The Learner Lab
Each episode we focus on one topic that can help you become a better leader and learner. We do our best to keep it short, useful, and engaging. Whenever possible we bring in the experts to share their research and work.
The Learner Lab
Sleep and Learning with Dr. Marcos Frank
Sleep is one of the most important, yet underrated components of the learning process. We brought in Dr. Marcos Frank - neuroscientist from Washington State University - to explain his research and show how sleep affects neuroplasticity and our capacity to grow.
Full Show Notes
Quick Links:
Dr. Marcos Frank
The Cat Study
The Rat Study
Sleep and Motor Skills Study
Dr. Matthew Walker
Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
Matthew Walker interview
Quick exercise. Think about how much you think sleep matters. Are we talking like scale of one to 10 here or, sure, maybe one to 100 okay. Whatever that number is. Multiply it by 20 because it matters way more than we can even fathom. This has been one of the craziest few weeks ever in learner lab history of digging into the research of sleep, why we do it and why it matters and honestly my mind is blown right now. I honestly don't really know where to start. There's so much we could get into like looking into how big of an impact sleep has on our health. Like as soon as we're getting less than six hours, heart attack, risk up, blood pressure, up, risk of stroke, up, terrible things. That's just if we're under six hours in, as soon as we're getting more than six, if we're getting seven to nine, all those things are way better. It has like a huge impact on our health more than we can even fathom and that stuff is super important. But this is the learner lab podcast, this right, the learner lab, and it ends up the research around how important sleep is to learning is ridiculous.
Speaker 2:I'm Trevor. I'm Alex. Welcome to the learner lab podcast presented by train ugly.com each week something new that can help us learn. Let's go.
Speaker 1:So sleep and learning. We're going to talk about a study that involves cat.
Speaker 3:My name is Marcos. Frank involved in sleep research for probably over 25 years. I moved to Washington State University in 2014 and now I'm chair of their department of Biomedical Sciences and Medical School. So right now most of my research was focused on how sleep influences brain plasticity,
Speaker 1:plasticity. Does that sound familiar, Alex? That's one of our favorite words. That's our all time favorite word here at the learner lab, and if you remember episode six, Michael Merzenich, the father of neuroplasticity showed us how this is sort of the foundation for learning because our brain can change. That means we can learn, grow, and get better. Neuroplasticity is everything. Now back to the cats. If you cover the, I have a cat, then the brain will sort of rewire those connections towards the eye that's open. That's the one that's going to be using. Yeah. And he said this is like a really good way to test for plasticity because it happens rather quickly. Like as soon as you cover the eye for a few hours, certain pathways fire towards the other eye and you could see the change happen like immediately. Exactly.
Speaker 3:So we can leverage that system now what asleep do with that kind of plasticity. So that's where I came in. Can we find a way that we can example how experience shapes these circuits and then let the animal to sleep a little bit and then see what happens to the circuits more after that.
Speaker 1:Basically what happens to plasticity when we sleep and when we don't sleep. So the way that they did this was they covered the eyes of these cats and then they let them just live their lives for a little. Uh, and then they took one group of the cats and they let them go sleep. And in the other group they kept the cats in the dark, but they didn't let them sleep. So we have a sleep group and this sleep deprivation group. Exactly.
Speaker 3:What we found in a nutshell was that if you let animals asleep after that experience, there's about twice as much plastic change. If you didn't let him sleep, you're completely went away.
Speaker 1:The sleep group went up to sleep deprivation group went down. So it was like an unwiring. It's like anti reps, right? It's what you don't want. Yeah, absolutely. So this blows my mind because I used to think of sleep like, oh, when we get it, it's fine. It's important. I feel rested. I never knew that it impacts plasticity in a good and bad way. Right. Lack of sleep not only just leads to no boost, but it actually takes away our plasticity. This is kind of the epitome of this is either going to help us or hurt us. Right? Like it's not just inactive time. Exactly.
Speaker 3:Until that time, there have been no direct evidence in any part of our brain and sleep received, lost actually effected plasticity in the Living Room. That's what made the so revolutionary at the time. And the fortunate thing was that it worked. It's because if it hadn't, you wouldn't be talking to you right now.
Speaker 1:Okay, so sleep helps with the neuroplasticity of cats, but there's more to this story. This is something that it affects us as well. We're going to get to that, but first a message from our sponsors.
Speaker 2:This episode of the Learner Lab podcast is brought to you by this stack of stickers on my desk. There's 300 of them left and they need a home. You can solve this problem. All you need to do is rate, subscribe, or comment on the pod. Send us your address and Jack will package the sticker and send it to you both free
Speaker 4:back to the show.
