answer is 25 percent, since waking up at six a.m. will lop off two hours of sleep from what would otherwise be a normal eight hours. But that’s not entirely true. Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part

Autistic individuals show a 30 to 50 percent deficit in the amount of REM sleep they obtain, relative to children without autism.

When it comes to information processing, think of the wake state principally as reception (experiencing and constantly learning the world around you), NREM sleep as reflection (storing and strengthening those raw ingredients of new facts and skills), and REM sleep as integration (interconnecting these raw ingredients with each other, with all past experiences, and, in doing so, building an ever more accurate

REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts. We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems or even be infused with radically new and original ideas.

these unborn infants suffered a depression in breathing during REM sleep, with breath rates dropping from a rate of 381 per hour during natural sleep to just 4 per hour when the fetus was exposed to alcohol.VII

REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity.

recent MRI scanning studies have found that there are individual parts of the brain that are up to 30 percent more active during REM sleep than when we are awake!

that REM sleep increases our ability to recognize and therefore successfully navigate the kaleidoscope of socioemotional signals that are abundant in human culture, such as overt and covert facial expressions, major and minor bodily gestures, and even mass group behavior.

Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off.

It’s a perspective on story that may also shed light on why you and I and everyone else spend a couple of hours each day concocting tales that we rarely remember and more rarely share. By day I mean night, and the tales are those we produce during REM sleep. Well over a century since Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, there is still no consensus on why we dream. I read Freud’s book for a junior-year high school class called Hygiene (yes, that’s really what it was called), a somewhat bizarre requirement taught by the school’s gym teachers and sports coaches that focused on first aid and common standards of cleanliness. Lacking material to fill an entire semester, the class was padded by mandatory student presentations on topics deemed loosely relevant. I chose sleep and dreams and probably took it all too seriously, reading Freud and spending after-school hours combing through research literature. The wow moment for me, and for the class too, was the work of Michel Jouvet, who in the late 1950s explored the dream world of cats.32 By impairing part of the cat brain (the locus coeruleus, if you like that sort of thing), Jouvet removed a neural block that ordinarily prevents dream thoughts from stimulating bodily action, resulting in sleeping cats who crouched and arched and hissed and pawed, presumably reacting to imaginary predators and prey. If you didn’t know the animals were asleep, you might think they were practicing a feline kata. More recently, studies on rats using more refined neurological probes have shown that their brain patterns when dreaming so closely match those recorded when awake and learning a new maze that researchers can track the progress of the dreaming rat mind as it retraces its earlier steps.33 When cats and rats dream it surely seems they’re rehearsing behaviors relevant to survival. Our common ancestor with cats and rodents lived some seventy or eighty million years ago, so extrapolating a speculative conclusion across species separated by tens of thousands of millennia comes with ample warning labels. But one can imagine that our language-infused minds may produce dreams for a similar purpose: to provide cognitive and emotional workouts that enhance knowledge and exercise intuition—nocturnal sessions on the flight simulator of story. Perhaps that is why in a typical life span we each spend a solid seven years with eyes closed, body mostly paralyzed, consuming our self-authored tales.34 Intrinsically, though, storytelling is not a solitary medium. Storytelling is our most powerful means for inhabiting other minds. And as a deeply social species, the ability to momentarily move into the mind of another may have been essential to our survival and our dominance. This offers a related design rationale for coding story into the human behavioral repertoire—for identifying, that is, the adaptive utility of our storytelling instinct.

The apprentice is required to master many techniques before receiving safari guide certification. Among the most difficult and essential of these skills is the ancient practice of unihemispheric slow-wave sleeping. The ability to sleep with half of the brain while the other remains completely alert, alternating between hemispheres, allows the guide to remain conscious twenty-four hours a day. This unconventional method has been observed in a number of terrestrial, aquatic and avian species, particularly those that dwell in areas of high predation. It is strongly recommended that safari guides avoid full REM sleep while guiding safaris. Though, when charged with the care of the most demanding and pampered of clients, a traditional fifteen minute nap is occasionally permitted.

If you don’t get enough non-REM sleep, which is common in people who wake up throughout the night, you will feel tired and depleted the next day.

REM sleep, the time of dreams, at about five to eight hertz. Hallucinations—Dreams “R” Us.

The pons is active during meditation, as we breathe deeply and regularly. It’s associated with the production of delta and theta waves in the brain, which research shows turns on a host of healthy processes in your cells. These include increased stem-cell production and the repair of skin, bone, muscle, nerves, and cartilage. These brain waves also lengthen our telomeres, the most reliable marker of longevity. A remarkable ability of humans is that we are able to activate or deactivate all of these brain regions by consciousness alone. We can shift our thoughts deliberately with meditative practices or simply by focusing on different stimuli. The brain responds accordingly. We’ll see the extraordinary neural effects of this superpower of “selective attention” in Chapter 6, and the evolutionary implications in Chapter 8. Pons Activation Benefits Increases Decreases Quality REM sleep Insomnia Cell repair Longevity Energy Cell metabolism Melatonin Delta brain waves Theta brain waves Dream frequency and quality Lucid dreaming To the Brain, Imagination Is Reality For thousands of years, sages have assured us that our minds create our reality. In Proverbs 23:7, the poet tells us that, “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.” Two thousand years ago the Buddha said, “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.” Now neuroscience is showing us how true this is. An ingenious study measured how our brains respond to scenarios that exist only in our imaginations. A research team at the University of Colorado at Boulder took 68 people and gave them a mild electric shock accompanied by a sound. They were then divided into three groups. The first group heard the sound repeatedly, though this time without the shock. The second group imagined the sound in their heads repeatedly. The third group imagined the pleasant natural music of rain and birds. The group imagining the sound showed the same brain activity as the one actually hearing the sound. Two brain regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the nucleus accumbens, lit up. As we’ve seen, the first regulates emotions like fear in the limbic system, while the second processes reward and aversion. Later, people in the “rain and birds” group were still afraid of the sound even when it was repeated many times without the shock. But those in the group that heard the real sound, as well as those imagining it, unlearned their fear. In neuroscience, this revision of reality is called “extinction learning.

During REM sleep, the brain allows the appropriate neural connections to make needed associations. The memory is processed and shifted to a more adaptive, usable form. That’s why you can go to bed worried about something but wake up feeling better or with a solution.

Increasing our time in REM sleep reduces depression, while the less REM sleep we get, the more likely we are to become depressed.

For contextual remembering, new memories are related to existing memory content. This happens in a later stage of sleep, when we dream. As we sleep and try to follow our dream actions and experiences in the virtual space created by our brain, we often move our eyes rapidly. That’s why this stage of sleep is called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. In REM sleep, the new memories uploaded in SWS are linked to past memory content, so it is not uncommon for us to wake up in the morning with new insights.23 We need to sleep and dream to be able to remember what we have experienced and thought in the long term.

This so-called adult hippocampal neurogenesis takes place mainly during REM sleep.29 An international team of researchers led by stem cell researcher Jonas Frisén at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden found that up to 1.5 percent of all hippocampal neurons are newly formed each year.30 This is significantly more hippocampal neurons than in any other species studied to date. And, as Frisén’s team was able to show, this new production continues throughout life in humans. Frisén’s researchers calculated the individual age of existing hippocampal neurons by determining the radioactive carbon isotopes incorporated into the neurons’ genetic material and thus inferring the production rate.