Dr. Matt Walker

Sleep is not something that we do.

Sleep is something that arrives to us with us.

And if it's not, you can't force it.

And it's a bit like someone's name, in fact, quite the opposite, that the harder you try to remember, the further you push sleep away.

And when you stop, it all of a sudden comes back.

But I love this idea of inserting something like that as a compensatory tool.

And that's why I think you and I have discussed openly here, in fact, on this series, at some point we're going to collaborate and we're going to look to see exactly what is happening

electrically at high fidelity mapping inside of the brain when we are going through these liminal states.

And what is the benefit of that?

Is it a very similar benefit for sleep?

And it's fascinating because it's possible that what we find at the level of the brain is that it's not sleep-like.

It's something else-like.

Maybe it's just a liminal state-like.

And what's also interesting is that it provides seemingly many of the benefits of sleep.

but it's not sleep.

In other words, you can arrive at the same destination of mental and physical health through two different routes.

One thing called sleep, one thing called these liminal states, or they both operate on the same highway in terms of mechanistic transaction benefits.

So much that we need.

We could stay here all night and all day, hopefully not all night.

Yeah, I was going to say, one of the other things I'd be fascinated for us to do is not just look at that model of what happens in the morning, but can we use that for people who have the opposite insomnia problem, which is that I can't fall asleep.