It's Friday, January 9th, 2015, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds.

I'm Indra Viscontes.

Each week, we bring you a new in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

We endeavor to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it all matters.

You can find us online at motherjones.com slash inquiring minds on Twitter at

inquiring show and on Facebook at slash inquiring minds podcast. And you can subscribe to the show

on iTunes or any other podcasting app.

Joining me once again as guest host is Kishore Hari. He's the director of the Bay Area Science Festival and a herder of nerds in the Bay Area and elsewhere. You can find him on Twitter as at Science Kish. Now, we've had Kishore on a few times at the beginning of the show to talk about science and the news with me. But this week, we actually handed him the mic, and he did the main interview.

So, Kishore, welcome back to inquiring minds.

It's great to be here.

So who did you have?

So you do it.

I do it.

We all do it.

We empathize with those who lack it.

We're jealous of those who get it in excess. I'm, of course, talking about

sleep. So this week, I got to interview Matt Walker from UC Berkeley. He leads a team of researchers

at UC Berkeley's sleep and neuroimaging laboratory. And he's one of the former sleep researchers

in the Bay Area. And they study the role of sleep in human brain function, especially the impact of sleep and lack thereof on learning, memory, and emotional regulation.

Now, I didn't sleep that well the night before, which is probably not the best idea when you're interviewing a sleep researcher.

So we quickly began to discuss

how much sleep we need each night before we start to see biological consequences. So if you were to,

...