Sleep helps us recharge, but research suggests its impact is far larger than recharging our physical and mental batteries.
According to Patrick McNamara PhD, Shelby Harris PsyD, DBSM, and Dave Asprey, sleep is imperative to restoring cells, regulating metabolism, consolidating memory, and synchronizing the body’s internal clocks. REM in particular aided human cultural evolution, allowing our ancestors to make creative leaps by connecting disparate ideas. With this powerful ability, humanity was able to advance past lives of pure survival and into ones filled with art, science, and culture.
We created this video for Brain Briefs, a Big Think interview series created in partnership with Unlikely Collaborators. As a creative non-profit organization, they’re on a mission to help people challenge their perceptions and expand their thinking. Often, that growth can start with just a single unlikely question that makes you rethink your convictions and adjust your vantage point. Visit Perception Box to see more in this series.
PATRICK MCNAMARA: In the modern age, we've lost our reverence for the dream state. But REM sleep is what has made us special.
More and more evidence is accumulating, which suggests that REM sleep was absolutely critical to the evolution of the special cognitive capacities that human beings evidence, and therefore critical to our cultural evolution and our special creativity.
What REM sleep normally does is it creates this very high cholinergic environment in the brain, which allows for intense creativity because it promotes connections between otherwise disparate ideas.
So, when our ancestors in the Upper Paleolithic acquired greater access to the REM sleep state, it helped to fuel the onset of cumulative cultural evolutionary processes.
SHELBY HARRIS: When you're in REM sleep, your body is quiet, but your mind is actually very active. So it's a time when your body and your brain is restoring itself. It's repairing any cell damage that happened during the day, but also helps with digestion and helps with memory. It has a lot of things that it's doing while you're asleep.
Sleep deprivation can lead to a number of different decrements. Decrements in attention and concentration, being able to learn more efficiently, that's just not as good. And also, there's a new line of research showing that people who don't get enough sleep, their body doesn't metabolize as well.
DAVE ASPREY: For all of the quadrillions of cells in your body to do what they're supposed to do they all need to know what time it is. And that's why every organ has a clock. That's what each cell has a clock. And that's why the master clock is stored in something called the SCN inside the brain. And light controls the SCN more than anything else.
You want to sleep well at night? The biggest thing is turn the lights down at night. It doesn't change the length you’ll sleep, necessarily, but it changes the quality of your sleep. And the reason this works is that timing system in the body is looking for that. And if you give it the bright light, especially in evening, it says, I don't know what time it is. And then all the different systems in the body are supposed to work as a system in unison, they don't do that. It doesn't take very much light at night in order to screw up the quality of your sleep and then the quality of your thinking.
PATRICK MCNAMARA: REM has been crucial to human creativity. It's constantly creating these dream worlds for us, and we can then compare our current world with these alternative simulations of possible worlds. And that creates tremendous forward, goal-seeking behaviors and can help us get creative solutions for dealing with the challenges we're all facing.
