October 23, 2014 • 37 mins
What about darkness is so unsettling? Find out about the most extreme instances of an absence of light and how it works on our bodies.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
if I may, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask our producer
knowl to uh down a little spooky music, and I'm
going to read a quote from HP Lovecraft. Wait, hold on,
(00:26):
let me turn on the white We are submerged in
complete darkness right now. It's a little weird. Wait, holding
this really difficult, but okay, there, all right? This is
from Lovecraft supernatural horror. In literature, children will always be
afraid of the dark, and men with mind sensitive to
hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the
(00:50):
hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life, which made poll
sat in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously
upon our own lobe in unholy dimensions which only the
dead and the moon struck can limps. That was beautiful.
(01:10):
And if you guys haven't guessed out there, we are
diving way into the deep dark in this episode. And
I love that because it really does evoke the sort
of primal fear that darkness has particularly for children. Yeah,
I mean the great thing about this topic is that
light and dark, those are the cycles that have defined
(01:32):
our lives, that have defined life for the most part
for so long. I mean, life here on Earth exists
within these cycles of light and dark, and that has
played into uh the evolutionary ascent of of almost all organists.
And it's so important to us that we have woven
it into this symbolic level, right, I mean the ying
and yang of dark and light, these opposites which really
(01:55):
represent these ideas of not just values, but of the
spheares that we inhabit. Because on one level of the
world of light, the word the sunlit world, I mean
that's an area of the known, and then the world
of darkness that isn't an area of the if not
the unknown, at least the uncertain. The other the possible.
(02:15):
They had sort of the quantum state where the darkness
can be simply emptiness. The darkness can be something you
could trip over, it could be a thief, it could
be a monster. There's there's room for just about any
fear within that undefined space of shadow. And that undefined
space of shadow is largely what occupied the the human
(02:35):
experience and in fact, if you look at archaeological evidence
that suggests that, you know, just four d thousand years
ago or so, early humans mastered fire before that, what
would you do. I mean, you didn't. You didn't really
have that access to something that could glow and provide
some sort of illumination in the dark. Now skip ahead
to today, where we have a possibility for twenty four
(02:59):
hour light environments, and we kind of take that for
granted that darkness really did rule the night. Indeed, I
mean for the longest, to borrow a phrase from historian
William Manchester, you had a world uh lit only by fire,
right at least a night lit only by fire. So
you even if you had you had fire, you had candles,
you had torches, you had campfires. Eventually you get gas
(03:21):
lighting and and and lanterns and other uh luminary innovations.
But but for the most part, you're sort of carving
out a little bit. You were reclaiming a little bit
of the night, but it's not quite as good as
the daylight, and you're still surrounded by all these shadows
and just gulfs of impenetrable darkness. Right until you had
like a really good um widespread source of artificial light.
(03:45):
All you have those dying embers to light the space
around you. So what would you do. You would submit
to that dark and most of us would go to sleep.
And that brings up this idea which we've touched upon before,
of two a sleep. Yeah, I mean this is pretty simple.
What happens when it gets dark? And again you may
have some some some light at your disposal, you may
(04:07):
have a camp fire your disposal, but your abilities are
greatly reduced. So you go to sleep. You simply call
it a day, except something happens about about halfway through,
right you wake because according to historian Rogert Eckert, who
published a book on the matter called at Days Closed
Night in Times Past, which by the way, was a
(04:29):
culmination of his sixteen years of research that uncovered more
than five references to a segmented sleeping pattern, he found
that you would wake in this fourteen hour sleep pattern
for maybe an hour or two, get up, tend your animals,
do a little white house keeping in the moonlight, have sex,
(04:50):
lay in bed, thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with
your bed fellows. In fact, and we've mentioned before, I
love this. It's widely known that Benjamin Franklin would light
a candle and take cold air baths, reading naked in
a chair. Indeed, that was his his strategy for this
this period between the two sleeps. And one thing I
(05:11):
love about this is it also really defines that idea
about the middle of the night, right because for us,
the middle of the night is typically more a situation
of staying up late enough for it to be the
middle of the night. But you go back to to this,
this earlier mode of sleep, and it's it's not merely
a stage of lateness, but a true in between that
(05:31):
this this little space, this little uh clutch of the
darkness that you end up occupying between these two dominant
phases of sleep. Now and Stephen Johnson's book How We
Got to Now in the PBS series, there is a
section on light and he talks about that. He talks
with historian Craig Koslovsky, who says that you know, are
(05:52):
kind of nighttime wakenings now or even insomnia may be
attributed to this original for seen our sleep phase. In
other words, it's kind of normal that we get up sometimes,
you know, midnight or two o'clock in the morning, and
we can't get back to sleep for a while. Yeah,
I mean that's the biological norm. That's what we evolved
to do. And it's only been in the last hundred
(06:13):
and fifty years, two hundred years, that we've really carved
out a substantial zone of the night and and ReLit it.
According to Stephen Johnson in the in the book of
How We Got to Now, in that that chapter and
Light points out that today's night sky burned six thousand
times brighter than it did in me or one hundred
and fifty years ago. So it's it's transforms. It's transformed
(06:34):
the way we sleep, the way we work and uh.
And that's of course spiral of office, Johnson explains in
his book into the creation of global networks of communication.
Uh and and and a lot of our modern technological world. Yeah,
because all of a sudden, you have improved street lighting,
you had the advent of social opportunities at the in
(06:55):
during the evening, you have you know, restaurants and cafes
to go to. And that cause is a shift in
people sleep patterns because before that, according to Koslovski, you
had associations with the night that we're not so good.
We're talking about before the seventeenth century. He says the
night was a place populated by people of disrepute, criminals, prostitutes,
(07:16):
and drunks. And he said even the wealthy who could
afford candle light had better things to spend their money
on than burning their candles all night long. There really
wasn't any prestige or social value. And staying up all night, yeah,
I mean nightfalls. You locked the door because the only
people out there are going to be people that are
probably up to no good. You don't want anything to
do with that. And the walls to the city, if
(07:36):
you have walls around your your here in which you live,
those are gonna close because anyone entering the city in
the night again up to no good. And hey, don't
forget about those nighttime predators of the animal ilk, right,
that's right. I mean it takes us back to our
primeval self, right. Uh, the idea that that there are
predators out there that will eat us and the night
belongs to to those creatures, not to us. Um. And
(08:00):
you know, you can spiral off from that into a
lot of our our fears of the of the dark,
of the dark, and concerns about the night and uh,
and that basic type one error and cognition that we
make when we believe a connection is really there and
uh when it isn't. We're hardwired to make type one
errors because a type to air a false negative gets
(08:21):
you killed. Always better to assume that their predators out
there in the dark. Always better to assume their thieves
and criminals and and whatever out there in the shadows,
because it's a safer bed. Now we'll talk later about
how this type one into cognition errors can uh kind
of mess us up here in our modern world. But
for now, let's try to figure out why we respond
(08:43):
so greatly to light and dark in the first place.
And in order to do that, we got to look
our old friends on the tree of life. I'm talking
about single filled bacteria because again, this comes back through
the very the basic nature of the evolution of life. Right,
Life evolved on a world that experiences period clockwork, periods
of night and day of light and darkness, and so
(09:06):
life itself is taking form within these environmental constraints yep.
