May 3, 2012 • 26 mins
What is hibernation exactly? Is it the opposite of sleep? Is it the future of manned space exploration? In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Julie and Robert enter the hibernacula and discuss this perplexing biologic state.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
is Julie Douglas. Julie, we are both warm blooded creatures,
and as we know, warm warm bloodedness comes with a
(00:24):
certain price. It's a high level of energy consumption. So
what do we what do we do if we don't
have energy to consume to feed our body? Well, take
it down? Yeah? Or or will we die? That's all possibility.
The idea behind hibernation itself is that you have to
cut the costs. You have to spiral down, like like
a business that test of lay off a bunch of
(00:46):
people and close one of its stores to survive a recession.
Or the example that always comes to my mind when
I was younger and I was living in Tennessee, I
found myself in a car a lot and I would
often listen to I think the guy's name was Dave Ramsey,
who is this kind of like local Locally here in
Atlanta we have Clark Howard, who's like the the economic
guru that tells you how to you know, get out
(01:06):
of credit and how to fine tune your financial situation.
He's wonderful, by the way, Yeah, yeah, he is Clark
how it is wonderful. But I remember listening to the
Dave Ramsey Show at this point and he was always
advising people and how to get out of credit card debt.
And he would say, all right, you're just gonna eat
rice and beans for a year, so you can do.
You eat rice and beans and cancel cable. And that
is kind of what hibernation is about our version at least. Yeah,
(01:29):
it's it's about cutting down that the energy consumption, cutting
down the level of life that is being lived by
the organism so that it can survive conditions that would
otherwise be lethal. Well, and I've actually read before to
that there are certain places in the world before the
advent of electricity and so on technology that, say you
were in Siberia, winter comes and a family of five
(01:52):
probably will have a sort of hibernation period. Of course,
they're going to have food available to them that they've
stalked away, but there's not a lot of reason to
go outside for months. And it always reminds me of
the Charlie and Chocolate Factory movie where you see the
family the entire family in the bed because you know,
they're all trying to keep warm it's winter, they're trying
(02:14):
to conserve resources. So this idea of hibernation, at least
in humans. Yes, we we don't completely close down our
heartbeat or I'm sure those people didn't back in the
day and Siberia, but there's a version of it in
which we have tried to batten down the hatches when
it comes to energy consumption. It sounds like it's a
great opportunity for board games and family use of board games.
(02:35):
Maybe that's only they have far better board games in
Europe and all the great board games come out of Europe.
I don't know. I don't know how you think like
Siberia would would well know when they're well no, no,
but literally, let's talk about these animals who do it right,
who do it straight up right. One of the most
important things to realize is that hypernation is not sleep.
In fact, according to zoo physiologist Brian Barnes, it's kind
(02:59):
of the the sit of sleep. He argues that instead
of a blissful slumber, because let's face it, sleep is
pretty much the best right if you can, if you
can actually achieve it and you don't have any issues
getting there, you're not plagued by nightmares in which dogs
all your face then, or you're you're back in college
and you didn't know you had an exam. You thought
you'd cancel the class. All that. If you can actually
(03:20):
achieve good old sleep, it's the best in a cozy,
warm cloud, right, So the idea of like, oh, this
winter sucks, I would be nice if I could just
sleep through it and wake up when it's warm or whole.
I really don't want to travel all the way across country.
It wouldn't it be great if I could just go
to sleep and wake up and be there. But Barnes
argues that it's not like this, So hibernating squirrels, for example,
(03:42):
would be stuck in something that would be more like
months of insomnia. So it would feel like long stretches,
he says, of icy stupor punctuated by short, costly naps like.
The idea here is that their energy level is down
and metabolism is down. Everything is taken down to the
level to where sleep is even possible. They have to
power things up a bit to actually sleep. They have
(04:04):
to start turning on the lights in the abandoned wings
of the hotel just to get to that level where
that the animal can rest well, isn't there. I believe
I read something to you about um after bears come
out of hibernation that there's a very long period where
they have a sort of sleep hangover, and they it's
almost like sleep deprivation, same thing, right, like, you're not
(04:24):
you're not necessarily having a nice, big, cozy sleep. You're
kind of coming out of the fog and re entering
yet another fog. And it cost energy to come out
of that. The ground spirrels, for example, they undergo cyclical
rewarmings during this hibernation process and it costs more than
the squirrels stored body fat to do that. Of course
worth noting. Even though we're talking mostly about warm blooded animals,
(04:45):
and indeed we are warm blooded animals, hibernation also occurs
in reptiles, cold blooded creatures, where it's called brumation. It
differs from the mammalian hibernation because reptiles, again are cold blooded.
They can't control their own body temperature, so they need
to spend the enter in a place where they'll stay
reasonably warm. It's not always a situation of something surviving
(05:05):
at cold temperatures. There's also something called estivation, and this
is where an animal enters a hibernation like state during
the summer, often in situations where there's less available water
and moisture. Yeah, right, because conditions become really hot and dry.
So that's in addition to maybe your food supply dwindling
in that area as well. But for the most part,
(05:26):
hibernation and as we understand it is considered a torpor state.
It's basically an umbrella term to describe all the various
types of temperature and metabolism reducing functions that are involved
in hibernation. Yep, that's right. So think about torpor in
terms of oxygen consumption, which can fall as low as
one percent of resting metabolic rate and core body temperatures
(05:46):
to near or below freezing temperatures, heart rate drops who
is little as two point five percent of its usual
level of chipmunk's heart rates flows to five beats per
minute from the usual two hundreds. Like you said, breathing
rate drops by fift a dred percent, which is just crazy.
