Dr. Darragh Ennis
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Darragh Ennis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And if you're in a competitive environment and you, as an animal, change colour, you know, you get a red stripe or something and suddenly that means the females are no longer interested in you. They're not going to mate with you because you've got this red stripe.
That's never going to be passed on because you don't reproduce and the mutation disappears and it's just literally thrown away from the population. But if it's the other way and the red stripe suddenly means all the females are interested in you, then gradually over time, you'll speciate. So you'll become the red striped version of your animal and you'll produce lots and lots of children.
And that's it. It's purely, this is the bit that people don't understand. It's not about growing bigger teeth to fight off the predators. It's just about, are you going to survive long enough to pass those genes on? And they're kind of like, you know, memes or viral things on the internet. You know, it doesn't necessarily have to be good. It doesn't necessarily have to be brilliant.
It just has to be popular. And that's it. Why do we sleep? Oh, that's a weird one, isn't it? So by any logical sense, anything that you think about, an animal going to sleep is a terrible idea. Like it's so bad for it. It makes you completely vulnerable.
And you would think that evolution of all things, this really strict, you know, filter that takes away anything that's dangerous will get rid of sleep. But It just can't. It seems to be deeply inbuilt into not just humans, but almost all animals, like flies sleep, fish sleep, dolphins and whales sleep, even though they have to breathe and all this kind of thing underwater.
And it seems so inbuilt to how our nervous systems specifically work. that we can't get rid of it. So the cost of getting rid of it is way too high. And if you ever meet someone who's sleep deprived, you very quickly realize why, because it just messes with us so badly.
Oh, I, it absolutely does. So our brain function completely relies on sleep. So we can't get completely to the bottom of this very easily because the ethical considerations of doing sleep deprivation studies means that they very rarely go past two or three days without sleep because it's so bad for you.
But in the ones that they have done are ones where people have had medical problems that kept them awake. You lose all critical function. Your brain stops working completely. It's almost like you've been drinking. You know, it's that kind of level of loss of motor control. You become emotionally problematic. You start overeating because your hormone system stopped working properly.
And a really key thing as well. is that your brain washes itself at nighttime. So there's been studies where they've watched people when they're going to sleep through MRIs and CAT scanners and things, and they've seen pulses of cerebrospinal fluid going over the brain during sleep.
And I really think that this downtime, this maintenance time of sleep helps remove, you know, bad things for your brain, toxin buildup, but especially things like misfolded proteins. So misfolded proteins can lead to Parkinson's disease, to dementia, and to all sorts of other neurological problems. And without sleep,
it's not able to do that because our brain is just so busy all of the time when we're awake, it's always got so much to do that it can't have maintenance. So effectively sleep is brain maintenance mode. You need to let the janitors in to clean up.
Yeah, I think a lot of people, especially since the pandemic, got a very skewed and peripheral idea of what the immune system is and what it does, because it was kind of covered on the news, but never in depth. And I've always used analogies to explain things to people. And I think a great way to look at it is like a security system with guards. And you've got two different systems.
One is urinate system, which just works away on its own. And it's, if it finds anything foreign, it'll attack it and it'll run a fever and it will provoke that kind of immune response very, very quickly. But then you've got your adaptive immune system, which is why we become immune to things. So this is, if it sees something it recognizes from before, it will instantly find it and attack it.
It's way more efficient, but you have to have been exposed to it before. And that's the whole reason why vaccines work, is because vaccines prime that innate system. It's kind of like giving your security guards a wanted poster going, if this guy comes along, you make sure you catch him real quick. And... A lot of people don't understand how it works.
There's a lot of disinformation out there because there's a lot of money to be made trying to tell people that they can not catch a common cold if they take this supplement and things, but most of it's nonsense.
It's a mixture. So your skin is one of your best defenses, actually. We're constantly bombarded by viruses and bacteria and funguses, and people don't realize this because they're so small. And almost all of them land on your skin and die.
If you're a scientist and you're doing microbiology, you have to sterilize everything and have a flow of sterile air, or you have to have a Bunsen burner to make the air above your station rise up and keep all of the spores and all of the bacteria off it, because they're everywhere. They're ubiquitous. If you cut yourself, you open the gates, you know?
So your immune system makes sure it doesn't get infected and then your body repairs it in a different way. So it's not your immune system fixing the cut, but it's making sure that nothing gets into that cut that will make it infected.
And that's way more important, to be honest, because infections, until relatively recently in human sort of technology, an infection like that could kill you because... Once they're in, that's when these guys, the bacteria and things cause such trouble.
Part of it is. So having an exposure on a constant basis boosts your immune system. Your adaptive immune system recognises more pathogens. You're more primed to do it. But I know this is going to sound a little gross, but a very large part of the reason why healthcare professionals don't get sick is because they wash their hands properly.
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