Tower of Babel AI

The Mind's Most Valued Partner

• Todd Francis

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We spend a third of our lives in a state where we have very little awareness of our surroundings.   We have thrived as beings whose minds shut down involuntarily every day.   Sleep is a central part of our physiology and a most powerful partner in our survival.  This episode is dedicated to our most cherished friend to the end.

#Insomnia #SleepDeprivation #Sleep #GoodSleep #Dreams #SleepAids #Melatonin #RapidEyeMovement #MentalHealth #TowerofBabel #Rest

SPEAKER_00:

Over the generations, over years. The ones who can sleep the ones who are able to play unconscious oblivious to their surroundings deeply. They're the ones that survive. This episode is all about sleep. How you doing? My name is Todd Francis. Welcome to Power Fabble AI, the podcast where we dare to confront reality. What about this subject makes you feel more of a renegade? Less available to manipulation. Less available to feeling as if you're disempowered. More available to achieve what you need to achieve before your eventual demise. Before you die, but your own, your own glory, your own well-keeping, your own positive steps. Overlooking the Connecticut Shoreline, USA, thanks for joining. From around the world. Don't get me wrong. Every society has notions, fully developed notions regarding sleep since the beginning of time. I believe they're all right, they're all correct. No conception of sleep is false. They all have meaning in the grand scheme of things. So many descriptions, so many attempts to postulate the meaning of sleep. One of my favorites comes from Aboriginal tribes where they believe that their ancestors not only created the universe, but it is a process ongoing continually. And to sleep, you become intertwined with those who are perpetually creating the universe. And if you are fortunate, you become one of the ones who become part of what's translated into the dreams time, where the tapestry of the universe is being perpetually woven. Go ahead, aboriginals, that's a good one. Love it. Kate, deprivation, sleep deprivation. There's something called fatal familial insomnia, FFI, and it's a rare neurogenerative disorder, which affects a few hundred people per year. It's a genetic mutation that causes misshapen proteins to build up in the brain. It damages the thalamus, which is the control switch between waking and sleeping. Without this in the brain, sleep is impossible. And without sleep, sufferers fall into a kind of waking coma. From the onset of symptoms, they rarely live longer than a year, possibly 18 months, without sleep. There's no cure currently for FFI. The treatment focuses on managing symptoms and improving quality of life. We need to say a quick prayer for those who are suffering from FFI. So the symptoms are the initial symptoms of FFI that typically appear in adulthood, then gradually worsen over time, which is progressive insomnia, cognitive decline, autonomic dysfunction, which is sweating, high blood pressure, motor coordination problems, and hallucinations. In the end, from fatal familial insomnia, death comes from a combination of severe brain damage and the resulting inability to perform basic functions and ultimately culminating in coma and death. So again, our hearts go out to people, the very few people, but the people who are suffering under these terrible circumstances in life. Your body is active while sleeping, but not in the way that when we're awake, the immune system releases proteins to fight infection, and hormones like human growth hormones are released to repair cells and inspire growth. Interestingly enough, during REM sleep, the body is apparently temporarily paralyzed to prevent acting out dreams. Does REM prevent us from screaming in the night inside our own heads? Alive, living, dead? And I write, with madness always a few days behind me, tracking me down, eroding my pillow. Are my dreams sparks or visions? Are they silent curses or willows? Madness always tracking me down, a few days behind and gaining. Cover up my tracks with sleeping, deep tracks, wide traps, fast tracks, screaming. However, if my conscious mind is leading the blind, alas, false hopes are abounding because I cannot keep this night away forever. I cannot keep this night away forever because it's far too deep and far too clever. Let the night rule. Let me fall away into it since the madness lasts. And I shall wither. What do we not understand about sleep? The reason for sleep. We know why it's important and how it happens, but the fundamental biological reasons for sleep remain a mystery. Now what does that mean? It means that since we sleep, do all the processes that the body uses sleep for? Did they grow because of our ability to sleep? Or did the body develop an ability to sleep because of all these processes that could occur more efficiently while the body was unconscious? Who cares, Todd Francis? Who cares? Well, it's an interesting, interesting difference. Why is it important? Because if sleep preceded our need, why did the first being start sleeping? Did they always sleep? What was the first being that started to sleep? Why do we care? What was the first being that started to sleep? I want to know. Why did it sleep? How did it get away