← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Everyday Habits That Make You Smarter: How To Master Memory, Focus & Learning | Dr. Gina Poe PT 2
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- [00:00]
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Dr. Gina Poe
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Tom Bilyeu
Welcome Back to part two of this incredible episode with the brilliant Dr. Gina Poe, director of UCLA's Sleep and Memory Lab. We've been talking about much more than just getting some sleep. And in this part we continue the conversation, diving deep into the realm of optimizing your sleep and how that actually unleashes your brain's superpowers. Crack the code with us as we explore ptsd, loose lucid dreaming, and how to get the most from your time in the bedroom. By the way, Impact Theory, if you didn't know, is now available on Amazon Music. So head over to Amazon Music to hear more Impact Theory episodes just like this one, the conversations that really matter. Don't wait. Subscribe to Impact Theory now on Apple Music and be legendary. I'm Tom Bilyeu and welcome to Impact Theory. Talk to me about PTSD and the locus coeruleus.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, blue spot. Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So I know when things go wrong with that spot, you can have all kinds of problems. But I also know that estrogen is protective against it. But I also know that women suffer from stress and anxiety more than men. So start us explain the blue spot and then help us understand estrogen's role in all of this.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, so the blue spot is in our brainstem and it is one of the first relay places for all incoming sensory and stimulation. So it'll wake us up, it'll switch our attention from this conversation to if somebody's listening or watching this and something goes on in their house, they're going to switch their attention away from what we're talking about to whatever it is. And that's really good. And it's adaptive because, you know, we need to be able to switch our attention.
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Tom Bilyeu
Otherwise.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, otherwise we're in trouble. That's the locus surrealist. It helps us to be alert and aroused and reorienting as we need to. It also as it's tonically firing, helping us to learn from whatever we are engaged in. So this conversation, hopefully both of our locuserulus is going and we're able to follow the conversation really well. But when it switches to a phasic, you know, sharp like, that's when we need to switch our attention. But right now it's tonically happening. So it's responsive to stressors. And what it does is it helps us to learn quickly from that stressor because what it provides to the brain, all over the brain, is norepinephrine, which helps us to learn quickly and strengthen synapses. It's only when it's not present that we can actually weaken those synapses after we've consolidated what we've learned and changed our schema. Once, once that's done, you can erase those novel memories from the novelty encoding structures in our proximal dendritic tree. And so we really need norepinephrine to be absent in order to be able to do that synaptic weakening. It can't happen when norepinephrine is present, when that blue spot is firing. So the only time when the blue spot stops firing is during rapid eye movement sleep. But that's something that we've known for since the 80s maybe and, but we've only ever studied it in males, so we know that that's kind of dogma. The locust rilla stops firing in REM sleep, that therefore REM sleep is able to allow us to reformulate our schema and erase those things that aren't necessary
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Tom Bilyeu
and we can strip the emotional intensity off of a memory.
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Dr. Gina Poe
That's right. So for example, if we're learning something that's emotionally really relevant to us and, and those emotions help us to learn those things our locustrillus is firing, helping us to learn that emotional memory. It's during sleep that we can consolidate those, all the facts to our, the rest of our brain, to those distal dendrites. And then during REM sleep, when we can erase the, the, the, the novelty of it, the salience of it, so that it's not something that just happened to us that day, it's something that we've consolidated, erase from the novelty encoding circuitry so we can encode something new. But it's with the lack of locus coeruleus activity, the lack of activity in the blue spot in REM sleep that we can do that. And just recently my lab has started to record from the locus coerulus in females. And we find across the estrous cycle, the lococerulus doesn't completely stop firing during REM sleep in some phases of the cycle, in the low hormonal phases of the cycle, which would really not allow you to refresh your brain quite as well as you would otherwise. And I don't know what the physiological importance of that is. But given that that's the case, that also might be why women are two to four times more susceptible to post traumatic stress disorder. Because post traumatic stress disorder is a disorder not of forgetting. And that's too overly simplistic. It's a disorder of not being able to relegate the past to the past. It's where these emotional traumatic memories stay in the present as though they just happened that same day. And yes, we're able to consolidate it, but then we're not able to do the second step, which is to erase it from this novelty encoding circuitry to allow us to learn new things after that. Instead hangs onto that traumatic memory and all the aspects of it, the emotionality and the way it makes our heart beat fast and our skin sweat and all of that. And so it just happened that same day. So if your locuserulus is not stopping firing during REM sleep at certain phases of our hormonal cycle, then REM sleep can't do what it's supposed to do, which is to refresh that novelty encoding circuit. That's our hypothesis and that's what we're doing.
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Tom Bilyeu
REM is a trip. Very interesting. Okay, so in ptsd my stress levels remain elevated, so I'm doing the this isn't important. This is important thing in sleep, but I actually can't get to the this isn't important because my stress levels are still so high, which is telling my body, no, no, no, this remains salient. And so it becomes a generalized salience. Like do you end up overwhelming your short term memory? Like if you're constantly just saying like, everything's important, everything's important, you can't strip anything away. Does that have long term? Like has anybody looked at PTSD and victims and how they have trouble learning new things?
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. So one of the things you can't learn, for example, is the context of safety, you know? You know, so yeah, that's, that's not good. And in animals, we, they, they don't learn any kind of reversal based learning, whatever. What I mean by reversal learning is that was then, this is now. Now my home is moved. Now the place where my food is used to be is moved. All of that is reversal learning. We call it reversal just because it's. It's not necessarily unlearning because you might still remember where your food used to be, but it's reweighting, I guess, recontextualizing.
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Tom Bilyeu
An example I've heard you use a lot, which makes a lot of sense, especially for people our age, is that you hear the sound of a helicopter, you're in war. That's bad sound. Danger, danger. But when you go back home, it could just be a news helicopter. And so you have to recontextualize the same sound.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yes. And not have the same panic response, which is perfectly adaptive in the theater of war. But at home, you don't want to be diving under the table every time a helicopter comes by.
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Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so that makes the prediction that anything that quiets that down should allow me to lessen, hopefully eradicate, ptsd. So beta blockers is something I've heard you talk about. Have we looked at how effective those are at?
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Dr. Gina Poe
There have been, as far as I know, eight clinical studies, and I think there's another one going on right now.
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Tom Bilyeu
What do beta blockers do?
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Dr. Gina Poe
So, beta blockers block the receptors of noradrenaline, which is the neurotransmitter produced by the locus coeruleus, that blue spot which helps us to learn. But whenever those beta receptors are occupied by norepinephrine, that only allows us to formulate new memories and strengthen new memories and doesn't allow us to weaken others. So beta blockers block that receptor, so noradrenaline can't occupy it and then make the neuron think that there's no norepinephrine here. There's nothing important, there's nothing stressful. We don't need to learn anything new. And I think the reason why many of those clinical trials failed is because they didn't quite understand that you do need the beta adrenergic receptor occupied by norepinephrine when you are learning something new, like the context of safety. But it's during sleep that you need the beta block, the beta receptors to be not occupied by norepinephrine anymore so that you can do the loosening that's required for reassociating and recontextualizing something so very interesting. So you need to give them at the right time, I think, and enough. You also. Other clinical trials, I think, failed because they gave too low of a dose and it didn't you know, didn't occupy enough or didn't block enough of the beta receptors in the brain.
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Tom Bilyeu
And have you looked at the research on psychedelics and trauma therapy?
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Dr. Gina Poe
I have. It's really fascinating. And the thing about psychedelics, many of them actually activate the serotonergic system. And we don't even know which specific receptors serotonin is another. Noradrenaline is one neurotransmitter system. Serotonin is a different one that is also on whenever we're learning. So the serotonergic system comes from all over the brain. It comes from the dorsal raphe nucleus in the brainstem, and that's another nucleus that shuts off during REM sleep. So the noradrenergic system and the serotonergic system are normally off during REM sleep. So psychedelics don't reproduce REM sleep because they're agonists of serotonin. However they might, there are at least 15, maybe 21 different receptors for serotonin. Serotonin. And each of them do a different thing and a different neuronal subtype in a different compartment of the neuron. And so in, in, in my model of the way things work, the serotonergic receptors out there at the distal dendrites, where our cortex is talking to each other, those are the ones that actually help dampen the effect of that on our response to the world outside. So what they do when you occupy the serotonergic receptors is they shunt out information coming in from the familiarity, encoding cortical, cortical schema, and don't allow that to dominate us anymore. And instead it weights everything toward what's going on right now, here and now. So again, there's lots of different receptors, but for that one any case, that's really important, I think, to be absent in REM sleep, because that's when you want to be building those schema about the outside world. If you don't have enough serotonin in your system, then you perhaps are always too attuned to what's going on out there in the distal dendrites and not enough attuned to what's coming in from the outside and learning new things. Depression antidepressants are certain urgic agonists. It may help us to be more attuned to the world around us as we're awakened and walking around it. But I would also suggest that maybe antidepressants should be stopped when we want to go to sleep because we need serotonin to be off in order to rebalance our system at night.
