The expert revealed the secrets of everything related to falling asleep, waking up and dreaming.
The Alpina Non-Fiction Publishing House has published the book Riddles of Sleep: From Insomnia to Lethargy. Its author, Candidate of Medical Sciences, Head of the Sleep Medicine Department of the Sechenov Institute Mikhail Poluektov, answered simple questions from KP about all the most mysterious and incomprehensible things associated with falling asleep, waking up and dreaming
RECORD TIME WITHOUT SLEEP - 11 DAYS
In the book, you talk about Leonardo da Vinci: supposedly every four hours he fell asleep for exactly 15 minutes, and then woke up and continued to work. It turns out that he spent only an hour and a half a day on sleep. And this did not bother him at all, but on the contrary, saved a lot of time
- There was no documentary evidence that Leonardo lived in this particular regime. And yet, for centuries, humanity has hoped that by reducing sleep time, you can increase wakefulness. In 1986, they conducted an experiment with another artist, a certain Francesco Jost. They thought to refute the myth of Leonardo, but, to the surprise of the researchers, Jost was able to live in a similar mode for 48 days. True, he fell asleep for 30 minutes every four hours, that is, he slept not one and a half, but three hours a day. And he retained his working capacity, and the scientists confirmed that during the experiment his memory and attention did not significantly deteriorate! Serious scientific research is currently underway in this regard. Moreover, they are ordered by large companies that conduct continuous mining in remote places. People there work on a rotational basis, and they,except for work, in general, there is nothing to do - except perhaps to drive round dances around the oil rig in the polar night. Both themselves and the company are only interested in making a profit. Is it possible to make them spend as little time as possible on sleep, and as much as possible on work? And it turns out that yes, most likely polyphasic sleep is possible. At least biphasic - that is, people can sleep twice a night, reducing sleep time while increasing productivity.biphasic - that is, people can sleep twice a night, reducing sleep time while increasing productivity.biphasic - that is, people can sleep twice a night, reducing sleep time while increasing productivity.
How many people can live without sleep?
- In 1963, American schoolboy Randy Gardner - he was then 18 years old - decided as an experiment to set a record, to spend as long as possible without sleep. He wanted to present the results at a science fair. And he managed to stay awake for 11 days - 264 hours. Friends watched him, and then famous somnologists joined the experiment, who supported the experience with their authority. Gardner periodically had hallucinations, he became irritable - but, nevertheless, on the last day of waking he played slot machines, and also played table baseball and won everywhere. And then he spoke to journalists and answered all the questions quite clearly. And after that I went to bed and slept for 14 hours and 40 minutes without a break. After waking up, he was examined by doctors - and found to be completely healthy. This achievement is still holding, it was entered into the Guinness Book of Records. Then they tried to beat him, but scientists did not follow the following experiments, so their results were not counted. And the Guinness Book of Records has ceased to register such records - it was considered there that they could be hazardous to health.
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And what is the minimum number of hours a person should sleep?
- To maintain at least some vital signs - five hours. This is called "nuclear sleep", without it you cannot live at all. And for a good life - at least seven hours.
Can I sleep off this weekend? That is, it is not enough to sleep all week, but on Saturday to catch up?
- This is a common practice in an industrial society. But it has been shown that people who sleep on weekends still lose at least five hours of sleep per week. Which you can't make up for: those hours when the body could recover better are gone forever. Therefore, I repeat once again: it is best to sleep at least seven hours a day. But still, “sleeping off” on weekends is the lesser of evils: if this is not done, the harm to health will be even greater.
How useful is naps?
- Recently, statistics on morbidity began to appear depending on the amount of daytime sleep. And it turned out that if it does not exceed 30 minutes a day, it has a beneficial effect on the state of the cardiovascular system. And if it exceeds, the risks, on the contrary, increase. In addition, if a person sleeps a lot during the day, he falls asleep worse at night, long daytime sleep is one of the causes of nighttime insomnia.
VALERIANA SPEEDS TO BELIEVE BY JUST 40 SECONDS
In the book, you write a lot about drugs for insomnia, explain the mechanism of their action. But an ordinary person is more interested in something else: if he cannot sleep, what pills should he buy at the pharmacy? Donated? Phenibut?