And one of these constraints is a circadian rhythm, which
tracks a standard Earth day's twenty four hour cycle. It's
a secret to why we can adjust to different time
zones and their accompanying sleep patterns. And according to Annally Knew,
it's writing for I O nine in the article this
(09:27):
is why you Can't sleep quote, it's likely that circadian
rhythms evolved in sino bacteria blue green algae over three
billion years ago. And so you would say, okay, fine,
why but why did that blue green algae need to
have some sort of circadian rhythm? And the answer is
that it's all about energy. Because single cell bacteria they
(09:48):
need energy, but to get at their bodies had to
carry out two different chemical processes that interfered with each other.
So the bacteria began keeping time by tracking the sun.
So when it was light outside the cyanobacteria, we'd get
energy from photosynthesis, and when it was dark they could
get energy by sequestering nitrogen. But if these two processes
(10:09):
were done simultaneously, they would cancel each other out. But
sequentially keeping track of light and dark and went to
do these chemical processes allowed a maximum gathering of energy. Now,
the other idea is that at that time there were
life forms who shared the same environment, and this was
also a way to compete with each other for food.
(10:31):
So some evolved to feed during the day and others
to feed at night. And then you go forward and
you have us bipedal energy hogs really taking advantage of
this whole circadian rhythm thing. And of course this brings
us back to our old friend, the pineal gland, which
we we did an entire episode about about the pineal gland.
I think we called it my third eye peneal optics
(10:54):
um and uh, certainly go back and listen to that
one if you want a deeper dive into this, but
just to refresh, pineal gland is a small organ shaped
like a pine cone, hence the name, and it's located
on the mid line attached to the posterior end of
the roof of the third ventricle in the brain and
humans is roughly one sentiment or in length, and the
(11:14):
pennel is composed of penelocytes and giggle cells. In older animals,
the penel often contains calcium deposits or brain stand Now,
it's it's not an eye, it's not a true eye,
but it is. It does have optical properties, and it
does and light does play a role in what it does.
So light exposure to the retina relays to the hypothalamus,
(11:36):
and this is an area in the brain that is
involved in the in the coordination of biological clock signals.
UH and fibers from the hypothalamus descend to the spinal
cord and project to the superior cervical ganglia, from which
post a ganglionic neutrons ascend back to the pineal gland.
So the penneal transduces signals from the sympathetic nervous system
(11:59):
into a hormone linal signal, and it produces several important hormones,
including melotonin, in response to environmental lighting. So the human
penel regulates the rhythm that beats out the biological thought
by secreting a substance melatonin according to the light stimulus
received through the eyes and from the skin. Yeah, the
(12:20):
penel gland acts as a control tower for the biological clock.
Inside of this directing some body functions like sleep based
on the data that it's getting back from these light
sensing skills. And I love this idea that this third
eye does have all the components of an eye, but
is not an eye, and it is taking in all
of these environmental cues in order to tell the body. Hey,
time to wake up or time to go to sleep? Now, Um.
(12:42):
Alison louder Milk, who is whenres senior editors here, had
brought up the point before, and I think she was
like talking about whales at the Georgia Aquarium who are
affected by daylight savings time she ran up the point
of what what would happen if you weren't exposed to
light at all? Yeah, this brings to mind some research
(13:04):
from two thousand eleven UH into the nature of the
Mexican blind cave fish. Now, despite what the name would
have you think, this species exists in both subterranean and
surface populations. Now the surface fish swim with the benefit
of sighted eyes, while their underground can go about blindly
(13:24):
in laboratory populations this UH. In this two thousand eleven
to say, the surface fish slept while the cavers darted
around all night. Uh. The researchers discovered that the differing
sleep behavior hinged on a few dominant gene mutations that
became fixed in the cave populations when they took to
the dark. After All, as we've discussed in our truck
(13:44):
lafonta episode of food is scarce in the subterranean environments
particularly in Subtranian waters. So natural selection favors the scavengers
who are willing to work long, long hours. Um. This
research also brings to mind the account of researcher Christina Lanzoni,
who spent a whopping two hundred and sixty nine days
(14:05):
of solitary confinement in the subterranean under lab in the
Frasasi Caves in central Italy. Now, granted she didn't have
to swim about all night scaven scaven for food, but
her sleep patterns altered significantly. On average, Lanzoni's waking days
stretched on for fifty four to fifty six hours, followed
(14:25):
by fourteen to sixteen hours of sleep. For furthermore, that
sleep was much more like that of an infant, as
she fall immediately into rim sleep and dream of wide
and open spaces. So UM, what I like about those
two studies is that they do really drive home how
crucial light and dark um is. Do an organism be
(14:47):
it to being an organism's uh evolutionary advancement into a
into a realm of darkness, or its continuing existence in
a room of light, or just taking a single organism
and taking it out of that that flow of light
and dark and putting it into a subterranean world. Now,
in those examples, as are those are all organisms who
could detect light. But the question becomes, what if you
(15:10):
were never indoctrinated into light in the first place. We're
going to take a quick break when we get back,
we're going to talk about blindness. We're gonna talk about
twenty four hours sleep wake disorder and fear of the dark.
All right, we're back, and we're discussing darkness. But it's
(15:31):
like to to live as an organism in a world
of light and dark and how light and dark rules
less at a very basic biological level. But what about
those of us whose ability to perceive light and darkness
is significantly degraded or almost erased, almost completely, at least
at the retina level. Yeah, and we'll talk about that
(15:51):
in a moment, about people who are blind and what
their sleep patterns are like. But first you have to
kind of go back to the whole spartadian rhythm in
the first place. And it turns out that most of
us have body clocks that run a little longer than
twenty four hours, and this can sometimes lead to something
called the twenty four hours sleep wake disorder. Or non
twenty four And according to the non twenty four site,
(16:16):
if your body clock is say twenty four point five
hours long, today, you're running a half hour behind. Tomorrow
you're an hour behind, and so on until your natural
rhythms have you sleeping during the day and a week
at night. Now this can go on and on and on.
So what basically what this um is saying is that
(16:38):
you could go to sleep at ten o'clock every night,
but if you have this non twenty four disorder, you know,
you might false ip at ten thirty and then eleven,
and then so on and so forth, and it just
keeps pushing that needle of your body clock around this
twenty four hour cycle, and in some cases it takes
up to say one and a half months to get
back to where you are simped up to say a
(17:00):
normal cycle that the rest of the world, at least
your time zone is on. I feel like this this
matches up at a symbolic level with with pretty much
everything uh in my modern life. Imagine with a lot
of people that you have within the the the calendar year,
within the the the confines of clock time, you have
x amount of time to spend on a given thing.
(17:22):
Unfortunately that thing actually takes x point five um to
to complete and it all adds up and you end
up just sort of not sticking to any particular schedule,
but just sort of falling through it. And this with
this amorphous sleeps cycle, with the amorphous attention to detail
and various corners of your life. UM and I feel
(17:44):
like my own just my own sleep sometimes falls like this,
like I'm not never never, just like to go to
sleep at this time, wake up at this It's like
like it'll it'll sort of flow and shift throughout a
given week. Well. As a former insomniac scept for, I
try to keep really close to the times that I
fall asleep and wake up because that helps a lot
in terms of regulation. But I understand what you mean.
(18:05):
I read on twenty four and I was like, well,
this is this does kind of feel like sleep can
become this very random thing and as you say, something
that you fall through as opposed to just being completely
SYNCD up on. And it turns out that among people
who are totally blind, as many as seventy suffer from
the effects of NON twenty four, which again comes about
(18:28):
because of this light of light perception, or more specifically,
the transmission of ocular light from the retina to their
circadian clock that is impaired, So you don't have that
sort of reset button, and you don't have that sort
of environmental cue of hey, let's wake up, and it
can be much more prevalent among the blind. So, you know,
(18:50):
we talked about that, this this idea that I can
take a month and a half to get sinked back
up to that cycle that at least your time zones on.
