Essentials: Understand and Use Dreams to Learn and Forget

Huberman Lab

Scicomm Media

Science, Health & Fitness, Life Sciences

4.8 • 26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 12 December 2024

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this Huberman Lab Essentials episode, I explain the important role that sleep and dreams have in learning, regulating emotions, and recovering from trauma. I discuss how dreams during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep contribute to emotional learning and the processing of traumatic experiences. I also discuss the similarities of REM dreams to clinical treatments like ketamine and EMDR therapy. I explain how non-REM dreams function differently to support other types of learning. Additionally, I describe science-backed strategies to optimize both types of sleep for improved learning, mood and emotional regulation. Huberman Lab Essentials are short episodes (approximately 30 minutes) focused on essential science and protocol takeaways from past Huberman Lab episodes. Essentials will be released every Thursday, and our full-length episodes will still be released every Monday. Read the full show notes for this episode at hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1: https://drinkag1.com/huberman Joovv: https://joovv.com/huberman Eight Sleep: https://eightsleep.com/huberman Timestamps 00:00:00 Huberman Lab Essentials; Dreaming, Learning & Un-learning 00:01:04 Types of Sleep 00:02:57 Slow-Wave Sleep, Motor Learning 00:06:23 Sponsor: AG1 00:07:30 REM Sleep, Paralysis, Unlearning of Emotional Events 00:12:29 Lack of REM Sleep, Emotionality 00:15:02 REM Sleep, Learning & Meaning 00:18:54 Sponsor: Joovv 00:20:08 EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization & Reprocessing) Therapy, Trauma 00:26:48 Ketamine Therapy, PCP, Trauma 00:29:52 Sponsor: Eight Sleep 00:31:23 REM Sleep as Therapy, Emotions 00:33:40 Tool: Improve Slow-Wave & REM Sleep 00:37:05 Recap & Key Takeaways Disclaimer & Disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health, and performance.
0:11.4	I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
0:17.4	Today we're going to talk about dreaming, learning during dreaming, as well as
0:22.2	unlearning during dreaming, in particular, unlearning of challenging emotional events. Now, numerous
0:29.2	people throughout history have tried to make sense of dreams in some sort of organized way,
0:33.5	the most famous of which of course is Sigmund Freud, who talked about symbolic representations in dreams.
0:38.6	A lot of that has been kind of debunked,
0:40.6	although I think that there's some interest
0:43.6	in what the symbols of dreaming are.
0:45.9	And this is something that we'll talk about
0:47.4	in more depth today, although not Freudian theory in particular.
0:53.2	So I think in order to really think about dreams
0:57.0	and what to do with them and how to maximize
1:00.3	the dream experience for sake of learning and unlearning,
1:04.4	the best way to address this is to look at the physiology of sleep,
1:07.8	to really address what do we know concretely about sleep?
1:11.6	So first of all, as we get sleepy, we tend to shut our eyes and that's because there are some
1:17.6	autonomic centers in the brain, some neurons that control closing of the eyelids when we get sleepy.
1:22.6	And then we transition into sleep.
1:24.6	And sleep, regardless of how long we sleep,
1:27.8	is generally broken up into a series of 90 minute cycles,
1:31.2	these ultradian cycles.
	...

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