So you know you have a reptiles out there, they
go hibernation period without breathing. Yeah, and then in many
(06:08):
cases we're also talking to about consciousness is greatly diminished.
So even though this for instances squirrel is in this
weird andsomnia state, uh, it doesn't mean it's just completely
conscious either, so which I don't think necessarily sweetens the deal.
It's kind of this uncomfortable semi conscious state, which is
a far cry from the oh I'm going to have
(06:29):
a long winter snap and wake up. Yeah. Yeah, I
mean it does kind of feel like, oh man, I
am trapped in this body and I don't get any
of the great benefits here. Of course, you know we're
from rising a little bit here. Another thing that's happening
is the body fat, which we know is packed with energy,
is burned off to provide energy that an animal needs
(06:50):
to maintain levels of body functions. And this can be
really efficient. And again we've got our Arctic ground squirrels
and they live entirely off a stored body fat as
long as in nine months. So you have glands in
the body that are altering the amounts of hormones that
are released to control just about every physiological aspect of hibernation.
(07:11):
And and when a mammal warm blooded animal. Inners hibernation,
it's essentially becoming like a cold blooded animal. It cranks
down the temperature, but it has a set point in mind.
And you can think of this like a setting on
your thermostat. Right. Let's say you're cutting energy consumption during
the winter. You're only willing to let the house get
so cold because if you know, if it gets colder
than this set point, it's going to start getting uncomfortable.
(07:33):
Uh and and and you'd rather not live that way.
So in this case, there's a set point because if
things get much lower, the creature may not be able
to live. So the set point will be there, and
it's things that get colder. If it starts to drop
below that set point, then the energy will crank up.
It will use some of those fat reserves to keep
it at a tolerable level. Right, So each animal has
its own little thermostat essentially. And you're probably wondering what
(07:56):
about defecation. Oh I was wondering that, Yes, yeah, yeah, well,
no fecal matter is produced because nothing's passing through the
dieg just shut that wing of the operation down. That's right,
talking too much money, using too much energy. We haven't
got it, shut it down. No pooping, no pooping, But
the body is always producing urea, which we know is
a waste by product of urine and hibernating animals, bodies
(08:17):
are able to recycle the urea. Whoa, So that's that's
pretty cool, right, because yeah, I mean, have you ever
like in the middle of nights, man, I really don't
want to get up and get at the bathroom. I mean,
that would be a good feature. I wish I could
just I mean, you know, do you actually try to like,
let me just try and focus and I do idea
(08:37):
trying to lucid dream it. Bears don't urinate at all
in the winter, but they break the urea down into
amino acids. And even though they don't drink any water,
they don't get dehydrated either. They're able to extract enough
water from their own body fat to stay hydrated. And
here's another really cool thing. This is specific to black bears.
They have a unique feature and that they actually continue
(08:59):
to form bones by keeping their calcium levels calibrated in
their blood levels. And researchers believe that it's the secretion
of a hormone called paraphormorn and that's the reason why
the calcium is recycled, and there are a bunch of
clinical trials in which they are using the human version
of that hormone and giving it to patients with osteoporosis.
(09:22):
So that's that's something that they're trying to crack there
with those blood bears. Like, why in the world would
they be actually forming new bone while they are hibernating
or anything, right, right, I mean think about ourselves. I
think if we've ever been waylaid by something and you're
in the hospital for two weeks with a cast on,
your body loses bone in calcium. So yeah, just from
(09:42):
that little bit of atrophy. You have other species that
basically enter this hope or state on a daily basis,
which is always amazing. Hummingbirds for example, Like hummingbirds are
are huge energy users. We discussed before. I think just
just how much energy a hummingbird uses, and and that's
whine Flapping wings are really not that that economic of
(10:03):
a system, but nature cannot make a propeller, so it's
stuck with flapping wings. Yeah, the heartbeats per second. Yeah,
it's crazy. It's in same because I have to use
an immense amount of energy and if they can't get
the energy they need on a daily basis, they will
just shut it down every day for a little bit.
So they'll shut things down like temperature will drop in
(10:25):
a hummingbird on a regular basis, just to maintain Think
of it as a business. As an energy consumption has
become more of an issue. You have various buildings that
will say on weekends, only have a certain portion of
the office that is air conditioned, and if you're coming
into work on the weekends, you need to relocate to
a certain portion of the building every day. Even it's saying,
all right, well during this time, we're gonna have to
(10:45):
shut it down a little because we cannot maintain the
energy costs involved in keeping this level of consumption up
minute to minute. That is an incredible ability to have.
And you know is joking saying that we're morphizing this,
but we can't help it to project our own idea
onto this and say, could could be actually harness this
for ourselves. And we're gonna take a quick break and
when we get back, we'll talk about this possibility of
(11:08):
humans hibernating. All right, we're back, So human hibernation. There
are two huge areas where we could use this. One,
of course, is space travel, because space is huge. It
takes a long time to get anywhere. With our current
understanding of how physics work and how a space propulsion
(11:30):
can work, they're very shortcuts in mind. But for the
most part, we're looking at long travels, travels in most
cases that are longer than the span of human lifetime.
So is there a way to suspend animation? Is there
a way to shut things down and preserve human life
across these vast distances, Because again, it's not only a
situation of like, oh, I don't want to sit there
and take that toes for you know, the length of
(11:51):
a journey. Again, hopefully they would have some quality European
board games aboard that space ship. But but then also
do we have the energy required in the resources to
keep people engaged in an everyday level of activity in
life over the course of a long voyage. Cheaper better
to turn them into low energy cargo for that duration.
(12:12):
The other huge area, of course is healthcare. All right,
so we have somebody who has a disease that cannot
yet be cured, or an injury that needs to be addressed,
Say someone's injured out in the middle of nowhere, and
you need to get them to a quality medical facility,
and it's going to be a day's journey or more.