Imagine this sort of chronic sleep disorder that would be
in place, and all the symptoms that would follow. It
would feel like you had jet leg every single day
of your life. Yeah, I agree. That's that's the way
(19:10):
I felt before I had when I had this unaddressed
to sleep problems a while back. Yeah, And in these cases,
it's you know, extremely difficult to be on time and
stay awake at work, to attend school, pursue interest, keep
your social life intact, and so there aren't many things
that you can do for this. However, some people have
(19:31):
found limited relief through treatment with a synthetic version of
melotonin that will sometimes help to drag forward the body
clocks reset time by creating that chemical pulse to the
circadian um body clock. But again this is limited and
not everybody responds to it. Yeah, but still the synthetic
(19:51):
melotonin is key, much better than wandering around in the
middle of the night trying to stuff the pineal glands
out of people, so that if you're victims skulls. Yeah,
there are only so many air bath that you can take.
But I mean, that's one of the things about sleep problems, right,
There's so many things you have to do in during
the course of a day, and here you are awake
in the dead of night, in the dark, and this
(20:12):
is you and you it's not only is it not
the time to do most of those things, but even
even the things that you could conceivably do that you
can turn on a light and grab a book or
or whatever, you work on your homework, work on your
you know, some some of your daylit work stuff, you
don't have the mindset to do it because what you
need is sleep at that time. Yeah, And I mean
(20:33):
it can also lead to other sleep disturbances like nightmares.
And there was a really interesting study that just came
out in the journal Sleep Medicine. And granted it is
one study, and it's very small, but in the study,
it showed that an average of of the dreams experienced
by people born blind are nightmares. And when you look
(20:54):
at sighted people in nightmares, it accounts for only six
percent of the dreams that they have. So that's you know,
a fourfold increase if you are born blind in this
one study. Yeah, Now, I do want to want to
drive home here that this is this is not something
that causes excessive trouble for those individuals. So don't think
about any blind people in your life or just you know,
(21:16):
uh that you may know and think, oh my god,
that you know that that poor person they're having to
just live of nightmare every night, something to that effect,
because it's not like that. No. In fact, when the
study participants who are born blinds were told of this
fourfold increase, they didn't even realize that it was disproportionate.
And they did they were fine for it. And if
(21:36):
you think about it, then we'll talk a little bit
more about this. That's maybe because dreams and nightmares kind
of helped guide us in an odd way. Yeah, we've
we've talked about dreams and nightmares in the past, and
I mean, you basically get down to this idea that
the dreams are, of course not just a screen saver
like dreams and and everything that's going on in your
(21:57):
brain at night. It's about processing the information, and from
the day, it's about processing your environment, your struggles, your stresses,
the problems that you're facing and working them out in
the brain. And sort of the the byproduct of all
that is the dreamscape that you end up inhabiting. Yeah,
and let's droll down into the nitty gritty of this
(22:18):
study because I think it tells something about that dreamscape. So,
people who are born blind, they didn't have dreams with
visual content, that's one thing, and then that's where their
dreams became nightmares. Now, people who lost their sight later
in life may have visual content in their dreams, although
the longer they've been blind, the fear dreams they had
(22:38):
with visual content. Now, consider that seven percent of their
dreams were nightmares, and dreams have normally sided people are
based on the images and that they had, and they
have nightmares only six percent a time. Now. The trial
subjects nightmares were often related to threats experienced in everyday life,
and one woman had nightmares about being run over by
(23:00):
a car or getting into embarrassing social situations like spilling
a cup of coffee on her. And if I remember
this correctly, I believe the woman was someone who had
been blind since birth. Now all of that comes to
suggest that again, that dreamscape is trying to work out
all of the things that are happening to you emotionally
and physically throughout the day. So there's this idea that
(23:23):
increased nightmares and those blind from birth maybe a way
to remember information that's important to survival and welfare, particularly
if you think about the more complex interactions with the
physical world, like navigating traffic. If you don't have any
sort of mental imagery of that or visual imagery of that,
(23:45):
then it's harder to create that blueprint. Right, So there's
there's more work that has to be done at night
while the bride brain is sleeping to help process all
that information. So it's just, you know, the situation where
there's there's a they live in a slightly different sense
world than cited individuals, and the way they interact with
that sense world requires more processing in the night. It
(24:08):
maybe perhaps more fear based processing is a way to
inform the way that they're going to navigate their their
world the next day, and again the researchers found like
zero pronounced anxiety or depression as a result of increased nightmares. Yeah,
because even when you get don't get down into like
really like fear with a capital of f A lot
(24:29):
of our navigation during the course of the day is
ultimately fear based. You know. Just think of taking the
train in the morning, which I often think about that
in terms of of people who who deal with blindness,
because there are a number of of of blind individuals
who take the train. We see them, see them every day.
But and you think about the the effort of doing that.
(24:49):
You're dealing with a this murderous piece of machinery that
goes down the tracks, that travels in this uh in
this pit that has rats in it, and and you
have to get there, have to go up an elevator
or take the stairs, and there's there. There's so many
different places, in different opportunities for me to die in
the course of of my daily commute, and I have
(25:12):
the benefit of sight uh to help me. I think
it also calls in, you know, to light this idea
that we really do dream with all of our senses
and those are all available to us. Yeah, it's it's
a it's a different sense world, that's for sure. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we get
back we will talk about being afraid of the dark
(25:34):
and whether or not having seem to do with insomnia.
All right, we're back. And this leads us inevitably to nicktophobia,
to fear of the dark. Now I have a toddler.
He's not really at the point where he seems to
have a fear of the dark yet. Um, he's in
(25:57):
the dark. You just can't see. But uh, your your
child is a is a bit older. Have you been
through fear of the dark has played into her experiences
at all? No, uh, not yet. I mean she's five
and a half. But I remember when I was um
around her age that I was definitely afraid of some
(26:18):
sort of monster lurking in the closet, which would only
become a fear, of course, when the lights were out.
When was the last time you slept with all the
lights on with but with the not not by accident,
but because you said I am going to leave a
light on when I go. I can't remember. I mean,
now I'm like Elvis and I have blackout shades and
you know, not not one little stream of light gets through.
(26:41):
What about you? Um? You know, I feel like there
was a time in the last few years when my
before my child came and uh, and that's when my
wife was out of town, and I think, I like,
I read something kind of spooky or watch something spooky,
and uh, and without the normal sort of comfort own
of sharing a bed with someone, I was like, oh, wow,
(27:02):
it's just me in here. And I ended up sleeping
at least part of the night with the light on
because because having that other person there you have, something
comes for you in the night, either they all hear
it or they can only really kill one of you
at once effectively, so someone's going to survive. That's so funny,
because when we've talked about outsourcing memory before, it's kind
of like outsourcing responsibility. A murder comes, then you take
(27:25):
care of it. But I do remember years before when
I saw The Ring for the first time, I slept
with definitely slept with the lights on all night after
seeing that. That one, that one scared me pretty bad.
I remember the book I Am Legend, which I got
from you, Richard Matheson that terrified. We had a hard
time going to say that's a good one. That's a
good fear of the dark book for sure, because it
(27:47):
has to deal with a character who, on top of
all of his his angst and his problems and his
his alcoholism, when the sun goes down, dark things come
out of of the shadow and come for him and
call for him, and uh and he must resist sleep
in order to survive. Yeah, it's it's it's an impressive book. Yeah,
(28:10):
not to mention his alcoholism too, which is that's not
a good time to be an alcoholic when you've got
the bloodthirstay at your door, alright, So uh yeah, nickophobia,
it is this anxiety reaction which is characterized by an obsessive,
irrational fear of the dark. And typically you see that
in children, and you know they tend to grow out
of it, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people are still
(28:31):
feared of the dark. And there's this idea that um
sleep disturbances could just be a fear of the dark.
