The Science of Sleep: Melatonin to Neural Pathways

36 thoughts on “The Science of Sleep: Melatonin to Neural Pathways”

1. Apparently the cortisol signal is a PWM signal.

2. So, any research into ideal sleep cycle? Is 24h the best one? (In an environemnt with no sun cycles, like a space station or submarine)

   Also, do we need to have 8h sleep cycles? What's ideal?

3. Some High-trim in the audio maybe ?

4. The guy looks like Simon Cowell.

5. I wish your videos weren't so quiet, if im using a mobile device I have to use headphones.

6. My ears popped at 5:44.

7. Just a minute or so in and I'm sure about how I feel when he says the LHC discoveries don't or won't affect us in our daily lives. That probably has to be either the worst analogy ever or the greatest misunderstanding ever.

8. This is all sensible and scientific information but what about polyphasic sleep?? How messed up are these people? Can you train to be polyphasic if you wish?

9. .

10. Ouch. What a bad analogy that the LHC will not affect everyday life. Abstract ideas like Einsteins relativity could be blamed for everything from Rock and Roll to Magical Realism. I suspect that if the LHC finds anything other than the Higgs Boson it will change a lot more than the patronizing compere can even imagine. Why is Britain so anti science and dumbed down? We shoot ourselves in the foot repeatedly with this sort of thing. We are not stupid people with no knowledge of science and technology, and if we are it is about time we started learning.

    Brilliant subject matter and information in the talk of course.

11. Bravo Ri! You are doing great work with science communication. Yet another great lecture, thank you.

    May the spirit of the christmas lectures never die!

12. The white design of the YouTube page is messing with my sleep…

13. The revelation that rods and cones are not the only light sensitive cells in the eye blew my mind all over the walls and carpet.

14. Will there be a Q&A video uploaded?

15. I stopped watching when he dissed particle accelerators

16. Thank you for this information, both educational and informative. It is this kind of video that I'm always searching for. It is important that we get information and not opinions which are usually based on conclusions. Thanks!

17. Watching this at 5:39am. Anyone else have dsps?

18. thank you very much for the lesson!

19. thank you guys for this amazing video!

20. What an astonishing video, how does this not have more views? So great!

21. People are missing out ! This is incredible information, exactly the one I've been waiting for years, ever since I lost my capacity to sleep well . The study should go on, because exactly like with the blind people I've experienced the same delay on my circadian rhythm because of too much blue light (laptop!) . So it seems that either no light receptors, or too much blue light in healthy people produce the same effects which in my case led to long depressions and mental incapacities. For people who think this isn't helping our day to day life, let me tell you that this is exactly what I was waiting for , as sleeping pills only made me sleep but be always tired and sleepy thoughout the day as well and forcing myself into a "good rhythm" led to massie jetleg which I knew but until now there had been no science behind it. Now I finally know why everytime I visit people with different patterns than my own I need about 2 weeks to recover! Everything they are talking about I have experienced and now I know why which is incredible !! I only now realize how sleep deprived I truly am !! so I can only now give my brain the rest it truly needs and I already feel much better. (F.lux is a great App to dim down the blue light until the screen is completely yellow at night time which automatically makes me want to sleep so badly that is impossible to stay awake, when before I would stay til even 6 AM in the morning !!)

22. Debra Skene does a great job of packing a lot of information about melatonin into 15 minutes. But she cuts a couple of small corners. First of all, the PRCs she presents are dose-specific PRCs. Every dosing regime is associated with a slightly different curve. 1 mg of sublingual melatonin has a significantly different PRC from 1 mg of sustained-release melatonin taken as a capsule. This is also true for the intensity and duration of the light stimulus for the light PRC. None of the PRC charts in this presentation can be interpreted in specific terms, because the dose protocol is not summarized (though I'm sure it can be found in the original sources, which are all indicated).

    My second point is that when she says "all" the circadian disorders, she means the structured circadian disorders, where the clock functions normally, but for one reason or another tends not to keep a desirable phase relationship to the diurnal light/dark cycle. There also exists disorders of the clock itself, where it fails to produce a properly structured 24-hour (ish) rhythm of any kind, or at least the right kind.