I need to put them in a hibernated state, and
potentially you could take this low energy cargo move it
(12:34):
to the facility where they can actually treat the injury
and take care of things there. Another example is, say
someone suffered oxygen starvation to the brain through a stroke
or heart attack. They could actually be put into the
suspended animation and lower their oxygen to man and prevent
brain damage. Right. Time is of the essence in these situations.
(12:54):
So if you could shut things down and sort of
contain the situation just long enough to get in there
and do something about and that would be huge. So
it's one of those things where one of the ideas
is very far reaching and super future of mankind and
our most cosmic visions, and the other is every day
people having strokes every day and and what can we
do to mitigate that? Yeah, and at the crops of
(13:15):
this is our metabolic right, right, our basil metabolic right,
which is pretty standard in humans. We don't have these
tip offs and our circadian rhythms to say, hey, guess what.
We're taking it down to the studs today. Go in
your cave. Um, we're pretty regular when it comes there
as basil metabolic rate unless you're like a super yogi, right,
and you can you can tinker with it a bit.
(13:37):
You could, you know, decent parlor tricks and opportun you
were dead for eighteen hours or something when in fact
you were not, but you had again taken down your
breathing and your heart rate. Okay, so beyond a yogi,
what are we thinking about here? Well, they're basically looking
at ways to either use temperature or chemicals to force
a hibernative state on human beings. And we are certainly
(13:58):
not there yet, but but a number of experiments have
been conducted. Mostly these are involving animals, and we're looking
at ways, all right, can we take animals, either hibernating
animals or non hibernating animals, tinker with them either with
temperature or chemicals, and force a hibernative state. Biologists at
the Institute of Arctic Biology and Fairbanks, Alaska are particularly
interested in this. They do a lot of inquiries into
(14:20):
how Arctic ground squirrels behave and how the hibernate They
point out that artic ground squirrels, like us, like all animals,
produce a molecule called a denazine, which slows nerve cell activities.
So when a squirrel begins to hibernate, even when you
or I feel drowsy, that's what it is. That's what's
going on. So they buys a number of experiments where
(14:40):
they took non hibernating Arctic ground squirrels and they gave
them a substance that stimulated a denazine receptors in the brain.
And then they also gave a substance similar to caffeine
to arouse other squirrels. And I mean to rouse them
from there, not to yeah, yeah, not to arouse them sexually.
So in this same way that a denazine is involved
(15:01):
in that drowsy feeling you're getting, we're also counteracting it
when we run for that cup of coffee or that
discussing energy. That's right, I mean that splits the binding point, right.
It basically says, I guess what you're not going to
bind here, I'm caffeine. I'm waking this person back up,
which I thought was fascinating. I mean, we know, obviously,
we know that caffeine purchase up, but to know that
it works that specifically, and in these experiments they were
(15:24):
able to activate a denazine receptors in sufficient enough manner
to induce this hibernative state in these Arctic ground squirrels
during the hibernation season. A small experiment in some senses,
you know, they're not certainly it's not the same as say, oh,
we put a human into hibernative state. In this case,
we took the ground squirrel and we're able to induce hibernation.
And it's actually rather big. I mean, it's one of
(15:44):
the steps that could conceivably lead us to being able
to create this effect in humans. Right. Another really good
example is I keep thinking of it as pet cemetery.
I have to say the zombie dogs. This is from
the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
They put dogs in a state of suspended animation by
(16:05):
flushing out their bodies of blood, taking out their blood
and replacing it with forty five degree fahrenheit saline solution
that contained oxygen and glucose. The dogs went into cardiac
arrest and they clinically died right after three hours. The
team withdrew the solution, so they reversed this process. They
reintroduced the blood and then applied to gentle electric shock
(16:28):
and the dogs were raised from the dead. Yeah, there
was a similar experiment that was conducted by surgeon at
the Messacuset General Hospital in Boston, Like I'm in the
name of Hassan Alam, and he tested the technique about
two hundred times on pigs with a success rate, and
it basically involved putting the animal under draining out some blood.
In this case, he'd used cuts and major veins to
(16:49):
stimulate the multiple gunshot wounds, so he was trying to
create the situation of fatal or life threatening injury. And
then as the pig rapidly loses about half its blood
and there is a state of shock, dr Alam would
drain the blood store it before pumping this chilled organ
preservation fluid into its system. Than the animal's temperature falls
to about tend to be celsius until it enters this
(17:10):
state of profound hypothermia, and then later they are able
to put the blood back in and restore the pig
to life. Yeah, and again, it's not about terrorizing dogs
and pigs. It's about trying to create these trauma situations
that might happen in a hospital and giving doctors an
alternative in terms of trying to extend the life period
and be able to take out all the tools in
(17:32):
the arsenal to help that person. And speaking about apthermia,
it just made me think about cell biologist Mark Roth.
He has a great ted talk about this about suspended animation.
He may be the furthest along I think in trauma
medicine in terms of looking at ways that we can
play with hibernation. He was inspired by a skier in
(17:52):
Norway who was trapped in the icy waterfall for two
hours before she was extracted. She had no heartbeat and
she was thought to be frozen dead. Seven hours later,
still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life
and she went on to be the head radiologist at
that hospital later on. Roth was always amazed by this,
(18:13):
and he wondered, if there's some agent in our bodies
that we make ourselves that we might be able to
regulate our own metabolic rate. Okay, So he was like,
is there some sort of flexibility here that we don't
know about that the skier unwittingly tapped into And normally
you would say this would be a fool's arranty even
try to mess with our metabolic rate in this way.