And there's a paper call quote, are people with insomnia
afraid of the dark? Pilot study from Ryerson University Sleep
in Depression Lab, And it looks at a possible link
between sleep disorders and the dark. Yeah, and this study,
(28:53):
nearly half of the students who reported having poor sleep
also reported a fear of the dark, and researchers confirmed
this objectively by measuring blink responses to sudden noise bursts
in light and dark surroundings. Good sleepers became accustomed to
the noise burst, but the poor sleepers grew more anticipatory
when the lights went down. So you end up with
(29:15):
a situation where the poor sleepers were far more easy
to startle in the dark compared to the good sleepers. Yeah,
and the reason for all the eye theatrics, according to
Dr Colleen Karney of Ryerson University, is that if you're
already a little anxious, the noise will make you flinch.
And she said, we looked at eye reactions because it
is one of the most robust ways to measure this anxiety.
(29:36):
If you blink immediately after the noise, that means it
startles you. It's It's an interesting thing about this in
terms of phobias because, as we recently discussed in our
Fear of Holes episode where we discussed phobias a bit,
I mean, phobias come out of in many cases anyway,
they stem from a realistic fear. And certainly it's realistic,
(29:57):
as we've discussed, to have some apprehension about the dark,
because at the very least, the dark is the environment
where you will not see the whole you're about to
step into. Yeah, it's again it's that uncertainty that's stepping
into the unknown. And so when you say, like you know,
a spouses out of town, all of a sudden, those
those noises in the dark become much larger in your
mind than they possibly are, and um, you respond to
(30:21):
them in a much more robust way. So the interesting
thing about this study is that it got the researchers
to thinking if some people with sleep disorders like insomnia
they have an active and untreated phobia of the dark,
that treatment methods may need to be reevaluated. In other words,
could the underlying cause of the insomnia be a phobia
(30:43):
to the dark. So in other words, maybe we're better
off treating the phobia if it's there, rather than the
inability to sleep. Yeah, and again this is more like
a hunch of the study, so you know, and they're
saying that they're just there's some people who do not
respond to behavioral drug therapy. Therefore, maybe there's something else
going on and it could relate to this. It's certainly
(31:06):
this would be a good one to hear from from
listeners because I know we have listeners. I know for
a fact we have listeners that have had problems with sleep.
And so, yeah, I ask yourself, to what extent do
you are you, honestly, um apprehensive about the dark and
do you feel that plays into your scenario or is
your scenario definitely not associated with that, because I know
(31:27):
I have a friend or I have one friend in
particular who has had always hadn't been plagued by insomnia,
and I know he's not afraid of the dark kind
of a guy like I think he just goes out
and walks in the dark. If you can't sleep, Yeah,
and then I mean there could be other underlying conditions
that you could have an anxiety just where you could
have PTSD. So it's not really um that apparent that
(31:48):
it could be just a more general phobia of the dark. Um.
But if you are afraid of the dark, if it's
something that bothers you, imagine being placed into this fictional
room outfitted and the darkest material known to man. WHOA,
you're of course talking about Zanta black. That's right. It's
(32:10):
so dark that any light that gets through the cracks
will essentially vanish into this material, which was created by
the company Surrey Nano Systems. And we're talking about a
dense forest of carbon nanotubes, single atom carbon tubes ten
thou times thinner than human hair that drink in nine
(32:31):
six percent of all incoming radiation. Yeah, it's super black,
it's infinite black. It's the gothiest material possible. Uh and uh,
you're probably wondering, why would you why would you create this?
What's the point? Are you just trying to suck the
soul right right out of this? Well? Uh, this is
the main applications for this material would relate to sensitive
optical equipment like telescopes. UM and in fact, a NASA
(32:55):
Goddard team led by John Hagga Paine has been developing
nanotube material else like this since the two thousand seven. Yeah,
it's been described by one of the CEOs as um
deep featureless black. Even when folded and scrunched. He says,
you expect to see the hills and all you can
see it's like black. It's like a hole, like there's
(33:16):
nothing there. It looks so strange. So it's it's a
wonderfully creepy concept in innovation. I love it. I would
love to see it. I mean, you put it on
a gallery wall and let us stare into it, because
I love I love works of art that are just
like stark, you know, white and dark, and you can
sort of lose yourself in the depths of of the darkness. Well,
(33:38):
and what I think is so interesting about it is
that even when you're in the dark, you do perceive
some sort of light. Usually there's a source of somewhere
if you're never fulling in the dark. But here is
a possibility to create a room that would truly encase
you and in total lightlessness. And what I was thinking about,
um we were talking about this earlier, is that we
(33:59):
are now entering into fall and very soon it's going
to be winter, and already the days are getting shorter.
There's not as much sunlight available to us. And so
that's why this idea of darkness is so interesting, because
a lot of us start to turn in word right
now and we start to see these sort of cracks
in our psyche and it can be sort of a
(34:20):
depressive time for some people, and then sometimes it can
be good. Um yeah, why they plan to do the
holidays during the darkest period of the year. I never
understood that can we do it in a happier mind
at least go outside? Well, I thought I thought I
could take comfort from this. One aspect of it is
that if you and not to make light of suffering.
If if you find that this is a season that
(34:42):
does make you turn in word and become more serious
about things or grapple with things, that, um, it's beneficial
to us ultimately. And because again those cracks in the
psyche are important. And uh, if I may, I will
read a quote from Leonard Cohen which goes a little
like this. There is a crack in everything, and that's
(35:02):
how the light gets in. So keep that in mind,
because you lie to candle at five third a p m.
When the sun goes down in your neck of the woods,
and lock the doors. Be sure to lock the doors,
because there are things out there in the night and
they want to get to you, all right. So there
(35:24):
you have it. Lots of good uh content in there.
I think kind of a just a dive into the
the idea of fearing the dark, our feelings about the dark,
evolving as a as a as a creature in this
world of light and darkness. So I'm sure a lot
of people have some feedback on that. In the meantime,
go to stuffabol your Mind dot com. That is where
(35:44):
you'll find all the podcast episodes we've ever done, the videos,
the blog post links after our social media accounts, and
on each and every podcast we're putting down these days,
you know, we're making a point to have a podcast
landing page. It's gonna have some cool art, it's gonna
have some links to other related podcast is gonna if
there are some outside materials of of note, we're gonna
link to that. Sometimes we'll have a gallery to go
(36:07):
along with the episode and we'll have a link to
that of course. So so if you haven't gotten stuff
to Blow your mind dot com, uh, do yourself a favorite,
go check out. Yeah, there's lots of photos of fully
clothed man just wink wink. Okay, I'm not gonna find
that in a lot of places. Okay, I try now,
I try to include lots of photos of fully dressed
(36:28):
women too. I keep it. I keep it even sometimes
sometimes we get some skins, sometimes not sometimes sometimes they're animals,
sometimes their plans. I want our plant listeners to feel included. Indeed, um,
all right, and uh, if you've got some ideas on
this percolating, please do send them to us. So you
can do that by sending an email to blow the
mind at house touff works dot com for more on
(36:54):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. And
if I may, I'm gonna I'm gonna ask our producer
knowl to uh down a little spooky music, and I'm
going to read a quote from HP Lovecraft. Wait, hold on,
(00:26):
let me turn on the white We are submerged in
complete darkness right now. It's a little weird. Wait, holding
this really difficult, but okay, there, all right? This is
from Lovecraft supernatural horror. In literature, children will always be
afraid of the dark, and men with mind sensitive to
hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the
(00:50):
hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life, which made poll
sat in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously
upon our own lobe in unholy dimensions which only the
dead and the moon struck can limps. That was beautiful.
