Power of the Nap

Why do we feel so refreshed after a power nap and so sapped after a mega nap? Do coffee naps work and just what sort of benefits can we get out of an extra 20 minutes in the hammock? Explore the answers in this episode of the STBYM podcast.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and I'm Julie Douglas.
Julia you a fan of the nap M. I love
the idea of a nap, but I never really get
to engage. Okay, I love a nap. I do not

(00:25):
take one every day, but when I do take one,
it is, uh, it's phenomenal. And I and I asked myself,
why do I not do this all the time? Why
do I Why don't I grab a quick twenty minute
nap every day? The time that I really want a
nap is on a plane, because I have the time
to do it makes total sense. But I'm just incapable

(00:46):
of doing that. And I know some of it's because
the vestibular system is keeping tapped on what's going on.
You know, You've got all sorts of sensory information that
the brain has to deal with, and so it's a
little bit occupied or too occupied in order for you
to you know, fall into some sort of slumber. And
yet people do it all around me. Yeah, I appreciate
a good long airplane nap. I also like a good

(01:09):
car nap. I haven't taken one in a while, but
when I was working in newspapers, I remember coming sneaking
back out, not sneaking, I would take a break outside
and I would think, if people can take smoke smoke
smoke breaks, I can take a nice nap break. So
I just go into the car, you leaning the chair back,
and you just doze off for a good twenty minutes.
And you know, this is not a weird concept. We

(01:29):
know the concept of the siesta, right yeah, yeah, this
is Latin for hora sex, or rather it comes from
Latin and hotta sexta means the sixth hour, because traditionally
the day would start at six am and six hours
later it would be noon. Perfect time for a siesta,
you know. And I mean because at heart, what is
a nap but sleep, just a little extra sleep, And

(01:51):
sleep is good, even though we tend to have this
sort of hostile relationship with with it, especially here in
the States, right, Like, sleep is that period of time
when you can't get anything done. Why would I have
more sleep during the day. That's time I could be
doing things. Yeah, I think of the T shirt all sleep.
When I die, I've probably seen that around sleep and
I'm dead. There's a war and Zevon song about that.

(02:14):
But sleep, just to refresh, does a number of great
essential things for us, and we've podcasted about this before.
I'll be sure to include some links to our our
whole suite of sleep related content on the landing page
for this episode. But sleep gives the body a chance
to repair muscles and other tissue, replaces aging or dead cells.

(02:34):
It gives the brain a chance to organize in an
archive memories. And sleep lowers our energy consumption, allows us
to to recharge the body, and the brain keeps us
around to eat all the time. It gets to just
sort of shut things down for a little bit. And
you know, all life forms have these built in chemical
clocks that are gauging the amount of light out there

(02:55):
and how to respond to it, right, and the human
penny all gland well, it regulates the rhythm that beats
south this biological clock for a secreting melotona according to
light stimulus. And you can kind of think of it
as this control tower queuing us as to when we
should fall into a slumber. And when we do fall
into a slumber, there are four key stages okay, and

(03:18):
this is going to be important later on in the episode. Uh.
Stage one five to ten minutes. First five to ten
minutes if your sleep this is a light sleep. This
is basically waking to sleeping transition period. The second stage
sees your heart and your body your heart rate and
your body temperatures drop because that kind of readies yourself
for deep sleep, right. Yeah. Stage two twenty minutes and

(03:42):
this is when your brain is producing a burst of
rapid rhythmic brain wave activity and it was known as
sleep spindles, and these play an important role in memory consolidation,
which will discuss in a bit. Then you have stage three.
This is the delta sleep or slow wave sleep. Uh.
This is a deep air of sleep where you have
slow brain waves known as the known as delta waves

(04:04):
that are beginning to emerge. Yeah. This is the time
where your body repairs and regrows tissues, builds bones and muscles,
and strengthens the immune system. So this specifically, your body
is really doing some work in this stage, and so
it makes sense that if you are awoken in this
stage that you feel exceedingly groggy in a fog. And

(04:26):
then finally they're stage four and this is ninety minutes
after falling asleep. Generally, this is a rim sleep. This
is the domain of dreams. Always think about the first
three stages. It's just being these portals into the inner
chamber of dreamland, right, because that's sort of the ultimate goal,
at least in my mind, because this is where stuff
really happens and memory consolidation becomes important here. Yeah, I