(18:35):
But he just kept picking up the problem, picking at
the problem, and he was watching like Nova or something
one night and they were talking about hydrogen sulfide and
he had that kind of ding ning moment where he's like, yes,
that's the thing in our body that we actually do produce,
albeit in small amounts. And he started to think, could
it cause oxygen to not bind like a kind of
(18:58):
game of musical chairs, leading to UH to not consume
that oxygen and then by reducing our demand for oxygen.
So he decides to start administering hydrogen sulfide to mice
and thin again and put it in the cold environment
because he thinks that there's something key to this cool
environment that happened with the skier. And indeed, then Mike
(19:21):
started stopped moving, appeared dead. Oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold.
So this again, this is really important, right because we
don't have brains to starve from lack of oxygen. But
he says, this is the real kicker. That hydrogen sulfide
is rapidly metabolized. So if you were dosed with US
after six hours of d animation. All you would have
(19:42):
to do is be put out into room air and
warm up and you would be, in his words, none
the worse for wear. So and one model of heart
attack animals were given the hydrogen sulfide and they showed
a seventy percent reduction and heart damage compared to those
who got the standard of care that you and I
were to receive if we were to have a heart
(20:03):
attack here today. And the same is true for organ failures.
So when you have a loss of function and going
to poor profusion of kidney or liver, you have damage
that suffered. So in two he started human trials and
he says that we're on the path of really understanding
this metabolic flexibility and the not too distant future we
could have e m T s actually giving people this
(20:24):
hydrogen is fullified and extending the their lives possibly you know,
so you know, if you were in an emergency situation,
you're being transported, you might be able to be put
under in this suspended animation and not have any ill
effects to your tissue. Well, that one of the take
comes here for me is that suspended animation induced human hibernation.
It may look easy in some of our sci fi visions,
(20:46):
many of our sci fi visions where it's just kind
of a plot something to move the plot around long
and somehow make vast distances traversible by humans. You know,
it's just a matter of Sigourney Weaver putting on your
sexiest underwear and climbing into a pot. Right. But but
but like the idea that it wouldn't just be Sigorny
Weaver in sexy underwear, it would be Sigourney Weaver in
a sosomniatic state, uncomfortably semi conscious for this long stretch
(21:10):
of time, you know, or or the possibility that you
would have to take Siggorny Weaver's blood out and put
some sort of saline chill solution in there instead. So
it's a it's it's a less attractive scenario when you're
talking about Sigorny where you're talking about the Riley character
and not Gus. That's I don't don't, don't don't ring
(21:30):
bullets of pony with your eyes. Yeah, but no, no
Ripley in an alien it's it is it is early
in the morning. Now, there have been some other There
are just as many sci fi visions of induced tibernation
that are far more in a centur realistic but certainly Nightmarrick.
For instance, Dan Abnett had a novel called Zenoes. It
was forty k novels he did that there was a
(21:52):
situation in that where he describes a planet that during
the course of its orbit, it enters a stage where
it's just too frigid on the planet for people to live, uh,
you know, energy consumption wise in terms of the civilization,
but also on a personal level. So most of the
population goes into a state of hibernation. And this book,
it opens with this action scene in which a villain
has woken everyone up prematurely, and so like thousands of
(22:16):
people are dying in their hibernation pots because it's such
a medically tinkered state that if you come out of
it without the aid of a physician, you're you're kind
of boned. So so that that that comes to mind.
Another title that comes to mind is the Worthing Saga
over the Worthy Chronicle by Orson Scott Card, the author
of Indur's Game, and this was material that was based
on an earlier novel he put out called Hot Sleep,
(22:39):
And in this he has this concept of what they
call hot sleep because the individuals are traveling across vast
distances and to do so, they are put into this
state of artificial hibernation by the use of this drug
called stomach As it turns out, though they call it
hot sleep because the individual actually undergoes this very uncomfortable
like heated, sweaty, increased temperature situation. I'm not sure how
(23:02):
that would work science wise, but the idea is that
the hibernation process is very uncomfortable and lasts for a
very long time, so they actually have to wipe your
memory before you go into it, store that memory digitally,
and then put it back into your head after erasing
the trauma of the hot sleep experience. If you haven't
read those and certainly if your Fano Mendor's game and
haven't explored other orson Scott card books, I highly recommend
(23:25):
the Worthing sorry, because he does all sorts of interesting
things with the concept of of so much induced hibernation,
and you have individuals in society who can afford it,
who start using this artificial hibernation technology to leap frog
across the centuries, so they can't actually extend human life,
but you're only able to live a certain amount of days,
(23:46):
but you can spread those days out through even century
long periods of artificial hibernation. Well, that's what mark Roth
is pointing to. He is actually saying that suspended animation
is tapping into immortality, which is really interesting. Of course,
in the way we've just grabbed it here we're talking
about hours, but who knows what the promises in the
future for extending that out for days years? I don't know.
(24:08):
And I was actually thinking about Aubrey de Gray again,
the bearded one who the bio gerontologists, who talks about
how the first person to live to be five hundred
years has already been born, and that we can basically
maintain ourselves like a good vintage car, and we have
the technology to do it. If you're going to do that,
then hey, maybe you want to take five years out
(24:30):
in your five hundred years of living. Hey, go ahead,
suspend animation, animate me for five years. That's fine. Cool. Well, hey,
we're on board with that. Yeah, I'm on board with it. Well,
how about the rest of you. If you have any
cool examples of induced human hibernation from science fiction that
you would like to point out right in, let me
know about it and I'll bring it up on the podcast.
Or if you have just general thoughts about the hibernation
(24:52):
in general in animals and how it might affect human life.
What if you could hybernate? What would you hybernate through?
