#045 Dr. Matthew Walker on Sleep for Enhancing Learning, Creativity, Immunity, and Glymphatic System
FoundMyFitness
Rhonda Patrick, Ph.D.
4.8 • 5.5K Ratings
🗓️ 28 February 2019
⏱️ 168 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Matthew Walker
Matthew Walker, Ph.D., is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and serves as the Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science.
Walker's research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. One area of interest focuses on identifying "vulnerability windows" during a person's life that make them more susceptible to amyloid-beta deposition from loss of slow wave sleep and, subsequently, Alzheimer's disease later in life.
Dr. Walker earned his undergraduate degree in neuroscience from the University of Nottingham, UK, and his Ph.D. in neurophysiology from the Medical Research Council, London, UK. He is the author of the New York Times best-selling book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams.
In this episode, we discuss:
- 00:00 - Introduction
- 08:47 - Sleep boosts learning
- 21:21 - Manipulating sleep to enhance learning
- 26:28 - REM sleep, dreams, and memory encoding
- 34:46 - Sleep deprivation causes loneliness
- 46:36 - Sleep is disturbed in all neuropsychiatric conditions
- 52:30 - Bright light exposure
- 01:00:02 - How much sleep is enough?
- 01:10:21 - Inflammation triggers sleep
- 01:26:16 - Bidirectional relationship between poor sleep and Alzheimer's disease
- 01:35:12 - Deep sleep deprivation increases beta-amyloid
- 01:41:40 - Preventing dementia
- 01:48:44 - Sleep tracking technology
- 01:56:25 - Four Pillars of Sleep
- 02:06:02 - Metabolism and microbiome
- 02:23:34 - Tips for better sleep
If you’re interested in learning more, you can read the full show notes here: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/matthew-walker
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back my Jedi level health omaniacs. Today's guest is Dr. Matthew Walker, author of the |
| 0:06.8 | New York Times bestselling book Why We Sleep, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the |
| 0:11.8 | University of California Berkeley and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. As such, |
| 0:18.2 | sleep is much of this episode's focus, and yet sleep is so important and its effects are so far |
| 0:25.3 | reaching that to simply say this podcast is about sleep really doesn't do it justice. It's almost |
| 0:32.0 | laughably inadequate in fact. So let's try this again. This podcast is not just about sleep, |
| 0:39.6 | but the extended biological context surrounding sleep. Not just a list of tips, there's that too, |
| 0:46.8 | but the why of the sleep, what we know about its function and maybe as important the consequences |
| 0:53.0 | of not getting it. In this whopping two and a half hour podcasts, we discuss how pulling an all-nighter |
| 0:59.0 | decreases learning capacity by up to 40%. How sleep is important for long-term memory because during |
| 1:05.6 | sleep we shift memories from the hippocampus, the vulnerable short-term storage reservoir, |
| 1:11.4 | and we move them out to the cortex, the long-term storage site within the brain. How sounds coupled |
| 1:17.6 | with certain learning can be used when played at sub-awakening volume to contextually strengthen |
| 1:22.8 | memories during sleep, a bizarre and fascinating phenomenon. On a similar note, how exposure to |
| 1:28.7 | odors during learning and then again during sleep can create this exact same selective enhancement |
| 1:34.2 | of retention. That's right, smells and even sounds can reinforce memories even while we sleep. |
| 1:40.4 | We also talk about possible explanation as to why we do not remember dreams. |
| 1:45.8 | Dr. Walker's lab's research showing how loneliness is a type of viral social contagion |
| 1:51.2 | that is promoted by sleep loss, which was demonstrated by experiments that showed people who |
| 1:56.0 | were sleep deprived distanced themselves from social interactions and were in turn shunned by other |
| 2:02.0 | people. We discuss how the amygdala, an area of the brain that is important for emotional regulation, |
| 2:07.8 | is 60% more reactive after sleep deprivation due to a dampening down of the prefrontal cortex function. |
... |
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