(04:49):
mean the channel Ralph Wick and this is where you're
a viking, right. Uh. Now. The progression of these stages
is interesting because you would think it would just be
one two three four, one two three four or what
have you. But the progression goes stage one, then stage two,
and then you get to stage three, then back to
stage two, then to stage four, then back to stage two,
and then it continues. Yeah, and the more you revisit

(05:10):
the rem stage, the longer lengths of time. So it
could be the ten minutes that you're in RIM the
first time, and then throughout the evening or the night,
um it could extend out toward an hour. Cool. So
that's the basic flow of a given night sleep. So
the important to keep that in mind when we start
talking about naps. The little slices of additional sleep that
we carve out for ourselves during the day. And I

(05:32):
do want to drive home that in this podcast we're
gonna be dealing with adult napping without diving into the
much research topic of infant and toddler napping, which is
a domain alto a ball on its own, although I
will say the parallel here is that a good nap
can solve almost any sort of crisis in either an
adult or child. It's true. All right, let's get to

(05:54):
know the nap um focusing on the length and the
sleep stages involved here. First of all, you have your
twenty minute power nap. This is the this is this
is a good one to have in your arsenal uh.
It yields mostly stage to sleep. So you're just dipping
your toes into the waters of slumber here. But still,
according to Jennifer Ackerman, author of Sex, Sleep, Eat, Drink,

(06:17):
Dream a day in the life of your body, that's
still enough to enhance alertness and concentration, to elevate mood
and sharpen your motor skills. Plus, you know, especially in
this modern day where we were so focused on clock time,
and we think about those those hour and half hour
blocks that we've carved up our time into it's easier
to get on board with a twenty minute nap because like,

(06:38):
that's not even half an hour, that's that's just a
third of an hour. So if I just allow myself
that that I'm not really cutting into the rest of
my day. Yeah, and if you're trying to be super
efficient about that twenty minutes, you want to get everything
you can out of it, well, you may want to
consider pairing it with caffeine, which I know sounds really counterintuitive,
but it's actually possible to hack your nap a bit

(07:01):
with caffeine. Um, so let's let's talk about that. You see,
your body produces a molecule called adenazine, and this adentazine
will slow down nerve cell activity, and when it builds
up a bit in your brain, that's when you really
begin to feel a bit um like you're kind of
slogging through the day. So caffeine games adentazine by doing this,

(07:26):
it binds to the receptors that adentazine would normally bind too.
So if you introduce caffeine, it will kind of sidle
up to that receptor before the adenazine does bind to
and say, ha, alert awake, um, so in a sense,
they're competing for those receptors. So here's we're sleep or
a nap comes into it. While you're napping, the adentazine

(07:50):
is being broken down by your brain and ferried away,
which means all those receptors are free. And so if
you're taking a twenty minute nap, that actually happens to
correspond with the peak effects of caffeine. So what that
means is that you know your brain has clear away
all they to denizine and now at the end of
those twenty minutes, the peak effects of caffeine are taking

(08:12):
effect and all binding to those free receptors. You wake
up feeling spectacular, like you've had eight hours of NonStop sleep. Nice. Yeah,
a little sleep hap hacking there. So that's that's that's
the idea behind it. Now a lot of you are
probably already aware of like the ideal twenty minute nap,

(08:34):
and maybe many of you try the coffee trick as well.
But obviously sometimes you hit that twenty minute mark, your
your alarm goes off and you just feel like maybe
maybe you just need a little more right, five more minutes,
ten more minutes, fifteen more minutes, right, but you You
need to be careful here because if you choose to
go too much longer, if you go past the forty

(08:56):
five minute mark, uh, then you risk getting beyond on
sleep phases one and two and into three. So if
you can and if you go longer you get into
phase three, you can that slow wave or delta wave sleep.
This is that area again, we're waking out of this.
You're gonna get groggy, and you're gonna have that sleep inertia.
You're gonna be disoriented, and that can last very good
half hour. So as it's tantalizing and and uh and

(09:21):
appealing as the idea of just an a solid hour
nap might seem, especially during the you know again thinking
of clock time, thinking of all right, we'll just take
one a whole hour and just recharge. If you do that,
then you're risk taking an additional half hour just to
recover from your nap, right, because it never feels good
to wake up from a nap and try to remember