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Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, you're welcome to stuff to blow
your mind. My name is Robert Lamb and my name
is Julie Douglas. Julie, we are both warm blooded creatures,
and as we know, warm warm bloodedness comes with a
(00:24):
certain price. It's a high level of energy consumption. So
what do we what do we do if we don't
have energy to consume to feed our body? Well, take
it down? Yeah? Or or will we die? That's all possibility.
The idea behind hibernation itself is that you have to
cut the costs. You have to spiral down, like like
a business that test of lay off a bunch of
(00:46):
people and close one of its stores to survive a recession.
Or the example that always comes to my mind when
I was younger and I was living in Tennessee, I
found myself in a car a lot and I would
often listen to I think the guy's name was Dave Ramsey,
who is this kind of like local Locally here in
Atlanta we have Clark Howard, who's like the the economic
guru that tells you how to you know, get out
(01:06):
of credit and how to fine tune your financial situation.
He's wonderful, by the way, Yeah, yeah, he is Clark
how it is wonderful. But I remember listening to the
Dave Ramsey Show at this point and he was always
advising people and how to get out of credit card debt.
And he would say, all right, you're just gonna eat
rice and beans for a year, so you can do.
You eat rice and beans and cancel cable. And that
is kind of what hibernation is about our version at least. Yeah,
(01:29):
it's it's about cutting down that the energy consumption, cutting
down the level of life that is being lived by
the organism so that it can survive conditions that would
otherwise be lethal. Well, and I've actually read before to
that there are certain places in the world before the
advent of electricity and so on technology that, say you
were in Siberia, winter comes and a family of five
(01:52):
probably will have a sort of hibernation period. Of course,
they're going to have food available to them that they've
stalked away, but there's not a lot of reason to
go outside for months. And it always reminds me of
the Charlie and Chocolate Factory movie where you see the
family the entire family in the bed because you know,
they're all trying to keep warm it's winter, they're trying
(02:14):
to conserve resources. So this idea of hibernation, at least
in humans. Yes, we we don't completely close down our
heartbeat or I'm sure those people didn't back in the
day and Siberia, but there's a version of it in
which we have tried to batten down the hatches when
it comes to energy consumption. It sounds like it's a
great opportunity for board games and family use of board games.
(02:35):
Maybe that's only they have far better board games in
Europe and all the great board games come out of Europe.
I don't know. I don't know how you think like
Siberia would would well know when they're well no, no,
but literally, let's talk about these animals who do it right,
who do it straight up right. One of the most
important things to realize is that hypernation is not sleep.
In fact, according to zoo physiologist Brian Barnes, it's kind
(02:59):
of the the sit of sleep. He argues that instead
of a blissful slumber, because let's face it, sleep is
pretty much the best right if you can, if you
can actually achieve it and you don't have any issues
getting there, you're not plagued by nightmares in which dogs
all your face then, or you're you're back in college
and you didn't know you had an exam. You thought
you'd cancel the class. All that. If you can actually
(03:20):
achieve good old sleep, it's the best in a cozy,
warm cloud, right, So the idea of like, oh, this
winter sucks, I would be nice if I could just
sleep through it and wake up when it's warm or whole.
I really don't want to travel all the way across country.
It wouldn't it be great if I could just go
to sleep and wake up and be there. But Barnes
argues that it's not like this, So hibernating squirrels, for example,
(03:42):
would be stuck in something that would be more like
months of insomnia. So it would feel like long stretches,
he says, of icy stupor punctuated by short, costly naps like.
The idea here is that their energy level is down
and metabolism is down. Everything is taken down to the
level to where sleep is even possible. They have to
power things up a bit to actually sleep. They have
(04:04):
to start turning on the lights in the abandoned wings
of the hotel just to get to that level where
that the animal can rest well, isn't there. I believe
I read something to you about um after bears come
out of hibernation that there's a very long period where
they have a sort of sleep hangover, and they it's
almost like sleep deprivation, same thing, right, like, you're not
(04:24):
you're not necessarily having a nice, big, cozy sleep. You're
kind of coming out of the fog and re entering
yet another fog. And it cost energy to come out
of that. The ground spirrels, for example, they undergo cyclical
rewarmings during this hibernation process and it costs more than
the squirrels stored body fat to do that. Of course
worth noting. Even though we're talking mostly about warm blooded animals,
(04:45):
and indeed we are warm blooded animals, hibernation also occurs
in reptiles, cold blooded creatures, where it's called brumation. It
differs from the mammalian hibernation because reptiles, again are cold blooded.
They can't control their own body temperature, so they need
to spend the enter in a place where they'll stay
reasonably warm. It's not always a situation of something surviving
(05:05):
at cold temperatures. There's also something called estivation, and this
is where an animal enters a hibernation like state during
the summer, often in situations where there's less available water
and moisture. Yeah, right, because conditions become really hot and dry.
So that's in addition to maybe your food supply dwindling
in that area as well. But for the most part,
(05:26):
hibernation and as we understand it is considered a torpor state.
It's basically an umbrella term to describe all the various
types of temperature and metabolism reducing functions that are involved
in hibernation. Yep, that's right. So think about torpor in
terms of oxygen consumption, which can fall as low as
one percent of resting metabolic rate and core body temperatures
(05:46):
to near or below freezing temperatures, heart rate drops who
is little as two point five percent of its usual
level of chipmunk's heart rates flows to five beats per
minute from the usual two hundreds. Like you said, breathing
rate drops by fift a dred percent, which is just crazy.
So you know you have a reptiles out there, they
go hibernation period without breathing. Yeah, and then in many
(06:08):
cases we're also talking to about consciousness is greatly diminished.