    I've managed to treat my own sighted N24-disorder with sustained-release melatonin capsules in the mid-afternoon, typically 15:30. (No single dose of any non-sustained melatonin at any dosage fully corrected my disorder. I spent three years working through the many permutations and combinations, intensely frustrated at having 80–90% of a solution, which still left me drifting an hour or two per week.) Untreated, I experience something worse than mere drift. My clock also seemed to lose structure every second week as I drifted around the clock, to where I was just a shell of my normal self on the back side of my cycle. This remained true no matter how many solid hours I slept during the day (and I had a drug which knocked me into a wonderfully deep sleep, and even though this had the same effect no matter when I took it, it only seemed to repair sleep debt on the day-mode side of my two-week cycle).

    Among the small, sighted N24 population, the failure modes tend toward the idiosyncratic. Mine certainly did. And it's only successfully treated now, after thirty years of struggle, because of valiant researchers like Debra Skene.

    Imagine your life is like Groundhog Day, only it's actually more like Lost in Translation running in reverse, with your jet lag daily getting ever worse, until you're a shell of a shell of your normal self, averaging one full week of accumulating jet lag hell out of every two or three week period. Well, I've been told, everybody goes without sleep some of the time. True. But it has all the wisdom of telling a haemophiliac impeded by a blackberry patch to stop breaking off each and every thorn and get on with with crashing through, because everybody bleeds sometimes.

    Normal people take the 24 hour day for granting, and they also take for granted the clock's natural self-repair after going full-on exam-week drunken meth-head party animal. I take one eye off my circadian clock, it dives into the thick underbrush like a hallucinating truffle boar. And then it takes me a full three weeks of unbroken vigilance to coax that greased pig back into his proper cage again.

    Greased-truffle-boar non-24-hour sleep-wake disorder in normally sighted subjects is not yet an official diagnosis in the DSM. But trust me, I'm working on it.

23. What ever purpose God has for us, how does God account for the disruption to our trains of thought that having to sleep causes? It is like having to turn your computer on and off every 30 minutes, but not only that; but when you sleep, you forget a lot of stuff. It would be better if we didn't need to sleep.

24. Superb lectures, incompetent editing. What is the point exactly of showing a room full of people staring at a screen at 13:20 and not showing us the screen that's being referred to by the speaker?

25. Wish I had come across these researchers when I was really struggling to sleep AT ALL. Everyone seemed to think I was joking. That I would surely catch up once I’d been up a night or two. A bit of ‘microsleep’ here and there would make sure I was okay for the problem was surely in my head. There was no insight from anybody about the correlation between chronic stress related illness and insomnia. All I got from the NHS through the Royal London Hospital of Integrated Medicine was an inane recommendation to stick with one drug only (Zopiclone, which was no longer working for me) and read an insipid book about CBT for insomniacs. Apparently all I had to do was dissociate the bed from anything but sleep.

26. My son, 28 and an electrical engineer, does internet all night and sleeps all day, his feeding is disrupted and displays a lots of abnormality. Can anyone tell me please, if melatonin will restore his normal cycle (rhythm)?

27. @48:27 The eye diagram looks like a logic matrix between the rods, and the optic nerve… They seem to be wired in a series, and then parallel, series again, parallel again, like it's compressing data similer to a .wav file being encoded to an .mp3 file, then off to the optic nerve.

28. Just one minute in
    and he's wrong.

29. Thanks a lot for posting this 🙂 <3

30. The research shows that meditation, darker light increase Melatonin content, that is the hormomes for sleep

31. Introducer has similar face structure as Morrissey

32. why are most long lectures on YouTube done by brits?

33. Layperson here. Learned absolutely nothing. YAWN.

34. Apparently the first speaker expected everyone to respect him and listen to him after he insists an entire branch of science in the first minute. TRI should edit that bit out

35. My favourite stutter is the one when he says "your your your", it sounds like a broken record.

36. How do they test cortisol levels during sleep without allowing the testing to influence the quality of sleep and resulting cortisol levels?

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