(09:41):
what your name is and where you are, and it's
just a terrible sort of mucking through feelings. So if
you go past that forty five minutes, you might as
well go to nine d minutes because that means that
you now have covered an entire cycle of sleep that
includes the coveted into the realm. Realm which, as we

(10:05):
know in in the other podcasts that we have, our
episodes that we've covered can aid creativity and emotional and
procedural memory, such as learning how to ride a bike,
for instance. So this is really helpful this ninety minute.
Now if you have learned a new task and you
want to try to consolidate that memory faster and make
it stickier, take that ninety minutes the whole. Let's the whole. Well,

(10:28):
maybe I should sleep on it thing right, Yeah, And
this allows you to essentially sleep on it in small form.
I wanted to point this little statistic out. Unlike of
all the million species, humans sleep just once a day,
which is bunk when you consider that the human brain
uses more energy energy than any other organ in the body.

(10:49):
I'm talking about, Um, you know those maps showing the
world's energy consumption. The brain is kind of like the
United States, you know, along with China. It really is
taking up a lot of energy. So what can a
nap do for you? Well, it can help reverse any
nighttime sleep deficits, boost our brains including improvements to creative

(11:12):
problem solving, verbal memory, perceptual learning, object learning, and statistical learning. UM.
It's generally good for about everything, including managing weight. So,
for instance, UM, think about lepton and grellin. These are
two hormones that help to maintain your appetite. UM. They
both suppress it and they ramp it up during the

(11:35):
day and night. And if you don't get enough shut I,
you'll have too much leptum in the system slowing down
your metabolism and too much grellan in the system telling
you that you're hungry. And that's why if you've ever
pulled an all night or the next day, you just
have the insatiable munchies because these hormones are completely off,
and so a nap can actually help to to balance

(11:55):
out those hormones again. And then in terms of alertness,
we can look at this study from NASA. It's titled
Alertness Management Strategic Naps in Operational Settings since from and
they looked at the beneficial effects of napping on seven
dred and forty seven pilots, and each participant was allowed
to nap for forty minutes during the day, sleeping on

(12:17):
average about twenty five point eight minutes, which is kind
of the sweet zone of uh napping as we've discussed,
and the nappers quote demonstrated vigilance performance improvements from sixteen
percent in media and reaction time to thirty and lapses
compared to the no rest group. So that would lead

(12:37):
us to this idea of performance and the workplace in
knowing that a nap can actually restore our attention, it
can increase the quality of our work. Um can help
our attention spans, reduce our mistakes, and it can also
help us to learn while we're on the job. And
yet yet not all of us have the kind of

(13:00):
corporate culture that has installed sleep pods or sleep tents. Yeah,
we were talking about this earlier before the podcast. There
was a time and how stuff works where it was
in the rule book that if you if you were
asleep in the office, you could be fired like I
assume on the spot and just kicked out like half
awake if you were asleep at your desk, which made

(13:23):
me think of a Llana from broad City, the Comedy
Central series in which she has trained herself to sleep
uh sitting in her chair at work with her eyes open. Ah. Yeah,
it's beautiful. It's a it's a brilliant it's a brilliant
strategy and one that I've seen in real life. When
I was in high school. Uh, there was there was

(13:43):
a guy in my class named Tojo and he was
he was in the football team, big guy, but not
as interested in his studies. And he could fall asleep
with his eyes open. He had perfected it for the
classroom use where he just sat there, his eyes are
open and he's dead asleep and maybe maybe he's absorbing
some of this right, some of the material that he's

(14:04):
listening to. Yeah, I judged him too harshly. Um, because
even a short sleep, last thing to sixty minutes, uh,
in that range can produce a fivefold improvement in information
retrieval from memory. Now, this these findings come from a
two thousand, fifteen neuropsychology study from Germany Starland University by
Sarah Studa, Axel mechel Linger and Emma Bridger. Now specifically,

(14:28):
they were interested in the consolidation of memories during stage
to sleep. Uh. This is when information is tagged for
easier recall. You can think of you know, the sleep
librarians going through the archives and tagging things individually and
putting things in order to where they'll be of more
use to the waking mind. And they focused on the
hippocampus here this is where the memories are consolidated, and

(14:52):
they looked for those tell tale sleep spindles UH that
we mentioned earlier that are in stage to sleep while
they were analyzed brain activities of test subjects via an
electro en cephalogram or e g. The more sleep spindles,
the stronger the memory. So this particular study unraveled like this.
Step one, test subjects were required to learn ninety single

