(Repeat) Adventures in sleep

All In The Mind

ABC listen

Life Sciences, Health & Fitness, Science

4.4 • 785 Ratings

🗓️ 21 June 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

At night our brain can have adventures. Even if they're fully asleep, some people end up sleep walking or sleep driving! The neuroscience of nightmares and dreaming—and what they can tell us about the workings of our brain.

This program was originally broadcast in June 2019.

Transcript

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0:00.0	What happens to our brain at night?
0:09.0	Today we hear some intriguing and at times bizarre tales of nightmares, night terrors and sleepwalking.
0:18.0	Jackie began to become aware that she was undertaking other behaviours in her sleep as well.
0:24.6	On one occasion she greeted her then landlady in the morning and the landlady said to her,
0:31.6	where were you going on your motorbike at one in the morning? To which Jackie was completely bewildered and it became apparent that
0:39.2	actually she was riding her motorbike in her sleep.
0:42.4	Hello, you're with All in the Mind on RN. I'm Lynne Malcolm.
0:47.5	Dr Guy Leshzina is a consultant neurologist and sleep physician at Guy's and St Thomas Hospitals in London.
0:55.0	He's fascinated by the field of sleep medicine because he says it describes the various states of our brain.
1:03.0	His book, The Nocturnal Brain, illustrates the neuroscience behind our sleep.
1:09.0	But before we delve into this secret world of sleep, why is it that we
1:14.0	sleep at all? Guy Leszina. The very short answer is we don't fully understand why we sleep. We know that
1:22.5	sleep has probably a variety of purposes. It's important for the regulation of the brain. It's also
1:31.1	important for regulation of the body and it has a broad range of influences on our health,
1:37.4	physical, psychological and neurological. We think that one of the very important functions of
1:43.5	sleep is in housekeeping of the brain.
1:46.9	So we know that there are a number of important chemical and electrical changes within the brain during sleep
1:53.7	that have a wide range of influences, including the removal of toxins and metabolites from the brain,
2:04.1	but also reconfiguring connections between various neurons in the brain to allow us to learn important for our memory, for our emotional
2:10.7	processing. And we know that also sleep is important for the regulation of our psychological health.
2:16.6	So if you disrupt sleep and there remains some uncertainty about whether one stage of sleep is more important than another for this,
2:23.4	we know that this can have really quite negative consequences on our mood and on our levels of anxiety as well.
	...

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