By playing, you agree to uListen's Terms and Privacy Policy and YouTube's Terms of Service.
Dr Rangan Chatterjee#1 Brain Surgeon: What Your Dreams Are Trying To Tell You About Yourself | Rahul Jandial
Summaries, chapters, transcripts, and FAQs on this page are made by uListen, not YouTube.
Great conversations run long. Their best ideas don't have to.
uListen is free on iPhone, iPad, Android, Chrome, and Claude.
See howTranscript
115 min read · 22,500 wordsWhy We Sleep So the Brain Can Dream
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:00 In your new book, This Is Why You Dream, you make the bold assertion-
Dr Rahul Jandial 0:06 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 0:06 ... that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream.
Dr Rahul Jandial 0:13 I do, yeah. And I think, um, what's helped me with this book is to really think about in a way where it could be a conversation in any form, so a pub over here, Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles, because dreams are for everyone. They are inside everyone. They pop up in everyone. Even if people say they don't dream, I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is. We all know what that is. Um, so I wanted to do it in a way where I could make statements that were, uh, profound and then go into the science that backs them up or also elaborate on the gaps in the science, but why it's likely to be true if it ever can be fully understood, and many things will not be. So that statement, I believe we sleep in order to dream. I believe we sleep, um, because the brain must dream, and we can get into that in the next little while. But the easiest way for me to say where I come to that conclusion is from the glimpses of transplant surgery, neuroscience, what happens when we go a day or two without sleeping. As a medic or as a surgeon, you know what that is. So the first thing is, um, there's something that builds up. It's called sleep pressure. We don't ask to sleep. We don't request to sleep, and if we try not to sleep after a day or two, sleep has to happen. Uh, the second thing is dreaming is a robust electrical and metabolic activity that happens in the dreaming brain, which is liberated during sleep. So when we think of our brains, they're not on/off, and they're definitely not off while we're sleeping. The metabolic activity, the usage of glucose, the measurements of electricity are robust while we sleep. Our bodies are sleeping, but our brains are not resting.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:13 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:13 Our brains are not sleeping. The dreaming brain and the waking brain, at times, the electrical activity can be so similar that it was called paradoxical sleep. So the first, first thing we all have to accept as a measurement, not my opinion, is that the brain is not quiet while we sleep. The brain is not resting while we sleep. The brain is doing something very fundamental because it forces us to sleep, and the s- and what happens when we sleep is that the electrical activity in the brain is something distinct, uh, from the electrical activity during waking life because different regions, uh, are dominant while we sleep. The dreaming brain fires up the imagination network, if you will, and logic is dampened. That's a measurement on fMRI. The waking brain has more executive network function, and we can get into that, and less, uh, imagination network function. So even though the electrical activity can be similar, if not identical, it's generated by very different ensembles of neurons-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 3:22 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 3:22 ... in, in the dreaming brain and the waking brain. So when you start to look at all of this process that sleep puts us down, sleep... We'll take risk to sleep. What happens when we sleep? Our brains are on fire, w- right? I put livers into other people. We don't reconnect the nerves. Sleep isn't really for the liver in some fundamental way. Yes, there are some metabolic changes that happen during sleep and, and those benefit people, but the massive thing happening in the sleeping body is the brain is throbbing with glucose usage and metabolic activity and electrical activity. So when I look at that, it makes me think that the process of sleep is for the benefit of dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:03 Yeah. It's so powerful. If we think about what happens in our body through an evolutionary lens-
Dr Rahul Jandial 4:11 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 4:11 ... the fact that certain parts of our brain are more metabolically active when we sleep, and in particular, when we are dreaming, it's hard not to make the case that dreaming therefore must serve a very powerful function for us, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 4:29 Right. If you go without sleep a day or two, then what the dreaming brain... And throughout this conversation, um, you know, some of the fundament- the foundations of conversation I wanna have with you and your listeners, and I thank you for this opportunity, is to walk away with things that are... Like, that's measurement. That's a, that's a fact. That's not a study show or an interpretation. It's a fact that in a twenty-four-hour cycle, your brain is active throughout. There's blood flow throughout, okay? It's just a question of there are two very different brain states, the waking brain and the dreaming brain, and if we go a day or two without sleep, when we are forced to sleep, something builds up inside us, dream pressure, sleep pressure. The dreaming starts to happen earlier in that sleep, so it's almost like it's waiting to get out.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:24 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 5:24 The vivid dreams and REM stages change when you go a day or two without sleep and then end up falling asleep. So it almost feels like there's something building up that must occur because when the brain goes without it a day or two, it jumps off earlier. So those kind of conceptual things are my interpretations, but it's a measurement that the activity is robust while we sleep in our dreaming brains.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 5:47 Is there any merit to the viewpoint that if certain parts of our brain are more active when we are asleep, and in particular, when we're dreaming, are those the same areas that might be, I guess, less active and then- You could argue resting during the day?
Dr Rahul Jandial 6:05 Mm. Mm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:05 Because can we have an organ that's going-
Dr Rahul Jandial 6:08 Hot all the time?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:09 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 6:09 Good question. Yeah. Perfect question. I had this conversation with my son, um, and he says that it's a great question because wait a second, you're saying waking brain and dreaming brain are both ac- active, both hot. But you just... You're also saying that certain partons are dampened, certain parts are dampened, certain regions are dampened.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 6:29 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 6:29 So then how can they be even? So just bear with me there. The waking brain, um, and, and this, these are established neuroscience concepts. This, this, what I'm about to say is well-known in neuroscience. The waking brain is executive network dominant. The executive network is a collection of structures throughout the brain, from evolutionary old parts of the brain, like the reptilian brain, to the modern parts of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex, that have pushed our foreheads forward. They're all connected, and they f- but they provide a certain function. Uh, much like if we talked about, uh, finance, there would be different parts of London and UK, but they would all fu- function as a finance industry.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:11 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 7:11 Well, the executive network is the dominant network while we're awake. It's focused on what's called task on. It's looking for things to do outside. It's using reason, it's using logic. That makes sense. When we go from waking brain to dreaming brain, this is a measurement, the executive network is dampened.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:31 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 7:32 Okay? So then if things are robust equally, then something must be heightened in the dreaming brain, and that's the point you're getting to, and that's really where the magic, in my mind, and beauty of dreaming is, that it's a... What- what compensates for the dampened executive network is the limbic system, which is emotional networks-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 7:52 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 7:52 ... as well as the imagination network, which other people call default mode network, but I call it the imagination network. So you have a hyper-emotional, hyper-visual dreaming brain, and, and you have dampened logic in the dreaming brain. Now, the massive point here, another measurement is, the degree to which emotions, not in every dream, not in your dream or not in my dream, but in some dreams, the top speed of emotions i- in the dreaming brain is higher than what we could ever feel, uh, emotionally in our waking brains.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:23 Right.
Dr Rahul Jandial 8:23 And that's an fMRI measurement of metabolic usage. So-
fMRI, EEG and Patient Stories: Tools for Studying Dreams
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:27 Just explain fMRI for people who don't know what that is.
Dr Rahul Jandial 8:30 Mm. Sure. So when we talk, uh... And why we're here is because for the first time in the last twenty years, we have exotic brain imaging that's giving us a glimpse-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 8:36 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 8:36 ... into dreaming that we, we never had before. Aristotle's talking about it two thousand years ago. Everybody's curious about it. But so when I, when I say measurements, there are three essential measurements of brain function we have now. fMRI is, uh, there's no radiation with it, so, you know, uh, when my wife was pregnant and she needed some imaging, she had an MRI. So neuroscientists can recruit people to study them without-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:00 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 9:00 ... injuring them. So that's why you're hearing that word quite a bit. Uh, an MRI is a, it's a functional MRI, and when you perform a task, the slight changes in, in blood flow, uh, the connection being that if these regions are more actively engaged in that task, they'll have a little bit more trickle of blood flow. So fMRI looks at, uh, metabolic usage in some sense through blood flow.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:24 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 9:24 Then the other thing we should know is you can measure electricity with scalp electrodes called an EEG. What I try to tell people is, think of it, we put an electrode on the heart, and that's an EKG.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:34 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 9:34 We all get that, right? That little classic squiggle.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:36 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 9:36 What if we put ninety-six on our scalp? You'll record something else. So those two, I think, are, are the essential f- essential studies we're using, uh, to understand dreaming and to understand a waking brain, 'cause there's no conversation without having an understanding of both. And then the last thing is patient stories, things you understand, too.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 9:56 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 9:56 Like, you can't, you can't not include the fact that o- on some rare exotic surgeries that where we remove half the brain in a child, uh, for seizures, they still dream. You know, like, that's an important part. We don't have to only rely on fMRI and EEG, right? We don't have to only re- rely on fancy pictures and measurements of electricity. Uh, we can, we can also rely on some of the stories from, from patients.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:22 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 10:22 Uh, so those three things are what I'm using to, uh, put this love letter together to dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:27 Yeah. That's, that's a beautiful way of looking at it, the love letter you put together for dreaming. You, you just used the word magic, and I love the term magic. It's not a term you would necessarily associate with a neurosurgeon or a neuroscientist.
Dr Rahul Jandial 10:44 With a neuroscientist.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:44 Right? And I think that speaks to something really powerful about dreaming. There is a mystery to dreaming that we all know. You know, what do our dreams mean, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 10:53 Right. Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 10:53 What was it that I dreamt about last night? What does that actually mean? Does it mean anything? Can dreams help us predict the future? All these kind of things that people will say cultures have written about and reported for years, but I love the fact that as a neurosurgeon, you're using the word magic when you're talking about the, this mystery of dreaming.