(15:15):
words and a hundred and twenty word pairs. And these
word pairs were just meaningless combinations of words, so they
weren't phrases or anything. It's the kind of thing you'd
have to really turn on your brain to absorb. The
next step, one group was allowed to nap after being
presented with this information around ninety minutes, while the other

(15:35):
watched some DVDs, in other words, to stay away. Can
not get a chance to nap and to consolidate those memories. Now,
the test subjects then took tests that targeted both hippocampus
dependent associated memories or a M and hippocampus independent item
memories or i AM. Their findings were that i AM

(15:55):
performance decreased for both groups, but a in performance that
type of memory consolidations occurring during sleep decrease for the
control group the ones watching the DVDs, but remained constant
for the knap group. So this was consistent with their
predictions uh that there would be this selective impact of
napping on hippocampus dependent recognition. All right, when it comes

(16:18):
to memory boosting and napping, dreams certainly play a big part,
and Robert stick Gold of Harvard Med School conducted a
dream and memory experiment published the results in the two
thoutent online edition of Current Biology. And what they did is,
I took ninety nine college students who spent an hour
practicing of virtual maze task on a computer with a

(16:41):
goal of remembering the placement of a certain tree. Now,
then they had students who were assigned to either take
a nap or just kind of hang out doing something
really nice and quiet, not necessarily meditative, but something that
didn't um take up too much of their brain serves
and allow them to kind of just hang out and

(17:02):
um restore their energy. So those who actively dreamed about
the experimental task we're talking about. Four people out of
fifty nappers found the tree much faster than they had
in the initial trials, and they described seeing people at
particular locations in the maze or hearing music that had

(17:23):
played in the lab during testing. And this reminds me
of a study that we've talked about before that essentially
concluded that students who were studying in multiple places did
better on their tests because they were creating more associations
that their brain could later recall in a testing situation. Right,

(17:45):
So they were kind of creating the different data points.
And what this is bearing out, and again this is
only four of the fifty nappers that actually dreamed, but
it's bearing out that those data points are being revisited
in these scenarios. So, in other words, it's not that
the dreams lead to better memory, but rather that they're

(18:06):
as signed that other unconscious parts of the brain are
are really working hard to remember how to get through
that virtual maze in those points of recall. Cool. Now,
we mentioned earlier that taking a nap can actually reverse
the effects of a bad night's sleep or you know,
a night of staying up and cramming for a test
or what have you. Uh. And so there's actually a

(18:28):
study that proves this out rather nicely. According to a
two thousand fifteen study published in the Endocrine Society's Journal
of Clinical Indochronology and Metabolism, a short napp thirty minute
range can help relieve stress and bolster the immune system
after a night of sparse sleep, such as only scoring
two hours UM. And this is key news since, according

(18:49):
to the National Health Interview Survey, nearly three anten adults
report they sleep in average of six hours or less
than nights. So a lot of us are rolling through
our daily lives with all always having to deal with
a little bit of a sleep deficit. Right. So, this
particular study revolve revolved around eleven healthy man between the
ages of five and thirty two. During one session, they

(19:10):
were limited to two hours of sleep for a single night,
and in another subjects were able to take two thirty
minute naps the day after uh their sleep was restricted
to two hours. Then the scientists analyze the participants urine
and saliva to determine how restricted sleep and napping had
altered their hormone levels. So this is where it gets

(19:30):
really interesting. They found that one night of limited sleep
caused a two point fivefold increase in the level of
nah rep andrin, a hormone and neurotransmitter involved in the
body's fight or flight response to stress. So, in other words,
you have a bad night's sleep, then the next day
you're more likely to want to you know, fight or
run from anything that that comes at you. You have

(19:51):
this more of a you know, um uh antagonistic relationship
with your environment. Um. However, researchers found no change in
non rep in efferent levels when the men had napped
following a night of limited sleep. So again, just just
just some short napping thrown in there can can remove

(20:11):
this uh, this battle the tiger or run from the
tiger approach to something as simple as a day of
taking tests on campus or a day of work in
the office. So that's interesting that that chemical clock that
we talked about can get off so very easily and
that cascading effect can be created, But it sounds like