So even though this for instances squirrel is in this
weird andsomnia state, uh, it doesn't mean it's just completely
conscious either, so which I don't think necessarily sweetens the deal.
It's kind of this uncomfortable semi conscious state, which is
a far cry from the oh I'm going to have
(06:29):
a long winter snap and wake up. Yeah. Yeah, I
mean it does kind of feel like, oh man, I
am trapped in this body and I don't get any
of the great benefits here. Of course, you know we're
from rising a little bit here. Another thing that's happening
is the body fat, which we know is packed with energy,
is burned off to provide energy that an animal needs
(06:50):
to maintain levels of body functions. And this can be
really efficient. And again we've got our Arctic ground squirrels
and they live entirely off a stored body fat as
long as in nine months. So you have glands in
the body that are altering the amounts of hormones that
are released to control just about every physiological aspect of hibernation.
(07:11):
And and when a mammal warm blooded animal. Inners hibernation,
it's essentially becoming like a cold blooded animal. It cranks
down the temperature, but it has a set point in mind.
And you can think of this like a setting on
your thermostat. Right. Let's say you're cutting energy consumption during
the winter. You're only willing to let the house get
so cold because if you know, if it gets colder
than this set point, it's going to start getting uncomfortable.
(07:33):
Uh and and and you'd rather not live that way.
So in this case, there's a set point because if
things get much lower, the creature may not be able
to live. So the set point will be there, and
it's things that get colder. If it starts to drop
below that set point, then the energy will crank up.
It will use some of those fat reserves to keep
it at a tolerable level. Right, So each animal has
its own little thermostat essentially. And you're probably wondering what
(07:56):
about defecation. Oh I was wondering that, Yes, yeah, yeah, well,
no fecal matter is produced because nothing's passing through the
dieg just shut that wing of the operation down. That's right,
talking too much money, using too much energy. We haven't
got it, shut it down. No pooping, no pooping, But
the body is always producing urea, which we know is
a waste by product of urine and hibernating animals, bodies
(08:17):
are able to recycle the urea. Whoa, So that's that's
pretty cool, right, because yeah, I mean, have you ever
like in the middle of nights, man, I really don't
want to get up and get at the bathroom. I mean,
that would be a good feature. I wish I could
just I mean, you know, do you actually try to like,
let me just try and focus and I do idea
(08:37):
trying to lucid dream it. Bears don't urinate at all
in the winter, but they break the urea down into
amino acids. And even though they don't drink any water,
they don't get dehydrated either. They're able to extract enough
water from their own body fat to stay hydrated. And
here's another really cool thing. This is specific to black bears.
They have a unique feature and that they actually continue
(08:59):
to form bones by keeping their calcium levels calibrated in
their blood levels. And researchers believe that it's the secretion
of a hormone called paraphormorn and that's the reason why
the calcium is recycled, and there are a bunch of
clinical trials in which they are using the human version
of that hormone and giving it to patients with osteoporosis.
(09:22):
So that's that's something that they're trying to crack there
with those blood bears. Like, why in the world would
they be actually forming new bone while they are hibernating
or anything, right, right, I mean think about ourselves. I
think if we've ever been waylaid by something and you're
in the hospital for two weeks with a cast on,
your body loses bone in calcium. So yeah, just from
(09:42):
that little bit of atrophy. You have other species that
basically enter this hope or state on a daily basis,
which is always amazing. Hummingbirds for example, Like hummingbirds are
are huge energy users. We discussed before. I think just
just how much energy a hummingbird uses, and and that's
whine Flapping wings are really not that that economic of
(10:03):
a system, but nature cannot make a propeller, so it's
stuck with flapping wings. Yeah, the heartbeats per second. Yeah,
it's crazy. It's in same because I have to use
an immense amount of energy and if they can't get
the energy they need on a daily basis, they will
just shut it down every day for a little bit.
So they'll shut things down like temperature will drop in
(10:25):
a hummingbird on a regular basis, just to maintain Think
of it as a business. As an energy consumption has
become more of an issue. You have various buildings that
will say on weekends, only have a certain portion of
the office that is air conditioned, and if you're coming
into work on the weekends, you need to relocate to
a certain portion of the building every day. Even it's saying,
all right, well during this time, we're gonna have to
(10:45):
shut it down a little because we cannot maintain the
energy costs involved in keeping this level of consumption up
minute to minute. That is an incredible ability to have.
And you know is joking saying that we're morphizing this,
but we can't help it to project our own idea
onto this and say, could could be actually harness this
for ourselves. And we're gonna take a quick break and
when we get back, we'll talk about this possibility of
(11:08):
humans hibernating. All right, we're back, So human hibernation. There
are two huge areas where we could use this. One,
of course, is space travel, because space is huge. It
takes a long time to get anywhere. With our current
understanding of how physics work and how a space propulsion
(11:30):
can work, they're very shortcuts in mind. But for the
most part, we're looking at long travels, travels in most
cases that are longer than the span of human lifetime.
So is there a way to suspend animation? Is there
a way to shut things down and preserve human life
across these vast distances, Because again, it's not only a
situation of like, oh, I don't want to sit there
and take that toes for you know, the length of
(11:51):
a journey. Again, hopefully they would have some quality European
board games aboard that space ship. But but then also
do we have the energy required in the resources to
keep people engaged in an everyday level of activity in
life over the course of a long voyage. Cheaper better
to turn them into low energy cargo for that duration.
(12:12):
The other huge area, of course is healthcare. All right,
so we have somebody who has a disease that cannot
yet be cured, or an injury that needs to be addressed,
Say someone's injured out in the middle of nowhere, and
you need to get them to a quality medical facility,
and it's going to be a day's journey or more.
