Matthew Walker

Yeah, I think there have been changes and maybe we'll speak about one of them, which is the emergence of this brain cleansing system called the glymphatic system.

But spitting that aside for potential future discussion, I would say that there are maybe at least two fascinating areas.

The first is the broader impact of sleep on

on much more complex human social interactions.

You know, we think of sleep at maybe the level of the cell or systems or whole scale biology or even the entire organism.

We forget that a lack of sleep or at least the evidence suggests a lack of sleep will dislocate

each other, one from the other.

And there's been some great work by Dr. Etty Ben-Simon, for example, demonstrating that when you are sleep deprived, you become more asocial.

So you basically become socially repellent.

You want to withdraw.

You become lonely.

And what's also fascinating is that other people, even they don't know that you're sleep deprived, they rate you as being less socially sort of attractive to engage with.

And after interacting with you, the sleep-deprived individual, even though they don't know you're sleep-deprived, they themselves walk away feeling more lonely themselves.

So there is a social loneliness contagion that happens that a sleep-deprived lonely individual can have almost a viral knock-on effect that causes loneliness in another well-rested individual.

And then that work spanned out and started to demonstrate that another impact of a lack of sleep socially is that we stop wanting to help other people.

And you think, well, helping behavior, that's not really very impactful.

Try to tell me of any major civilization that has not risen up through human cooperation and helping.

There just isn't one.

Human cooperative behavior is one of our innate traits as homo sapiens.

And what they discovered is that when you are insufficiently slept, firstly, you don't wish to help other people.