Dr Rahul Jandial 11:13 Yeah. I think, um, you know, first of all, thank you, um, because, um, this is just giving me space to, uh, to move around with thoughts and also qualify and also say, say things like magic. And-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:29 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 11:29 ... and, and I think it, I think it works for me because we just, we just opened with a few minutes of, "Look, we're gonna take this apart in a really scientific way." Right? We've got tools now. We're measuring with fMRIs and pretty brain imaging. We're measuring electricity. I'm talking about measurements and interpretation and executive network and imagination network. We did some, some introduction to the foundations of the science, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 11:50 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 11:51 Dreams, sleep pressure. Um, but then I just need everybody to know, I hope that when you see or learn a little bit about the science of dreaming, you'll be left in more awe of dreams. You know, that- That learning just a glimpse of how they may be working and the patterns, uh, that have, ha- have been there since antiquity that are now partially explicable, you leave with a sense of... You leave more impressed.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:18 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 12:18 It does feel like magic when you take actually a scientific glimpse at it, because there will always be gaps. I'm not that guy who's here saying, "Aha, I got dreaming figured out." No. I'm just offering you a, a perspective that hasn't been offered in a long time, and I look forward to more dream information, not just the, the measurements, the, the hardcore neuroscience I'm talking about. But as more people contribute based on different sexuality, based on different gender, into what they're dreaming, as we get more surveys and questionnaires and see more patterns, there'll be more interesting linkages with the patterns-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:54 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 12:54 ... of dreaming and the patterns of brain activation while dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 12:58 Yeah. It's fascinating.
Survey Limits and Why We Rarely Dream of Math
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:00 You mentioned surveys there.
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:02 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:02 And you, you refer to surveys quite a lot in the book about what people are saying-
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:07 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:07 ... when we ask them about their dreams, and it made me think that, are we always gonna be missing something with surveys? Because presumably, the people who fill them in and are able to articulate-
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:23 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:23 ... what they dreamt about, that's an inherent bias there, isn't there?
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:27 Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:27 Because the people who can't remember their dreams are probably not filling in those surveys.
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:32 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:32 I mean, it's a tricky one to get around, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:34 Well, a- and that's, that's sort of an insight people who, um, who look at science fairly want to present. They want to present how it's done so the listener can understand what are the limitations.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:51 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:51 W- I, I don't want to conceal the limitations. We are working with something that's... It's elusive. It's like trying to grab, you know, like a cloud or something.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 13:59 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 13:59 And you're exactly right that when we talk about surveys and questionnaires, I, I use that rather than studies-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:07 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 14:07 ... because a lot of the patterns of what we dream, okay, and how we dream is the brain stuff. What we dream is, what have people been saying for thousands of years? What, what did Aristotle say about lucid dreaming? Um, why did people start reporting more color dream, color-filled dreams once TV went from black and white to color?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 14:28 Is that really what happened?
Dr Rahul Jandial 14:29 Yeah. That, so that's out there as a survey. Now, we... Now, you and I can explore is there brain science that links to that and what it means. But so when I say surveys or measurements, now we're at... Now we have a good platform. So that's one thing. Why do people in these surveys across the last... They're called dream reports, so people have been waking people up [laughs] while they're asleep. "What are you dreaming about?" Writing it down. So they're, they're trying to not just do it on the, on the backend of somebody saying, "Last night, I think I dreamt of this." They're, they're trying to be a bit more rigorous and having people in sleep labs in different stages of sleep, waking them up and saying, "What are you dreaming about?" They're, they're trying. It'll always be an incomplete picture-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:11 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 15:11 ... of course, but w- let's work with what we have-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:15 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 15:15 ... because we have something more than we've had in a long time. And so another thing that I noticed there, the color TV thing threw me off. Like, imagine me reading this, like, uh, I had, like... I was pulling from so many different... I was pulling from everything. Like, there were... There's no... You don't type in dream science. I mean, I was looking at cognitive neuroscience, looking at how penguins have [laughs] 5,000 episodes of sleep or whatever high number they have.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:37 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 15:37 I was really trying to survey a lot of science, uh, to understand this, and the, the fact that the dream reports rarely... I mean, somebody's dream may have math, but when you look at 10,000 dreams, not your dream, not my dream.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:53 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 15:53 But when you look at a lot of dreams, math is rarely reported.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 15:57 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 15:58 Okay? So I said, "Okay, that's interesting." And then you look at the brain picture of somebody who's asleep or in REM stage of sleep with vivid dreaming and when they're startled awake and they report they were dreaming, the region of the brain, specifically the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, people don't need to worry about that, but they're like, it's the area, like, where horns would be. It's a part of that most, you know, new part of your brain, if you will. That is the part that's dampened in dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:25 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 16:25 Remember I said dreams are hyperemotional, hypervisual, and dampened logic? So that makes sense because when patients have injury in that area, they struggle with math. So you start to see the connection. Okay.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:36 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 16:37 The areas that are less robustly engaged in the dreaming brain, the things that part of the dreaming brain would kind of do don't really show up in dream reports, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:46 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 16:46 So imagine me seeing that, like, a year and a half ago, and I was like, "Oh, wow, that's-"
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:50 I mean, that's pretty profound, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 16:52 Just that, that by itself is profound, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:54 People don't tend to dream about maths.
Dr Rahul Jandial 16:56 That's... And there's a brain scan that we could use to explain why.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 16:59 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 16:59 Mic drop.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:00 Yeah. It really is-
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:00 That's my contribution
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:01 ... you know, the prefrontal cortex, the dorsolateral part of it, is where we do our maths.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:05 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:06 That is shut down at night.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:07 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:08 So of course we don't.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:09 See, uh, now some- somebody should write in and say, "No, I do math." I get that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:12 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:12 We're not saying it can't happen, but the patterns start to take some shape, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:17 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:17 I mean, that, I felt that when I first... I saw this about a year and a half ago. I was looking at it and I said, "Huh." Even if that's the only thing I can contribute to the world, like-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:28 Well, that's massive
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:29 ... Rahul's like, he kind of explained why a lot of people don't talk about math in their dreams, 'cause it fits with the-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:34 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:34 ... a lower metabolic usage in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, in the sleeping/dreaming brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:40 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:40 Like, ah, Rahul Jandial. I'm cool with that 'cause it just shows that it's possible.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:44 It is possible.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:45 And then everybody else that follows me can say, "Hey, we have more surveys. We have more neuroscience 20, 30 years from now." But maybe-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:52 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:52 ... you know, somebody listening now is gonna be like, "Hey, the, just the fact that even anything about dreaming could be explained."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 17:59 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 17:59 I mean, just one single thing.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:00 Yeah, it is amazing.
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:01 It's massive to me.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:02 You know,
Noradrenaline, Divergent Thinking and the Book as a Dream
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:02 one thing I learned yesterday when I was researching for our conversations, reading your book, I was looking up all kinds of papers, just trying to build up this picture of dreaming and sleep, and I- I came across some research which suggested that during REM sleep, REM sleep-
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:19 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:19 ... the part of the sleep cycle where these vivid-
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:23 Typically, but yes
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:24 ... ty- typically, yeah, we'll, we'll get to that, the, the, where these dreams happen. Apparently, it's the only part of the day or night where we have no noradrenaline in the brain, which I found fascinating 'cause noradrenaline is a, is a stress hormone.
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:39 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:40 It helps us focus. It sort of narrows things down for us. We're focusing on the task at hand.
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:45 Detects the signal out of the noise.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:47 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:48 As you would want if-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:49 Exactly
Dr Rahul Jandial 18:49 ... you're in the day dealing with a task or a threat.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 18:51 Yeah. Whereas if, if it's true, which I think it is, that m- it's the only time where the brain doesn't have any noradrenaline bathing around it, then it kind of makes sense. Well, that would then allow us to be broad and imaginative because the noradrenaline's not there to focus us. So instead of more signal, uh, to noise, maybe, maybe it's the flip side, more noise-
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:14 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:14 ... and less signal.
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:15 Divergent thinking.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:16 Divergent thinking.
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:16 So let me just, let me just get into that r- It's the fact that our brains have lower adrenaline or noradrenaline, uh, during sleep and dreaming, that's a measurement.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:26 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:27 The interpretation or the opinion-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:30 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:30 ... the conversation we're having now, and I welcome everybody to. I mean, if somebody's got a better idea of... That, to me, that's consistent with the way our dreaming brain thinks-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:41 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:41 ... feels, um, connects dots not so closely, looks for wider associations because it's now permitting the noise to have a bit of space.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 19:51 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 19:52 That's divergent thinking, right? So when you talk about convergent thinking and divergent thinking, convergent thinking is a type of thinking like where you're trying to design an engine. Divergent thinking is more cr- These are neuroscientific, uh, terms used in cognitive neuroscience. That's, uh, creative ideation is divergent thinking, not looking for the immediate connection, not looking for the shortest route, but looser associations sometimes that are required for creative thinking.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:18 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 20:18 So the fact that thousands of dreaming brains and thousands of dream reports in general show very little math kind of fits with a brain scan that shows that region of the brain that does a lot of-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:32 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 20:33 ... math and calculation is dampened. Not off-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:35 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 20:35 ... just less than it usually is during the day, and the imagination is liberated. The fact that we have a lot of wild thoughts, and we don't do math, that at the chemical level, the brain is 100 billion neurons, little molecular jellyfish-like things floating in a bath.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:52 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 20:53 The chemical story, right? Not just the flesh story of activation-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 20:57 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 20:57 ... deactivation, or blood flow, but anatomically, that makes sense. Also, at the electrochemical level, it makes sense that the neurotransmitters responsible for this are dampened. So that's how this book is built, where I'm trying to connect what I can.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:13 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 21:13 I take measurements, and I'm very forthright about, "I believe," or, "Wouldn't it be interesting?" So we just had a conversation about it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:20 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 21:21 The point you made or the point that I've written, that's not out there somewhere that I extracted with a reference, and that's why this book has been such a, like, a wonderful thing for me because, uh, you know, after 10,000, over 10,000 patient, over thousands of operations and all the humanity you learn through it, you start to feel like, "I think I know a lot about neurosurgery and neuroscience," and then you explore this topic, and you're almost reborn again because it's-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:44 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 21:44 ... it's a fresh look at everything.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 21:46 Here, here's a question for you that just came to me. If we use the dreaming brain and dreaming as an analogy, right? We're saying that when we're awake, there are certain parts of our brain that are more active and are getting more blood flow and whatever it might be-
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:03 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:03 ... which enables us to do certain things in the day, focus, you know, task, whatever it might be.
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:10 Mm-hmm. Fair.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:11 But at nighttime, in some ways it's flipped, where those bits go to sleep, and other things become more awake. Might you argue that you writing this book is a beautiful analogy for that? So as someone who's a neuroscientist-
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:28 Hmm. [laughs]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:29 Right? A neurosurgeon.