(20:32):
it can invert that relationship. Indeed, so another thing that
can be affected by sleep or napping is your blood pressure.
So think about your old ticker. They're working really hard
all day, pumping blood to and fro, and when your
head hits the pillow, your heart gets arrest too, because
there's less demand to pump blood throughout your body. But

(20:53):
if you have this sort of chronic loss of sleep
or sleep deficit, it means that your heart muscles can
become fatigued and this can lead to an increase in
blood pressure or possible thickening of the heart muscle. So
how does the nap figure in here. Researchers at Liverpool
John Moore's University in the UK tested nine healthy volunteers,

(21:15):
eight men one woman who did not routinely take afternoon naps.
They wore equipment that checked blood pressure, heart rate, and
forearm cutaneous vascular conductance, which is just determining the dilation
of blood vessels, and they found a significant drop in
blood pressure during the sleep trial. Okay, they also had

(21:36):
a resting and standing trial. So what's more here is
that this drop in blood pressure occurred mostly after the
lights out moment, just before the volunteers fell asleep. And
this is a kind of fascinating insight into mind body
that the researchers stumbled upon because it's just this kind

(21:57):
of mirror anticipation of an afternoon nap UM in which
the body then followed suit and decreased blood pressure. So
what I'm saying here is that they didn't even have
to complete the nap, just just by virtue of laying
down and starting to float into that first stage, they
could feel the effects of a nap on their blood pressure.

(22:21):
Just wanting the nap, just giving into the nap was enough. Yeah.
I mean, you have to be in the right context,
right of the right situation. Again, you can't be sitting
up and thinking, Wow, I would love a nap right now,
and then all of a sudden you're blood pressure is decreased. Um.
But what it's saying is that the body knows that
it's preparing itself for sleep, and it's it's beginning to

(22:42):
take the body down to the studs there and so again,
you don't even have to enter into this the full phases.
All right, So at this point we might be wondering,
what is there any downside? All of this sound just fantastic, right,
I Mean, we're boosting our memory, we're restoring our energy
where we're improving our mood, we're helping our bodies stay alive.
Like what possible downside could there be to taking a nap. Well,

(23:07):
there does seem to be some degree of association between
between naps and increased diabetes risk. Now this is kind
of There are two studies, the two thousand ten study
in two thousand and thirteen study. Both are publishing the
journal Sleep, and these studies looked at Chinese participants who
reported taking naps four to six times a week, and

(23:28):
in the first study, they found that the individuals were
fifty more likely to have diabetes than those who napped
less frequently. Now, both of these studies took place in China,
where where the where the culture is generally more on
board with a good nap for anybody and everybody, regardless
of age or or status h then you would find
in in many Western cultures. Um. Now, the two thousand

(23:49):
thirteen study followed up that the and more or less
confirmed this correlation, but also suggested that while longer nap
durations were associated with an increased risk for high blood
sugar and diabetes, these people who took short naps of
say less than thirty minutes, tended to have lower blood
sugar levels compared to non nappers. However, this wasn't like
a really statistically significant link. What it all means though,

(24:13):
is that these findings can't really prove out into cause
and effect. It's still a matter of correlation. Uh, but
there is this possibility that napping and diabetes are connected. Now,
remember diabetes as a condition in which the individual experiences
high blood sugar because the body doesn't produce enough insulin
to remove excess gloof cose from the blood, or because

(24:34):
the cells have become resistant to insulin. So there's this
possibility here, and it's again this needs to be proven
out in in additional studies. Uh, but it's possible that
too much or too little sleep upsets the balance. Again,
think of that. Uh, the biological clock that we've been
talking about here interferes with our internal clockwork of insulin release,

(24:56):
upsetting the balance and leading to the the to the
to the lack of balance found in the diabetic Okay,
that kind of chemical cascade. Yeah, indeed, a chemical cascade effect. Now,
another study here about napping shows that it may be
more efficient in the young. Um. This is according to

(25:17):
a study published in the two thousand and nine December
issue of the journal Sleep. Patricia Saga Spay studied twenty
four people twelve young people between the ages of twenty
and twenty five and twelve middle aged people between the
ages of forty and fifty now. Participants first drove a
hundred and twenty five highway miles in the daylight between

(25:39):
six and seven thirty at night okay, which she might
feel a little bit fatigued at that time right then,
and a test of the effects of coffee and napping
on nighttime driving. Participants drove another hundred and twenty five
miles between two am and three thirty AM after having
a cup of coffee with two hundred milligrain milligrams of