Speaker 1:Now, this isn't just something that works in cats, right? Matthew Walker, he's a professor of neuroscience at the University of California Berkeley, and before that he was a professor at Harvard Medical School. Great Book called, why we sleep. A lot of his work is around motor skills, which is a super relevant topic, especially for athletes like motor skills or any sort of movements gets huge for sports. Learning an instrument, absolutely artistry, all of that stuff. So talk to us about some of his motor skills. Research is, so they had these two groups and they taught them the basic motor skill and then they would test them. So the first group, they started at 10:00 AM in the morning and they tested them to see how many times they could do it in 30 seconds. And then they tested them again 12 hours later at 10:00 PM and they sought no real increase there. And then they let them sleep and 12 hours later they tested them again and there they saw a 20% increase. Wow. So no increase between practice session and test session without sleep yet with sleep. A 20% boost. Right now there's kind of another interesting thing that comes with the other group. The other group, they brought them in at 10:00 PM tested them and then let them sleep and come back 12 hours later, 20% increase again right there, and then they let 12 more hours pass and tested them at 10:00 PM the next day. No increase again. So that first group, they waited 12 hours. There was no increase in cause they were awake, right, right. The second group, they waited 12 hours, which was sleep and they saw a 20% of, okay, so what you're saying is regardless of when these gaps of time happen, if we're awake, we don't get the boost when we are allowed to sleep, we saw a 20% boost in performance. Right. Again, this is illustrating something is happening when we're sleeping. It's not just like, oh do this and then go away from it. It's like when we sleep, more changes happening, right? It's not just rest. Our brain is rewiring connections and that's going to show up and our motor skills later.
Speaker 3:It's kind of funny idea that brain is idling or dialing it. Self doubt during sleep is still a prevalent, but that was dispelled. He's 60 years ago, so when rem sleep was discovered back in the 1950s that was the end of the idea, at least among those that knew that sleep was a time where the engine was simply idling or turning off. But because the brain was full of activity and it is full of activity during rapid eye movement sleep,
Speaker 1:so like Marco studies shows that plasticity is increased and this is sort of the proof of it in a motor skill. Exactly like they didn't necessarily measure the neurons like Marcos date, but they measured their performance, which is what we care about more. She was saying our brain's changing and because our brain is changing, we're seeing the results in the motor skill. 20% boost in performance because we slept. This works on both sides of the fence. There's a study I saw that Matt Walker was talking about where they had two groups of students. One was allowed to sleep and one was like the sleep deprivation group, but this time they looked at it before an activity and what they found is under these two conditions, the sleep deprivation group actually soaks up 40% less information than the group that was allowed to sleep. So sleep's important beforehand too, before and after. I almost said Doris, that's not say during, but before this is sort of priming our brain to soak up more information. That's a 40% boost compared to the sleep deprivation group and then we get the boost afterwards. Sleep isn't just like the save button, so say we get a bunch of reps doing something right. I used to think, oh hey, go to sleep and like you put it on right where you were when you left off with this evidence is suggesting is it actually boost like more learning happens while we're asleep, whether that's cats in their neurons or the motor skills that we all are trying to learn and get better at. Perhaps the most fascinating study that I found, they were looking at rats like running through a base. And the way they set it up, they could like hook these little electrodes up to the rats as they run through the maze. And they're able to come up with sort of a sound profile of the rat running through the maze. So when certain pathways firing the brain, it creates a certain sound. So if it runs through the maze, say it creates a sound like boop, boop, boop, boop, like that's the rat running rate of the mace. Every time they run through the maze, it makes that sound same exact sound. Then the rats were allowed to sleep, but they were still hooked up to the electrodes. And what they heard is that same pattern. But on hyperspeed there's like up to eight x faster than the actual speed of the rat running through the maze. So is that saying that when we're sleeping, we're running through not only running through and firing the pathways, but an increased speed. It's like Max reps like boom, boom, boom, boom, firing those pathways at eight x. That's crazy. Now we don't know exactly what happens when we sleep. That leads to this boost and learning. Right? But I think this starts to shine some light on. Perhaps what is happening is our brain is actually reliving the experience and firing those pathways again, and it could be at hyperspeed that would sort of align with that plasticity research from earlier, right? If we're running through and replaying those those experiences from earlier in the day. Yeah, it's rewiring our brains still. It goes right back to what Michael Merzenich taught us. What fires together wires together. If you think about this from an evolutionary standpoint, if we evolve to spend eight hours a day not doing anything, and it has no benefit to us pretty down, it's the biggest mistake of all time, all time. So just the proof that all animals sleep, all of them, and that's a really terrible movie, but you're very in the jungle. You're just sitting there in the corner must be valuable. It's not just about rest, it's just sort of flying in the face of everything. I thought about sleep 100% like number one, the way I used to think about it is it's for scrubs. It's like I would pride myself on not sleeping, right? The layer above that is like, Oh yeah, it's nice to sleep. I feel better when I do. Right.
