Dr. Guy Leschziner
speaker
55 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Dr. Guy Leschziner’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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So there are lots of theories, but none have been definitively proven. One of the theories is that dreaming is absolutely crucial to the development of consciousness in early life, so what differentiates us from other animals. But it also appears that dreaming is of significant importance in terms of memory, in terms of emotional processing, in terms of learning something about our environment.
And one of the popular theories about dreaming is that actually it creates a virtual environment in which we can tweak our model of the world around us so that we're integrating the sum of all our past experiences to tweak what we understand about the world around us.
I think to argue that it predicts the future is very difficult from a scientific rationalist perspective. But certainly there is some evidence that REM is linked to creativity. So REM sleep being the stage of sleep that we most associate with dreaming. You know, there are many, many examples of people who have dreamt particular songs or particular works of literature.
You know, I think it was Paul McCartney in Yesterday is often... It's often used as an example of that he said that came to him in a dream. So, you know, clearly there is potentially something in the fact that REM is about creating links between different parts of the brain which facilitates creativity.
I think that has largely fallen away as a popular idea in the world of neuroscience.
Yes, the brain is a creature of habit. And, you know, sleep is a learned habit and as such can be unlearned. I think the exception to that is that occasionally I see people who have become so obsessed by their sleep that they actually, if they don't meet that rigid schedule, they become very, very stressed and then don't sleep at all as a result.
So there is a line to be trodden balancing your sleep
It is important to stress that we all within our brains have a clock. We have a circadian rhythm. There's a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus that regulates our circadian rhythms throughout our bodies. It's also important to understand that sleep, as I said, is not a continuous state. So people are constantly having brief awakenings or having very, very light sleep.
And so it's quite possible that there are some circuits within the brain that maintain a degree of awareness or a degree of consciousness. In fact, that's what we think is happening during lucid dreaming, which is when people have an awareness of the fact that they're in a dream and can actually sometimes exert conscious control over their dream.
These are networks that are responsible for consciousness that are firing during our dreaming sleep and they probably fire in different stages of sleep as well. So, you know, to think of the brain as being switched off during sleep is quite incorrect.
The answer to that is mixed. The difficulty that I have with sleep trackers is that, first of all, they sometimes engender a degree of obsessionality about sleep. But also people may be drawing very wrong conclusions about the nature of their sleep in that we know that sleep trackers do have issues in terms of their accuracy. They're good at telling us how long we spend in bed.
They're okay at telling us how much sleep we get, but they're not very good at telling us what stages of sleep we're in. And people often become quite obsessed about the fact that they're not getting as much deep sleep as they feel they should or that their sleep tracker shows that they're waking up multiple times a night. And that can actually drive the insomnia and can make things worse.
And actually, when you talk to people with significant insomnia, they will often say, you know, when I'm sitting on the sofa watching television or listening to music or reading a book, I will doze off. And once I get into bed, I find it incredibly difficult. So it's when they're not thinking about the process of going to sleep, when they're not in bed thinking about sleep.
that they're actually far more able to fall asleep.
Okay. Bye-bye.
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