Essentials: Understanding and Using Dreams to Learn and to Forget

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• 00:00

  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.

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  I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

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  Today we're going to talk about dreaming, learning during dreaming, as well as unlearning during dreaming.

• 00:23

  In particular unlearning of challenging emotional events.

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  Now numerous people throughout history have tried to make sense of dreams in some sort of organized way.

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  The most famous of which of course is Sigmund Freud who talked about symbolic representations in dreams.

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  A lot of that has been kind of debunked, although I think that there's some interest in what the symbols of dreaming are.

• 00:45

  And this is something that we'll talk about in more depth today, although not Freudian theory in particular.

• 00:53

  So I think in order to really think about dreams and what to do with them and how to maximize the dream experience for sake of learning and unlearning, the best way to address this is to look at the physiology of sleep, to really address what do we know concretely about sleep.

• 01:11

  So first of all, as we get sleepy, we tend to shut our eyes.

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  And that's because there are some autonomic centers in the brain, some neurons that control closing of the eyelids when we get sleepy.

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  And then we transition into sleep.

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  And sleep, regardless of how long we sleep, is generally broken up into a series of 90 minute cycles, these ultradian cycles.

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  So early in the night, these 90 minute cycles tend to be comprised more of shallow sleep and slow wave sleep.

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  And we tend to have less so called REM sleep.

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  REM sleep, which stands for rapid eye movement sleep.

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  For every 90 minute cycle that we have during a night of sleep, we tend to start having more and more REM sleep.

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  So more of that 90 minute cycle is comprised of REM sleep and less of slow wave sleep.

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  Now this is true regardless of whether or not you wake up at the middle of the night to use the restroom or your sleep is broken.

• 02:06

  The more sleep you're getting across the night, the more REM sleep you're going to have.

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