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Tom Bilyeu
Do SSRIs disrupt sleep?
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Dr. Gina Poe
They do. They really do. They actually block REM sleep pretty effectively depending on when you take it and how much you take it. But also those studies haven't been done in people who are trying to learn something new. So we don't know if it's 100% blocking REM sleep when someone is studying for an exam, for example, maybe that homeostatic need for sleep overcomes the SSRI's blockage of REM sleep. And you get beautiful REM just when you need it.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that's really interesting. So when you get people on different medications, the amount most people are going to be taking it chronically, it's. So this is a reason that I'm very hesitant to take supplements. When you start isolating things, the number of knock on effects that you can have is, is pretty crazy. But I've heard you talk about the importance of if you've just suffered something traumatic, you need to understand this, what you can do to block the encoding of that traumatic event. And I don't want to put words in your mouth, but it's like, hey, if you can talk yourself down and get into a calm place before you go to bed, great. If you can't, even getting drunk might be better than just going to sleep. Why would that be true?
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, we do want to learn from our traumatic experiences. Right. We don't want to not learn what's dangerous out there, for example, but we don't want to hang on to that novelty of that memory for the rest of our lives. We want to put it where it goes and then leave it. Right. And access it when we need it the next time. But other than that, it's lying dormant and sitting there ready when you need it. You don't want it to be there, present and part of your life every single day and influencing every decision you make.
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Tom Bilyeu
Is that first night's sleep an important window for avoiding that?
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, the first couple of nights sleep, it takes about a week to consolidate a memory and put it away. Yeah, but that first couple of nights is when you actually are hanging on to the memory until it's consolidated. You don't want to erase it until it's really fully consolidated, fully entrenched in everything that you know and in the way that it should be entrenched. And then after that, once it's consolidated, you want sleep to be able to reverse the weight of that salience. So what happens in the first couple of nights when you've learned something really Mind blowingly new is you are consolidating it and you hang on to it until that whole process is done, and then you start erasing it from that novelty encoding circuitry. But in order to consolidate it and put it where it needs to go, you need to rearrange the schema that are already there, right? So if you want, for example, to remember the specific context of something that's scary and fearful, instead of just generalizing it, if you want to learn the specific context, you want to put those memories where they go, and that involves some weakening of some of the memories in that schema already in order to put the pieces of information where they go. And you also need your novelty encoding proximal dendrites to be ready for those new pieces of information and all the refinements of them. If that is already saturated with something, then you can't learn anything but the simple relation in out relationship. You know, sound scary run, right? That's the simple ones. So if you want to learn all of the pieces of the information of context in which something scary happened, you need your brain to be refreshed by the sleep the night before and able to encode all the pieces of information and then able to write it out to the long term memory structure and then able to refresh that novelty encoding circuitry again. So the next day you can refine that with even more information, more context, as you think about the trauma that happened, you can even contextualize it more, you can talk it through with your friends and family. They can help you realize that was then, this is now, this is why this happened. You'll be able to learn these new things and these new pieces of context. Because your sleep that first night was a healthy sleep. So that's why you really need that sleep to be norepinephrine free. Because you can both write the new pieces of information into the context through those sleep spindles and erase that novelty encoding context from the novelty encoding structures so that you can again recontextualize and relearn the next day. And then after a few days of that, a few nights of that, you'll have done the job of writing out all those pieces of information. Your memory will be good, your schema will be good, and you can just completely erase that from your novelty encoding structure so that you can turn your attention to something new. So when you said it's better to even get drunk or stay up all night, if your sleep doesn't lack that norepinephrine and serotonin, then that first night. Then instead of doing, you might be able to consolidate it, but you're going to saturate your system with that traumatic memory and create a positive feedback loop that just continues to re entrench it as though it happened the same day every day.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. So I want to talk about that. So everything that you went through assumes everything is working well. So get your sleep. Make sure that you don't have dysregulated stress response, just in general. But as somebody who I went through a period in my life where my anxiety was off the charts. Now it ended up being, I'll call it 70% diet. And so I no longer have generalized anxiety disorder, but I know what it feels like to have a very disproportionate response to something and just be like, I don't understand what is going on. So if somebody were in a car accident, let's say very traumatic moment, I know that historically people thought, well, you need to talk to somebody about it, then the studies show that's actually terrible and you're just reinforcing it.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
So, one, I'd love to hear what we know about how to talk therapy over a traumatic event can actually just reinforce it.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Right.
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Tom Bilyeu
And then if we had somebody that has a disproportionate response and their amplitude of stress does not match what happened. What kind of protocol? If we had an infinite pharmacy or maybe that isn't the right answer, but we have access to anything. Like, they're going to perfect compliance. If we need drugs, we have drugs. Like, what would that protocol look like?
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. So unless that talk therapy is teaching you something about how to contextualize that it's actually really good to speak to a loved one after a traumatic event
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Tom Bilyeu
if they're helping you de stress.
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Dr. Gina Poe
If they're helping you de stress and contextualize. So one of the things that shuts the locus coerulus off fastest after a traumatic event is being able to learn from it. So, you know, if you had a car accident and someone can say, well, yeah, but you ran the red light, you say, oh, you're right, I was texting. I ran the red light. I next time, I'm never going to do that again. I'm never going to text while driving.
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Tom Bilyeu
And you was a drunk driver, and I was just sitting at the red light.
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Dr. Gina Poe
If you're just sitting at the red light and there's a drunk driver, there's not much you can learn from it.
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Tom Bilyeu
So now stress level through the roof.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Life's unpredictable. Oh, my God. I'M never going to leave my house again.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Locus aerials will not stop firing. If there's nothing to be learned from it, it is still searching for what can I learn from that? What can I learn from that? That. So the way to, the way that I, you know, de stress after such a random haphazard event is to take what I have. I have a worldview where I believe that everything ultimately will work out for the best. Even if right now it looks terrible, it will work out for the best. And that helps me to de stress because I know, oh, you know, it's horrible now, but, but with a long view, you know, I'm gonna, you know, this is. All these troubles are gonna be over.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's very interesting.
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Dr. Gina Poe
And, and so that can help me calm down. And, and talking to my mother always helped me with that because why she's, she had the wisdom of the years,
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Tom Bilyeu
right, of like, you're gonna get better from this thing.
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Dr. Gina Poe
You're gonna get better, you're gonna stay positive. It's gonna, you know, you, maybe in the future you're gonna be a transportation minister and you're gonna be able to make lights safer or reduce the amount of drunk driving because you're gonna help, you know, know.
- [22:14]
Tom Bilyeu
So that is really profound. So I am a growth mindset junkie and I've never understood that there was even like an actual brain mechanism happening behind the scenes. But like, you, you and I have, I think, very different worldviews, but they probably serve the same function. I literally just took a note, prayer, because I know that you pray and you've often referred to that as being something that you use to lower your stress. That's really interesting when I think about how something like prayer could serve such a profound function to last, you know, for thousands of years, probably more. That's very.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Giving you a universal worldview that takes you out of the immediacy of this
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Tom Bilyeu
moment and tells you something good will come from this. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to learn something. I'm going to get something. Feels like a really interesting trigger. What I find so fascinating about it, though, it's just the thought. But that thought, somehow that context registers at a very deep limbic level.
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Dr. Gina Poe
That's right. It does, it does. Our locus coerulus is connected. It gets all kinds of inputs from our prefrontal cortex, from our hippocampus, from our learning and memory systems, from our emotional systems, and it feeds back onto our locuserilis and says, okay, it's okay now. And our locus is okay. It's all right. I'll stop barking. I'll stop alerting you. It's going to be all right.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. I love understanding the mechanisms to things when they're, I guess is a known one. Okay, very interesting. So you have a world view. You just had this car accident. Even though it was a drunk driver, your world view kicks in. You feel like it's going to work out for the better. What else would we throw in our protocol?
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Dr. Gina Poe
Right. So if that's not enough, because that
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Tom Bilyeu
really might be enough.
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Dr. Gina Poe
It.
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Tom Bilyeu
Oh, yeah, whatever. You. You just need to quiet the locust.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Right, right, right. Got it. Sometimes it's not enough. Sometimes you have forgotten to go back to your worldview or pray or you don't have people around you to remind you that, you know it's going to work out. Then. Yeah. Well, again, like we were just saying, it's something inside your own brain that you can. Can teach yourself. So you can calm yourself down. Your mind can keep you.
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Tom Bilyeu
Well, your mind can keep you.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, that's a.
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Tom Bilyeu
That's nice.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
The mind can also make you sick.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yes, exactly.