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:30 This is cool. Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:30 Yeah. Looking at all the facts and the data-
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:33 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:34 ... and what does this operation mean? If I remove this part of the brain, what happens? A lot of fact and rational thinking, I think, please correct me if I'm wrong, but it almost feels like this book is your exploration into the dream world and-
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:50 That's great, man
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 22:50 ... as to what might be.
Dr Rahul Jandial 22:51 That's great, man. I mean, nobody's... You know, I've had some proper conversations. Nobody's, uh, put it out there like that and connected that, but, uh, thank you. Uh, just to take the conversation to a new place in my mind, right? Is, uh, is welcome. Um, and I think that's why I love this book and topic because, um, I was feeling like I was getting to the point, humbly and respectfully, that I was mastering the craft of things that are, like, daytime or executive network, like performing surgery, what this means, avoid this, what this results. It was becoming... I was starting to see, uh, even though I feel, um, that I was at the, at the leading edge of taking a fresh look at the brain and mind, I was starting to th- become constrained in my thinking about this-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 23:43 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 23:43 ... this heavenly flesh, if you will, right? This, this white flesh that gets all this blood flow but is white. There's so many things about it that don't make sense from a, uh, from a literal or from a convergent thinking point of view. To, to fa- do a fair job of this topic, I had to approach it with divergent thinking and thoughts and try to connect-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:05 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 24:05 ... like, you know, later when we get into it, like Aristotle was talking about lucid dreaming. But, um, that sounds... I'm skeptical about that. I ended up having two chapters out of nine on that. So I went through that. Like, there's things I thought there was, there's no way there's any science on this. There's tremendous science on lucid dreaming, and other things like, oh, that makes sense, and I was like, "Wait, that's, maybe that hasn't been fairly presented-"
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:26 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 24:26 ... like symbols and dream dictionaries. So we don't have to get into all of that now, but, but yes, this book is me Um, a- a- and, uh, my publisher and friend said that I s- I said, "There's gonna be a lot of holes when you l- [laughs] there is no dream science. I mean, we've got stuff that you've never had before, so I can... I'm gonna..." You know, and they're like, "But that's why we want you to do it, is we want you to tell us what it is there. Do it in your way where it's storytelling, where it's accessible to everybody, 'cause we don't wanna make this academic."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 24:57 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 24:57 "Because dreams are for everyone. Dreams happen in everyone. And then where you're not sure, try to come up with the, uh, an idea or a hypothesis," which is what you do in science. Like, when you apply for a grant at the National Institute of Health, the, the first part of the grant is not like, "Hey, show us some clever experiment and some fancy details and charts."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:17 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 25:17 They're significance and innovation. Innovation in scientific grant writing is, "I think Mother Nature works this way." So I was already learning to do that, and given permission to do that w- in my, in my laboratory. So then it was, in this book, it's, you know, "I think. I, I think this area is dampened, not off, and maybe that explains why very few people talk about math."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:41 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 25:41 That... The c- the measurements, and then the hypothesis, and that's where in this book you'll see, "I wonder, could it be?" And it's an invitation to the reader.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:49 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 25:49 If you've, if you've got a better approach or an insight, I welcome it-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:53 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 25:53 ... 'cause I'm as curious as you are about this. I don't have it figured out.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:56 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 25:56 I'm just giving you a new look.
Can Dreams Help Process Trauma and Stress?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 25:58 Do you think dreams can help us deal with things like trauma and negative thoughts and chronic stress?
Dr Rahul Jandial 26:05 I would ask that people not ask dreams to be something we wouldn't want our waking thoughts to be, right? Our waking thoughts are wild and all over the place, and sometimes they help us, and sometimes we ruminate. And not every waking thought is worth holding onto. The... What is happening in dreaming that, the... First, some people have said that maybe the dreaming brain functions partly, I don't, I don't think you can capture it with one thing, but sort of as a nocturnal therapist. Okay. And where do they get that statement? I think that as you get seven, six, seven, eight, nine, you know, roughly, I, I, I, I always pause at giving hard numbers-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:43 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 26:43 ... because it doesn't mean that y- you're not coping well if you get by with six hours of sleep.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:47 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 26:47 I just wanna leave freedom for people. Like, I got a bunch of people who only work night shifts. They're, you know, they're doing fine.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 26:53 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 26:53 They're not popping up new cancers all the time. I just wanna leave room that people have very different sleep habits, and if we describe something as not like you're suboptimal to what you could be. Everybody's got their own-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:04 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 27:04 ... patterns. That said, that as you get into the later parts of sleep, you tend to have more of these vivid dreams in REM sleep, and people tend to have more positive emotional valance, which is, like, just affect, as they engage, um, longer sleep. That maybe s- clarity that comes with good sleep is because you've had vivid dreams at the tail end of it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 27:26 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 27:26 See, that's the hypothesis. But that's where they come up with the maybe it serves as a nocturnal therapist. But what I would say is, yet some of my patients, they have PTSD nightmares. So dreams are a du- they're a double-edged sword. For some, they can help people cope. For some, they can actually, uh, worsen their emotional milieu, emo- emotional environment, because a, a bad memory, uh, is trapped on loop, and it pops up in nightmares. So my answer is can they help people with trauma, is they can. Um, I think there's nocturnal processing going on. If you pay attention to your dreams and the context of your dreams, and if you try to remember your dreams, you're more likely to remember your dreams. But there is something happening there where I think that hyper-emotional state leans therapeutic. Not for everybody-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:21 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 28:21 ... but in general, it leans therapeutic.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:24 Yeah. I, I think so too. A lot of sleep researchers call REM sleep the part of the sleep cycle which we can consider emotional first aid, where we are processing the emotions of the day. And I've heard some researchers say that it's when we take off the emotional, um... Like, something's happened, let's say something negative.
Dr Rahul Jandial 28:50 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 28:50 We take off the emotional edges of it and lay it down in a much more rational, less emotional state during REM sleep. I've heard that being said. I think Matt Walker once told me that on this podcast, actually, a few years ago. And it's always been fascinating, that, to me, the fact that... And I think this fits with that initial statement that I put to you, where you feel that, or you, you at least assert that perhaps the reason we sleep is so that the brain can dream. I thought, well, one of the most important things for us as humans is to process what happens to us, right? We have to deal with negativity all the time. You know, how do we do that? If REM sleep is where we take off those negative emotional edges, and REM sleep is also where a lot of these vivid dreams take place, then to me it kind of makes sense. Yeah, well, perhaps dreaming is a way for some of us-
Dr Rahul Jandial 29:43 Very good.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:44 I appreciate what you're saying. Some people, it makes things worse for them. Maybe, I don't know, maybe something like PCSD, maybe you're repeatedly dreaming about-
Dr Rahul Jandial 29:50 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:50 ... something which is making you wake up, and-
Dr Rahul Jandial 29:52 Right
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 29:53 ... making you feel even worse. But I think for many people, it stands to reason, at least in my brain, that the process of dreaming may be your attempt to process some of the events of your life. Sorry to interrupt. To make sure you are taking action after watching this video, I have created a free special guide to help you improve your sleep and reduce fatigue. Now, in my clinical experience, most people who are struggling to sleep are doing something unconsciously in their day-to-day life that is negatively impacting their ability to sleep at night. So in this free guide, I share with you five of my very top tips, tips that I have seen transform the lives of many of my patients. So if you wanna get hold of this guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below.
Dr Rahul Jandial 30:48 Um, what I would say is, and I mean this with the, the utmost respect when I use words like likely or maybe, it's to leave room. It's not that I haven't-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 30:58 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 30:58 If, if there was a factor measurement that I had, I-- trust me, I would be bringing it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:02 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:02 But, but when you say that, my, my mind goes, "Likely."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:07 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:07 And so then I say, um... But I like, I like stories from patients, and I like measurements, and then I like to c-connect the dots-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:16 Sure
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:16 ... in a divergent way, if you will. Yeah. So we're having a... We're, we're ha- yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:20 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:20 I'm dreaming, dreaming while awake. Um-
Daydreams, Mind-Wandering and the Imagination Network
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:23 Well, what is on that? What's a daydream compared to a dream at night?
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:27 So the, the, the two terms-- So there are a lot of misnomers and stuff like that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:31 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:31 So I try to simplify language. Um, daydream and mindw- if, if there's anything during the day that's more like dreaming, it's mind-wandering. So daydream is still directed thought. The executive network is saying, "If I go to London, I'll take the train. I'll go meet him." It's, "I'm doing something, but I have a directed thought about something else."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:50 So therefore you would say that technically it's not really a dream.
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:55 Correct.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 31:55 Okay.
Dr Rahul Jandial 31:56 Mind-wandering is, is a-- it follows a similar pattern, although at a very micro scale as dreaming. It's jumping of thoughts without you leading them.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:06 Yeah. You also mentioned the default mode network before, the DMN, and how you have, um-
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:12 AKA the imagination network.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:13 Yeah. You've been very clear in the book to call it the imagination network.
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:18 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:18 So let's just again connect waking and nighttime.
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:25 Perfect, 'cause then, let's see that everybody gets oriented with that, and then we explore, and we come back to that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:29 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:29 'Cause that's the twenty-four hour. That's what your brain's doing in twenty-four hours if you like it or not.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:34 Exa-
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:34 Waking and, and sleeping. Waking brain, dreaming brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:36 Yeah. So we've spoken about the default mode network on this show before.
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:41 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:41 I've written about it.
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:42 Mm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:42 But in the context of, let's say you're struggling with a problem-
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:48 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:48 ... on your emails and your work. Whatever your job is, you can't, you can't find the, the solution. And instead of continuing to try or continuing to-
Dr Rahul Jandial 32:59 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 32:59 ... you know, send emails or whatever, you put everything down. You down tools. You go for a walk for thirty minutes without your phone, let's say.
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:06 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:06 And during those thirty minutes, because you're not focused on a task-
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:11 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:11 ... the DMN, the default mode network, fires up-
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:14 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:14 ... and starts to solve these problems for you without you actually-
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:18 Or takes a fresh look at it differently, yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:19 Or takes a fresh look at it, yeah. So you may come back after thirty minutes and go, "Oh, I was trying to do that for five hours. I couldn't solve it. Now I know how I might move this forwards."
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:29 Right.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:30 That's the part of the brain which you're calling the imagination network that's super active at night.
