The really remarkable thing about the work in C. elegans and Hydra is, it’s not just that they have these behavioral characteristics of sleep, but a lot of the molecular machinery involved in sleep appears to be conserved. So the same genes, from this little microscopic worm all the way up to humans, are involved. For example, if you give Hydra melatonin, they enter a sleep-like state.
So it’s called hypocretin and orexin. It’s a neuropeptide, so it’s released from neurons and binds to a receptor. And it was first identified in these really classic studies in dogs from Emmanuel Mignot’s group at Stanford. And they had these narcoleptic dogs, and he was hunting for the gene that caused narcolepsy. And he found a mutation in the receptor for hypocretin. And it caused the dogs, when they would get excited, to essentially fall asleep with cataplexy, so they wouldn’t move, they’d be paralyzed. And then later it was found that humans with narcolepsy often had a loss of hypocretin neurons in their hypothalamus.
fascinating.
And he found that the activity pattern in this area, the dorsal pallium, which is the evolutionary precursor to the mammalian neocortex, had these REM- and non-REM-like sleep patterns. He then used further drug treatments to find that the same drugs that would induce REM-like sleep would induce REM-like patterns in zebrafish. That really showed that there’s kind of a direct line. Not only in the behavior of sleeping, but in the structure of the brain’s activity during sleep, from non-mammalian models all the way up to humans.
So fasting reduces the need for sleep!!
t if you starve a fruit fly, and it loses sleep, it doesn’t need to rebound from that. So it doesn’t need to make up that lost sleep. But if you were to sleep deprive it by mechanically shaking it, it would need to make up that reduced sleep. And the way I think most of us interpret that is, it’s evolutionarily built-in to find ways to compensate for sleep, when it’s part of the brain’s wiring. But when it’s not, when it’s something like mechanical shaking, the brain’s unprepared to do that. And so, there’s a consequence, which is you need to sleep more.
Wow - when I did my Bigu fast I only needed five hours of sleep by the end of the fast - and my qi energy was the strongest - body had the Yuan Qi activated....
free radicals can be derived, also, not from oxygen, you know, from some other thing. But the critical thing there is that you have an unpaired electron in their outer orbital, in their valence orbital. So that’s the orbital that engages in chemical reactions. And you need electrons to be paired for stability. So these molecules are kind of wobbly. And they attack cellular molecules. They steal electrons, so to speak, from DNA from protein from, from fats, they oxidize them. So this is very similar to rusting, right? Or, like, when you cut an apple, you expose it to air, it gets oxidized. That’s the brown stuff, okay? So you turn these cellular molecules also into dangerous molecules, free radicals, which then attack other things.
So when we increase the "yin qi" as negative ions we are essentially adding the electrons back into the body....This is why the Earthing movement says that the negative ions "neutralize" the free radicals. That's why when I eat sugar I immediately get an internal tingling sensation!!
Strogatz (20:52): Huh, very interesting. So sleep is really tied to digestion, or something.
Rogulja (20:58): Yeah, I think so. I think so.
Strogatz (21:00): Well, that would explain why every animal up and down the, whatever, the tree of life, is going to need to do this, we all have to eat. Everyone knows eating is important. Metabolism is important.
Rogulja (21:11): Well, there’s also something else, you know, like the gut is one of the first organs that, that appeared in animal evolution. And I used to think of it as — before this study, I would not have been fascinated by the gut because you just think, oh, you eat to survive. But think about, like, everything that you’re made of essentially, it has to come through your gut. You have to eat it, extract some molecules, turn it into yourself.
This is like a place close to the middle of your body where wild things happen. You have to break down tissues of other animals, of plants, of different things without harming yourself. It’s nothing else that you can think of in your body is exposed to anything approaching what your gut is exposed to.
So they're saying that we sleep after the gut releases the antioxidant enzymes when digesting food....
it was actually really, really quick that we got to this surprising answer, which was the bad things were happening in the gut, specifically.
animals start massively dying, sleep-deprived animals, so there’s a huge, huge, huge increase in reactive oxygen species, specifically in the gut.