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Tom Bilyeu
The terrifying flip side.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, I didn't make up that catchphrase. That was the title of a TV show or not tv. It was an NPR show. And when I was a child, I used to listen to it all the time.
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Tom Bilyeu
I love it.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
Your mind can keep you. Well, I like that.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. But if all those things fail, then I would, you know, stay up. If you're, if you have insomnia and because you can't figure this out and you are stressed, be awake, Be awake until you can find your way out of it. And for some people, maybe it's doing something super relaxing to get their mind off of it. Like you were listening to podcasts, a story, get your mind off of this immediate thing. Listen to a nice story, you know, watch a nice movie, read a nice book, or listen to, you know, get a storyteller to tell you a good story, a bedtime story that takes your mind off of this. This horrible thing that just happened. Allow your whole system to relax and then have a very good night's sleep. Most sleep is adaptive. Most people don't get PTSD from a traumatic event. And that's because our sleep is most of the time doing what it's supposed to do. But if you are, you know, for some reason you sleep deprived from the night before and you're super sleepy, even though you, you know, you're wired, you can go to sleep. That's not good. Don't go to sleep wired. I guess that's the, the thing I'm trying to say. Don't go to sleep wired. Do something to calm yourself down so that your locuserilis can quiet and do what it's supposed to do during sleep.
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Tom Bilyeu
Do you meditate?
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Dr. Gina Poe
I have tried. For me it's prayer.
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Tom Bilyeu
But I was gonna say prayer is so meditative.
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Dr. Gina Poe
It is, it's meditative.
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Tom Bilyeu
So this may be too private. By all means, say nothing. But how do you pray? Are you asking for something for yourself, for others, for protection, love?
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, I mean, just knowing that there is an all powerful being who cares about me really helps. And then secondly, prayer is also thanking, being thankful. So meditating, I guess on all the things you're thankful for and you're grateful for. So prayer reminds me of all the good in my life and the good in the people around me. And then also praying for people and for things helps me to not feel as helpless. I don't feel helpless because I'm doing something right. I'm asking God to, who's all powerful, to intervene and to change things. And that very much helps me feel like I've done something. It helps. You know, some people, they like to write lists that also helps me, but that's a way to put the list in God's hands.
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Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. So I'm not religious, but I have been in situations before where something feels so out of my control. I am desperate to appeal to a higher power. I get it.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Go for it.
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Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. It's.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Even if you don't believe it, do it.
- [28:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, it makes you feel like, oh, I still have a thing I can do. I totally get that. Has anybody looked at prayer and loneliness? So I used to be religious and I remember that feeling of like I'm talking to somebody who's listening. They're powerful and loving. It's a very nice feeling.
- [28:21]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, it is. I think the moment in my life. There was a moment in life when I was the loneliest ever and I was crying and I just felt completely spun out of control. And I heard this voice in my head that just said, why are you crying? I'm with you. And it kind of arrested my tears. Oh yeah. That was the only time I've ever heard God. But you know, but it was like, why I'm, I'm here with you. And I'm like, oh yeah, I'm not alone. I'm not alone. I'm never alone.
- [28:56]
Tom Bilyeu
So interesting. Yeah, that's One of those things, man. There. So I have a thought that runs through my head frequently and longtime listeners of the show will have heard me say it many times. But there is a God shaped hole in all of us. You need to fill it with something. So. All right. I'm really starting to formulate a very useful understanding of how I can leverage sleep to whether it's strip the emotional resonance off of something, whether it's free up my short term memory so I can learn new things. The consolidation, the removing of the narrative from the dots and snapping back to just dots so I can update my schema. That's really going to stick with me.
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Dr. Gina Poe
I love the way you said that. It's really nice.
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Tom Bilyeu
Thank you.
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Dr. Gina Poe
It's going to stick with me too.
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Tom Bilyeu
Nice. May it be useful.
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Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
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Tom Bilyeu
How do I supercharge learning? So I am a big believer that we can all 100x our abilities, but it doesn't happen by accident. And so I'm always looking for an edge on how I can learn something better. Is it naps? Is it just meditating before I go to bed? How do we really make sure we remember what we learned?
- [30:14]
Dr. Gina Poe
That's a good question. And we don't really know how we tag the things that we want to remember and how we tag the things that we want to forget. There's a lot of automaticity to it. That must be pretty good. I think your brain is probably already optimized to learn. Great.
- [30:31]
Tom Bilyeu
I really hope that's not true. If this is optimized, we are all in trouble. I just throw a lot of time at it. That's my only solution, which I really want to shorten that time.
- [30:42]
Dr. Gina Poe
Right.
- [30:45]
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- [31:15]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, I mean, so here's one shortcut, but I don't think it's good in the long run.
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Tom Bilyeu
Shortcut.
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Dr. Gina Poe
It's not good in the long run though. Yeah, it's probably good for cramming in one piece of information, but okay, we'll take it.
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Tom Bilyeu
We'll take it.
- [31:29]
Dr. Gina Poe
Right? Right. One study done in the 90s, I believe it was that while the person was learning something kind of mind blowing. They had a clock ticking in the background. It was very loud clock. And then when they were in REM sleep, the experimenter made that clock go back on again. And so it did reactivate a lot of the pathways that we're learning. But what we don't know yet is what the locus coerulus is doing. Is that just again, reinforcing that one thing you learned and preventing it from being, you know, from disconnecting and becoming dots and making it creative. There was no creativity. Part of that study stuff is so complicated. Yeah. So we still need to look at creativity and insight. Whether you. That those people 20% better on that one thing that they were learning, but they didn't test whether or not they could extract that and apply it to other situations. But 20% better, you know, that goes. That's a C to an A, right, If you're talking about a test. But you might also not be able to do the erasure parts that you need to do. You might be sacrificing other parts of other things that you learned the day before that, for example, and that you need to schematize instead of learn via just rote.
- [32:56]
Tom Bilyeu
Man, I hope somebody does some research on that because so my brain already starts worrying. So, all right, let's say that each day I was going to pick one thing and I was going to study it for, let's say, 20 minutes. And then I'm going to replay the clock ticking for five minutes during my REM cycle, which, let's say is tied to my Fitbit or whatever. And so I know when I'm actually in rem, it triggers, but it only triggers for a brief period. So that theoretically I can still do all the other things. That would be really interesting.
- [33:27]
Dr. Gina Poe
I would just do it that one night and just for five minutes. Yeah, I don't. Don't do it night after night. You're gonna screw everything up and saturate your brain with that one thing.
- [33:39]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, that sounds about right. You end up getting some advantage in one area, but you end up sacrificing everything else because you are competing against evolution. Evolutions had a lot of time to figure things out. But we were talking about this right before we started. Rolling camera. There's a really interesting meme about here's what the Olympics looked like in 19. Whatever, 1921. Here's what they look like in 1921 or 2021. And it is hilarious how much more advanced we are now. So obviously, as you pointed out, it's not our biology. Our biology hasn't changed, but the cultural element that stacks. We've more belief because we've seen what's possible. Better equipment, better training.
- [34:21]
Dr. Gina Poe
Right. We know what our bodies can do. We can push it harder knowing that we're not going to rupture anything. Or if we do, at least there'll be good physicians on hand to help us heal.
- [34:33]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Man, it's so interesting. Learning. Learning really is a superpower. And memory is the thing that I've struggled with most profoundly in my life. So. And I'm always looking for things that can help with that.
- [34:43]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Are there.
- [34:45]
Tom Bilyeu
You might hate this question, but are there drugs that help with memory?
- [34:48]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. There's even one called memantine. I mean.
- [34:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Memantine.
- [34:52]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. For memory. Right.
- [34:54]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [34:55]
Dr. Gina Poe
How have I never heard of this? Yeah, it's. It's got side effects.
- [34:59]
Tom Bilyeu
What's the on label use case?
- [35:02]
Dr. Gina Poe
So I believe it's for dementia. Okay. Yeah.
- [35:07]
Tom Bilyeu
And it works.
- [35:09]
Dr. Gina Poe
Somewhat. Somewhat. Again, nobody studied these things in relation to sleep. So what it does is it boosts. Boosts acetylcholine by blocking the receptors that reuptake it. Acetylcholine is really important for neuroxide.
- [35:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Is that what makes you feel tired?
- [35:26]
Dr. Gina Poe
I mean, that's adenosine. Yeah, yeah. That's all right. Acetylcholine. Ach. Is the.
- [35:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. Trying to cram the things into the little bit that.
- [35:34]
Dr. Gina Poe
I understand. You're right. Yeah. So acetylcholine, you need it when you're attending to something. It's pumping great and giving us great rhythms for learning when we're exercising. So walking and learning is great thing to do. Or running and learning is a great thing to do. It's also really present in our brains when we're in rapid eye movements.
- [35:55]
Tom Bilyeu
You're more likely to remember something that you learned while walking or running.