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:35 Correct.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:35 But I guess the difference might be that in the day we can remember what has just happened-
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:41 Oh, I love that
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:41 ... but we can't always at night. [chuckles]
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:43 Yeah. Because during the day you still have a, you still have executive network at play.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 33:47 Yeah. So you can then apply that straight away, but it's... Yeah, I don't know. But, but dreaming, something similar is happening, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 33:53 Yeah. Yeah. Let, let's, so let's... Uh, look, just give me some time on that one. That's a fundamental thing you brought up. So right away, we've-- we can all accept that there's a awaking brain and dreaming brain, and that the dreaming brain, the sleeping brain is, is wild. [chuckles] It's off the charts. It's doing a lot of stuff. Let's just... That's a measurement. We've-- So now we have that. Then, uh, the way to think of our brain is not a certain spot or region or on or off. It-- That's the other thing I would love for people to walk away with is the... There're a collection of structures, and the brain isn't like a liver where it's like the same tile all the way through. I mean, it's exotic nodules and nodes and hubs and-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 34:35 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 34:35 ... and so we call them networks. To, uh, to perform a task, you have the executive network, so there would be something in the frontal lobe. Of course, it would receive things from the occipital lobe because you're taking in vision. It would bring an instinct from your limbic structures a bit too, right? So think of it as a giant ensemble and certain instruments play. Dun, dun, dun, dun, right? That's the executive network. Um, what the other players, um, when the executive network is not playing, not engaged with something outward, not in a ta- when your brain is not-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:09 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 35:09 ... in a, quote, "task on" mode, the-- this is how these, they were, this was discovered. So people thought, um, the executive network now, is now dampened. And what w- nobody was looking... See, all of neuroscience for a long time, cognitive neuroscience, behavioral neuroscience, was provoke and see what happens in the brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:29 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 35:29 And then somebody looked at to identify the default mode network. Oh, I got a lot of stories in this one. The, uh, that when you're not task on, it's not like you're a computer in hibernation waiting for somebody to click the keyboard. Something else fills up the space.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 35:44 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 35:44 And that's the imagination network. You're always toggling between executive network and imagination network. That's when you're under threat, it might be fifty-two percent, let's give it percentages, executive network and forty-eight percent imagination network. Those are the subtle shifts in modulation that happen in the brain. You can't have a, you can't have a brain part turned off. It'll die. There's always blood flow going. There's just a partial-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:13 That's a stroke, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 36:13 Right. Exactly. So there's just a partial d... So during the day, you're mostly executive network, fifty-one, fifty-two percent, and at night, at, and, and you're forty-eight percent imagination network. But in mind-wandering, uh, you might be fifty-one percent executive network and forty-nine percent imagination network. So still enough memory to sometimes direct thoughts or in mind-wandering, grab a good thought.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:38 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 36:38 Both are at play. What happens in dreaming is you're f- maybe fifty-three. These are just rough approximations for the concept. This is not a measurement but- In the dreaming brain, it's like fifty-four percent imagination network and forty-six percent-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 36:55 Okay
Dr Rahul Jandial 36:55 ... executive network. It's-- The executive network is still there. It would die otherwise, right? The, those structures are pulled in different directions. So when you talk about, uh, executive network and imagination network when it comes to mind wandering, you're... As you don't-- Since you don't have anything in front of you, you're driving a car, you still need an executive network. You're walking around without your phone, as you mentioned, you still need executive network to not bump into a wall.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:22 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 37:22 But it's not-- It allows some of that mental workspace created by the imagination network to weigh in. And that's why people, I think, when they're shaving or they're doing some task, but not a demanding one, uh, that allows the imagination network to come back into play-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:38 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 37:38 ... a little bit more. And so they get... What do they get? They don't get solutions. They get the contributions of divergent thinking-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 37:45 Wow
Dr Rahul Jandial 37:45 ... which may lead to solutions. We're not all gonna be geniuses, creative geniuses, but understanding that, uh, here comes a measurement, they put people with poetry, writing poetry, they put them in these scans to look at th-the measurements of brain, brain activity, specifically, you know, anatomically. Th-- Writing poetry brought up the imagination network a bit. You could see those structures-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:09 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 38:09 ... light up a little more. But evaluating the poetry required the executive network to come back.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:16 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 38:17 You kinda, you j- you kinda need both. You need that divergent thinking to come up with the fresh ideas, and then you need to know the dots, right? Like, is this, is this a good idea or not? And that comes back to what you were saying about what happened with my book, and it comes back to this toggling, which happens naturally in a twenty-four-hour period. You got two-thirds of the day is executive network dominant, you know, and imagination network can come up a little bit. And then one-third of the day is actually sleep and dreaming, where the imagination network is dominant.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 38:45 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 38:45 This, this back and forth leading to different contributions in our brain in twenty-four hours or in the production of poetry is a, to me, is a very invigorating thing that, that the different states of mind have different brilliance to contribute.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:02 Yeah.
Dreaming Versus Hallucinations and Psychedelics
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:03 What's the difference between what's going on in our brain when we're dreaming compared to when we are hallucinating or something that's becoming more and more common is-
Dr Rahul Jandial 39:14 Psychedelics
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:14 ... the use of psychedelics. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of people, when they're under the influence of psychedelics, might say that they felt-
Dr Rahul Jandial 39:23 In a dream state
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:24 ... as if they were in a dreamlike state.
Dr Rahul Jandial 39:25 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:26 Yeah. So-
Dr Rahul Jandial 39:27 I'd love to tackle this one because-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:28 Well, let's do it.
Dr Rahul Jandial 39:29 Um, the only thing I can-- I found on hallucination versus dreaming is when you hallucinate, you see something on a real background. Like, it's the... You're awake. Hallucination means you're awake. Uh, our-- my patients do it after surgery. They put... ICU psychosis, people can look that up, or ICU delirium. They still see the, uh, the hospital walls, they just hallucinate or imagine somebody in that landscape.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 39:55 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 39:55 When you dream, you actually create the landscape. So the, the imagination, uh, you, the, the imagination product of a dream, you actually create the whole landscape plus the content. Whereas hallucinations, the landscape is created by the real world, you're just inserting things in front of it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:16 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 40:17 That was the only way I could find a difference between hallucination and dreaming. If there was more, I would bring it to you, but that's the-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:23 Okay. That's interesting.
Dr Rahul Jandial 40:24 That's in... That, that was something I said I could take away with that. Um, [lip smack] psychedelics, very interesting. So again, as a cancer surgeon in the United States, psilocybin is being, uh, you know, clinical trials for patients with cancer who have existential crisis that something inside them is, is, uh, is eating them up alive, right? There's a, there's a field called psycho-oncology that it's, uh, specifically the psychiatry or the psychological management of people with cancer.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 40:52 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 40:53 Uh, and in that field, psychedelics have relevance. So I'm not coming at this with some unfamiliarity, let's just say that. Uh, our approaches to mental health are imperfect because mental health is com-complex, and if there is something that can help some people-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:06 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:06 ... and it can be safely done, I'm all for it. So that said, psychedelics, um, the science that's out there, um, it suggests, and it's very important, they actually have less default mode network, uh, slash imagination network activation on psychedelics.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:24 Really?
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:24 Yeah. You would expect it to be-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:26 That re-
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:26 ... more.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:27 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:27 You're still imaginative, but it's not, the source is not the imagination network.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:31 Wow.
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:31 You still have divergent thinking, but it's not coming from that, and that might be related to serotonin.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:34 I mean, this, this just feeds more into the mystery of the brain, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:36 Right. Right, right, right.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:36 'Cause it's like, well, where the hell is it coming from?
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:39 You made a... Exactly. No, I felt the same way. And, uh, look, for example, psychedelics modulate serotonin. Serotonin is also used for selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 41:47 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 41:47 We use it for antidepressants. It's also related to psychedelic experiences. We have dreamlike states when the imagination network is liberated in dreaming, uh, and then psychedelics have actually dampened dream, uh, imagination network. So let me, let me just explain what, what the relevance there is. So when you dream, it's, you fully inhabit the experience. You are central. You are in the driver's seat of a car you can't control. You're going on this joyride that you've made, but you're fully, you're in the middle. You are, you, you are in the nucleus, you're the central pers- central, central feature of it. And that there default mode network slash imagination network is, is robust. In psychedelics, it seems to be that the imagination network slash default mode network really is dampened, and it allows for something called ego dissolution. It's closer to a dissociative state that you're floating above the car- And seeing yourself being driven around in it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:50 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 42:50 You're not fully inhabiting the experience. You're seeing it from a step removed, which therefore may allow you to see the things in your life in a different light-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 42:59 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 42:59 ... leading to the potential, uh, mental health benefits. It's, it's, uh, stepping away from your cancer diagnosis that allows you to maybe have the therapeutic value. So psychedelics have a dreamlike state, but they're closer, in my opinion, to dissociative states where you-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:14 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:14 ... it's ego dissolution and stepping away from the experience i- in a dreamy way-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:19 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:19 ... in a wild way, whereas dreams, you're being thrashed around as the central feature of the dream. So, uh, therein lies why I used the term magic early on.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:29 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:29 You know, just to have that glimpse, it actually a- adds-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:32 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:32 ... more questions. But that is the current science that I have been able to find.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:35 Yeah. The more you delve into this topic, the more mysterious [laughs] -
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:40 Right
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:40 ... it gets. Like, I can't imagine-
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:42 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:42 ... what it was like writing this book actually because, you know, you said it's trying to catch a cloud or, you know, I think about it as trying to almost catch a ghost, you know?
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:51 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:51 But it keeps moving, and there's new things coming up and about. [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:54 And we sh- and we keep learning more about neuroscience and ourselves as we explore.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 43:57 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 43:57 It's not, it's not, I want the listener to know, it's not confusing in a negative way.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:01 No.
Dr Rahul Jandial 44:01 It's, it's unpacking more doors, uh, that allow us g- guidance to, to understanding other things like mental health.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:08 Uh, I love the fact that we can't fully explain these things actually. I remember about a year ago, a professor from Berkeley, Dr. Dacher Keltner, was here in the studio. He'd just written a book on the-
Dr Rahul Jandial 44:18 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:18 ... science of awe. And incredibly enough, he, he, he was saying that it's really hard to define awe. And I remember saying to him, "I love that."