(26:02):
coffee or a placebo um which was a cup of
caffeinated coffee, or a thirty minute nap, and what they
wanted to look at the researchers they wanted to look
at the inappropriate line crossings, self perceived fatigue and sleepiness
um to try to figure out how this nap, how

(26:24):
this caffeine was affecting the participants, and they showed that
the napping led in the younger subset here led to
fewer inappropriate line crossings than the middle aged participants, and
during napping, young participants slept more and had more delta

(26:45):
sleep than middle aged participants. And what is this pointing to.
It's not that um, young people should nap more, although
go for it if they want, um, but it's pointing
to the fact that as you get older, it's harder
to drop into a sleep state, and it's harder to
stay in it and and be more engaged in it.

(27:05):
So it's another one of those like you has wasted
on the youth. They can nap the best, and yet
they're probably not napping so much. Now. Finally, one more
study I want to mention here is a study that
came out in two thousand fourteen that was published in
the American Journal of Epidemiology, and it found correlation between
daytime napping and increased mortality risk among sixteen thousand British

(27:29):
men and women surveyed. Uh Specifically, they found that daytime
nappers were nearly a third more likely to die before
they turned sixty five. Now, this led to a lot
of headlines making the rounds um naps linked to death,
naps linked to increased mortality rates, et cetera, which makes
it sound like naps are killing people. If you nap

(27:51):
too much, then you you're going to die. But but really,
what this all boiled down to is that excessive daytime
napping might be a useful marker of underlying health risk,
particularly respiratory problems UM in people that are sixty five
years of age or younger. So the fact that you're
sleeping a little extra, you're taking you know, more naps,

(28:12):
maybe long naps every day, that in and of itself
is not the problem, but it might be a sign
of other existing health concerns that will ultimately cut your
life short. Okay, So to be clear, we're not talking
about the quick twenty minute nap here. We're talking about
excessive napping, perhaps even sleeping through the afternoon, which, besides

(28:33):
being associated with maybe some underlying health conditions, could also
be associated with UM depression, as we know that that's
one of the red flags. Yeah, I incidantly think of depression.
And then also, um, you know, individuals are saying bedridden
with some sort of condition or injury, right, I mean,
obviously that's the reason you're in bed, that's the reason

(28:54):
you're you're you're you're napping excessively. Uh, and that may
be the thing that's going to impact your health. And
also you would have uh, you know, a more sedentary
situation for your body as well, right, which could spiral
into other effects. Still, when you get down to it,
I feel like the pros really went out against the
cons here when it comes to napping, especially if you

(29:17):
can nap in a hammock rather than a bed. Oh yes, yeah, yeah,
well sure this is this is scientifically proven. Uh huh,
because it turns out that hammocks are just adult sized
rocking cradles and uh. This this was from a two
thousand and eleven study from the issue of Current Biology
in which twelve participants slept in an experimental hammock, and

(29:40):
the researchers found that the rocking increased the duration of
stage and to sleep. This is that form of non
rapid eye movement sleep that normally occupies about half of
a good night's sleeps with quality sleep, and this rocking
configuration of a bed hammock also had lasting effects on
brain activity, increasing slow oscillations and bursts of activity known

(30:05):
as we As we mentioned before, sleep spindles. So yeah,
get you to a hammock that sounds that sounds like
the way to go then, So, based on what we've
discussed here, the idea is you need to take that
that nap you need to refresh your mind and body.
You want to drink some coffee, set your alarm for
twenty minutes, and then throw yourself in a hammock ideal ideal, Yeah,

(30:29):
with a little yea in the background. Maybe I don't
know about that. Actually, yeah, go for it. It's doothing.
I used to listen to any all the time. Now
if you don't have time for that, you could consider
blinking as a kind of extreme micro nap. That that
sounds made up right there. That sounds like something I

(30:50):
would say in a program like I don't take naps.
I just blink a lot, and then that takes care
of the problem. Well, okay, there's this idea. There's this idea.
Researchers were onto something here. If you're like, the about
of blinking that goes on, you know, for the average
person is way too much for like clearing debris away. Okay,
we blink far more than it is actually necessary. So