- [35:58]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, yeah. Or incorporated.
- [36:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [36:01]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [36:01]
Tom Bilyeu
Because of the neurochemistry.
- [36:03]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Because of the rhythms of our brain.
- [36:05]
Tom Bilyeu
The rhythm or the.
- [36:07]
Dr. Gina Poe
And the chemistry. The chemistry sets up the rhythm. So.
- [36:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Interesting.
- [36:11]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [36:11]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow. I've never heard that before.
- [36:12]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [36:13]
Tom Bilyeu
I. I have experience that you can get insights while walking, which is very interesting.
- [36:20]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [36:21]
Tom Bilyeu
But I did not know that you're more likely to remember something.
- [36:24]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So actually sitting at our desk trying to learn something is probably not the best way to learn things.
- [36:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Really?
- [36:32]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [36:32]
Tom Bilyeu
That's interesting.
- [36:33]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [36:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Is there an evolutionary reason for that? Just that we would have always been moving?
- [36:41]
Dr. Gina Poe
I think so. I think it's probably. That's probably what it is? Yeah. I don't know otherwise, but we can create. For example, cats. Watching a bird fly around has a ton of that acetylcholine. Actually, whenever we attend to something, acetylcholine gets ramped up in that area of the brain that we're using for that purpose. And then again during REM sleep, we have a ton of acetylcholine in those areas of the brain that are trying to learn. During slow wave sleep, when we're cleaning our brains, acetylcholine is gone. It's completely gone. So we need it to be absent when we're doing the cleaning process.
- [37:23]
Tom Bilyeu
Very interesting. Okay, I'm gonna try to talk through something.
- [37:27]
Dr. Gina Poe
The side effects are.
- [37:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh, please.
- [37:28]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Acetylcholine is what every single one of our muscles uses. Our gut uses it. And so a lot of acetylcholine will screw us up, screw up our guts, make us feel awful in lots of ways.
- [37:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So does not sound like a good trade. Anything that makes me feel sick, like, even eating a meal too late, which is actually something we didn't talk about. When you talk about sleep hygiene, for me, even stopping eating three hours before I go to bed, I will feel the difference. So I stop eating seven hours before I go to bed, and it feels awesome. I love it. And I used to eat, literally chew, chew, swallow, sleep. And when I stopped. Stopped doing that, I was like, whoa, this really makes a huge difference.
- [38:15]
Dr. Gina Poe
That's great.
- [38:15]
Tom Bilyeu
And I remember when my wife. My wife had massive digestive issues, and she kept saying, you know, I really think it matters, like, how much before I go to sleep that I stop eating. And I was like, why? Doesn't make sense.
- [38:27]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, 100.
- [38:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Definitely not it. She's like, no, I really. I really think it is. And I'm gonna start stopping earlier and earlier. And she settled on about three hours. Then when I started doing intermittent fasting, just for other reasons, had nothing to do with how I was sleeping, I found that it improved my sleep.
- [38:43]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, that's true.
- [38:44]
Tom Bilyeu
Very, very interesting.
- [38:45]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, it is. Actually. There was just a study out about what eating a high protein meal will do. It changes the way your gut. A hormone your gut secretes that then travels to your. That hormone travels to your brain and helps you sleep better.
- [39:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Protein. I've heard that carbohydrates help you sleep better, but I've never heard it about protein.
- [39:07]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, I think that. That there's a lot of research that needs to be done yet. This was in flies and mice, but. And then baby mice and baby humans sleep better if their tummy is full.
- [39:24]
Tom Bilyeu
But not adults.
- [39:25]
Dr. Gina Poe
Not adults. Well, actually I'm trying to think of what studies have done with adults and being full and sleep. But I know if you're working your digestive system, that's not a good thing while you're sleeping. But again, I think more studies need to be done to iron these things out. Why does it work in babies? Why is it different in adults? We don't know.
- [39:48]
Tom Bilyeu
It's very interesting. You can understand why babies would need food in terms of just the rapid growth. Especially now. They've got tons of body fat, but I would imagine they're not accessing the body fat and they're eating a high sugar diet for sure while they're breasting.
- [40:06]
Dr. Gina Poe
Readily available energy. Yeah.
- [40:08]
Tom Bilyeu
But sort of quick to go through the system. Very interesting. Yeah. I mean there can't be enough studies on diet. It's. But it is a very difficult thing to do unless you can literally imprison people and only give them the food that you want them to eat because the compliance is so low. Yeah, very interesting. All right. There's a complex idea that I want to try to talk through. Nudge me if I go too far afield here. But when you were talking, you made me realize that there are concepts that are pre embedded in the brain. And one of the things that I find really important. So I'm obsessed with what I was talking about earlier. The brain is a prediction engine. Whatever it is, whatever cool thing you're trying to do with your life, you really are trying to update your schema so that you get closer to ground truth and you're better able to do only the things that are going to be effective. And as a species, what makes humans interesting, and you made sort of an oblique reference to this earlier, is that we don't come pre hardwired with everything. We don't adapt to a limb that we don't have. We are doing things based on the actual environment that we're in. We could have been born into a lot of environments, but we're actually in this one. And so making sure that we're adapting to that. So, all right. Humans are the most adaptive of all the animals, which is exactly how we've become the most dominant apex predator world has ever seen. But at the same time, we're not blank slates. So there are ideas that are embedded in the brain. And I can't remember what you were saying, but the note I took was right or false. And true are categories of things that are innate and that our brain, when we sleep, is tagging things. This is true, this is false. And I just thought, whoa, that has real implications in terms of as we. All social media is sort of deranging this where we're losing a hold of. And I don't mean it like in a political way, but if. If true and false are a category that the brain is looking for to tag something, this is effective part of the schema. This is ineffective part of the schema. And adjust accordingly. If you're reinterpreting the world based on true and false, you better be right. And so then it becomes a question of what are we using to tag things as true and false. And this is where, as somebody who teaches entrepreneurship, I'm always trying to get people to understand if you don't have the right metric by which you judge the success or failure of a test, you're going to be in trouble. How close am I with that, like, category thing that the brain is doing?
- [43:13]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, I think you're very close. I have a good friend, someone I used to work with, whose world schema was built by his parents and his community. But then he went to business school and he learned all kinds of new things that weren't quite fitting with that schema. For example, what he was told was good for him. He saw how the business world was just taking advantage of it and using it to profit and not necessarily working out for his best interests, but for the bottom line, best interest of the business. And then one day, with one experience, his whole schema changed and he's no longer. He realized that all that schema was wrong. I mean, there was just huge holes in it. It didn't align anymore. And he saw how they could align. And then he realized that he couldn't just trust his parents anymore. He was an adult at that time, and he couldn't just trust his community around him. That there was a whole other world out there and forces at work that they didn't understand and that he didn't understand until that moment. And so he had to shift his whole worldview and make a whole new schema. And so the way that we build the world is usually first we have to trust our parents, our caregivers, we have to trust. And if they say something's important or something scary, you know, we trust them because that's part of survival. But there comes a point when we should start, you know, weighing things for ourselves and based on our experience and based on our own thoughts and based on what we've Learned so that we are building a schema that makes sense to us. And like you say, you better be right. But if we're wrong, we might be able to survive. Okay, but not optimally.
- [45:11]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really interesting. So as you were saying that it made me realize, okay, you've got the categories of true, false, but the entire worldview is going to influence the tagging of true and false. Yeah, that's really interesting. So what are other categories that the brain comes pre hardwired with? So it doesn't give you your worldview, but it does give you category of you can determine this is useful, this is not useful, or this is true, this is false. Have you thought about other categories that we come pre hardwired with?
- [45:47]
Dr. Gina Poe
Sure. Well, we're, we're pre hardwired to learn who our parents are and to imprint on them so that we know who to trust and who to look for for comfort and for food. And that is pre hardwired. We have this area of our brain or several areas of our brain that are trained to look for the caregiver. And whether that caregiver is a good one or bad one doesn't matter. We are hardwired to imprint on that person and to, and to learn from them. It can be really difficult when we're later, when we were older to say that parent or that caregiver that I imprinted on did a terrible job and I don't want to be that and I don't want to marry that and I select a partner. It can be really difficult to fight against when we learn something new about the world and get a bigger and a different world view, that's wrong. I don't want somebody to abuse me. I don't want to find a partner who's going to abuse me like I was abused when I was a child. And it's really hard because we've imprinted, you know, our brain and that critical period of imprinting has closed. So it's, it becomes a really hard thing. It's not impossible. Absolutely. It is possible, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of sleep.
- [47:07]
Tom Bilyeu
What does that effort look like? How do you begin? Because childhood trauma really freaks me out because of how long it echoes through people's lives. And it seems for most people either because they won't adhere to a treatment protocol, but it seems intractable.
