Mini-Episode: Cool Facts Friday #4
The Human Upgrade: Biohacking for Longevity & Performance
Dave Asprey
4.6 • 7.3K Ratings
🗓️ 30 October 2020
⏱️ 14 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Cool Facts are quick hits of new human and world science curated into short bursts of information just for you. This fun compilation publishes one Friday a month. Enjoy!
Here’s the current lineup for episode #4:
- Sheep brain waves offer clues about human brain wave activity.
- New materials protect from EMFs.
- We know sperm are strong swimmers, but the way they swim is a bit wonky.
- Sorry, your dog doesn't care what your face looks like.
- Think you have one foot arch? Turns out we've evolved to have two.
EPISODE SPONSOR: Lambs /Clothing that protects against EMFs. https://getlambs.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to a new edition of Cool Facts Friday. This cool fact is about sheep brainwaves. |
| 0:07.2 | Neurobiology researchers at the University of Cambridge have found that sleeping sheep's brains |
| 0:12.1 | have bursts really similar to that found in sleeping humans. And those brain bursts are fast |
| 0:19.1 | zags of neural activity called spindles. And they show up as a burst of electroactivity on an EEG, |
| 0:26.2 | and we think they help people solidify memories during sleep. What they're doing for sheep, |
| 0:32.4 | I don't know, but I will tell you, as a sheep farmer, sheep do recognize individual people, |
| 0:37.3 | so maybe they're doing the same thing. The researchers implanted electrodes in six female |
| 0:42.8 | marino sheep's brains and collected electoral patterns over a period of two nights and a day. |
| 0:48.9 | And they found that in sheep, those spindles occurred during the day and when the sheep are awake. |
| 0:56.5 | And that made the researchers say, hey, maybe people are more sheep like than we thought, |
| 1:01.5 | and maybe people have those spindles that we thought were sleep spindles when they're awake. |
| 1:06.1 | And that if those day spindles exist in us, they might help people with memory retention |
| 1:12.3 | when we're awake, which would be phenomenal in a major finding in brain science. And compared to |
| 1:18.0 | night spindles, day spindles appeared less abundant, more localized, and at unpredictable spots in |
| 1:24.2 | the sheep's brains. What does that mean for us? Well, we're probably going to find the same thing |
| 1:29.9 | as true in people. It's just hard to implant electrodes and have us walk around, but there are |
| 1:33.8 | definitely companies looking at doing that. Of course, Elon Musk is one of the guys looking at that. |
| 1:39.6 | We'll probably also be able to capture this with external EEG leads. And I think what we're going |
| 1:44.8 | to find is that there are applications or things like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Huntington's, |
| 1:50.6 | but more interestingly, for everyone, even if you're not in a high risk category for those things, |
| 1:57.0 | what if there was a way to turn those on at the right time, at the right part of the brain, |
| 2:02.6 | to help you learn things faster? So you study and you do something to cause those spindles. |
... |
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