(31:13):
what they did is they begin to look at how
people blink throughout the day. And by the way, this
is in a two thousand twelve paper published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Uh. They
found that people tend to blink at predictable moments. So
when you're reading, when you get to the end of
a sentence, you'll will typically blink. If someone is speaking,

(31:34):
you may blink when the speaker pauses between statements. And
if a group of people are all watching the same video,
everyone tends to blink at the moment when the action
briefly lags. And so the idea here is that that
that brief shuttering of the the eyes, the window shades
there that refreshes the brain and it momentarily stems the

(31:55):
flow of stimuli. And I was thinking about this because
you we do videos, and um, when we first started
doing these videos, we didn't have a teleprompter, which meant
that you'd have to write the script right, you do
your research, write your script, and then ten minutes later
you would commit the stuff to your memory. And I

(32:16):
noticed that I was blinking like mad. And I do
think some of that has to do with recall, we
use a teleprompter now and so there's less blinking. I
think you're right, I think because I definitely remember blinking
more during those and and certainly i'd have to look
back and look at some of the videos we do
that and that don't use a teleprompter, and see if

(32:39):
there I can see a difference between my my blinking
in uh say an ethics science versus a monster science. Yeah,
and uh yeah that I just noticed at one point
that was like, gosh, my eyes are just fluttering like mad.
I look like there's I've got some sort of blinking disorder.
We What we should have done is just kept with
that strategy and have Tyler put little blue circles over

(33:01):
our eyes or green ones. And then you can just
use c G I later to just keep our eyes open,
just non blinking. That wouldn't be creepy, No, not at all. All. Right,
there you go, sleep and the nap. You know, Let's
call over our let's call our robot out of its
unnatural slumber and see if we have a little listener mail. Alright,

(33:26):
this one comes to us from Nevin. Uh. Nevin writes
in and says, hi, guys, ope that you were both
doing well. It seems like an awful long time since
had the opportunity to enjoy having breakfast with both of
you at the Majestic. I missed that place anyway. A
student who minored in sociology. I really enjoyed the Mean
World Syndrome podcast. I don't watch a lot of television,
but when you look at movie buildings, that often seems

(33:47):
to me as if the movies which have a tendency
to violence are the ones that get top billing. More
complex movies, which one often which are often more realistic
or actually really or actual real life, don't then to
feature as much. Is this because actual real life the
scene is boring that if we look too closely we
will be saddened by what we see. I don't know,

(34:08):
but I think this is worth thinking about as an
example of mean world syndrome. I stayed in Harlem and
New York City once. I was warned by all Uh
and Sundry to be extremely careful there. It was dangerous,
there was a big chance I'd be mugged, etcetera, etcetera.
Had any of the people saying this actually been there,
note they only knew it from television. All the best
to you both. Nevin should explain that Nevin is from Ireland.

(34:30):
He's from Cork and he is a listener of ours,
and we had breakfast with him one day at the Majestic,
which is this great breakfast place here in Atlanta, And uh,
it was so great talking to Nevin. He just has
all these amazing insights. So you know, yet again here
we have something he's bringing up from mean world and um,

(34:52):
and I thought that was really interesting because again he's
he's coming to Harlem as someone who's not just um,
someone from the United States visiting there from a different state,
but from a different country. And I thought, yeah, that's
the expectations are really outsized. Yeah, and I think he
has a point there. I mean, people go to see
movies for the most part, they want the drama, they

(35:13):
want the conflict, right, and so what kind of a
world gives you more drama and conflict, the mean world
or the the the less mean world of reality, Which
also brought to mind, and I wrote back to nev
And about this, is that I think one of the
reasons why Game of Thrones does those big narrative dumps
during a sex scene is because they know that people

(35:34):
aren't going to be interested in this sort of um
plot points that have to be put out there, those
sort of more dry narratives, so they face it with
something that really lends to a sort of escapist moment.
Shall we say yeah in the In the books, most
of those moments were involved food, characters eating like a
big banquet and lots of descriptions of the food, and

(35:55):
then all these plot details were thrown out. Well, I
would say that the series has also tapped into a
kind of pleasure reward system there indeed, all right, So
there you have it. Hey, In the meantime, if you
want to listen to past episodes, check out blog post, videos, etcetera.
Go to Stuff to Blow your mind dot com. That

(36:16):
is the motorship, that is the homepage. And if you
have any thoughts please do you send them our way.
You can email us at below the mind at how
stuff forts dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.