The future of sleep | Jonathan Berent | TEDxPaloAlto

[Music] [Music] about 10 years ago I met a googler who practiced polyphasic sleep now before I tell you what polyphasic sleep is let me

tell you a little bit about Tom he looked like a normal Google engineer he was a little shorter than me had a little bit more hair you know I'm not sure if he brushed it that morning but that's okay because he had a pleasant smile on his face and he was willing to

talk to me about my favorite subject sleep now what I knew about Tom before I met him was that he had an unusual sleep schedule and it started in college okay

fine I tried dream journaling incubating dreams even controlling my dreams through lucid dreaming but I didn't know anything about unusual sleep schedules I was intrigued but when Tom started

talking I was floored like many Google Engineers he had his PhD in computer science AI 2003 a little bit ahead of his time you could say but unlike

anybody I had met before or since he didn't just have one degree but nearly 10 degrees including Masters in biomedical engineering electrical engineering and physics and he did all

this by sleeping a lot more than the rest of us wait a minute JB did you get that turned around okay fine he slept a lot more often but with less Total Sleep time you see when you're monophasic you

sleep in one large block you may get up to go to the bathroom but you go back to sleep or at least you you try to Tom he would sleep four to six times per 24

hours no more than 30 minutes now it turns out he wasn't the first to sleep like that Buckminster Fuller and benter architect of the

geodesic dome created what he called the dixion and it was a schedule where he would sleep four times for 30 minutes for a total of two hours and he did that

for two years Time Magazine covered that in 1943 both Buckminster Fuller and his unusual sleep schedule so you've met Tom you've met his inspiration Buckminster

Fuller you now know what polyphasic sleep is but what you don't know and what I would have never guessed at the time but meeting Tom learning about polyphasic sleep would change my life

profoundly in both good and bad ways my am in this talk is to mine the Nuggets of my research my conversation with Sleep Experts my lectures at for and give you what I think is not just the

key to the future of sleep but helping you personalize your rest to Unleash Your Potential 85% of all mammals are

polyphasic we come into this world massive polyphasic sleepers babies sleep four to six different periods a day now dogs dogs are the expert at this schedule how many of you have seen your

dog knocked out only to pop up as soon as you get up now this was a costly even risk Ry trait for evolution to select we're not

reproducing when we're asleep hopefully we're not Gathering food we're not able to protect ourselves we weren't sleeping four to six hours at a time

when our lives consisted not getting eaten by lions and gathering enough food I believe we evolve to be polyphasic sleepers that Evolution selected a trait

that allows us to go down pop back up go down again until we get our sufficient rest now some of you especially those of you who in the co days maybe got used to

a little bit of an afternoon snooze you know who you are this sounds pretty good well you know what this is your justification this talks over for you go out take your naps live guilt-free

but if you haven't started harnessing the power of intermittent napping or what I'm calling paleo sleeping then hang on for the wild ride where I tell you what I learned how I failed I almost

got fired for Google from taking 4,400 naps from January 2016 until today first things first we know a lot

less about sleep than we think and that's a good thing why well because how else are we going to help the billion people that complain about their sleep or probably half of you that don't feel

like you get enough sleep Dr build Min Dr build min the father of sleep medicine credited

with discovering REM used to attend my lectures at Stanford on sleep hacking after one of the lectures he came up to me and he said JB after 50 years of study we still don't know why

we sleep now we do know a lot more about why we sleep and credit to Matt Walker's book of the same name but I think we should listen to the guy that arguably

contributed more than anyone to the field for example here are some questions that we don't have great answers to why do we sleep differently in the first half of the night versus

the second and are they of equal value what about naps are they universally a good thing a bad thing or it depends now cognitive

decline is associated with changes in sleep patterns what's the cause and the effect here which comes first so when you admit that you don't

know everything about something you become curious and when you're curious you start to experiment and when you experiment you can sometimes discover experiences you never thought possible

or maybe even abilities you didn't know you had that's what happened to me in 2016 when I started what is called the every man sleep schedule I went to bed

at 10:30 p.m. I woke up at 1:30 a.m. I

jumped into my swimming pool and I started my day I then took three 20 minute naps spaced evenly throughout

that year alone I took 98 naps I also wrote a novel I learned machine learning I read PhD textbooks in Neuroscience I

started lecturing at Stanford and I felt great even though I was sleeping three hours less I did this for about 2 years until

the fall of 2018 when I almost got fired from Google Now when we talk about the pitfalls of unusual sleep schedules and I eat some Humble Pie you see I thought I discover the next big thing it's like

wow who knew we don't need you know seven hours of sleep we need four Well turns out we actually do need six to seven hours of sleep most of us and the

challenge is though I had this mentality that I could do anything and so I was taking naps and I had an admin who was tired of scheduling around my naps and I

was cranking I didn't even know it and you she thought I was trying to fire her I was actually going to promote her well she found out I was trying to start a company and I was using Google

resources you know a video monitor and time and I got a written warning and I said if I do that again I could get fired you'd think I get the message right well when you were sleeping as

little as I was you don't always think straight so this person gave a talk on diversity in Creative works and I was so excited about the novel that I wrote I approached her afterwards and said hey

will you help me get really authentic diverse characters and she's like sure sure follow up now how dumb do you have to be to ask your admin to schedule that meeting with the person that was going

to help you with a personal project well how dumb are house sleep deprived it turns out there are limits when it comes to these unusual sleep schedules and I had found mine now I pulled back way

back from the Every Man's sleep schedule but I never gave up my nap and to this day I always carry this around and I don't miss the nap why it's an absolute superpower to be able to shut down at

any time any moment of the day when you're not feeling your best now the Everyman sleep schedule didn't work for me but I found one that did if I sleep six hours maybe even seven and I take