Dr Rahul Jandial 44:28 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:28 "I love the fact that we as humans can't give a robust and clear definition for everything. There are some things out there that are still that mysterious." I think, I think that speaks to the magic of life.
Dr Rahul Jandial 44:42 And, and actually, and that it speaks to the, the conversations you're gonna have a- with, with somebody in a pub because if somebody walks into a pub and says, "Hey, I got all the dreaming figured out," they're gonna look at you like, "Come on."
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 44:52 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 44:52 And so there's something that also is, uh, intuitive for people that does not rely on science and explanations-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:01 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 45:01 ... that, uh, nobody's ever gonna figure out dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:03 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 45:04 We, we're just... And people have been commenting about it for thousands of years. In 2024, we're just commenting about it with, uh, the per- the, from the perspective of neuroscience-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:15 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 45:16 ... uh, realizing it's quite limited, realizing we'll learn more and then have more questions for it. And I would say to people, "Isn't that how you want your life to be?" Where, you know, where you learn something, and you think you're at the mountaintop, or you think y- you've arrived at a moment, and you realize there's so much more past that. Well, that's what this book has done for me.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:34 Yeah. No. I mean, there's so many wonderful passages in your book.
Dr Rahul Jandial 45:37 And I love the way you, you [laughs] you've edit- you've marked it up like an editor. I love that you do that.
Why Dream Wildness Is Acceptable Only at Night
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:42 I, I really have. I-
Dr Rahul Jandial 45:42 Other people don't. [laughs]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 45:43 I, I've been deep into this. Uh, and it, it has been truly fascinating. But there's so many bits, I think, which have captivated me. I mean, the word captivate, you write here, "Dreams captivate, scare, arouse, and inspire us because they are both so real-
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:00 Thank you
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:00 ... and so surreal. We are simultaneously creators of our dreams and helpless participants in our strange creations. They emerge from us but seem somehow apart from us, home movies we have conjured that do not follow the laws of time or nature-
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:17 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:17 ... both intimate and out of our control." Rahul, that is beautiful.
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:22 Thank you. That's the love letter part.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:24 That's the love letter part, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:26 And the o- other way is you're, you're in a car. You're in the driver's seat of a car you can't control. It's, it's both.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:31 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:31 I- And I think it, the topic deserves that, sometimes a little finesse and flair and sometimes just re- regular conversation-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:38 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:38 ... about it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:38 It's also fascinating to me that some of the things that happen when we are dreaming are acceptable only-
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:48 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 46:48 ... when we're dreaming, like hallucinations, being delusional, being disorientated, having a wild fluctuation in our emotions, the amnesia of forgetting what just happened. If, if anything-
Dr Rahul Jandial 46:59 Jumping from event to event without any connection
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:01 ... if, if that happened in the daytime-
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:03 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:04 ... right? [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:04 It would be illness.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:06 Yeah. It, it... Even that is fascinating, isn't it? If you were displaying those things in the daytime-
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:13 It would be disturbing and difficult
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:15 ... yeah, someone might say, "Hey, you probably need to see a psychiatrist," right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:20 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:20 But these are things that we are perfectly okay with when we're in our bedrooms at night.
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:26 And they happen because the executive network is dampened, so logic does not get in the way of being at the top of a building and then next being, you know, being naked in front of a podium a second later. Like, those jumps of-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:41 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:41 ... scene and story and emotion are possible because the executive network is dampened, and they're so vivid, and they're so emotional many times and so story-driven because, uh, the emot- imagination network and the limbic systems-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 47:58 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 47:58 ... are liberated. So when you see what's, you see what's going on with the dreaming brain, then the wildness of dreams feels consistent.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:07 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 48:07 Not necessarily explicable but consistent.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:11 Yesterday, I put out a little video on my Instagram page saying that I was about to talk to you about the topic of dreaming, what did people want to know. I think we've had almost maybe just over 1,000 comments now-
Dr Rahul Jandial 48:26 Wow
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:26 ... already from people saying, "Oh, can you ask him this? Can you ask him this? Can you ask him this?" No, I can't ask 1,000 questions.
Dr Rahul Jandial 48:33 [laughs]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:33 But there were some patterns.
Dr Rahul Jandial 48:35 Patterns.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:35 Right? [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 48:36 Very good.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:36 Um, most of them actually were to do with the interpretation of dreams-
Dr Rahul Jandial 48:41 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:41 ... which is presumably highly individual. So we'll, we'll get to that shortly 'cause I think that's really, really fascinating, and people wanna know about that. I guess before we start interpreting them, though-
Nightmares, Erotic Dreams and Why Dreaming Isn't a Glitch
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 48:52 Let's go through what do people tend to dream about, right? Are there categories that you've found? You know, are there particular things that broadly speaking this-
Dr Rahul Jandial 49:04 Sure
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:04 ... these are the topics that humans tend to dream about, at least the ones who fill in reports and surveys.
Dr Rahul Jandial 49:10 Yeah. Um, the... First of all, there are universal dreams, and the early chapters are nightmares and erotic dreams. Over 90% of people report them. I don't have to tell you what a nightmare is. You don't have to tell me what a nightmare is, but we've had to tell our children it was only a nightmare, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:27 Well, well, let's just pause there a second. I've heard you say that nightmares are proportionally more common in children than adults.
Dr Rahul Jandial 49:35 Mm-hmm. Much more.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:36 Okay, so when do nightmares start? Do all children get them to our knowledge? And there's something you just said there, we have to teach them-
Dr Rahul Jandial 49:44 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 49:44 ... that these are not real. I mean, maybe just explore that a little bit for me.
Dr Rahul Jandial 49:48 Yeah, but it's chapter two because again, um, when I had conversations with people and they s- you know, things would pop up 'cause I w- I want... This is a book for everyone. The... One of the common things I heard and th- things I thought myself were, "Well, wait a second. You're saying dreaming must happen. We sleep in order to dream. Come on. Nightmares must be a glitch." There can't be any use for nightmares. It just feels like a mistake, right? Something that we don't necessarily share and don't want to experience. Um, so nightmares, again, some, some surveys and measurements. So people say, "What, what kind of, uh, data is this?" Some families signed up for their kids being woken up and asked about their dreams [laughs] for a long time. I pr- I... Listen, this, it's, this doesn't hurt them, um, whatever, but that's, I had that information to work with.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:33 Okay.
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:34 But, you know, so they're, they're following-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:35 You're not commenting on the morality or the ethics.
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:37 [laughs]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:37 You're just saying the data was there-
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:38 Well, that's, that's interesting
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:39 ... you went in and had a look.
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:40 I, exactly.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:41 Okay. [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:41 'Cause this is from the last 30, 40, 50 years. [laughs] Um, not to be light about it, but it, I, that's not something I would do, but I'm, you know, I'm glad somebody did it 'cause it gave me a look that I wouldn't have had.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:50 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:50 They're called longitudinal studies.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 50:52 Okay.
Dr Rahul Jandial 50:52 You know, it's not just asking, like, a, a thousand people at this moment. It's, you know, asking Johnny and Susie, uh, at age two, at age five, at age seven.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:01 Okay.
Dr Rahul Jandial 51:01 Johnny and Susie, as they grow up-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:03 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 51:04 ... participate in, uh, reporting on their dreams.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:07 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 51:08 So you can start to see the patterns of dreams as a developmental feature, okay?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:11 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 51:12 And so, um, they tend to dr- nightmares in general tend to arrive, you know, six, seven, eight. Five, six, seven, eight, nine. Interestingly, they arrive at the same time the imagination network is being cultivated in the child's mind.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 51:28 Now, isn't that interesting?
Dr Rahul Jandial 51:29 Right. That's a measurement. Now, we could talk about, like, what we think about it, but that's a measurement, and the first thing you noticed is, I notice also is, you know, I've... Part of what I do is pediatric neurosurgery. So you get, you know, you see children. You see injured children. You see children with cancer, children you've operated on. So you get a lens into dreaming from, um, from quite a few, uh, quite the breadth of, of the human brain and human mind, right? But almost all parents, in gen- I'm just qualifying it just as a, as a way to be respectful to the listener, so it's... But essentially, kids have to be told it's only a dream.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:05 What, 'cause they believe it to be real?
Dr Rahul Jandial 52:07 Or they d- my, my idea is that waking thought and dreaming thought is inseparable for a while for kids.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:13 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 52:14 So when, when you, when you ask ch- the younger children about their dreams, as soon as they can communicate, they're not very dynamic. It's like a table or a, a, you know, or a piece of furniture or something-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:25 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 52:25 ... a scene that's not moving. So it could be that dreaming thought and waking thought for children aged two, three, four is kind of a continuum, and then when nightmares arrive, we have to teach them it was only a nightmare. So a big, broad hypothesis would be that the arrival of nightmares for every child around the age of four or five serves to cultivate, to mature the mind, much like... That's my idea.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:55 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 52:55 Much like we learn to t- walk and talk, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 52:57 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 52:57 That's a process. It has to be developed. It has to be stimulated.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:01 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 53:02 The arrival of nightmares at the same time as the arrival of the imagination network and something else called theory of mind we'll get into, I think it serves a function. It's hard for me to look at the brain and mind and see things that happen, like, essentially 100% of the time.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 53:18 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 53:18 They happen for everybody. They serve a purpose, and they change the person. You'll say, "Okay, wait, that's really high-flying," but isn't that what adolescence is? Our brains don't look different as we go from teenager to adult, but something dramatically changes in that brain. I think nightmares, um, cultivate the mind. I think erotic dreams prepare the mind and body for, for the erotic act and procreation, and just like later on they'll be adolescent. There are, uh, psychological and cognitive developments happening, um, that, that dreams play a role in. That's, that's the big, the big thesis in my mind.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:00 I've heard some researchers suggest that dreaming is almost a mistake, that actually when evolution was, you know, creating sleep, for want of a better term, the goal was sleep, and the side effect was, oh, you get dreams as well. And, and I've heard some researchers compare it to, let's say, the formation of the light bulb, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:29 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:29 The goal of the light bulb is to give light.
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:31 Every phenomenon. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:31 Yeah. It's to give light, but you also get heat generated.