I need to put them in a hibernated state, and
potentially you could take this low energy cargo move it
(12:34):
to the facility where they can actually treat the injury
and take care of things there. Another example is, say
someone suffered oxygen starvation to the brain through a stroke
or heart attack. They could actually be put into the
suspended animation and lower their oxygen to man and prevent
brain damage. Right. Time is of the essence in these situations.
(12:54):
So if you could shut things down and sort of
contain the situation just long enough to get in there
and do something about and that would be huge. So
it's one of those things where one of the ideas
is very far reaching and super future of mankind and
our most cosmic visions, and the other is every day
people having strokes every day and and what can we
do to mitigate that? Yeah, and at the crops of
(13:15):
this is our metabolic right, right, our basil metabolic right,
which is pretty standard in humans. We don't have these
tip offs and our circadian rhythms to say, hey, guess what.
We're taking it down to the studs today. Go in
your cave. Um, we're pretty regular when it comes there
as basil metabolic rate unless you're like a super yogi, right,
and you can you can tinker with it a bit.
(13:37):
You could, you know, decent parlor tricks and opportun you
were dead for eighteen hours or something when in fact
you were not, but you had again taken down your
breathing and your heart rate. Okay, so beyond a yogi,
what are we thinking about here? Well, they're basically looking
at ways to either use temperature or chemicals to force
a hibernative state on human beings. And we are certainly
(13:58):
not there yet, but but a number of experiments have
been conducted. Mostly these are involving animals, and we're looking
at ways, all right, can we take animals, either hibernating
animals or non hibernating animals, tinker with them either with
temperature or chemicals, and force a hibernative state. Biologists at
the Institute of Arctic Biology and Fairbanks, Alaska are particularly
interested in this. They do a lot of inquiries into
(14:20):
how Arctic ground squirrels behave and how the hibernate They
point out that artic ground squirrels, like us, like all animals,
produce a molecule called a denazine, which slows nerve cell activities.
So when a squirrel begins to hibernate, even when you
or I feel drowsy, that's what it is. That's what's
going on. So they buys a number of experiments where
(14:40):
they took non hibernating Arctic ground squirrels and they gave
them a substance that stimulated a denazine receptors in the brain.
And then they also gave a substance similar to caffeine
to arouse other squirrels. And I mean to rouse them
from there, not to yeah, yeah, not to arouse them sexually.
So in this same way that a denazine is involved
(15:01):
in that drowsy feeling you're getting, we're also counteracting it
when we run for that cup of coffee or that
discussing energy. That's right, I mean that splits the binding point, right.
It basically says, I guess what you're not going to
bind here, I'm caffeine. I'm waking this person back up,
which I thought was fascinating. I mean, we know, obviously,
we know that caffeine purchase up, but to know that
it works that specifically, and in these experiments they were
(15:24):
able to activate a denazine receptors in sufficient enough manner
to induce this hibernative state in these Arctic ground squirrels
during the hibernation season. A small experiment in some senses,
you know, they're not certainly it's not the same as say, oh,
we put a human into hibernative state. In this case,
we took the ground squirrel and we're able to induce hibernation.
And it's actually rather big. I mean, it's one of
(15:44):
the steps that could conceivably lead us to being able
to create this effect in humans. Right. Another really good
example is I keep thinking of it as pet cemetery.
I have to say the zombie dogs. This is from
the Safar Center for Resuscitation Research at the University of Pittsburgh.
They put dogs in a state of suspended animation by
(16:05):
flushing out their bodies of blood, taking out their blood
and replacing it with forty five degree fahrenheit saline solution
that contained oxygen and glucose. The dogs went into cardiac
arrest and they clinically died right after three hours. The
team withdrew the solution, so they reversed this process. They
reintroduced the blood and then applied to gentle electric shock
(16:28):
and the dogs were raised from the dead. Yeah, there
was a similar experiment that was conducted by surgeon at
the Messacuset General Hospital in Boston, Like I'm in the
name of Hassan Alam, and he tested the technique about
two hundred times on pigs with a success rate, and
it basically involved putting the animal under draining out some blood.
In this case, he'd used cuts and major veins to
(16:49):
stimulate the multiple gunshot wounds, so he was trying to
create the situation of fatal or life threatening injury. And
then as the pig rapidly loses about half its blood
and there is a state of shock, dr Alam would
drain the blood store it before pumping this chilled organ
preservation fluid into its system. Than the animal's temperature falls
to about tend to be celsius until it enters this
(17:10):
state of profound hypothermia, and then later they are able
to put the blood back in and restore the pig
to life. Yeah, and again, it's not about terrorizing dogs
and pigs. It's about trying to create these trauma situations
that might happen in a hospital and giving doctors an
alternative in terms of trying to extend the life period
and be able to take out all the tools in
(17:32):
the arsenal to help that person. And speaking about apthermia,
it just made me think about cell biologist Mark Roth.
He has a great ted talk about this about suspended animation.
He may be the furthest along I think in trauma
medicine in terms of looking at ways that we can
play with hibernation. He was inspired by a skier in
(17:52):
Norway who was trapped in the icy waterfall for two
hours before she was extracted. She had no heartbeat and
she was thought to be frozen dead. Seven hours later,
still without a heartbeat, they brought her back to life
and she went on to be the head radiologist at
that hospital later on. Roth was always amazed by this,
(18:13):
and he wondered, if there's some agent in our bodies
that we make ourselves that we might be able to
regulate our own metabolic rate. Okay, So he was like,
is there some sort of flexibility here that we don't
know about that the skier unwittingly tapped into And normally
you would say this would be a fool's arranty even
try to mess with our metabolic rate in this way.