(01:10):
And if you guys haven't guessed out there, we are
diving way into the deep dark in this episode. And
I love that because it really does evoke the sort
of primal fear that darkness has particularly for children. Yeah,
I mean the great thing about this topic is that
light and dark, those are the cycles that have defined
(01:32):
our lives, that have defined life for the most part
for so long. I mean, life here on Earth exists
within these cycles of light and dark, and that has
played into uh the evolutionary ascent of of almost all organists.
And it's so important to us that we have woven
it into this symbolic level, right, I mean the ying
and yang of dark and light, these opposites which really
(01:55):
represent these ideas of not just values, but of the
spheares that we inhabit. Because on one level of the
world of light, the word the sunlit world, I mean
that's an area of the known, and then the world
of darkness that isn't an area of the if not
the unknown, at least the uncertain. The other the possible.
(02:15):
They had sort of the quantum state where the darkness
can be simply emptiness. The darkness can be something you
could trip over, it could be a thief, it could
be a monster. There's there's room for just about any
fear within that undefined space of shadow. And that undefined
space of shadow is largely what occupied the the human
(02:35):
experience and in fact, if you look at archaeological evidence
that suggests that, you know, just four d thousand years
ago or so, early humans mastered fire before that, what
would you do. I mean, you didn't. You didn't really
have that access to something that could glow and provide
some sort of illumination in the dark. Now skip ahead
to today, where we have a possibility for twenty four
(02:59):
hour light environments, and we kind of take that for
granted that darkness really did rule the night. Indeed, I
mean for the longest, to borrow a phrase from historian
William Manchester, you had a world uh lit only by fire,
right at least a night lit only by fire. So
you even if you had you had fire, you had candles,
you had torches, you had campfires. Eventually you get gas
(03:21):
lighting and and and lanterns and other uh luminary innovations.
But but for the most part, you're sort of carving
out a little bit. You were reclaiming a little bit
of the night, but it's not quite as good as
the daylight, and you're still surrounded by all these shadows
and just gulfs of impenetrable darkness. Right until you had
like a really good um widespread source of artificial light.
(03:45):
All you have those dying embers to light the space
around you. So what would you do. You would submit
to that dark and most of us would go to sleep.
And that brings up this idea which we've touched upon before,
of two a sleep. Yeah, I mean this is pretty simple.
What happens when it gets dark? And again you may
have some some some light at your disposal, you may
(04:07):
have a camp fire your disposal, but your abilities are
greatly reduced. So you go to sleep. You simply call
it a day, except something happens about about halfway through,
right you wake because according to historian Rogert Eckert, who
published a book on the matter called at Days Closed
Night in Times Past, which by the way, was a
(04:29):
culmination of his sixteen years of research that uncovered more
than five references to a segmented sleeping pattern, he found
that you would wake in this fourteen hour sleep pattern
for maybe an hour or two, get up, tend your animals,
do a little white house keeping in the moonlight, have sex,
(04:50):
lay in bed, thinking, smoking a pipe, or gossiping with
your bed fellows. In fact, and we've mentioned before, I
love this. It's widely known that Benjamin Franklin would light
a candle and take cold air baths, reading naked in
a chair. Indeed, that was his his strategy for this
this period between the two sleeps. And one thing I
(05:11):
love about this is it also really defines that idea
about the middle of the night, right because for us,
the middle of the night is typically more a situation
of staying up late enough for it to be the
middle of the night. But you go back to to this,
this earlier mode of sleep, and it's it's not merely
a stage of lateness, but a true in between that
(05:31):
this this little space, this little uh clutch of the
darkness that you end up occupying between these two dominant
phases of sleep. Now and Stephen Johnson's book How We
Got to Now in the PBS series, there is a
section on light and he talks about that. He talks
with historian Craig Koslovsky, who says that you know, are
(05:52):
kind of nighttime wakenings now or even insomnia may be
attributed to this original for seen our sleep phase. In
other words, it's kind of normal that we get up sometimes,
you know, midnight or two o'clock in the morning, and
we can't get back to sleep for a while. Yeah,
I mean that's the biological norm. That's what we evolved
to do. And it's only been in the last hundred
(06:13):
and fifty years, two hundred years, that we've really carved
out a substantial zone of the night and and ReLit it.
According to Stephen Johnson in the in the book of
How We Got to Now, in that that chapter and
Light points out that today's night sky burned six thousand
times brighter than it did in me or one hundred
and fifty years ago. So it's it's transforms. It's transformed
(06:34):
the way we sleep, the way we work and uh.
And that's of course spiral of office, Johnson explains in
his book into the creation of global networks of communication.
Uh and and and a lot of our modern technological world. Yeah,
because all of a sudden, you have improved street lighting,
you had the advent of social opportunities at the in
(06:55):
during the evening, you have you know, restaurants and cafes
to go to. And that cause is a shift in
people sleep patterns because before that, according to Koslovski, you
had associations with the night that we're not so good.
We're talking about before the seventeenth century. He says the
night was a place populated by people of disrepute, criminals, prostitutes,
(07:16):
and drunks. And he said even the wealthy who could
afford candle light had better things to spend their money
on than burning their candles all night long. There really
wasn't any prestige or social value. And staying up all night, yeah,
I mean nightfalls. You locked the door because the only
people out there are going to be people that are
probably up to no good. You don't want anything to
do with that. And the walls to the city, if
(07:36):
you have walls around your your here in which you live,
those are gonna close because anyone entering the city in
the night again up to no good. And hey, don't
forget about those nighttime predators of the animal ilk, right,
that's right. I mean it takes us back to our
primeval self, right. Uh, the idea that that there are
predators out there that will eat us and the night
belongs to to those creatures, not to us. Um. And
(08:00):
you know, you can spiral off from that into a
lot of our our fears of the of the dark,
of the dark, and concerns about the night and uh,
and that basic type one error and cognition that we
make when we believe a connection is really there and
uh when it isn't. We're hardwired to make type one
errors because a type to air a false negative gets
(08:21):
you killed. Always better to assume that their predators out
there in the dark. Always better to assume their thieves
and criminals and and whatever out there in the shadows,
because it's a safer bed. Now we'll talk later about
how this type one into cognition errors can uh kind
of mess us up here in our modern world. But
for now, let's try to figure out why we respond
(08:43):
so greatly to light and dark in the first place.
And in order to do that, we got to look
our old friends on the tree of life. I'm talking
about single filled bacteria because again, this comes back through
the very the basic nature of the evolution of life. Right,
Life evolved on a world that experiences period clockwork, periods
of night and day of light and darkness, and so
(09:06):
life itself is taking form within these environmental constraints yep.
And one of these constraints is a circadian rhythm, which
tracks a standard Earth day's twenty four hour cycle. It's
a secret to why we can adjust to different time
zones and their accompanying sleep patterns. And according to Annally Knew,
it's writing for I O nine in the article this
(09:27):
is why you Can't sleep quote, it's likely that circadian
rhythms evolved in sino bacteria blue green algae over three
billion years ago. And so you would say, okay, fine,
why but why did that blue green algae need to
have some sort of circadian rhythm? And the answer is
that it's all about energy. Because single cell bacteria they
(09:48):
need energy, but to get at their bodies had to
carry out two different chemical processes that interfered with each other.