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:35 Mm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:35 Heat wasn't the goal. Light was the goal. Heat just came along for the ride. It's very hard for me to believe that that's the case, particularly because there is such a high metabolic cost-
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:45 Exactly
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:46 ... to dreaming, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:47 Exactly.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:47 You, you know, Mother Nature doesn't really mess it up like this, where you actually have so much-
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:53 Let's take that apart
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:53 ... energy going to these parts of the brain when you are asleep. I don't think that's a-
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:56 It's costly.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 54:57 Exactly.
Dr Rahul Jandial 54:57 Metabolically and it... and just risk.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:00 But that also plays into what you just said about you think nightmares serve a role. You think that erotic dreams serve a role, and I guess- One of the things I've been thinking over the last twenty-four hours, Rahul, as I've been deeply immersed in, in the, in the topic of dreaming, is perhaps dreaming is our safe space to explore everything and anything. Maybe in the day, because of social norms-
Dr Rahul Jandial 55:28 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:28 ... because of-
Dr Rahul Jandial 55:29 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:29 ... our job and how we're meant to-
Dr Rahul Jandial 55:31 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:31 ... behave, our prefrontal cortex, our executive network, has to keep a lid on things, right? So we can function and be-
Dr Rahul Jandial 55:38 To get things done.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:39 To get things done. But at nighttime-
Dr Rahul Jandial 55:42 Right
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:42 ... perhaps in the safety of our bedrooms, actually all bets are off. We can go anywhere we want to. I know we're not directing it necessarily, but it makes me think, is it our way of, you know, liberating us?
Dr Rahul Jandial 55:56 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 55:56 So we, we act a certain way in the day, but we can explore everything.
Dr Rahul Jandial 56:00 The subconscious has its time in the sun.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:02 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 56:02 Let me take both of those. There's very-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:04 There was a lot there.
Dr Rahul Jandial 56:04 No, no, no, no. But that gets to why we dream, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:06 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 56:07 We've been talking about what we dream, all these patterns, and we'll get back into it. Nightmares and, and erotic dreams being universal is a type of, is a pattern of dreaming. We've been talking about the dreaming brain-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:16 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 56:16 ... how we dream. We talked about what we dream. You've pulled us into why we dream.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 56:20 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 56:20 But before we get there, um, thinking of dreaming as a glitch, it's just something I just can't wrap my head around. 'Cause a- again, back to the story is w- when the human body is asleep, just imagine, just zoom away for a little bit, and the body's mostly paralyzed, not completely. It's a chemical temporary paralysis. Of course, we can breathe, we can move our eyes, right? That's where you get the rapid eye movement. Uh, we can have some reflexive movements and stuff like that. Just imagine the, the human body asleep, and then put a heat map on it. [laughs] And the, and inside the skull is red hot.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:00 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 57:00 Okay? Now, put some electrical measuring, put it on a, put it on a mat like an iPhone charger and see where the electricity's being generated, and you get a l- you get a little flicker from the heart, from the heart still beating, right? From the three nerves on top of the surface of the heart. That's where you ... The EKG is a measurement of the electrical, uh, electricity generated by the nerves on the surface of the heart. It's not from the pump or the muscle-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 57:23 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 57:23 ... or the valves. So you get a little bit from there. You get some faint electricity from the skin, and you have [laughs] this, like, explosive electricity again from within the skull. Right? Like, if we just took a real common sense look at it. So what's happening in the sleeping body, it, it has to do with the brain. Like, that, I don't think anybody will contest that. Then the question is, um, w- whatever the brain is doing, if, if dreaming is the glitch or the, the roar outside the stadium, but not something fundamental, then what is fundamentally happening in that-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:00 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:00 ... throbbing, hot, electrically active brain? You know, what I would say to those people who considerate that is, um, if you don't sleep for a day or two, then more dreaming happens.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:14 So it's as if your brain's, "Oh, we're missing out on that. We need to ramp it up now to make sure you get your dream quota."
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:21 Dream hunger.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:22 Dream hunger.
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:22 Sleep pressure. It ... Just, just, you know, hey, the ... I'm not gonna be able to prove it, but I think the way I'm thinking about it makes int- it, it makes common sense-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:31 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:31 ... that dreaming isn't the glitch because the brain wants to do more of it when it can't get sleep.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:37 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:37 Sleep is for the brain. It's not for your body. I've moved-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:40 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:40 I've transplanted hearts, kidney, pancreas, part of the transplant surgery. We're not connecting the nerves. [laughs] You know? The body is interchangeable. It's the dre- it's the brain that's saying sleep, and when the brain sleeps, it l- it's robustly having dream activity.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 58:55 Yeah. Wow.
Dr Rahul Jandial 58:55 So you can say that's, "Hey, that's a glitch," but to me, that doesn't make intuitive sense. And I have something on that thing, is it a glitch or not, I have something at the end of this conversation, new information coming in the last five years, about brain electricity at the time of death that I'd like to come back to this point, too-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:10 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 59:11 ... uh, for the listener. That I've, I've, uh, explained to. And not only is it a glitch, I think it's fundamental. Uh, and I'll, I have some, you know, something that might persuade you even further in that direction.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:21 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 59:22 Um, that said, why do we dream, okay? So let, you know, f- it's ... Let's say it's not a glitch, all right? And d- you, you like the concepts there. Um, the, the most romantic and, and the biggest theme here is, um, that if we start with the fact that the brain is flesh, it's white flesh, right? It's flesh. It ... There are still some governing principles that apply for your thigh muscle [laughs] -
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 59:55 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 59:55 ... as they, as they do for your brain flesh. It's not a muscle. The use it or lose it thing, right? If you don't use your arms, it atrophies. If we don't, if we cover up on- one eye for a patient for medical purposes, the part of the brain that's responsible for that can wither-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:10 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:00:10 ... or be repurposed, right? So the brain is the ultimate use it or lose it organ, and if we only use the parts needed to get on the tube or drive the a- 101, uh, in LA, by design, the waking brain wants to be efficient because it steals 20% of the blood flow of the body, and it's only f- five, six to five kilograms. So it's a energy hog. It wants to be efficient. It evolved in a resource-depleted environment, and so wants to form habits. It wants to get things done with just 12% of the brain, limited executive network usage. Taking a stroll without having to pay attention, that is actually smart.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:00:50 Just taking a quick break to give a shout-out to VIVO Barefoot shoes. Now, I've been a huge fan of VIVO Barefoot for over 10 years now, well before they started supporting my podcast. They are the only shoes that I wear, and they really have had a huge impact on my own life and the lives of many of my patients. You see, when people start wearing minimalist shoes like VIVOS, you can see improvements in things like back pain, hip pain, knee pain, foot pain. Even things like plantar fasciitis can often get better. And scientific research shows us that just wearing Vivos for about four months or so improves the strength in your feet by over 60%, which is absolutely incredible. One thing people don't realize about these shoes is just how flexible they are, which allows your feet to do what your feet naturally want to do rather than the shoe dictating your foot's movement. VIVOBAREFOOT are giving my audience a 15% off one-time code when you make your first order, and they make it really easy for you to give them a try. They give a 100-day trial for new customers, so if you don't like them, you just send them back for a full refund. I'm a huge fan. I really hope you take advantage of this offer. To get your 15% off code, all you need to do is go to vivobarefoot.com/livemore or click on the link in the description box below.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:02:20 But if we did not have these nightly robust engagement of all the neurons and all the emotions and these dramatic scenes, I believe those capacities would wither. If we don't use those-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:34 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:02:34 ... mental capacities, we would lose them, and they won't be there for our creative solutions the next day or for the next challenge our species or individuals we might face. I think dreaming, by having that experience every night, uh, keeps us adaptive, keeps us, uh, creative for challenges that have yet to come.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:02:53 So in some ways it's like going to the gym for our creativity muscle.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:02:58 Well, it's high-intensity training for the mind. There you go.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:01 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:02 High-intensity training for the mind. It's letting everybody in the orchestra have a pl- ha- warm up the instruments, even though the next day for the performance there will be select instruments used by the waking brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:10 Well, there are examples, aren't there, of artists or songwriters or poets having come up with ideas in their dreams, which has then informed what they've created in the day.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:24 The dreaming mind informing the waking mind, the waking mind informing the dreaming mind. That's should come as no surprise to us now that we realize that it's the same brain in a 24-hour rotation, and it's burning hot and electrically sparking through both waking-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:40 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:41 ... and dreaming, and the- they're just two different brain states-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:45 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:45 ... in the same person.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:47 Okay. So, so back to the things that we dream about. You mentioned nightmares are pretty much universal.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:51 In children.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:52 In children.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:53 And then they fade away.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:54 And then they fade. Okay.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:03:55 They come, and they go away in a wave. And-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:03:58 And then people will say maybe they come back at stressful times in their lives-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:04:01 Correct
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:01 ... which I guess feeds that idea that maybe it's our way of processing something-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:04:06 Potentially
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:06 ... or our subconscious potentially processing something that we haven't managed to in our waking lives.