- Drugs that actually improve sleep are prescription drugs. And the doctor prescribes them depending on what the patient's problem is. This applies to donormil, phenibut, and many other drugs. Over-the-counter medications have little or no proven effect. For example, medicinal herbs such as valerian. In 2010, an analysis of the results of all studies in which valerian was used as a sleeping pill was carried out. The speed of falling asleep in people taking valerian was compared to the speed of people taking a pacifier - a placebo. And it turned out that those who took valerian had an increase in sleep time by just 0.7 minutes compared to the placebo. That is, when we drink valerian, we rather convince ourselves that it helps us.
However, there are also melatonin preparations - this is a mild remedy, it has been proven to help sleep, it is better than a placebo. And then there's alcohol, a versatile sleep-enhancing agent. It's easy to buy over the counter too, and it helps. Although then other, very undesirable consequences are possible.
Mikhail Poluektov, Candidate of Medical Sciences, Head of the Sleep Medicine Department of the Sechenov Institute.
Sounds pretty unexpected. But what about the saying "The alcoholic's dream is a bit and brief"?
- It still exists in the form of "short and anxious" … In any case, it is completely incomprehensible where this saying came from. The mechanism of action of alcohol in relation to sleep is the same as that of sleeping pills, it acts on the same receptors. And in serious scientific research, it has been shown that small doses of alcohol improve sleep, while not significantly affecting its structure. But alcohol taken in large quantities changes the structure of sleep, affecting the ratio of its deep and superficial stages. Sleep becomes unnatural, and even if a person sleeps more in time, sufficient recovery does not occur: waking up in the morning, he does not feel that he has slept. That is, it all depends on the dosage. The cardiological community recommends alcohol doses of up to two drinks a day for men and up to one for women. (According to the US system,"Drink" is 14 grams of pure alcohol, that is, 350 milliliters of beer, or 150 milliliters of wine, or about 45 milliliters of a 40-degree drink. - Ed.) But this is the opinion of cardiologists, and gastroenterologists and narcologists categorically disagree with them - they say that there are no safe doses of alcohol.
IT IS GOOD TO SLEEP IN THE DAY. BUT NOT MORE THAN HALF AN HOUR
It's December. Why do people want to sleep more in winter?
- This is due to the work of the internal clock. Our sleep is regulated, on the one hand, due to the accumulation of the need for sleep, an increase in the amount of adenosine in the brain, and on the other hand, due to daily changes in the activity of the internal clock. And the activity of the internal clock decreases during the cold season, when there is little light. In addition, a decrease in physical activity plays a role. And in general the emotional tone.
Fitness trackers have appeared for a long time, which, among other things, monitor the state of sleep. How effective is it?
- Fitness trackers are more good than bad. Their very use makes a person pay attention to different aspects of his life, including sleep. That is, the very fact that he monitors what time he falls asleep and what time he gets up helps him maintain sleep hygiene. And recently, their accuracy has been increasing - according to research, the accuracy of the most modern ones reaches 85%. And this is already comparable to professional devices.
Lethargy is mentioned in the title of the book. This is probably the most mysterious condition associated with sleep. Does it really exist, or is it fiction from the era of romantic writers like Edgar Poe?
- "Lethargic sleep" is a common term, and it includes different, from the point of view of a doctor, conditions. Most often they mean a trance state, which is usually caused by mental illness. This is, for example, hysteria in which a princess lies, waits for a handsome prince and does nothing else. Or schizophrenia - there is a catatonic form of it, in which a person remains conscious, but does not move at all. A real lethargic dream, when a person is in a sleepy state for several days or even weeks, is a consequence of a serious brain damage. There is such a disease - lethargic encephalitis. His epidemic raged during the First World War and immediately after it, in the USSR alone, about 12,000 cases were recorded. And then this disease disappeared somewhere - over the past twenty years, less than a hundred cases have been recorded worldwide.
HOW TO MANAGE YOUR DREAM
How long does the dream last? The French scientist Alfred Mori described his dream with the guillotine, and his story later became very famous. He was unwell, dozing in bed, his mother was sitting next to him. Suddenly he dreamed that he was in the era of the Great French Revolution and is being brought before a tribunal. He argues with Marat and Robespierre, then he is sentenced to death, taken to the guillotine and beheaded. He wakes up in anguish - and sees that the part from the headboard came off and fell on his neck. The mother said that it happened the minute he woke up. According to Mori, in a matter of seconds, the brain not only transformed a blow to the neck into a blow from a guillotine knife in a dream, but also came up with a detailed "preface" - unfolded a huge chain of events that preceded it …
- There is a theory that there is a "compression of time" in dreams, that is, in other words, it is compressed. But no one can give an exact answer yet. Neurophysiologists seem to have found a similar phenomenon in mice, but many other scientists deny this possibility. Previously, dreams were studied from reports about them, and it was established that the longer a dream lasts, the longer a person talks about it. That is, it seems that the time in dreams should correspond to the astronomical one. But Mori's famous dream about the guillotine is knocked out of this conceptual apparatus. Probably, each of us has come across in dreams that some thought comes to mind, and then “under it” a whole series of events unfolds like a fan … Maybe there are two types of dreams in which time flows in different ways. This issue has not yet been resolved.
