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Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truce, and I am really delighted to welcome Matt Walker, who I believe has had more impact on sleep health than anyone I know. That's reflected by the fact that he is a professor at UC Berkeley. heads up the center, that he originated for human sleep science.
He wrote a remarkable book back in 2017, Why We Sleep, and also we'll link to that as well as the TED Talk of 2019, Sleep is Your Superpower, with 24 million views. That's a lot of views here. It's frightening, isn't it? Wow. Wow. So if that, I think, does reflect the kind of impact you were on to the sleep story, you know, sooner, earlier than anyone I know.
And what I wanted to do today was kind of get to the updates, because you taught us a lot back then. And a lot of things have been happening in these years since. You're on it, of course. I think you have a podcast, Sleep Diplomat, and you've obviously continued working on the science of sleep.
But maybe the first thing I'd ask you about is, in the last few years, what do you think has been, are there been any real changes or breakthroughs in the field?
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.
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