with it? I guess that's the point. Intuitively, we're in a continual state of sensory overload. And we're so used to it that we don't understand how difficult it is to exist as earthly beings. And considering the nature of our senses, where they are so sensitive and exceptionally powerful, that of course we require a shutdown. As our strength and sensory grew, so did our need for that which is providing that sensory to shut down. And I write, straight and plain and simply, it is painful to exist with my senses. I'm so used to my senses that it doesn't feel like pain. I have a safe on my back, it's a pink Cadillac with sassafras jelly slopped liberally on its sides. I stand with a proverbial mop in hand, and the floorboards like glitter are covered in crystal shards beneath my knees as I fall down on them to hear something. I roll around on them when I take a whiff to smell something, where they stick to my skin covered in blood when I open my eyes to see something, which is why I need my Zs and 40 winks every night. So some key things that happen while you're sleeping include energy conservation and storage. During the day, cells throughout your body use stockpiled resources to keep doing their jobs. While you're asleep, your body uses less energy. That lets those cells resupply and stock up for the next day. Self-repair and recovery. Being less active makes it easier for your body to heal injuries and repair issues that happen while you're awake. While you're sleeping, your brain reorganizes and catalogs memories and learned information. It's like a librarian sorting and shelving books at the end of the day. It makes accessing and using things you learn and remember easier and more efficient. Recommendations for sleep amount by age are newborns 14 to 17 hours of sleep. 1 to 5 year olds, 10 to 14 hours, including nap time, school age children 9 to 12 hours, including nap time, teenagers, 8 to 10 hours, including nap time. I always thought that teenagers needed a little more sleep than younger age, but that's not quite. Still, it's a slope downwards to where adults 18 and older require 7 to 9 hours, 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night. Lucky those who get that much. But these sleep hours, these sleep times are recommended because the brain requires ample opportunities to fall into and out of what REM sleep. With each subsequent REM stage, each REM stage becomes longer throughout the night, with the final one sometimes lasting up to an hour. For healthy adults, getting 7 to 9 hours of sleep means that you should aim for about 90 to for about 90 to 120 minutes of REM sleep in total. So many people aren't getting that, which is incredible. For healthy adults, REM sleep accounts for about 20 to 25% of sleep time. So so many of us aren't doing the best for ourselves, including myself. There's something called your sleep life, which is which is very interesting. It's the fact that you do have your waking life, but you also have your sleeping life, and you should take care of your sleep life as much as you do your waking life. So there's all sorts of things that go into that, right? Electronics off an hour before sleep, um, getting ready for bed slowly. You don't just throw your bed clothes on and go to sleep. You slowly, gradually, after dinner, move towards that time. We're gonna get in bed and go to sleep. Interesting stuff. So function of REM, brain development, particularly important for infants and children, stimulates growth and maturation of neural pathways, and contributes to cognitive abilities and learning. Emotional regulation sleep is associated with the processing and integration of emotions, help regulates emotional experiences. We all know this. Reducing stress, reducing stress and anxiety while promoting emotional stability. REM sleep helps with creative problem solving, it helps with physical health, and of course, the all important, vivid dreaming. Definitely thought to be associated with vivid dreaming, REM. There's so much we don't understand about it or know about it, and it's a third of our life, and there are chemical processes which push us toward push us towards it and pull us out of it. So in the West, my favorite explanation for dreams in contemporary thinking is that dreaming is our mind's way of helping to regulate our emotions, process daily emotional experiences, diminish their intensity, dreaming, and integrate them into memory systems, which helps to reduce stress, process trauma, and regulate your overall mood. Now, just as an addendum, as a something to add on to that, I would like to say that what you recall in your dreams has very little to do with how your mind supports keeping emotions in a good space. I'd say that without your involvement at all, that your mind and emotions are interacting all night. They're conversing through imagery, your brain and your emotions are working to put themselves back on the same page, fighting to shift through the overload of sensory data, information your mind has received every second of the day. It's an overload. And the brain and your emotions are in a desperate fight day to day to keep your being in balance, in balance. So that's the only thing I would I would attempt to suggest, submit, is that most dreams we are and forever remain unaware of our cognition, our