There are also so-called "lucid", or lucid dreams - when a person is asleep and realizes that he is sleeping, moreover, he can control his dream
- Yes, during lucid dreams, one part of the brain continues to sleep, and the other - the one responsible for critical perception - wakes up. Usually we are not surprised at anything in our dreams, but here we realize that we are dreaming and we begin to evaluate it: “Something is not right here, this cannot be in real life!” Moreover, most people can learn this: the appropriate techniques were developed back in the 70s of the last century. Those who have mastered this technique are called oneuronauts, from the Greek word "oneiros", which, in fact, means "dreaming." Another question is that it takes time and effort. And … Recently I met at a seminar with a oneuronaut, and he suddenly told me that lucid dreams bored him: yes, he met wonderful women in them, traveled to fabulous countries, but then he realized that he could not think of anything new,and lost interest in them.
And, finally, prophetic dreams …
- Modern science believes that the so-called "prophetic dreams" are divided into several categories. First, these are the usual coincidences. Secondly, it often happens that a person in reality received some kind of information, perhaps without even paying attention to it, but in a dream it develops into a whole conclusion, a forecast. For example, Mikhail Lomonosov, when he was returning from Germany to Russia, once dreamed that the ship of his father, a Pomor fisherman, crashed, and his father ended up on an uninhabited island. In Moscow, he learned from his brother that everything had happened, his father died on this island. But scientists believe that Lomonosov, who grew up in a family of Pomors, knew exactly what dangers might lie in wait for fishermen and imagined what routes they were sailing. In addition, he worried about the fate of his relatives. And his brain made an unpleasant forecast in a dream, which, alas,turned out to be accurate. The third category of "prophetic dreams" is the so-called self-fulfilling predictions: a girl dreams that she is going to a nightclub and meets an interesting young man. Then she wakes up, goes to the club in the evening and really meets someone there, while the image of the chosen one corresponds to the image of a person from her dream, because it is precisely such people who attract her … The fourth category is dreams about a disease, in which, for example, people with diseases the respiratory system dreams that they are being strangled or they are drowning, and the core dreams that he received a stone blow in the chest. And finally, I would single out anomalous dreams, in which the incoming information, perhaps, goes beyond everything that science knows about space, time or energy. But, as you understand, I, as a scientist, cannot comment on the last category. The third category of "prophetic dreams" is the so-called self-fulfilling predictions: a girl dreams that she is going to a nightclub and meets an interesting young man. Then she wakes up, goes to the club in the evening and really meets someone there, while the image of the chosen one corresponds to the image of the person from her dream, since it is precisely such people who attract her … The fourth category is dreams about a disease, in which, for example, people with diseases the respiratory system dreams that they are being strangled or they are drowning, and the core dreams that he received a stone blow in the chest. And finally, I would single out anomalous dreams, in which the incoming information, perhaps, goes beyond everything that science knows about space, time or energy. But, as you understand, I, as a scientist, cannot comment on the last category. The third category of "prophetic dreams" is the so-called self-fulfilling predictions: a girl dreams that she is going to a nightclub and meets an interesting young man. Then she wakes up, goes to the club in the evening and really meets someone there, while the image of the chosen one corresponds to the image of a person from her dream, because it is precisely such people who attract her … The fourth category is dreams about a disease, in which, for example, people with diseases the respiratory system dreams that they are being strangled or they are drowning, and the core dreams that he received a stone blow in the chest. And finally, I would single out anomalous dreams, in which the incoming information, perhaps, goes beyond everything that science knows about space, time or energy. But, as you understand, I, as a scientist, cannot comment on the last category.
What is the main mystery in the world of sleep and dreams for you, as a doctor?
- I would like to know how to control sleep, how we can send a signal to the brain that would allow us to sleep more or less. This would allow people to control both sleep and wakefulness. In fact, every aspect of sleep that the specialist plunges into ends up being a mystery. Our knowledge of sleep and dreams is still very superficial.
DENIS KORSAKOV