- [47:26]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, it's intractable. We have plasticity, like you say, we are able to learn new things, but we need to be dedicated about it and surround ourselves, for example, by People who aren't going to abuse you anymore and believe that that is the good thing. And we will always have that wiring, that original imprint wiring. But we can form new synapses and make those synapses strong and stronger than the original ones were. But if we ever.
- [48:01]
Tom Bilyeu
What does that process look like?
- [48:03]
Dr. Gina Poe
It's actually synaptic remodeling. It's actually dendrites and axons.
- [48:07]
Tom Bilyeu
Repetition.
- [48:09]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Repetition, repetition. Surrounding ourselves again by this new world that we want instead of the world that we had and a dedication and attention to it every day and sleeping on it every night. And it's a long, slow process because during those critical periods, it happens quickly. It happens quickly because our brain said, okay, this is the time when we learn about who our parents are and what a caregiver looks like. And once that critical period is closed, when I call it critical period, there is a particular time of life.
- [48:45]
Tom Bilyeu
What's the window?
- [48:47]
Dr. Gina Poe
Well, with caregivers, if we were chicks, baby chicks, it's at 17 hours after a closure, after hatching, that's brief. So, yeah, so for a couple of hours after that, if you don't happen to encounter your mother until hour 19 or 20, it's okay, you'll still. But if you encounter something at 17 hours that's not your mother, like something that's making a sound and moving away from you, you're going to imprint on that. And so there's a, there's a, it's so it's a few hours. I'm sorry, for a few hours. For, for a chick. For humans, of course it's going to be longer, but we don't actually know what the exact critical period is yet. There's, there's some studies that need to be done. Language learning is another thing that our brains are set to learn. If we are born deaf, we will still learn language. It won't be the oral language. We'll learn body language better. We'll learn to lip read, we'll learn sign language if it's given to us or the signs that the body language of our caregiver is giving us. So our brain is set to learn. And there is a critical period to that too. If we are, for example, born into an English speaking family and we try at age 35 to learn Chinese. And that's the first time. Well, not the first time, but if during your critical language learning period in the first, first six months of life, if you never heard Chinese and all the sounds of it and it was never directed toward you and you were Never told a story in that language, you won't have built, saved the synaptic pathways that were open during that period of time.
- [50:22]
Tom Bilyeu
Six months.
- [50:23]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yes. Yeah. Before we're even babbling or just at the beginning of babbling. Just listening to the sounds of these languages will change our brain and help us to preserve synapses that will allow us to always hear the sounds of that other language so that later when we try to actually pick it up ourselves, we'll still be able to hear it. And those people that were never exposed to it will have pruned those synapses away.
- [50:49]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay, so really tight period for imprinting for language. What are some of the other phases? And I will contextualize this so this really matters to me. So Impact Theory. The reason this company is called Impact Theory is my theory on how to impact people at scale is through story. So I tried just telling people, think like this, act like this. You can build your own company, do whatever you want. 2% of people would take that advice and do something with it. And it was extraordinary to witness. But I was just like, what about the 98% that are doing exactly nothing with this information? And how do we reach them?
- [51:25]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [51:25]
Tom Bilyeu
And that's when I really started getting obsessed with worldview. So I'm. I'm going to assume you know nothing about my story. So my last company was in manufacturing. So we were in the inner cities. So we had. I had big brothered for a kid that grew up in South Central as sort of a knock on of going to USC. And I watched him get consumed by his zip code. Flash forward 15 years later. I now have a thousand employees that remind me of him. And I'm like, ah, but I'm not a young kid anymore. I know what to do with this. And so realizing that the difference between the 2% and the 98%, the 2% had a growth mindset and they were willing to try things and deploy it. But I had one guy in the 2% get in a fist fight with his friends because they were like, you changed because you've started reading.
- [52:09]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [52:10]
Tom Bilyeu
And I was like, you got in a fist fight because you read now? He's like, yes. And I was like, oh my God, like, this does not make any sense. So then I was like, okay, I'm going to give up on adults and I'm going to focus on kids and I'm going to catch them at what I think of as the age of imprinting. 11 to 15. You're not imprinting on your parents. You're now imprinting from, from culture that I can influence. I can't influence who your parents are, but I can influence what your friends think is cool. And so the whole idea of impact theory is to tell stories, make video games, yada yada, that have actual real useful ideas at the core. So the way that we sum it up is if in one of our stories a mentor gives the character advice, you as the viewer can take that advice because it's real. And so I want to know that that age of imprinting, the 11 to 15 rough swag is actually a moment where I can influence people because Disney takes a younger approach. And so they're going after like that 6 to 11, like really get them young. It's just as a person that's not a form of entertainment that I find as interesting. So I'm really hopeful. But there's something still, you know, going on here.
- [53:22]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, and we are still learning in
- [53:26]
Tom Bilyeu
terms of what's possible.
- [53:27]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, our brains are definitely still developing at age 11 to 15.
- [53:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Not we as researchers. Yeah, 11 to 15, we are still learning.
- [53:35]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, yeah, definitely. And social learning is a big, big thing at that time. So it's great to surround yourself by people who like to read, for example, at that age. Because even if you came from a family which didn't do a lot of reading, you can have that influence you because it's your peers and people you respect and like and admire who are doing this behavior that you can then engage in. So absolutely is possible the, the school system. The reason why preschool is actually a really good age is because again, that language learning, if you have someone reading to you when you're a baby and you know, age 1 to 2, 3 looking at you, telling you are a good person, that's also a really big critical period for language learning, vocabulary learning. It's not the end, but it is a critical period.
- [54:31]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you know Jeffrey Canada?
- [54:33]
Dr. Gina Poe
No.
- [54:34]
Tom Bilyeu
Man, I want this guy on the show so bad. So he's one of the early charter school people. So grows up in Harlem, says, I'm going to fix the education system, gets a full ride scholarship to Harvard, goes into education, spends I think a decade trying to fix it from the inside, Realizes never going to fix this from the inside, starts these schools on the outside. But largely based on a key insight, which is he asked why do middle income kids do well and lower income kids do poorly? And he realized it's the number of words you hear by the age of three and the ratio of positive to negative. I was like, what and he said, in a middle income household, you hear roughly, I think it's 5 million words. And the ratio positive negative is 70% positive, 30% negative. In the inner cities, it's either 3 million or 2 million, I can't remember, but it's dramatically less. And the ratio is flipped. It's 30% positive, 70% negative.
- [55:32]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [55:33]
Tom Bilyeu
And he said, what that does to the language centers of your brain is so startling. And so he went on this crusade to get people who are about to become mothers, wait till they actually had kids if you were about to become a mother. He wanted you to start reading to your baby in utero and to keep reading. Yeah. Once they were born. And I was like, whoa, that's one of those insights about the brain that scares me. Yeah, it scares me. It, it has become not that age, but that idea has become the central mission of my life.
- [56:06]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [56:06]
Tom Bilyeu
If you can intercept people at the right time with the right idea in the right format, you will change how their brain develops.
- [56:14]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly how they see the world, the entire schema at those early, early ages, we're forming our schema of the world, how the world works. It's really good to intervene early if you want someone not to be screwed up and to work better in this society.
- [56:30]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, no doubt.
- [56:31]
Dr. Gina Poe
But it's incredible. I mean, this guy is probably one of the examples. There are lots of people who are surrounded by horrible situations as they grow up, up, and they're able to, you know, lock, lock on, to latch onto the one role model that's different and that's better and they're able to not reproduce that same bad situation in their own life when they're adults. And it's a very inspiring story, but we actually really do. Even those people who say, I did it all by myself, there's always somebody or some influence somewhere that helped them.
- [57:12]
Tom Bilyeu
For sure.
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Dr. Gina Poe
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- [58:14]
Tom Bilyeu
All right, what do you, as you look at the research being done around sleep, being done around the brain in general, where, where do you think this goes? So you've already planted a flag on mitochondria, the energy system. Yeah, I love a good hypothesis. I completely understand you have no idea where this will all lead and you're super open to being wrong. As a scientist, I'm sure that just guides all of your thinking. But what are some interesting areas that either you want to see studied or that you see some early research coming out that could be very meaningful?
- [58:44]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, well, there are lots of fields. So drug addiction, that's a powerful remodeler
- [58:51]
Tom Bilyeu
of the brain that drugs negatively and positively or only negatively.
- [58:55]
Dr. Gina Poe
Well, it's positive in terms of drug seeking behaviors. Right. It rewires the entire brain toward, you know, if you're a drug, hey, yeah, you know, but, but it's a powerful rewiring of, of your brain that I would like to see good ways to use sleep, to rewire back, to learn through sleep and the processes, restore the processes that happen during sleep so that we can be open to relearning the good way again and not to be so stressed. So drug addiction is one area, PTSD is another, something I'm really passionate about. I've got some family members who have PTSD and lost a family member through ptsd. So that's again another way that stress powerfully remodels the brain for the worse. And I would like to figure out a way to make it so that sleep helps us be adaptive, sleep helps us to adapt.