subconscious, our unconscious mind, and our emotion passing back and forth in a language. Even when we see our dreams and recall them, we don't know what they mean. But the brain then emotion, but the brain and your emotional side understand them, understand them just perfectly. Be glorified, give blessings to God above. Scientists say that we have four to six dreams per night, and yeah, and we don't recall. How many dreams do you recall every night? We passively watch imagery and it's a beautiful thing. So I write. AI says that dreams play a significant role in emotional processing by providing a safe and simulated environment for the brain to explore and integrate experiences. And here's how dreams facilitate this process. Dreams rehearse and simulate things that have happened to you. They replay and rehearse emotional events, positive and negatives, in a console in a controlled setting, which is your mind. And this helps us process and prepare for process and prepare for similar situations in the future. They provide a platform for expressing and releasing intense emotions. By experiencing these emotions in dreams, we can get a sense of the catharsis and reduce their impact in waking life. And again, dreams consolidate memory. What does that mean? Consolidate memories? I suppose everything's categorized. Is that it? A dream is signified by the morning rise. All these things imply that dreams have a proactive function, which is to protect you from future trauma, like a defense attribute. So, one way or another, dreams do help support your sanity. The amount of sensory information we take in over the course of the day is nearly infinite. Traditional cultures, anyway, traditional cultures such as some sub-Saharan African cultures believe that dreams were messages and signs produced by ancestors living in the spirit world. Some Chinese traditional cultures believe that dreams are portals or were portals to the future. And I write, lost and lonely, sleepy head, don't be dead in the morning. Don't be dead in bed when I try to wake you up. Now, as we know, it's not the amount of sleep or the but the quality of sleep that is important. And it is a combination of sleep environment, personal health, and lifestyle habits, and psychological factors, and physiological factors. Per the National Sleep Foundation, NSF, defines sleep by several factors, which is sleep latency, which is taking longer no longer than 30 minutes to fall asleep, sleep efficiency, which is being asleep for at least 85% of the total time you spend in bed, awakenings, stay asleep for the night with minimal awakenings, wake after sleep onset, waking up and being awake for a limited time during the night is okay, according to the NSF. Now, a quick word about the NSF National Sleep Foundation. It's an American nonprofit and it's a charitable organization founded in 1990, and its stated goal is to provide expert information on health-related issues concerning sleep. It provides the public with a lot of great information to the public, such as polls, health indexes, recommendations, a sleep journal, monitoring standard monitoring standards, physician education, plus health and safety campaigns. On the other hand, the National Sleep Foundation is sometimes criticized on the grounds that it works that its work is unduly influenced by funding from sleeping pill manufacturers. In 2005, for instance, released a survey purporting to find extremely high rates of insomnia, declaring that insomnia is a crisis or an epidemic and announced an Insomnia Awareness Day and a National Sleep Awareness Week. And simultaneous to this, there were drug companies introducing extended release sleeping bills. So they must have gotten a heads up. NSF once sold my pillow on its own website. The National Sleep Foundation and Nike have released a joint report that shares new insights on how Americans are sleeping. Now these companies don't make money unless people are having trouble sleeping. True. But they do in fact contribute to individuals getting better sleep. My opinion, there's a threshold to where making profit and money out of products you produce, there's a threshold between that and being manipulative. Do your best. Truly hope you're enjoying Tower of Babel AI. We sit at the base of the Tower of Babel where once God said, I don't want you constructing this Tower of Babel. It's unrequired for yourself as beings to construct. It's unrequired of you to be confounded our languages and scattered us across the earth. What the heck is that all about? So after these lives and lives away, we here have returned to sit at the base of where the Tower of Babel was and consider these things, consider a great many things, and prov and build a proverbial one, a symbolic one, straight up to the sky where we can sit with a resonance, and be one with the gifts of factual information, be one with a sense of community, be one with a sense of pleasure and happiness and kindness. That the power of understanding the nature of sleep is empowering to you in your daily life. Fight the good fight, fight the power, fight the requirement that you not be creative. Inspire yourself. Live long, live well, live long and prosperous, Spock would say. Live long tomorrow, live long today. Enjoy yourself. Love you guys. Talk to you next time.