So the bacteria began keeping time by tracking the sun.
So when it was light outside the cyanobacteria, we'd get
energy from photosynthesis, and when it was dark they could
get energy by sequestering nitrogen. But if these two processes
(10:09):
were done simultaneously, they would cancel each other out. But
sequentially keeping track of light and dark and went to
do these chemical processes allowed a maximum gathering of energy. Now,
the other idea is that at that time there were
life forms who shared the same environment, and this was
also a way to compete with each other for food.
(10:31):
So some evolved to feed during the day and others
to feed at night. And then you go forward and
you have us bipedal energy hogs really taking advantage of
this whole circadian rhythm thing. And of course this brings
us back to our old friend, the pineal gland, which
we we did an entire episode about about the pineal gland.
I think we called it my third eye peneal optics
(10:54):
um and uh, certainly go back and listen to that
one if you want a deeper dive into this, but
just to refresh, pineal gland is a small organ shaped
like a pine cone, hence the name, and it's located
on the mid line attached to the posterior end of
the roof of the third ventricle in the brain and
humans is roughly one sentiment or in length, and the
(11:14):
pennel is composed of penelocytes and giggle cells. In older animals,
the penel often contains calcium deposits or brain stand Now,
it's it's not an eye, it's not a true eye,
but it is. It does have optical properties, and it
does and light does play a role in what it does.
So light exposure to the retina relays to the hypothalamus,
(11:36):
and this is an area in the brain that is
involved in the in the coordination of biological clock signals.
UH and fibers from the hypothalamus descend to the spinal
cord and project to the superior cervical ganglia, from which
post a ganglionic neutrons ascend back to the pineal gland.
So the penneal transduces signals from the sympathetic nervous system
(11:59):
into a hormone linal signal, and it produces several important hormones,
including melotonin, in response to environmental lighting. So the human
penel regulates the rhythm that beats out the biological thought
by secreting a substance melatonin according to the light stimulus
received through the eyes and from the skin. Yeah, the
(12:20):
penel gland acts as a control tower for the biological clock.
Inside of this directing some body functions like sleep based
on the data that it's getting back from these light
sensing skills. And I love this idea that this third
eye does have all the components of an eye, but
is not an eye, and it is taking in all
of these environmental cues in order to tell the body. Hey,
time to wake up or time to go to sleep? Now, Um.
(12:42):
Alison louder Milk, who is whenres senior editors here, had
brought up the point before, and I think she was
like talking about whales at the Georgia Aquarium who are
affected by daylight savings time she ran up the point
of what what would happen if you weren't exposed to
light at all? Yeah, this brings to mind some research
(13:04):
from two thousand eleven UH into the nature of the
Mexican blind cave fish. Now, despite what the name would
have you think, this species exists in both subterranean and
surface populations. Now the surface fish swim with the benefit
of sighted eyes, while their underground can go about blindly
(13:24):
in laboratory populations this UH. In this two thousand eleven
to say, the surface fish slept while the cavers darted
around all night. Uh. The researchers discovered that the differing
sleep behavior hinged on a few dominant gene mutations that
became fixed in the cave populations when they took to
the dark. After All, as we've discussed in our truck
(13:44):
lafonta episode of food is scarce in the subterranean environments
particularly in Subtranian waters. So natural selection favors the scavengers
who are willing to work long, long hours. Um. This
research also brings to mind the account of researcher Christina Lanzoni,
who spent a whopping two hundred and sixty nine days
(14:05):
of solitary confinement in the subterranean under lab in the
Frasasi Caves in central Italy. Now, granted she didn't have
to swim about all night scaven scaven for food, but
her sleep patterns altered significantly. On average, Lanzoni's waking days
stretched on for fifty four to fifty six hours, followed
(14:25):
by fourteen to sixteen hours of sleep. For furthermore, that
sleep was much more like that of an infant, as
she fall immediately into rim sleep and dream of wide
and open spaces. So UM, what I like about those
two studies is that they do really drive home how
crucial light and dark um is. Do an organism be
(14:47):
it to being an organism's uh evolutionary advancement into a
into a realm of darkness, or its continuing existence in
a room of light, or just taking a single organism
and taking it out of that that flow of light
and dark and putting it into a subterranean world. Now,
in those examples, as are those are all organisms who
could detect light. But the question becomes, what if you
(15:10):
were never indoctrinated into light in the first place. We're
going to take a quick break when we get back,
we're going to talk about blindness. We're gonna talk about
twenty four hours sleep wake disorder and fear of the dark.
All right, we're back, and we're discussing darkness. But it's
(15:31):
like to to live as an organism in a world
of light and dark and how light and dark rules
less at a very basic biological level. But what about
those of us whose ability to perceive light and darkness
is significantly degraded or almost erased, almost completely, at least
at the retina level. Yeah, and we'll talk about that
(15:51):
in a moment, about people who are blind and what
their sleep patterns are like. But first you have to
kind of go back to the whole spartadian rhythm in
the first place. And it turns out that most of
us have body clocks that run a little longer than
twenty four hours, and this can sometimes lead to something
called the twenty four hours sleep wake disorder. Or non
twenty four And according to the non twenty four site,
(16:16):
if your body clock is say twenty four point five
hours long, today, you're running a half hour behind. Tomorrow
you're an hour behind, and so on until your natural
rhythms have you sleeping during the day and a week
at night. Now this can go on and on and on.
So what basically what this um is saying is that
(16:38):
you could go to sleep at ten o'clock every night,
but if you have this non twenty four disorder, you know,
you might false ip at ten thirty and then eleven,
and then so on and so forth, and it just
keeps pushing that needle of your body clock around this
twenty four hour cycle, and in some cases it takes
up to say one and a half months to get
back to where you are simped up to say a
(17:00):
normal cycle that the rest of the world, at least
your time zone is on. I feel like this this
matches up at a symbolic level with with pretty much
everything uh in my modern life. Imagine with a lot
of people that you have within the the the calendar year,
within the the the confines of clock time, you have
x amount of time to spend on a given thing.
(17:22):
Unfortunately that thing actually takes x point five um to
to complete and it all adds up and you end
up just sort of not sticking to any particular schedule,
but just sort of falling through it. And this with
this amorphous sleeps cycle, with the amorphous attention to detail
and various corners of your life. UM and I feel
(17:44):
like my own just my own sleep sometimes falls like this,
like I'm not never never, just like to go to
sleep at this time, wake up at this It's like
like it'll it'll sort of flow and shift throughout a
given week. Well. As a former insomniac scept for, I
try to keep really close to the times that I
fall asleep and wake up because that helps a lot
in terms of regulation. But I understand what you mean.
(18:05):
I read on twenty four and I was like, well,
this is this does kind of feel like sleep can
become this very random thing and as you say, something
that you fall through as opposed to just being completely
SYNCD up on. And it turns out that among people
who are totally blind, as many as seventy suffer from
the effects of NON twenty four, which again comes about
(18:28):
because of this light of light perception, or more specifically,
the transmission of ocular light from the retina to their
circadian clock that is impaired, So you don't have that
sort of reset button, and you don't have that sort
of environmental cue of hey, let's wake up, and it
can be much more prevalent among the blind. So, you know,
(18:50):
we talked about that, this this idea that I can
take a month and a half to get sinked back
up to that cycle that at least your time zones on.