- [60:06]
Tom Bilyeu
Do you see a path? Because is it just, oh, we just need to read a good book, play a calming video game, meditate, whatever, and then you're going to be fine. Or do you see, like, is AI going to play a role some of the brain feedback that people are getting?
- [60:21]
Dr. Gina Poe
I think biofeedback is going to help. People are very unaware of their own stress levels, for example, and how they're processing things. If we're able to tell them through a wearable that, hey, it looks like you are stressed right now, you should probably do some relaxation exercises before you go to bed. And then. And yeah, there's also a really interesting study where they cued people to learn something before they went to sleep and then gave them the cue during the dreams. Yeah, it was like a ticking clock. It was a little different. It was a tone they used and got people to dream about that thing that they were trying to. New thing they were trying to incorporate into their old schema. And if they dreamed about it especially, but actually everybody were better able to incorporate that into the scheme of who they are. Again, I wouldn't overuse this, Be careful. But. So I think, yeah, I don't know enough about AI, but probably there's a way, biofeedback, at least to let people know what state they're in, because they're oftentimes pretty much too much in their head and don't really know what their body is doing and how it's reacting.
- [61:40]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'm going to follow up on something you just said. So based on something I've heard you talk about before, which is that if you understand the neuronal firing of a rat compared to where it's at in the maze, you can actually effectively read its mind. And so, knowing the. Look, I'm not an expert on AI, but I'm deep enough in it that I understand where this is headed, that AI really will be able to take inputs. If you put a, a device of sufficient fidelity on the brain and let me read the brain patterns, the waves, the, you know, neurons that are firing that will be able to start to reconstruct what you're thinking about, they've been able to get very rooted. Like if they tell you to think about a person's face, it's pretty startling. Like how, I mean, it's not like a portrait, but like, you start to get a sense of what they're thinking about. I have a feeling that we're going to get pretty good at interpreting brain signals. You'll need better sensors. But when you have a company like neuralink, where it's actually tapping into the brain, combined with AI just recognizing pattern after pattern. Because what you'll do is you'll read people, let's say a million people, as wearables begin to be a thing, and you'll say, okay, this person is doing this thing and we get this readout. Therefore, when I see this readout out, you're doing this thing, and they'll be able to basically just reverse the, you know, the, the direction that they're thinking about it. And so that is, as I think about biofeedback and I think about AI and I think about just the ability to collect all of this data that you'll be able to get somebody with a PTSD or whatever and say, okay, you're about to go to sleep. I'm going to visualize where your brain is right now, how you're feeling, and there's a target. And so you're going to start moving the. Okay, this is a stressed brain. This is a calm brain. And as you move it there, the screen lights up or does something to reinforce.
- [63:45]
Dr. Gina Poe
That's right.
- [63:45]
Tom Bilyeu
And people will be able to use that visualized biofeedback as a way to control their emotional state, which is my fantasy. As somebody that struggled with anxiety, I was like, I really want a way to practice.
- [63:58]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yes.
- [63:59]
Tom Bilyeu
Calming myself down, which is how I found meditation, which ended up being utterly transformed. Transformational.
- [64:05]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. No, I think exactly that that is the goal. I think these. The promise of these wearables is that they are measuring peripheral measures of heart rate variability, for example, temperature, skin conductance, a lot of these things that are peripheral measures of what's going on with our autonomic nervous system. That the thing that meditation is probably best at calming down. So. So I think there is real promise because people, again, are kind of famously bad at reading their own bodies. And so if you can give them a device that tells them, you know, there's a green window, now you're good, go to sleep, that would be amazing.
- [64:51]
Tom Bilyeu
Be very amazing. So I. I am either just really dumb and when I work out, I'm just terrible, or I have a natural tendency towards muscular imbalances. I fear it's column A. And so I have many times ended up having, like, really chronic pain from. It's often been in my traps or my scalenes where I thought that I had a weakness in my traps and, oh, I need to get my neck stronger, my trap stronger. But in reality, it was my middle back was weak.
- [65:23]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [65:23]
Tom Bilyeu
And I went to see a physical therapist, and he pointed it out. He's like, nope, the problem's actually in your middle back and you're not stabilizing yourself. And he was like, fire your middle back muscle. And I'm like, I'm firing it. He's like, no, you're not. And I'm like, I promise you I am. And so he's like, okay, let me put biofeedback on you. And he's like, make it beep. And I'm like, okay, I'm firing it. And he's like, if it's not beeping, you're not firing the muscle. And so learning to fire it was. Was eye opening at how different my body map of where that muscle was and where the muscle actually was. I felt. I used to joke with him. I feel like I'm firing my heels to like get it that low in my back to just reach my mid back. But once I learned how to do it, yeah, my ability to because it, when I first started, it would beep at you. So when you fired it beep. And then by the time I was done, I could get it to go. And so I was like, wow. And so realizing that once you hear or don't hear, or in this case see or don't see, you can make profound changes and you can fire things. In this case, a muscle that truly felt out of my conscious control. But slowly, slowly you're able to do it. If people could get a hold of their autonomic nervous system, and I don't know how much they'll ultimately be able to get a hold of, but if you can get a hold of it, it's pretty profound. Are you familiar with tumult meditation? Do you know Wim Hof?
- [66:46]
Dr. Gina Poe
Nope.
- [66:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Oh my gosh. You're gonna love this. So I can't believe he's real. I've met him. As far as I can tell, he's been studied by science. He can maintain a core body temperature even in ice. And so he set all kinds of world records for swimming under ice. And his corneas froze and he went blind swimming under the ice. Thankfully he was with a diver who was able to pull him back up. But like water that cold, cold. And so he went into a laboratory setting and they measured his internal core temperature. He can do that. He can also take like a dime sized spot in his palm and warm that up when people ask him to. They injected him with an endotoxin and he was able to muster an immune response. So everybody was like, okay, it's just you, you're a freak of nature. He's like, no, I can teach anybody to do this. So he teaches people. So anyway, this concept of tumult meditation is that basically they can control their heart rate, body temperature. So things that we would say are normally outside of the reach Houdini did.
- [67:44]
Dr. Gina Poe
Right.
- [67:45]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. I didn't know Houdini did that. But yes, things like that, that there have been sort of the rare people throughout history that have been able to do. But if through wearables, AI, we can give people a better way of doing that, that's about as close to being a superhero as I can imagine getting.
- [68:06]
Dr. Gina Poe
I agree.
- [68:07]
Tom Bilyeu
That kind of stuff is I really hope that that ends up being a thing. Another thing that's very similar to that that I've heard you talk about, I've always wanted to be able to do, and I can't. Is lucid dream. Is lucid dreaming real?
- [68:21]
Dr. Gina Poe
Oh, yeah, it's real. I don't know if it's real. Good.
- [68:28]
Tom Bilyeu
So for people that don't know what it is.
- [68:29]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [68:29]
Tom Bilyeu
What is it?
- [68:30]
Dr. Gina Poe
So it's a way to realize that you're dreaming and control your dreams or introduce a new element to it or through some studies. It says, okay, when you're in REM sleep, we're going to know, and we want you, when you hear this sound, to incorporate this thing into your dream. And when you've done it, tell us by moving your eyes in a particular pattern. So some people can do that and they can do it about a third of the time of, of when they go into REM sleep. Not all the time, but a third of the time.
- [69:03]
Tom Bilyeu
How does it not wake them up? The second I tell myself I'm dreaming, I wake up.
- [69:07]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, that's the thing.
- [69:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Do they train themselves?