Speaker 3:The feeling about sleep as well. It must be restoring something. It must be restful cause I feel better. But that's your, that's your conscious appreciation of some deep process, right?
Speaker 1:This is, oh my goodness. We have to be sleeping not only for the health stuff like that could be a whole nother pod. Right. But specifically for learning. He's civically for learning a huge boost in what we learn and what sticks because of the sleep it's giving. It's essentially giving us additional reps. Right? Firing the pathways more. This is nuts. We're going to provide links to additional research and some suggested podcasts and books, but I think these few studies illustrate the point. Sleep matters more than we can even fathom for health and learning. We need to be getting more of it, but now we need to kind of phase into, so like what is good sleep? What does that look like? It's not just as simple as that, like a number of hours. A lot of the research we've seen is it's more about like the quality of the sleep we're getting and in regards to quality of sleep, uh, the two things we keep hearing as it needs to be consistent and continuous. Right. And this continuous piece just means trying to do it at the same time each night yet. So you're not going to bed, waking up similar times regardless of the day. Right. And then that continuous piece deals with the phases of sleep, which are, there's rem cycles and then non rem cycles. Right. And Rem cycles are those deep sleep. It's what we call dreaming. Sleep. Yes. And to get to the deep sleep, you have to go through these non-rem side. Yeah. You kind of, you can't just like immediately go there. Right.
Speaker 3:No good night's a good night of sleep in a person or an animal or mammal for that matter requires that you have all the right, so the poor sleep, what are the first thing that goes is, so someone's got problems sleeping. Rem Sleep is really fragile. It just, it doesn't like big changes in temperature. It doesn't like, um, you know, it's very sensitive to medications still when wrapping this go on, your quality of sleep is definitely impacted.
Speaker 1:To summarize, it's, we're trying to get more hours without a doubt, right? Because that gives us a better chance of getting to the rim. Right? And we need to be focused on being consistent with it and the continuous night's sleep. Okay, so how are we supposed to do this? How do we go about it?
Speaker 3:There's a term called sleep hygiene, right? And that refers to doing things before bed that will interfere with your ability to go to sleep.
Speaker 1:Now there's a lot out there about things that can help us sleep, but some of the more broad categories that have, we've seen across the research, so from different sources. One is the importance of light and dark, and so there's a lot of stuff about our circadian rhythms and how when it gets dark, our body is designed to release Melatonin, which helps us get to sleep. The problem is with our phones and with lights and screens, we're sort of interrupting those rhythms and oftentimes delaying our Melatonin release, which is why it's hard to get to sleep because we're essentially tricking our brain to believe it's still daytime because there's light everywhere. We walked to her house at 10:00 PM and all the lights are on and we're looking at our phone, our brain pumps. I'm picking up on these signals and what they found is like our circadian cycles are actually super sensitive to light. There was a study that we saw where they compared one hour of reading before bed and dim light versus an hour on an iPad. What they found is the group that spend an hour on their iPad, their melatonin release was delayed by two to three hours. That's crazy and the peak level of Melatonin was decreased by like 50% so they're not going to get, they're not getting as much and it's delayed. So one more difficult to fall asleep because I'm not getting that release. It's delayed and then the level of Melatonin is lower and that's just an hour before bed on an iPad compared to the group that just spend an hour reading. Right. The other side of the light and dark equation is a lot of the stuff that we've read shows that it's actually important to get a lot of natural light throughout the day and this kind of stores up the Melatonin it's going to be released. So the goal is it's just kind of like live like a human. When it's Day, get some natural light and when it's dark keep it dark. Right. The other topic is temperature for our body to really like move into that sleep mode. If we can make it cool, it helps a lot. We've seen a range. It's like the ideal range is like 64 to 66 degrees a little cooler than you think that can help us get to sleep. Another interesting one is Matt Walker talks a lot about this. It's don't stay in bed if you're having trouble going to sleep and what you're trying to do is you want your brain to associate your bed with sleep and so, and I'm the worst at this, like laying there for hours, not able to sleep. If that's happening, the research suggests that we like go do something else. Go read on the couch. Once we're tired, go back to bed. The bed is for sleeping or trying to create this association. Bed means sleep. That doesn't mean TV. Bed doesn't mean rolling around. Thinking about when I'm going to fill out my taxes did that last night. The bed is for sleep. The last piece, this one's tough. It's talking about like substances and there's a few pieces to this puzzle. One is there are certain substances that are traps. What I mean by that is they