Imagine this sort of chronic sleep disorder that would be
in place, and all the symptoms that would follow. It
would feel like you had jet leg every single day
of your life. Yeah, I agree. That's that's the way
(19:10):
I felt before I had when I had this unaddressed
to sleep problems a while back. Yeah, And in these cases,
it's you know, extremely difficult to be on time and
stay awake at work, to attend school, pursue interest, keep
your social life intact, and so there aren't many things
that you can do for this. However, some people have
(19:31):
found limited relief through treatment with a synthetic version of
melotonin that will sometimes help to drag forward the body
clocks reset time by creating that chemical pulse to the
circadian um body clock. But again this is limited and
not everybody responds to it. Yeah, but still the synthetic
(19:51):
melotonin is key, much better than wandering around in the
middle of the night trying to stuff the pineal glands
out of people, so that if you're victims skulls. Yeah,
there are only so many air bath that you can take.
But I mean, that's one of the things about sleep problems, right,
There's so many things you have to do in during
the course of a day, and here you are awake
in the dead of night, in the dark, and this
(20:12):
is you and you it's not only is it not
the time to do most of those things, but even
even the things that you could conceivably do that you
can turn on a light and grab a book or
or whatever, you work on your homework, work on your
you know, some some of your daylit work stuff, you
don't have the mindset to do it because what you
need is sleep at that time. Yeah, And I mean
(20:33):
it can also lead to other sleep disturbances like nightmares.
And there was a really interesting study that just came
out in the journal Sleep Medicine. And granted it is
one study, and it's very small, but in the study,
it showed that an average of of the dreams experienced
by people born blind are nightmares. And when you look
(20:54):
at sighted people in nightmares, it accounts for only six
percent of the dreams that they have. So that's you know,
a fourfold increase if you are born blind in this
one study. Yeah, Now, I do want to want to
drive home here that this is this is not something
that causes excessive trouble for those individuals. So don't think
about any blind people in your life or just you know,
(21:16):
uh that you may know and think, oh my god,
that you know that that poor person they're having to
just live of nightmare every night, something to that effect,
because it's not like that. No. In fact, when the
study participants who are born blinds were told of this
fourfold increase, they didn't even realize that it was disproportionate.
And they did they were fine for it. And if
(21:36):
you think about it, then we'll talk a little bit
more about this. That's maybe because dreams and nightmares kind
of helped guide us in an odd way. Yeah, we've
we've talked about dreams and nightmares in the past, and
I mean, you basically get down to this idea that
the dreams are, of course not just a screen saver
like dreams and and everything that's going on in your
(21:57):
brain at night. It's about processing the information, and from
the day, it's about processing your environment, your struggles, your stresses,
the problems that you're facing and working them out in
the brain. And sort of the the byproduct of all
that is the dreamscape that you end up inhabiting. Yeah,
and let's droll down into the nitty gritty of this
(22:18):
study because I think it tells something about that dreamscape. So,
people who are born blind, they didn't have dreams with
visual content, that's one thing, and then that's where their
dreams became nightmares. Now, people who lost their sight later
in life may have visual content in their dreams, although
the longer they've been blind, the fear dreams they had
(22:38):
with visual content. Now, consider that seven percent of their
dreams were nightmares, and dreams have normally sided people are
based on the images and that they had, and they
have nightmares only six percent a time. Now. The trial
subjects nightmares were often related to threats experienced in everyday life,
and one woman had nightmares about being run over by
(23:00):
a car or getting into embarrassing social situations like spilling
a cup of coffee on her. And if I remember
this correctly, I believe the woman was someone who had
been blind since birth. Now all of that comes to
suggest that again, that dreamscape is trying to work out
all of the things that are happening to you emotionally
and physically throughout the day. So there's this idea that
(23:23):
increased nightmares and those blind from birth maybe a way
to remember information that's important to survival and welfare, particularly
if you think about the more complex interactions with the
physical world, like navigating traffic. If you don't have any
sort of mental imagery of that or visual imagery of that,
(23:45):
then it's harder to create that blueprint. Right, So there's
there's more work that has to be done at night
while the bride brain is sleeping to help process all
that information. So it's just, you know, the situation where
there's there's a they live in a slightly different sense
world than cited individuals, and the way they interact with
that sense world requires more processing in the night. It
(24:08):
maybe perhaps more fear based processing is a way to
inform the way that they're going to navigate their their
world the next day, and again the researchers found like
zero pronounced anxiety or depression as a result of increased nightmares. Yeah,
because even when you get don't get down into like
really like fear with a capital of f A lot
(24:29):
of our navigation during the course of the day is
ultimately fear based. You know. Just think of taking the
train in the morning, which I often think about that
in terms of of people who who deal with blindness,
because there are a number of of of blind individuals
who take the train. We see them, see them every day.
But and you think about the the effort of doing that.
(24:49):
You're dealing with a this murderous piece of machinery that
goes down the tracks, that travels in this uh in
this pit that has rats in it, and and you
have to get there, have to go up an elevator
or take the stairs, and there's there. There's so many
different places, in different opportunities for me to die in
the course of of my daily commute, and I have
(25:12):
the benefit of sight uh to help me. I think
it also calls in, you know, to light this idea
that we really do dream with all of our senses
and those are all available to us. Yeah, it's it's
a it's a different sense world, that's for sure. All Right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we get
back we will talk about being afraid of the dark
(25:34):
and whether or not having seem to do with insomnia.
All right, we're back. And this leads us inevitably to nicktophobia,
to fear of the dark. Now I have a toddler.
He's not really at the point where he seems to
have a fear of the dark yet. Um, he's in
(25:57):
the dark. You just can't see. But uh, your your
child is a is a bit older. Have you been
through fear of the dark has played into her experiences
at all? No, uh, not yet. I mean she's five
and a half. But I remember when I was um
around her age that I was definitely afraid of some
(26:18):
sort of monster lurking in the closet, which would only
become a fear, of course, when the lights were out.
When was the last time you slept with all the
lights on with but with the not not by accident,
but because you said I am going to leave a
light on when I go. I can't remember. I mean,
now I'm like Elvis and I have blackout shades and
you know, not not one little stream of light gets through.
(26:41):
What about you? Um? You know, I feel like there
was a time in the last few years when my
before my child came and uh, and that's when my
wife was out of town, and I think, I like,
I read something kind of spooky or watch something spooky,
and uh, and without the normal sort of comfort own
of sharing a bed with someone, I was like, oh, wow,
(27:02):
it's just me in here. And I ended up sleeping
at least part of the night with the light on
because because having that other person there you have, something
comes for you in the night, either they all hear
it or they can only really kill one of you
at once effectively, so someone's going to survive. That's so funny,
because when we've talked about outsourcing memory before, it's kind
of like outsourcing responsibility. A murder comes, then you take
(27:25):
care of it. But I do remember years before when
I saw The Ring for the first time, I slept
with definitely slept with the lights on all night after
seeing that. That one, that one scared me pretty bad.
I remember the book I Am Legend, which I got
from you, Richard Matheson that terrified. We had a hard
time going to say that's a good one. That's a
good fear of the dark book for sure, because it
(27:47):
has to deal with a character who, on top of
all of his his angst and his problems and his
his alcoholism, when the sun goes down, dark things come
out of of the shadow and come for him and
call for him, and uh and he must resist sleep
in order to survive. Yeah, it's it's it's an impressive book. Yeah,
(28:10):
not to mention his alcoholism too, which is that's not
a good time to be an alcoholic when you've got
the bloodthirstay at your door, alright, So uh yeah, nickophobia,
it is this anxiety reaction which is characterized by an obsessive,
irrational fear of the dark. And typically you see that
in children, and you know they tend to grow out
of it, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes people are still
(28:31):
feared of the dark. And there's this idea that um
sleep disturbances could just be a fear of the dark.