- [69:12]
Dr. Gina Poe
So there is some controversy. Are they awake? Is there a good portion of their brain that is actually awake and able to respond? If you're able to respond to the outside world, hear a tone or whatever and make control your body in a way, I mean, what. How does that differentiate from wakefulness? It might actually be wakefulness. I said paradoxical sleep. REM sleep is paradoxical because your brain looks like it's awake. Well, it looks like it's awake during lucid dreaming too. So how do you know someone's still asleep? You don't. Atonia is really the only way, which is when our muscles are actively inhibited so that we don't act out our dreams. There's some indication that people who are lucid dreaming maintain that atonia. But atonia is something that could also be dissociated from sleep. People with cataplexy, you know, narcolepsy with cataplexy, they will fall down with atonia while being perfectly awake. So it's, it's controversial. Now, having said that, those dreams, people who do lucid dreaming, you know, are very vivid and they're different from daydreams. They're. They're more active, they're more vivid, I guess is the way to say it. So it might be this in between different brain state. That's not just regular REM sleep. And the reason why, I don't know if it's real good is because nobody has been able to record from the locus coeruleus, for example, or the dorsal raphe nucleus, which we know shut off during REM sleep. Do they shut off when someone's in lucid dreaming? They're awake. They're on whenever we're awake. So do they go on? Are we really. Is this state kind of hallucinogenic kind of state that's more like wakefulness and sleep? We don't know. I would caution people to be cautious with it. Don't try and do it all the time. Because in fact, if it's really more waking than sleep and it's serving sort of a waking function and not the sleep function, then you're depriving yourself of real REM sleep when you're doing it. So. And all the good things that come from real REM sleep. So I've lucid dreams, I've been able to tell I'm in a dream and change it in some way. It's great way to get rid of nightmares. But I also just let myself have a real dream and wake up and remember just part of it instead of the whole thing. And because. And so one of the new bits of research that we're doing in the laboratory is being done by a graduate student named Raquel Guthrie and another graduate student named Ward, Ward Pettibone. And what they're doing is they are seeing in animals and in humans whether or not the whole brain sleeps at the same time and is in the same sleep state at the same time. There's lots of evidence that animals that sleep unihemispherically sleep unihemispherically. One hemisphere is awake while the other is asleep. People don't do that. But we might be able to sleep one chunk of brain at a time. For example, our hippocampus, Raquel showed, in humans can be in asleep very long minutes before our cortex goes to sleep. And so what is it doing? It's. It's doing this other brainwave pattern and it's not remembering. And this is probably, although we haven't done the study yet in people, probably the reason why we don't remember what happened in the two minutes before we go to sleep. So, you know, if you're reading a book and you're falling asleep over the book, you can read the same page four times over and over. Yeah, over and over again. Right. That's because your hippocampus, your memory, you know, immediate associative memory system, is asleep. And so your cortex is, you're moving your eyes, there's the working memory is in your cortex, but it's not going into your long term memory. So does that same thing happen during REM sleep? Can your hippocampus be in REM sleep while your cortex is in slow wave sleep? Or the opposite? And maybe lucid dreaming is this thing where you can somewhat respond to the world around you because there are parts of your thalamus that's not closed. Can you remember dreams? People who can remember their dreams and tell it to you vividly, is it because their hippocampus is not asleep actually it's awake and writing those new memories in even though you know. And those who can never remember their dreams, the hippocampus is in REM sleep proper. So we don't know the answers to these yet. There aren't enough people with electrodes planted in their brain that we can ask, what did you dream and how did you change your memories? We can't ask these things of animals. So we can't say, hey, what did you dream about? We can see what their activity of their brain is. And if it's not consistent with the world immediately around them, but consistent with the world that they experienced the day before, we can say, hey, it looks like that rat is running that maze. We can't ask it. You dreaming about running the maze so
- [74:05]
Tom Bilyeu
it will actually replay the maze in its head.
- [74:08]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [74:08]
Tom Bilyeu
That's so interesting because dreams, the ones that you remember. I can't tell you a time where I have ever had a dream that was like the thing I learned I am dreaming about. It might be something I'm stressed about, but the dream is so surreal that it's like, is this about that it's good.
- [74:24]
Dr. Gina Poe
It's good that it's different. I think that's again that backing out from the literal thing to the dots again.
- [74:31]
Tom Bilyeu
So it gives you a new way to interpret, a new way to interpret things. But the rats are doing it literally.
- [74:36]
Dr. Gina Poe
Well, they do some of it literally and some of it. Sometimes they make moves that they can't make in real life. And so this is something that Ward is looking into. How do we gain insights from. From our dream state in rats? He's looking in rats. Do rats that have gained insight and shown you that they've gained insight by the performance. Did they do their dream sleep and non and non REM sleep state look differently than rats that didn't learn anything? Do the rats are the rats with ptsd, do they just replay the literal thing that happened to them? And if they didn't get ptsd, are they replaying portions of that, but also, you know, incorporating new things?
- [75:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Abstracted way?
- [75:16]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [75:17]
Tom Bilyeu
That's really interesting. Do you put much stock in dream interpretation?
- [75:22]
Dr. Gina Poe
I love dream interpretation, just because I think that it tells us how it's. It's kind of like interpreting a movie, right? It tells us how we're thinking about things. I don't think it's necessary. I think most people don't remember their dreams well enough to. But. But the stories that we make up about our dreams reflect, you know, who we are and where we are and what we're thinking.
- [75:46]
Tom Bilyeu
That's interesting. Have you ever had recurring dreams?
- [75:49]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [75:50]
Tom Bilyeu
What one? I'd love to hear what they actually were and I'd love to hear your breakdown of why. Recurring dreams. Is it something that we're struggling with?
- [75:58]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, I think it is. I think my recurring dream when I was a child was a big monster was chasing me and my feet were like, in mud. I couldn't run away from it. It was so stressful and so fearful. Fear and jealousy. Yeah, it was. It was awful. And I told my mother about it, and probably because she was listening to the mind can keep you well, she said, okay, next time you have this. That dream, do something different than you've been doing every time. This past time. These past times. And I said, okay, what should I do? She said, oh, let's see. What can you do? Think about it. And I was like, oh, I could. I could go. I could, you know, stab the monster. I could hit it. And she's like, okay, let's rehearse that. So imagine. Imagine yourself turning around and stabbing or hitting it. And so I did that. And then the next time I had that nightmare, I was too afraid to actually turn around and stab it or hit it or touch it in any way. But I was able to at least say, no, stop. And I was able to do something different. Was just something different and knocked me. I never had that recurring nightmare again. I've had other recurring dreams. Flying, for example. It's a great recurring dream. You know, it's a lot of fun. Or being able to swim underwater. You know, what's the use of that? I'm never going to be able to fly. But, you know, but maybe it has something else to do. Maybe that nightmare of the monster was about an uncontrollable force in my life that I didn't have, couldn't get away from. And so in my dream, the fact that I was able to do something against that force may have allowed me to make a difference in my waking life too. Against that thing that I didn't even know was that was the thing that I was embodying in my dream. But I could take some control over it, even if it was just saying no. So that maybe during my waking life I was able to say no to this adult that was doing something to me.
- [77:52]
Tom Bilyeu
I don't know.
- [77:53]
Dr. Gina Poe
I don't remember back then. But it can be powerful. Our minds are extremely plastic when we're in the dream state of sleep. And so even though I think the interpretation of our dreams may say more about our waking selves, I think what happens during our dreams actually can change our mind minds and can change the way we think about the world. So again, flying dreams, I don't know, maybe that's about power and about, you know, feeling in control and able to do things that you couldn't otherwise do. And so maybe it's a reflection of a sense of elation that I had about learning new things, like about the brain. Yeah.
- [78:34]
Tom Bilyeu
It's really, really intriguing. Dreams are fascinating. I don't remember nearly enough of mine.
- [78:40]
Dr. Gina Poe
You probably remember just as much as you need to.
- [78:43]
Tom Bilyeu
It's interesting. Maybe I used to remember more. And because I find dreams so interesting and because I'm such a student and fan of narrative, it's. I always love, like, they would just be so impossibly weird that, I don't know, there was something fun. And the way that time can change or the way that things melt into something else or the way that it's like, oh, I'm talking to this cocker spaniel, but I know it's actually my mom.
- [79:06]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [79:06]
Tom Bilyeu
And you're like, like, what?
- [79:08]
Dr. Gina Poe
And it changes into your mom and then changes into your girlfriend and then.
- [79:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah. It's like, yeah. So weird.
- [79:14]
Dr. Gina Poe
It is wonderful. It's weird and wonderful. And I understand why you want to, you know, remember more of your dreams because it's like a free movie that is just fun. Yeah.
- [79:23]
Tom Bilyeu
And that you are so wired into emotional that it's literally plugged into your central nervous system, which is everybody. Anybody that's into like the metaverse and stuff. Like, that's the fantasy, right? That one day, like, you'll be able to actually experience these just impossible scenarios, but actually experience them. And you do when you dream. But I so rarely remember mine now. And I've never known, like, is it because I have a high stress life and that's why I don't remember them because I used to have them a lot. And I used to. I mean, do we dream every night?
- [79:55]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [79:56]
Tom Bilyeu
No matter what?
- [79:56]
Dr. Gina Poe
No matter what.
- [79:57]
Tom Bilyeu
Okay.
- [79:57]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [79:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So I'm still dreaming clearly, but I almost never remember them.
- [80:02]
Dr. Gina Poe
It might be a really good sign that your sleep is super efficient, you know, and again, we don't know, but it's quite possible that the dreams that you remember is because your hippocampus was actually awake maybe for the last half of the dream and able to sew that working memory, all that stuff into a long term memory. And so that, that could be fine occasionally. But if you're doing it all the time.
- [80:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Right.
- [80:27]
Dr. Gina Poe
Your hippocampus is missing out on all the brain clearing things that you need to do. So. So it could be a very good sign.