Adult Nightmares, Infidelity Dreams and Personal Interpretation
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:04:12 So on a very grounded level, like the first half, the first part of this conversation has been fantastic because I like the, um, the... it's conceptual and lets people know how we're approaching it. Now, at the, at the ground level, that nightmares in adults are uncommon. If they show up, I think they can serve as a psychological thermometer, if you will. The pattern of nightmares is what matters. The occasional nightmare is not an issue, but if you start to have more and more nightmares, much like if you had more and more headaches, then I think it can be a clue to your wellbeing or your lack of wellbeing or your mental health-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:04:49 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:04:49 ... during the day. At its boldest, um, nightmares in adults, they could be a warning sign of issues that people are having that they haven't even noticed or grappled with during the waking brain. They could be-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:05 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:05:05 ... a warning sign, if you will. And I have some stories about that, but that's the way to think of nightmares in adult- adults are a psychological thermometer, not the occasional, but, uh, the consist... Nuance that they call it, nuanced nightmares, meaning you haven't had them, they show up, and they persist, and they're getting worse. And then PTSD nightmares are flashbacks. It's a bit of a different biological basis. That's a memory on loop that's stamped with emotion.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:30 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:05:30 Whereas adult nightmares of a monster or falling and you wake up, th- not always, but if there is a clue, it's coming from a hyper-emotional brain state, and maybe that is the warning sign for some issues you haven't actually looked at or grappled with that are affecting you but not at the front of your mind.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:50 You mentioned that erotic dreams may be universal.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:05:55 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:05:55 Again, do we have to accept that there's a bias there in the sense that we can only know that from people who have reported them? So if you are surveying 100 people or 1,000 people, and they all say it, then we know that those 1,000 people who remembered their dreams are all having some form of erotic dream, but we can't necessarily say that everyone has them.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:06:16 Fair.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:16 Is that fair to say?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:06:17 I think it's fair to say, and I think we have to have that nuance here. When we s- when I say universal, um, when 90-something percent of people, not 100, say they've had erotic dreams, I... and nightmares even higher, I'm putting that in a s- a universal-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:32 Yeah. Okay
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:06:32 ... category, and that's fair for you to say. And as you know in medicine, that, you know, things when they get in the 90s because of issues with statistics and sampling, they start... that starts to feel like 100%.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:06:42 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:06:42 So i- in our world and in this, in this context, nightmares and erotic dreams are in the 90-plus range. Uh, teeth falling out are in the 20, 30 range. Math is in the, not zero, but, like, very, very low range, so we have to have that flexibility.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:00 It's interesting. When I put out that Instagram post yesterday, lots and lots of public comments, but I've had loads of private DMs, direct messages-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:07:10 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:10 ... with people saying, "I can't really share this in public, but I'd love you to put this to Rahul if you can." And quite a lot of women sent me messages saying, "I'm happily married- But I often have dreams about being intimate with other people or-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:07:27 Right
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:28 ... becoming pregnant with other people, right? Sometimes people I know, sometimes people I don't know. What does this mean? You know, I'm really happily married. I love being a mom. What does that mean? And first of all, it's interesting that people don't feel that they can share that, which I totally understand publicly.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:07:45 That, that's an interesting point in itself, yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:47 Yeah. But, you know, maybe explain that to us. How common is that? I think, I mean, you've written a whole chapter on this, right? So-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:07:53 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:53 ... what's your-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:07:53 It's my favorite chapter because-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:07:55 [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:07:55 ... I think it leaves room for everybody. Um, again, I don't... I'm not the guy who comes in here and explains erotic dreams to everybody, but I do have some interesting things to say. The, uh, the erotic dreams of an ex or, or infidelity in erotic dreams is also very, very common, and that was a survey and report that I found very interesting. Healthy relationships, healthy marriages, infidelity dreams are very common, 70, 80%. And I thought, "That's interesting." And that took me down the, down the path of erotic dreams are sort of an embodiment of desire, meaning it's the, it's the feature of a healthy brain. It just happens to be that erotic dreams tend to be narrow. It tends to be with some repellent bosses, people at work. But the characters, you know, family even when the people are younger, the characters are narrow sort of within the tribe, and then the acts are wild is my s- my assessment of the dream reports about erotic dreams. The other thing that I found interesting is, um, they're reported across cultures. So that's an interesting thing. And also erotic fantasies during the day tend to link with more erotic dreams than actually having a robust sex life or looking at a lot of porn. It was your fantasies, your daytime imaginations of sex and the act that are more likely to l- have erotic dreams or those ideas show up in erotic dreams.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:25 Okay. So for those women, and I'm sure this happens to men as well, so for those people who are in a stable relationship, yet are having these erotic dreams with other people-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:39 Healthy brain
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:39 ... you say healthy brain.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:40 Healthy brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:41 Nothing for them to be worried about.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:43 Nothing for them to be worried about.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:44 Okay.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:45 And then for those who are in an unhealthy relationship, dreaming fidelity is maybe just reflective of it and how they deal with it afterwards.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:52 But that then speaks to the whole subjective nature-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:54 Right
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:54 ... of how we interpret dreams, doesn't it? Because-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:56 Within the context of your own life.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:09:58 Yeah. Uh-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:09:59 Has to be.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:00 Yeah. But also, we can't even give these hard and fast rules, can we? In the sense that let's say someone is having a dream of infidelity. If they've got a stable marriage and they really like their partner and think things are going great, they could choose to interpret that as, "Oh, I've got a healthy brain. I'm just-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:10:23 Right
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:24 ... exploring all things in my mind, but I'm happy in my real daytime life."
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:10:28 Not a latent desire.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:29 Yeah. Whereas you can also interpret that very same dream-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:10:33 Sure
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:34 ... completely differently if you don't feel your relationship is going well. You could say to yourself, "This is a sign that I need to get out of this relationship and move on." Which is very hard to study scientifically, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:10:49 Right.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:10:49 Because this is purely subjective.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:10:52 But it, it also... And so th- that's why those are surveys. So the analysis is, is mine, that it's a healthy brain. The, the fact or the survey that I'm giving people is healthy relationships are reporting infidelity dreams. Happily married people-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:09 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:11:09 ... report infidelity dreams at, at the same amount as unhappily married people-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:14 Right
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:11:14 ... as well as single people. It seems to be a process of the human mind. That said, j- a bridge in your dream and a bridge in my dream could mean very different things also.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:11:24 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:11:24 So the... When we get to it, dream interpretation is really about the hyper-emotional dream as, uh, as something that's reminding you to reflect upon what's going on in your own life. It can't mean the same thing for the same per- uh, for different people. A bridge or infidelity or different acts. And I think the, the hyper-emotional brain state, whatever emotions, experiences it creates as part of the dreaming process, is our portal to self-examination. That's the biggest way to think of it. It's your, it's your own brain's creation, so it has to be understood in the context of your own life. Uh, beyond erotic dreams, that's the way to think of why dream, dream symbols like a leaf can't be the same thing for many different people. A bridge can't be the same thing for many different people. It has to be understood in the context of your own life.
Other Common Dreams, Life Events and Dream Meaning
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:17 What are some other things that are common in terms of what people dream about?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:12:23 Other ones are, um, showing up naked in front of a podium.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:27 [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:12:27 Alarm not going off for an exam. So that I, I try to conceptualize dreams. Those are the types of dreams that require no interpretation. They're obvious. Your waking intense... Waking li- waking brain an- anxiety and your dreaming brain anxiety are, are highly inter- intertwined.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:12:43 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:12:43 The other ones are these interesting ones called, um, genre dreams, um, where your waking life experiences are so profound that you're also having them in some ways, uh, in your dreams. So end of life for some of my patients that are at the end of their journey, they have dreams of reconciliation or these expansive dreams about their whole life, almost as if the dreams are their, their partner or shepherd in this complex process.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:08 Oh, that, that's interesting. So you do a lot of cancer surgery.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:13:12 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:12 So a lot of your patients at the end of their lives, so, uh, with terminal conditions-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:13:18 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:18 ... are having dreams. And are those dreams, in your experience, comforting for them? Or-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:13:25 N- not always, but surprisingly so
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:13:27 Okay, that's interesting
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:13:28 Very interesting. So it see- it seems to have, back to your original point, where others have made about it's a therapeutic, it, you know, dreams are a therapist or they're, they're helping us process emotion. Maybe. But if there was any stage where it suggests that, it's, uh, end of life, um, for people I've seen with cancer, and they're reported on that. Genre dreams. All of them? No. Are they all coping well? No. But a surprising number, the dreams, uh, are a source of comfort for them.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:00 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:14:00 A way to reflect back on their life. And especially it seems to happen when they've, when they, they're starting to make that decision to, "I've had enough treatments. I'm moving towards palliation," which is, you know, more comfort, not necessarily extending life-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:15 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:14:15 ... but the quality of life. It... So it's, it's their partner. Another example would be, uh, pregnant women. They ha- tend to have dreams of maybe a baby in the bed or naming dreams of children.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:26 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:14:26 So massive life events, dreams, whether in end of life or in pregnancy, tend to have a comforting... Tend, right? We're just, we're giving a g- we're giving a impression here. Um, they tend to have a positive emotional therapeutic role.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:42 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:14:42 Then... And I, and I think that's the dynamic nature of dreams.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:14:48 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:14:48 Like, that's beautiful, right? Back to erotic dreams, some very interesting facts. Erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act. Like, and people who've never had sex have erotic dreams, but the fact that erotic dreams arrive before the erotic act, it's an interesting orientation of events.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:09 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:15:09 Usually, it's use it or lose it. We have this ability, and then we have to-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:13 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:15:13 ... cultivate it or, or it withers. Erotic dreams, they arrive before we have the capacity to feel erotic touch. So I just want people to know when, uh, you know, when, when you have the capacity or you learn as, in your teenage years that this feels like a caress, not just a touch. It's the same nerves in your hands and arms. There are... You didn't grow new nerves there. Where they land in the brain, how the brain perceives it changes.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:15:40 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:15:41 And that, those brain changes happen after erotic dreams arrive. Uh, wouldn't it be magical and wild to think that in some ways, again, erotic dreams are a cognitive maturation that leads to a, leads to a cerebral maturation, that leads to a bodily maturation, ultimately for procreation, right? Like, so nightmares arrive, and the kids are different. Erotic dreams arrive, and then the body is different, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:11 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:16:12 There's something about that there has to be a thesis for why nine- greater than 90% of people have, uh, nightmares and erotic dreams, and they arrive i- in certain waves in our development.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:25 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:16:25 So those two I leave as very sort of theoretical, wonderful things to explore.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:30 Falling is also common, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:16:32 Very common.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:32 What, what do you think falling symbolizes?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:16:34 I'm not sure. I think it's, uh, falling, being chased. Some people have said, "Oh, m- this is the threat rehearsal feature of the brain." I welcome all ideas. May- If you're falling in your dreams, it scares you, maybe you're less likely to walk next to an edge and fall off. Who knows? Maybe that's a cognitive inheritance from our ancestors.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:16:52 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:16:53 Um, but w- what they... Those are common dreams. So people being chased, people feeling the anxiety of being naked, people falling are convergent, like in evolution, convergent features of the human mind when there's waking anxiety. And to me, that suggests that the dreaming process is not a glitch, that it, uh, that it goes through certain-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:22 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:17:22 ... experiences that we have in common that have been reported from when people were on a horse and carriage all the way to an electric car, right? And they happen later in life. People who've never actually been stressed out with a school exam might have it later on in life when they're stressed out about something else.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:37 Yeah. And it's interesting to, to think about this, that I would've thought that you can only dream about things maybe that you can somehow-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:17:48 Address
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:48 ... have ex- well, maybe have experienced.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:17:50 Or experienced. Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:51 But then you're saying with erotic dreams, that's not the case.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:17:52 Right.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:53 You can in advance of the event.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:17:54 Can't stop magic.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:17:55 So it gets even more complex. But I guess the wider point as we delve into the interpretation of dreams, and I was thinking about this when I was reading all the, the comments from people saying, "What does this mean? What does this mean? What does this mean?"