one two sometimes three naps a day I feel absolutely amazing and I feel like I can do anything and that's what I want for you so now I'm going to give you

three tips that will allow you to live your best life and here we go so tip number one refuse to be tired refuse to

be tired day or night if you're sleepy just sleep now you're thinking but I can't always fall asleep all right fine so even periods of quiet rest where you

don't fall asleep can be in incredibly restorative all right let me explain no let me demonstrate if you're bold and curious close your eyes with me right now now go ahead it's okay now as we

have our eyes closed in our brains in the back region of our brains our cital cortex is starting to slow down that is where visual processing happens because it doesn't have any visual stimuli it's starting to generate a certain Rhythm

that's propagating through our brain at 8 to 12 Hertz neuroscientists call this the alpharithm you can open your eyes it's also called the PDR posterior

dominant Rhythm because it actually does dominate and go through this is what your brain looks like on on Alpha okay this is a funny picture but

hopefully it primes you for a very neuroscienc slide that's coming next so the alphar Rhythm can be seen in what's called a spectrogram so a spectrogram on

the y axis have the frequencies of the brain and on the x-axis have time and the Shaded regions are showing the power so in this Paradigm which is very Classic this person has their eyes open

they have them eyes closed and they have them eyes open and they have eyes closed and can you guess which are the areas where their eyes were closed if you pick the Shaded regions then you know that

yes this person was able to generate Alpha in these very short instances 80% of you generated Alpha just in this very short exercise when we close our eyes

and you gave yourself that Alpha Spa for your brain now that you have the context let me tell you how to put this to practice so I want you to today anytime

maybe later this afternoon you're not feeling your best grab a sleep mask or go buy one if you don't have one and go find a quiet place now even at Google they have nap pods I went

to my car so go to your car if you have no other place and I want you to lie down close your eyes and find an app that plays music that stops on a timer so really important just that it stops

on its own so YouTube does that they have a sleep timer I used to use brain FM for a while those are two example apps but it doesn't really matter it's just soothing music that will

stop now Pro tip make sure you set a 20-minute alarm that actually does rain because the day will come when you'll go from I wonder when this music's going to

stop so I can get up to like oh my God I don't remember when the music stopped and when that happens you have found the off switch for your brain and that's your first step towards eliminating exhaustion in

your life number two trust your body not your tracker okay so one of the challenges of all these

rings and bands that are that are tracking you know in addition to the fact they're not as accurate as they should be because they're tracking heart rate and and not brain waves is that they're starting to shame people on how

they slept right first thing in the morning can you relate it's telling me to take my day a little easier I'm a CEO I can't take the day easy right now you

all know about the placebo effect scientists study the oppos opposite it's called the nobo effect and so I want you to stop looking for your tracker first thing in the morning don't get anchored on that in

fact when I was polyphasic sleeping one of the things I realized how you first feel when you wake up actually is an indicative of how you slept so no matter how you feel or what your tracker says I

want you to look for that sleep mask and carry with you the confidence that you're going to be able to get restored anytime you need during the

day third tip stay curious and experiment this part I love that I talked to this researcher at UCSF

yingu and she studies people with a modified deck2 Gene and their supermatic nucleus that's a part of the brain that communicates with every cell's

clock and she found that these people only need four to five hours of sleep in fact some of them thought they were insomniacs but they felt totally fine

now I want you to experiment with the Every Man's schedule in fact I don't recommend those extreme polyphasic sleep schedules but what I do recommend is trying some of the things that we talked

about today and trusting that you will find a sleep schedule that works for you that allows you to live the life you're meant to live because we sleep to be

awake after all don't we so we've looked at the past we've talked about what you can do today now it's time to turn to the Future and see how techn techology is going to change

the way we think about sleep and how we actually rest so I've started a company NEX sense and our mission is to eliminate exhaustion and to bring joy energy and purpose and we've created a

set of brain sensing earbuds now these not only track sleep but they enhance sleep and what I think that technology like ours and others are going to show that you can actually have these personalized schedules where you're

doing at different times during the day in fact one of the reasons I pulled back from my polyphasic schedule is I wasn't sure what was happening during my naps

well now I know so here's a picture of my nap just a few weeks ago and in it you'll see these slow oscillations and this was like an 11-minute nap and I

actually had deep sleep very restorative so the day is coming when you will have personalized sleep schedules because more science will be published around

the restorative nature of the Naps second technology will not only track sleep but it'll enhance it we did a

study in 2017 on how you could enhance slow wave activity so this was at my time at Google we weren't the first and we certainly weren't the last lots of labs have studied this phenomenon you

can actually influence deep sleep by playing certain stimuli and frequencies at the right time of sleep now what does this mean this means that some of you are going to sleep the same that you are

now but you're going to feel fine and others of you might even sleep a little bit bit less but feel great because you're going to be like young Fu's short

sleepers your sleep will be more highly efficient third paleo sleep is the future when the day comes when we have a Sleep Clinic in our pocket and we have

the ability to personalize our sleep schedule we'll have sleep at the knowledge that exercise is think about how many exercise routines there are tens of thousands of exercise routines

right think about what happened with metabolic health and how many diets there are well that day is coming will there'll be hundreds of sleep schedules for you to choose from and I hope that

you'll choose one that allows you to live the life that you want to live now in closing I want to tell you a story many years ago I tried to outsmart

our high school science teacher and so I caught a grasshopper with my bare hands and I put it behind my back and when I found him I said Mr herther is this

grasshopper alive or dead if he said alive I would just crush it and show him the dead grasshopper if he said dead I would just release it and and Let It Go

without missing a beat he said Jonathan the future of the grasshopper lies in your hands friends the future of sleep lies in your hands or maybe your ears thank

you very much for