Joe Rogan Experience #1109 - Matthew Walker

A very small fraction (<<1%) of the population has a genetic variant that may allow them to survive with less sleep according to Matthew Walker, who runs a center for sleep research at UC Berkeley. It is discussed in his book or you can watch him talk about it here: this video Wishing you the best in getting the benefits of less sleep without any health consequences. You might want to contact him to discuss.

Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, says sleep aids like Ambien are counter-productive. link "Dangers aside, Ambien and other hypnotics don’t necessarily provide you the kind of sleep your body actually needs. In his book, “Why We Sleep,” Matthew Walker, director of the Center for Human Sleep Science at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that the sleep people get from taking hypnotics doesn’t have the same restorative quality as natural sleep. In an interview with New York Magazine, Walker explains that drugs like Ambien simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain, and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” The drugs actually sedate you, he says, and “sedation is not sleep.” The good news for those who desperately crave sleep is that a variety of techniques and methods can help you achieve a blissful state of slumber without prescription medications. Here’s a look at some good ways to reboot your sleep cycle. ..." Discussed at length in his book: link Also mentioned in this review: link "At last comes an explanation: According to the new book Why We Sleep, by Matthew Walker, the director of the Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab at the University of California, Berkeley, the sleep people get on sleeping pills like Ambien is not true sleep. Drugs like these simply “switch off the top of your cortex, the top of your brain,” he explained to New York Magazine, “and put you into a state of unconsciousness.” That’s not sleep; that’s cryogenics. Accordi

It'll likely be the nth time Matthew Walker is cited here, but in his interview with Joe Rogan, he mentions this is likely a societal trend rather than a biological need: this video > Joe Rogan: Yeah, I've heard this recently, that people - that you should have two sleeps. The idea of two sleeps. > Matthew Walker: Yeah, it's actually a little different than the idea of two sleeps. So there was a time in the sort of Dickensian era where people would sleep for the first half of the night, maybe sort of 4 hours or so. Then they would wake up, they would socialize, they would eat, they would make love, then they would go back and have a second sleep. If you look at natural biological rhythms in the brain and the body, that doesn't really seem to be how we were designed. It certainly seems to be something that we did in society, but I think it's more of a societal trend than it was a biological edict. However, we do seem to have two sleep periods. Those tribes will often sleep about 6.5, 7 hours of sleep at night. And then especially in the summer they'll have that siesta like behavior in the afternoon. And all of us have that, sort of this - what's called the post-prandial dip in alertness, just means "after lunch" - and if I measure your brainwave activity with electrodes, I can see a drop in your physiological alertness somewhere between 2 to 4 pm in the afternoon [irrespective of diet].

Try to sleep 8 to 9 hours every day. In this JRE podcast [0], Matthew Walker, a sleep expert, claimed that sleeping poorly can decrease your performance by 30%. Strive to maintain a good work-life balance. Burnout sucks. Your health and family are more important than work. A workplace that doesn't consider this to be the case is likely to be toxic. As for actual software development advice... Beware blanket statements. They can help you develop a low-resolution model so you don't suffer from paralysis, but real-world problems tend to be complex and messy. Here's an example: if you were building a traditional web app, many software engineers would probably suggest using something like PostgreSQL. That doesn't mean other database technologies don't have their place. However, PostgreSQL is able to adequately serve a large category of problems with relative ease, so it often makes for a sensible starting point. Once you become more familiarized with that domain you'll develop a higher-resolution model and you can begin to evaluate other technologies more effectively. Much of software engineering is about figuring out what tradeoffs to make. Another example in traditional web apps is using cookies for auth. Using cookies for this purpose is well documented and pretty much supported everywhere. There's plenty of known problems with using cookies for this purpose, but the alternatives also have their own set of issues to deal with. My final example: testing. Testing your code is gre

I remember listening Rogan's podcast on the subject of sleep with Matthew Walker, who is a professor of Neuroscience at Berkley. Hopefully I'm not making stuff up as it's been a while, but he talked about a study where each subject was given a task to learn while their brain activity was being recorded. The study found that the same areas of the brain that flared up during the learning and memorization processes were also very active during sleep, as if the brain was replaying the same activity over and over again. Edit: adding link to the podcast if anyone's interested - this video

Oh yes, definitely. Another one from these experts is Valter Longo with his book "The Longevity Diet". All three of them were interviewed by Rhonda Patrick link for people who like to watch/listen before reading. Matthew was also a guest in Joe Rogan Experience this video