kind of put us to sleep, but the research shows that there's a difference between being sedated and asleep, right? Things like alcohol or sleeping pills will certainly help you go to sleep, but the research shows that it actually blocks the rem. It's putting you in a sedated state so you're not really getting them deeper cycle sleep. But I'm not hitting those cycles. I'm not getting the rem, I'm not getting all the benefits of the sleep. And again, that's kind of a trap. You're like, oh, helps me go to sleep, must be good. It's like we have to be aware it's blocking those really, really good cycles. Right? The other one, and this one hurts my heart, caffeine, we know that caffeine wakes us up. What we don't realize is how long it stays in our body. Matt Walker's suggests kind of cutting it off by noon because as that caffeine remains in our system, two things happen. One is it makes it harder to fall. And I know someone out there listening is like, I can have a coffee at dinner and I still fall asleep and it's you. But here's the truth. Maybe that's true, but the evidence shows that it also blocks our rim. So you might be getting to sleep, but because there's caffeine in the system, it's sort of like getting in the way of that good stuff that we're after. Right? That's sort of the struggle with a lot of this, right? Like yeah. Even though we might feel like we're getting to sleep and we might be getting to sleep, we're still blocking those deeper messages about quality. Of course, one of the battles to fight is to get to sleep sooner. Right. But the real battle, and perhaps the more difficult is when we need that quality to be good, hit him with the recap. So where we're at with this, sleep is not only good for our health, it's essential for learning. Yeah. And that's like a word that I'm definitely wouldn't have used it three weeks ago. No, I wouldn't say sleep is good. Right? Not. It is essential in the process of becoming a better learner. Right. Obviously the quantity of sleep that we're getting is important. We all need more, right? For seven to nine hours is that racing eight but also important is the quality of that sleep, which is trying to get to those deeper rims. That's kind of the underrated side that we don't really realize. Then we also talked about some some tools to help us get to sleep and also get good quality sleep, keep it dark, keep it cool if we're restless, like go somewhere else. Right, and then the aware of how the substances could can be traps and kind of get in the way of this. Right. I hope that we did this justice because like everything we've learned in the past two months of the learner lab matters. Like I will go to bat on all these things. This is just something that kind of has opened my eyes and I think it matters like so much and this is something this is about or we should all be fighting and encouraging those around us to fight as well. It's like we need to be better sleepers and it just, I think it's so important. So hopefully we did the topic justice. If you're hungry for more we'll provide the links. But um, yeah I don't, I just don't know what to say. It's like I'm kind of blown away like how important this is and as a recovering terrible sleeper, it's like really hitting home now. It's time for the questions. Jack, load him up.
Speaker 5:Hi Trevor. I'm pissing policy from Green Bay volleyball. The team and I recently listened to your learn your lab podcast and we emphasize growth mindset in our gym everyday at practice, but it's hard to correlate it during the game, especially in high pressure situations. How would you recommend translating the growth mindset we have in practice and to games? Thank you
Speaker 1:Kristin. First of all, really appreciate the question. Um, low key, huge fan of your team. In fact, coach Sutherland is one of the best learners I know. So it's really cool to hear from you guys. Really, really good question there. And honestly, we've kind of been pondering like an entire episode about finding this balance. I think the big, the big issue here just for now is to be clear on what a growth mindset is. It's the belief we can grow that isn't in conflict with wanting to do well in the game. Like I can believe I can grow and still want to win. Just because we care about playing well doesn't mean we have a fixed mindset, has nothing to do with that. So as long as we're maintaining the belief we can grow and get better, that's good. I think what we're really trying to do is always be learners. Learners are hungry to grow regardless of the situation. Yes, we want to win. We want the game to go well and I want to play well and at the same time I can appreciate the opportunities to grow. I'm not afraid to put it on the line. I'm not afraid to go to battle and I'm hungry to grow. At the same time, none of these are mutually exclusive. We can kind of do it all at the same time. And the growth mindset is this underlying fuel that helps me believe that I can grow and get better. And that challenges and obstacles are a source that can help me do that. This is a topic we talk about a lot and we've kind of been working on a whole episode devoted yet it's, it's going to take about 20 minutes to do this justice, but my number one tip is let's be learners. Use that word that makes more sense. That's an action that we can all understand and use, and there's nothing wrong with caring about the outcome and performing well as a long as it doesn't get in the way of the opportunities to grow. Remember, you can leave a question.(805) 635-8459 see you next week.
