Essentials: Use Sleep to Enhance Learning, Memory & Emotional State | Dr. Gina Poe

Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. And now for my discussion with Doctor. Gina Poe. Doctor. Gina Poe, welcome. Thank you. I've really been looking forward to this conversation. I know that many people are going to be excited to learn about your work as it relates to sleep, as it relates to problem solving, creativity, and a number of other important topics. To start things off, I would love for you to educate us a bit about this thing that we are all familiar with and yet very few of us understand, which is sleep. Could you describe the various phases of sleep that exist? What distinguish them? And perhaps frame this within the context of what would a perfect night's sleep look like? All right, so sleep is really different from wakefulness, and in fact, can't be replaced by any state of wakefulness that we've been able to come up with so far. Our brain chemistry is completely different, and in the different stages of sleep, which there are non REM and REM are the two major states of sleep. Those two states are entirely different from one another too. And even within non REM, there are three states. Stage one, which is what you slip into when you're first falling asleep. It's dozing. There's an interesting rhythm that goes on in the brain. It's a fast gamma rhythm. And then there's stage two, which is a really cool state. We used to ignore sleep researchers because it was a transient state between wakefulness and the deep stage three slow wave sleep, which is the most impressively different, which is when big slow waves sweep through our brain. And now we realize that it cleans our brain. One of the things that those big slow waves do is cleans our brain and does other really important things to restore us from a day of wakefulness. And then REM sleep, which is the most popular because that's where we have the most active dreams. When you wake up someone out of REM sleep, they'll almost always report having dreamed something really bizarre. That's called REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. So those are the four states of sleep, of human sleep. And we cycle through them every ninety minutes or so. And then we start over again. And we have about five of those per night for a perfect night's sleep, four or five, something like that. So a perfect night's sleep is seven and a half, eight hours. And what about the sleep where we are lightly asleep and we might have a dream that has us somehow thinking about movement or that we jolt ourselves awake. That often happens early in the night, Yeah, yeah, that's the first stage, stage one …