(18:35):
But he just kept picking up the problem, picking at
the problem, and he was watching like Nova or something
one night and they were talking about hydrogen sulfide and
he had that kind of ding ning moment where he's like, yes,
that's the thing in our body that we actually do produce,
albeit in small amounts. And he started to think, could
it cause oxygen to not bind like a kind of
(18:58):
game of musical chairs, leading to UH to not consume
that oxygen and then by reducing our demand for oxygen.
So he decides to start administering hydrogen sulfide to mice
and thin again and put it in the cold environment
because he thinks that there's something key to this cool
environment that happened with the skier. And indeed, then Mike
(19:21):
started stopped moving, appeared dead. Oxygen consumption rate fell by tenfold.
So this again, this is really important, right because we
don't have brains to starve from lack of oxygen. But
he says, this is the real kicker. That hydrogen sulfide
is rapidly metabolized. So if you were dosed with US
after six hours of d animation. All you would have
(19:42):
to do is be put out into room air and
warm up and you would be, in his words, none
the worse for wear. So and one model of heart
attack animals were given the hydrogen sulfide and they showed
a seventy percent reduction and heart damage compared to those
who got the standard of care that you and I
were to receive if we were to have a heart
(20:03):
attack here today. And the same is true for organ failures.
So when you have a loss of function and going
to poor profusion of kidney or liver, you have damage
that suffered. So in two he started human trials and
he says that we're on the path of really understanding
this metabolic flexibility and the not too distant future we
could have e m T s actually giving people this
(20:24):
hydrogen is fullified and extending the their lives possibly you know,
so you know, if you were in an emergency situation,
you're being transported, you might be able to be put
under in this suspended animation and not have any ill
effects to your tissue. Well, that one of the take
comes here for me is that suspended animation induced human hibernation.
It may look easy in some of our sci fi visions,
(20:46):
many of our sci fi visions where it's just kind
of a plot something to move the plot around long
and somehow make vast distances traversible by humans. You know,
it's just a matter of Sigourney Weaver putting on your
sexiest underwear and climbing into a pot. Right. But but
but like the idea that it wouldn't just be Sigorny
Weaver in sexy underwear, it would be Sigourney Weaver in
a sosomniatic state, uncomfortably semi conscious for this long stretch
(21:10):
of time, you know, or or the possibility that you
would have to take Siggorny Weaver's blood out and put
some sort of saline chill solution in there instead. So
it's a it's it's a less attractive scenario when you're
talking about Sigorny where you're talking about the Riley character
and not Gus. That's I don't don't, don't don't ring
(21:30):
bullets of pony with your eyes. Yeah, but no, no
Ripley in an alien it's it is it is early
in the morning. Now, there have been some other There
are just as many sci fi visions of induced tibernation
that are far more in a centur realistic but certainly Nightmarrick.
For instance, Dan Abnett had a novel called Zenoes. It
was forty k novels he did that there was a
(21:52):
situation in that where he describes a planet that during
the course of its orbit, it enters a stage where
it's just too frigid on the planet for people to live, uh,
you know, energy consumption wise in terms of the civilization,
but also on a personal level. So most of the
population goes into a state of hibernation. And this book,
it opens with this action scene in which a villain
has woken everyone up prematurely, and so like thousands of
(22:16):
people are dying in their hibernation pots because it's such
a medically tinkered state that if you come out of
it without the aid of a physician, you're you're kind
of boned. So so that that that comes to mind.
Another title that comes to mind is the Worthing Saga
over the Worthy Chronicle by Orson Scott Card, the author
of Indur's Game, and this was material that was based
on an earlier novel he put out called Hot Sleep,
(22:39):
And in this he has this concept of what they
call hot sleep because the individuals are traveling across vast
distances and to do so, they are put into this
state of artificial hibernation by the use of this drug
called stomach As it turns out, though they call it
hot sleep because the individual actually undergoes this very uncomfortable
like heated, sweaty, increased temperature situation. I'm not sure how
(23:02):
that would work science wise, but the idea is that
the hibernation process is very uncomfortable and lasts for a
very long time, so they actually have to wipe your
memory before you go into it, store that memory digitally,
and then put it back into your head after erasing
the trauma of the hot sleep experience. If you haven't
read those and certainly if your Fano Mendor's game and
haven't explored other orson Scott card books, I highly recommend
(23:25):
the Worthing sorry, because he does all sorts of interesting
things with the concept of of so much induced hibernation,
and you have individuals in society who can afford it,
who start using this artificial hibernation technology to leap frog
across the centuries, so they can't actually extend human life,
but you're only able to live a certain amount of days,
(23:46):
but you can spread those days out through even century
long periods of artificial hibernation. Well, that's what mark Roth
is pointing to. He is actually saying that suspended animation
is tapping into immortality, which is really interesting. Of course,
in the way we've just grabbed it here we're talking
about hours, but who knows what the promises in the
future for extending that out for days years? I don't know.
(24:08):
And I was actually thinking about Aubrey de Gray again,
the bearded one who the bio gerontologists, who talks about
how the first person to live to be five hundred
years has already been born, and that we can basically
maintain ourselves like a good vintage car, and we have
the technology to do it. If you're going to do that,
then hey, maybe you want to take five years out
(24:30):
in your five hundred years of living. Hey, go ahead,
suspend animation, animate me for five years. That's fine. Cool. Well, hey,
we're on board with that. Yeah, I'm on board with it. Well,
how about the rest of you. If you have any
cool examples of induced human hibernation from science fiction that
you would like to point out right in, let me
know about it and I'll bring it up on the podcast.
Or if you have just general thoughts about the hibernation
(24:52):
in general in animals and how it might affect human life.
What if you could hybernate? What would you hybernate through?
We're curious to know, and be sure to check out
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and we walk you through this experiment, and then we
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