- [80:34]
Tom Bilyeu
That makes sense. You've talked about the thalamus a couple times. I've heard you say in previous interviews that every time you do new research, your sense of where the consciousness is seated changes.
- [80:46]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [80:47]
Tom Bilyeu
Are we currently settled on the thalamus? Do we not know what's the.
- [80:51]
Dr. Gina Poe
No, no. I think consciousness is an emergent process and so there's no one area that controls it. It.
- [81:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Is it a complexity thing? You stack enough neurons and you're eventually going to get to consciousness?
- [81:04]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah, yeah, I think so. And so I think, outstanding question still is, can an ant be conscious or is it an ant colony that's conscious? Is it all of these individual players working together is. Yeah. Is a beehive conscious? How does you know? We transfer information one beef to the next and then you see them pulling pulse. Yeah.
- [81:28]
Tom Bilyeu
Hard to say that they're not connected pretty rapidly.
- [81:30]
Dr. Gina Poe
Right? Yeah. And if you look at an individual neuron migrating to the spot it's going to go, you can say, well, that that looks like a conscious being. It's making decisions, it's putting out its filipodia here, there, and then it's saying, nah, not that one. I'm going to go up here and then I'm going to go over there and it looks like you're watching a snail, you know, go to the food or something like that, or a place of safety. And then if you think of, you know, the billions of neurons you have in your brain as each independent, you know, entities, then, then you think of it a city as your brain is a city or a universe rather than an individual.
- [82:09]
Tom Bilyeu
I actually have a quote that I wrote down of you saying that. Yeah, yeah, this is, I find this really interesting. You said, and I quote, it's almost like your brain is filled with billions of individuals making decisions and talking to one another. It's almost as if our brain is a city or even a universe full of communicating entities that do different tasks. Yeah, yeah, that's heavy.
- [82:33]
Dr. Gina Poe
And so how does that brain filled with independent entities, direct our body to do anything? To be sitting here talking to you today, it takes. I don't know if it's just majority rules or what it is. Where is the will? We have no idea. But we do know will has a lot to do with things. For example, the belief that you can change can make all the difference in the world between whether you do change. Where does that belief come from? What is it that believes? Is it the consciousness of all of these entities saying, you know what? We're just going to it, you know, there's no little man in our head saying, you know, this is what we're going to do now. This, this is what we are. We're made of all these billions of neurons.
- [83:26]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, yeah, that, that's a trip to me. The. It's interesting. I did not expect this theme to emerge in this conversation, but the idea of the metronome of something that is conducting all of these incredibly complex, complex things. But when you think about each neuron really fighting for its own survival, looking for a connection, being self directed in some way that I imagine we don't fully understand at this point, it's really interesting that a self emergence. Now the. One of the things that I find, uh, terrily fascinating about the brain is that if you cut the corpus callosum, the thing that connects the two hemispheres, for those that don't know, know, you'll get two personalities. That's weird.
- [84:12]
Dr. Gina Poe
It is crazy, isn't it? I mean, it's amazing. And yeah, the, the studies are so revealing about what, what consciousness is.
- [84:24]
Tom Bilyeu
What do you take away from it? How do you interpret that data?
- [84:27]
Dr. Gina Poe
Well, you know, we do know there is lateralization to function. Like our language for the most of us is in the left hemisphere and our spatial relations is in the right hemisphere. And the idea that these two areas, one can dominate the other and make it do what it wants is really interesting. So one of those corpus callosum studies, a man was describing trying to dress himself in the morning and button up his shirt. And while his right hand was buttoning, his left hand was uneven buttoning. So like these two consciousness. And does that mean that the left hemisphere just didn't know what the right hemisphere is doing? Just said, hey, why is my shirt, you know, why, why is it coming together? I Want to go to bed is the right hemisphere. Want to go to bed. And left hemisphere wants to go out into the world. You know, I don't. I don't know. Because the right hemisphere doesn't have the language when he talks about it. He talks about what? What he was trying to button up his shirt. He says, I was trying to button my shirt. If you were able to speak to his right hemisphere, would it say, oh, yeah, that was. Was silly. I was trying to go to bed. Right.
- [85:42]
Tom Bilyeu
It was interesting. One of the studies that I heard about the. One of the hemispheres was deeply religious and the other was a pure atheist. I was like, wow, man in the same brain. And so you begin to realize that this is a competition of perhaps rivals going on in the brain, that there is some mechanism, whether it's majority rule or what. But something is happening and it has happen so fast that you're unaware of it.
- [86:07]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [86:08]
Tom Bilyeu
And I feel like a stable me. I feel a sense of I have a self. And like, this is one thing I've often thought about with alcohol is. And look, I've never been blind drunk the way a lot of people have, but I've never not felt like me.
- [86:26]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [86:27]
Tom Bilyeu
I've always felt, I call this my overwatch mechanism. I've always felt like there's a me version above. Like I feel the silly impulses the way that everybody is. Else says, but I feel like I've got a guy sort of riding above it all. Yeah, that's me.
- [86:39]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [86:40]
Tom Bilyeu
And so that idea, knowing that it's actually super false and my brain is billions of these somehow cooperating things that come to some kind of consensus and can move me forward and cause me to react to. So like, if I see a hose out of the corner of mine, I think it's a snake. I'll jump back like so fast.
- [87:02]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [87:03]
Tom Bilyeu
Or pulling your hand back from something that's hot before you have any sort of conscious awareness.
- [87:07]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [87:09]
Tom Bilyeu
So weird. It is our a trip.
- [87:11]
Dr. Gina Poe
I think it's incredible everything that you said. Also it's incredible that we wake up still me in the morning, considering how much is going on in our brains, how different our brains are when we fall asleep, how much plasticity happens with REM sleep. How do we wake up still knowing who we are and feeling like we're the same person. Yeah.
- [87:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Especially when I think about.
- [87:36]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. How do we recognize a childhood friend is like, oh, yeah, you're the same. How do we say you're the same? It's been 30 years since we saw them 40 years. And how do we know that maybe they aren't. Maybe you both have changed together and that's why you recognize them. I don't know. Anyway, go ahead.
- [87:54]
Tom Bilyeu
What were you going to say? No, just that you have a sense every cell in your body is turning over, but there is a sense of you that does stay the same.
- [88:03]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [88:03]
Tom Bilyeu
I've thought about this. With skin, like if you get a sunspot or a liver spot or whatever they're called, every cell in your body's turning over, but somehow that stays.
- [88:12]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah.
- [88:13]
Tom Bilyeu
So like there's scars.
- [88:14]
Dr. Gina Poe
Stay.
- [88:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Scars I sort of get. Do the cells turn over in a scar? I guess they must. Right? That's interesting.
- [88:21]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, I just recently learned from Aaron Schumann, who's in Germany, that the rate at which proteins turnover in our brains. So, you know, every seven days.
- [88:35]
Tom Bilyeu
Whoa.
- [88:36]
Dr. Gina Poe
You know, our neurons are different because our. Every protein is turned over. So that's startling. Yeah, it is.
- [88:43]
Tom Bilyeu
Wow.
- [88:43]
Dr. Gina Poe
And I'd heard it was every seven years, which is still incredible. Right. But. And so there must be something that's slower than protein turnover, that takes longer.
- [88:52]
Tom Bilyeu
But you know, that's really interesting. That must have implications in terms of neurodegenerative disease. Like if you could harden, halt whatever is breaking down and make sure that the next round is healthy. That's actually really encouraging from like a stem cell standpoint, if things are turning over that fast, obviously I have no idea if that's going to end up being productive or not, but.
- [89:14]
Dr. Gina Poe
Oh, very well.
- [89:15]
Tom Bilyeu
Could be really interesting.
- [89:16]
Dr. Gina Poe
Yeah. Yeah.
- [89:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Gina, this is utterly fascinating. Where can people follow you?
- [89:21]
Dr. Gina Poe
I have. I have my own lab website. I don't update it as often as I should, so instead if you want to go to the department at ucla, it's the Integrative Biology and Physiology or just ibp ucla Edu. I will make sure that my lab website is tied to that and is linked. But my department's full of really great people doing super fascinating research. And so I and all UCLA is, I'm also part of the Brain Research Institute. Bri. Ucla. Edu. But either way, IBP is. Is fine. Yeah, I love it. Yeah.
- [89:58]
Tom Bilyeu
Thank you guys. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. And until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Peace.
- [90:04]
Grainger University Maintenance Announcer
If you work in university maintenance, Grainger considers you an MVP because your playbook ensures your arena is always ready for tip off. And Grainger is your trusted partner, offering the products you need all in one place, from H Vac and plumbing supplies to lighting and more, and all delivered with plenty of time left on the clock, so your team always gets the win. Call 1-800-granger. Visit grainger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done.