And there's a paper call quote, are people with insomnia
afraid of the dark? Pilot study from Ryerson University Sleep
in Depression Lab, And it looks at a possible link
between sleep disorders and the dark. Yeah, and this study,
(28:53):
nearly half of the students who reported having poor sleep
also reported a fear of the dark, and researchers confirmed
this objectively by measuring blink responses to sudden noise bursts
in light and dark surroundings. Good sleepers became accustomed to
the noise burst, but the poor sleepers grew more anticipatory
when the lights went down. So you end up with
(29:15):
a situation where the poor sleepers were far more easy
to startle in the dark compared to the good sleepers. Yeah,
and the reason for all the eye theatrics, according to
Dr Colleen Karney of Ryerson University, is that if you're
already a little anxious, the noise will make you flinch.
And she said, we looked at eye reactions because it
is one of the most robust ways to measure this anxiety.
(29:36):
If you blink immediately after the noise, that means it
startles you. It's It's an interesting thing about this in
terms of phobias because, as we recently discussed in our
Fear of Holes episode where we discussed phobias a bit,
I mean, phobias come out of in many cases anyway,
they stem from a realistic fear. And certainly it's realistic,
(29:57):
as we've discussed, to have some apprehension about the dark,
because at the very least, the dark is the environment
where you will not see the whole you're about to
step into. Yeah, it's again it's that uncertainty that's stepping
into the unknown. And so when you say, like you know,
a spouses out of town, all of a sudden, those
those noises in the dark become much larger in your
mind than they possibly are, and um, you respond to
(30:21):
them in a much more robust way. So the interesting
thing about this study is that it got the researchers
to thinking if some people with sleep disorders like insomnia
they have an active and untreated phobia of the dark,
that treatment methods may need to be reevaluated. In other words,
could the underlying cause of the insomnia be a phobia
(30:43):
to the dark. So in other words, maybe we're better
off treating the phobia if it's there, rather than the
inability to sleep. Yeah, and again this is more like
a hunch of the study, so you know, and they're
saying that they're just there's some people who do not
respond to behavioral drug therapy. Therefore, maybe there's something else
going on and it could relate to this. It's certainly
(31:06):
this would be a good one to hear from from
listeners because I know we have listeners. I know for
a fact we have listeners that have had problems with sleep.
And so, yeah, I ask yourself, to what extent do
you are you, honestly, um apprehensive about the dark and
do you feel that plays into your scenario or is
your scenario definitely not associated with that, because I know
(31:27):
I have a friend or I have one friend in
particular who has had always hadn't been plagued by insomnia,
and I know he's not afraid of the dark kind
of a guy like I think he just goes out
and walks in the dark. If you can't sleep, Yeah,
and then I mean there could be other underlying conditions
that you could have an anxiety just where you could
have PTSD. So it's not really um that apparent that
(31:48):
it could be just a more general phobia of the dark. Um.
But if you are afraid of the dark, if it's
something that bothers you, imagine being placed into this fictional
room outfitted and the darkest material known to man. WHOA,
you're of course talking about Zanta black. That's right. It's
(32:10):
so dark that any light that gets through the cracks
will essentially vanish into this material, which was created by
the company Surrey Nano Systems. And we're talking about a
dense forest of carbon nanotubes, single atom carbon tubes ten
thou times thinner than human hair that drink in nine
(32:31):
six percent of all incoming radiation. Yeah, it's super black,
it's infinite black. It's the gothiest material possible. Uh and uh,
you're probably wondering, why would you why would you create this?
What's the point? Are you just trying to suck the
soul right right out of this? Well? Uh, this is
the main applications for this material would relate to sensitive
optical equipment like telescopes. UM and in fact, a NASA
(32:55):
Goddard team led by John Hagga Paine has been developing
nanotube material else like this since the two thousand seven. Yeah,
it's been described by one of the CEOs as um
deep featureless black. Even when folded and scrunched. He says,
you expect to see the hills and all you can
see it's like black. It's like a hole, like there's
(33:16):
nothing there. It looks so strange. So it's it's a
wonderfully creepy concept in innovation. I love it. I would
love to see it. I mean, you put it on
a gallery wall and let us stare into it, because
I love I love works of art that are just
like stark, you know, white and dark, and you can
sort of lose yourself in the depths of of the darkness. Well,
(33:38):
and what I think is so interesting about it is
that even when you're in the dark, you do perceive
some sort of light. Usually there's a source of somewhere
if you're never fulling in the dark. But here is
a possibility to create a room that would truly encase
you and in total lightlessness. And what I was thinking about,
um we were talking about this earlier, is that we
(33:59):
are now entering into fall and very soon it's going
to be winter, and already the days are getting shorter.
There's not as much sunlight available to us. And so
that's why this idea of darkness is so interesting, because
a lot of us start to turn in word right
now and we start to see these sort of cracks
in our psyche and it can be sort of a
(34:20):
depressive time for some people, and then sometimes it can
be good. Um yeah, why they plan to do the
holidays during the darkest period of the year. I never
understood that can we do it in a happier mind
at least go outside? Well, I thought I thought I
could take comfort from this. One aspect of it is
that if you and not to make light of suffering.
If if you find that this is a season that
(34:42):
does make you turn in word and become more serious
about things or grapple with things, that, um, it's beneficial
to us ultimately. And because again those cracks in the
psyche are important. And uh, if I may, I will
read a quote from Leonard Cohen which goes a little
like this. There is a crack in everything, and that's
(35:02):
how the light gets in. So keep that in mind,
because you lie to candle at five third a p m.
When the sun goes down in your neck of the woods,
and lock the doors. Be sure to lock the doors,
because there are things out there in the night and
they want to get to you, all right. So there
(35:24):
you have it. Lots of good uh content in there.
I think kind of a just a dive into the
the idea of fearing the dark, our feelings about the dark,
evolving as a as a as a creature in this
world of light and darkness. So I'm sure a lot
of people have some feedback on that. In the meantime,
go to stuffabol your Mind dot com. That is where
(35:44):
you'll find all the podcast episodes we've ever done, the videos,
the blog post links after our social media accounts, and
on each and every podcast we're putting down these days,
you know, we're making a point to have a podcast
landing page. It's gonna have some cool art, it's gonna
have some links to other related podcast is gonna if
there are some outside materials of of note, we're gonna
link to that. Sometimes we'll have a gallery to go
(36:07):
along with the episode and we'll have a link to
that of course. So so if you haven't gotten stuff
to Blow your mind dot com, uh, do yourself a favorite,
go check out. Yeah, there's lots of photos of fully
clothed man just wink wink. Okay, I'm not gonna find
that in a lot of places. Okay, I try now,
I try to include lots of photos of fully dressed
(36:28):
women too. I keep it. I keep it even sometimes
sometimes we get some skins, sometimes not sometimes sometimes they're animals,
sometimes their plans. I want our plant listeners to feel included. Indeed, um,
all right, and uh, if you've got some ideas on
this percolating, please do send them to us. So you
can do that by sending an email to blow the
mind at house touff works dot com for more on
(36:54):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it, How stuff
works dot com
Stuff To Blow Your Mind News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Lamb
Joe McCormick
Popular Podcasts
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Decisions, Decisions
Welcome to "Decisions, Decisions," the podcast where boundaries are pushed, and conversations get candid! Join your favorite hosts, Mandii B and WeezyWTF, as they dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often-taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. Every Monday, Mandii and Weezy invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, they share their personal journeys navigating their 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engaging in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that resonate with your experiences, "Decisions, Decisions" is your go-to source for open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world. Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections—tune in and join the conversation!