Dr. Matt Walker

And the first night, they would have to go into the room maybe six or seven times.

Still brutal for the person in the experiment.

Not too much fun.

But by the end of the five days or six days, I think they were going back into the room something like 17, 18 times.

Why?

Because the people were...

building up this growing REM sleep debt.

And the brain had such a hunger for it that by night five of no REM sleep, all it wanted to do was rocket into this thing called REM sleep and start devouring it with high volume.

But that wasn't the interesting part.

The interesting part was the consequence to these subjects.

They were all well-adjusted, perfectly normal individuals.

By about day three of selective REM sleep deprivation, they started to show signs of paranoia.

They started to believe people were out after them.

They started to have hallucinations and delusions.

And by day five,

they were bordering on having, you know, aspects of quite severe psychosis.

And so what all of this research has taught us in some ways is that

it's almost as though REM sleep, and again, it's hyperbolic, is the difference between sanity versus insanity.

It's the thing that separates those two.

And there's a wonderful quote from an American entrepreneur called E. Joseph Kosman.