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:18:06 Mm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:06 And there were some patterns. Of course, it's great to look at the science of what's happening in the brain, what's happening with electrical activity, but so much of dreaming is internal that maybe science will never fully understand, or at least to me. And given that we know from science how important our mind is, how we think, how we perceive things-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:18:31 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:32 ... then maybe one of the powerful lessons is, look, dreams serve a role. They're there for a reason, right? Pay attention to them, particularly the big vivid ones.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:18:43 I agree.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:18:44 And if you can then start to assign meaning in a way that it helps you, perhaps the onus is on us to spend time with ourselves journaling, thinking, writing down whatever it might be to come up with the meaning that works best for us.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:19:03 Right. What I'm telling you is nobody else can tell you what this means. It has to come from you. Your brain conjured it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:09 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:19:10 It has to be interpreted by you. You can't go to a dream dictionary and say that this means the same thing. There are patterns, and we're exploring the science to, to really get you to the point that this is a built-in process. This is not a glitch.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:19:25 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:19:26 It's a built-in personalized process that your brain goes through every night. If you have the opportunity to dream more through auto suggestion, if you have the opportunity to remember more of your dreams in the morning by not quickly waking up and trying to remember your dreams, which people report they can, you have given yourself access to Uh, your, your own mind during a state of hyper-emotion that you don't have during the day, that's a rare window to yourself that you can't get by turning outward, and that dreaming should be a priority in our lives, particularly when we fall asleep and when we wake up, sleep entry and sleep exit, and that this is afforded to us and it's free and it's possible. Not every time, not for everyone, but it shouldn't be neglected. It's quite the opposite of the glitch. It's, it's the rarest glimpse into your, uh, into yourself.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:17 Yeah.
Does Everyone Dream? Recall, Epic Dreaming and Alcohol
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:17 Do you think everyone dreams?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:20:19 The electricity and the metabolic activity suggests something wild is happening.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:23 Some people will say that I don't remember-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:20:26 Correct
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:26 ... my dreams. So ev- even if I take myself and my wife, for example-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:20:32 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:32 ... I do dream, I would say quite rarely, because I remember them rarely. And, and I'm saying rare compared to my wife, who seems to have lots of vivid dreams-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:20:44 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:44 ... and will share what they are and can remember them in seemingly quite a lot of detail.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:20:50 Mm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:20:50 Now, I don't think relative to her experience, I remember them in the same detail as she seems to. So that's all I can compare it with. So you think that the brain science is suggesting that everybody dreams, whether they can remember those dreams or not?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:21:07 I think so.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:08 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:21:08 Um, I think so. The brain science doesn't suggest. The brain science shows that your brain is burning hot. And the people who remember vivid dreams and the people who don't remember the dreams much at all-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:22 Still burning hot
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:21:23 ... it's still burning hot-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:24 Right
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:21:24 ... and electricity's still sparking. People can make from that what they want. What I'm saying is, um, even for people who don't remember their dreams in the morning, the dreaming process is still serving you at night, serving your brain at night-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:21:40 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:21:40 ... to have those divergent thoughts, to have those experiences, those awkward emotional situations, that social dynamic interplay, and part of the reason we don't remember them, I believe, is to avoid dreaming life and waking life confusion, which some people can develop in rare cases. So our autobiographical memory by design kicks in in the morning and stitches the waking brain memory throughout our life to keep it distinct from our dream life memory. But just because we don't remember it, trying to remember, you can remember more, and it's a portal to self-examination, right? That's what dream interpretation really is about. But it's still serving some housekeeping role-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:19 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:22:19 ... whether you remember it or not, and the example I would give to you is, if you run in your dreams, whether you remember it or not, those same motor neurons are firing. It's just your body's not reacting.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:31 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:22:32 If you feel hurt in your dreams, it's still the same experience as being heartbroken during the day. It's just that your body is or isn't reacting. So those neurons are still flaring up.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:42 Well, some people can actually wake up, and this is some of the questions, they can wake up feeling exhausted after a really-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:22:48 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:48 ... vivid dream.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:22:49 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:49 Which kind of makes sense if you look at brain metabolic activity.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:22:54 Well, the experience, at the level of the brain, it happened.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:22:57 The, the question I've written down fr- from Instagram is, "Can you wake up exhausted from a dream?"
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:02 Yep.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:02 And you would say?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:03 The people report vivid dreaming so much, something called epic dreams, that they actually are fatigued by it. So-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:10 So when we're [laughs] I'm, you know, what I'm thinking about here is, as doctors, one of the most common things that come into us, maybe not as a neurosurgeon, but certainly in more general medicine, would be fatigue.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:20 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:20 And of course, there are a number of things on the differential diagnosis when a patient presents with fatigue, some more serious, some, you know, not so serious. But I don't think [laughs] on my differential-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:33 Don't
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:33 ... in the past-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:33 Epic dreaming should be, yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:34 ... I ever put, you know, excessive dreaming or, you know, vivid dreaming.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:38 That's what it's called. It's called epic/excessive dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:40 Epic. I said E-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:41 Even if... Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:41 ... EPI said epic dreaming.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:43 It's, it's, it's a misnomer, but it... What I, these are what I call unicorns. Just to know that that exists opens our mind-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:23:49 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:23:49 ... that dreaming also, in a certain way, can leave people exhausted. Dreaming, um, some people wake up in the middle of their dreams, yet they're still dreaming. Some people say they don't remember their dreams, and other people have vivid dreams. That variety-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:04 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:24:05 ... I think is important. It's the dreaming process. It's a liberated state of mind that's hyper-emotional and hyper-visual, and what it creates, uh, is very personal. But the process is going. The neurons are... That's how you get that electricity, those sparks.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:25 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:24:25 That's how you get all that glucose usage, 'cause the neurons are using it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:28 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:24:29 As you're being chased, the neurons in your brain, versus being chased in real life, it's having the same experience.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:24:36 What do you think alcohol does to our ability to dream?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:24:39 I'm not sure. So this is a, this is a good question. So one thing notably absent from the book is, uh, the effect of drugs on dreaming. It was just so broad. So from my patients waking up from anesthesia, um, from antidepressants, um, from other drugs. I just couldn't find a pattern that said, uh, you know, maybe I found that, you know, m- marijuana led to even less dream recall, but I couldn't find, um... You know, of course, drugs change REM sleep, but there wasn't... I w- there was a lot of information, but I couldn't find a, uh, a story-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:19 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:25:19 ... that I could use to sort of explain the role of drugs on dreaming. The, the point, though, is they absolutely have a effect on-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:27 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:25:27 ... on dreaming. It's biological, so drugs affect it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:29 Alcohol reduces REM sleep, right?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:25:32 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:25:32 So... And REM sleep is where we have all these vivid dreams. Well, let, hold on. Let's just clarify that for a minute. It's been said that dreaming only occurs during REM sleep. What's your take on that?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:25:46 The best way to think of it is, uh, when you go from waking brain to sleep/dreaming brain, there's a period called sleep entry, and then on the other end, there's a period called sleep exit. When you're waking people up, you can have different times during the night where people have report more, more dreaming, more vivid dreaming. But now dreams are being reported from the seconds you are falling asleep throughout the night, different types of dream all the way to the awakening.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:14 Even when you're not in REM sleep?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:26:15 Correct.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:16 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:26:16 Correct. And I was pleasantly surprised by that. So that's where the bold statement comes in that theoretically we could be dreaming one-third of our lives because we sleep one-third of our lives roughly.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:27 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:26:28 So though being woken up in different stages, people are reporting dreams.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:31 Uh, I've often wondered why alcohol is such a depressant for people that can, you know, people can feel depressed the day after, and regular alcohol drinkers can often-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:26:42 Disrupt your sleep.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:42 Yeah. And, and I think there's many potential biological explanations for that, but, but one of them I think, or at least a contributing factor-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:26:49 Disrupted dreams
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:26:50 ... disrupted dreams, disruptive REM sleep. Again, the part of sleep, which is our emotional first aid, as it were. It kind of makes sense. If you're missing that key part during your sleep cycle, there's gonna be a consequence the following day.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:27:06 And interestingly, uh, and I... Patients who are depressed, they go a day, w- their first night of skipping sleep, their mood improves.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:18 To make sure you're taking action after watching this video, I've created a free breathing guide that's gonna help you reduce stress, calm your mind, and boost your energy. In this guide, I share with you six really simple breathing practices that work immediately. Even just one minute a day will start to make a big difference. To receive your free guide, all you have to do is click on the link in the description box below.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:27:46 So they, so then the thought is maybe the emotional therapist or the REM sleep or the nocturnal therapist is, is altered. Maybe depression is a failure of dreams to pr- to have their therapeutic benefit.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:27:59 Wow.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:27:59 These are all theoretical statements.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:00 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:28:00 And I think Matt Walker mentioned that. So, but again, though, I would welcome people to bring their opinions in, but the measurement is people with depression, they skip sleep, they feel better just that first day. That's not a treatment-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:13 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:28:13 ... but that's an interesting measurement. People with, uh, people who are alcoholic or they ingest too much alcohol and they don't sleep well or sleep long enough, uh, they don't feel well. What could it be from? I think it could be from a lot of different things.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:27 Exactly.
Stimulus-Independent Dreams and Historical Explanations
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:29 What is this idea that you talk about that dreams are stimulus independent? What does that mean?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:28:34 Stimulus independent. So, um, the big thing, the big, the big thought is on planet Earth, things self-organize. Um-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:28:45 What do you mean by that?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:28:46 Meaning, uh, termite mounds form, crystals form, um, cells coalesce. They come together. In my laboratory, if I put one neuron dissected out in a Petri dish, uh, floating in some fluid, it's, it's nothing. But if I start putting a few in there, they come together.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:05 Without you doing anything.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:29:06 Without me nudging them. They, they coalesce, and then they start sparking electricity towards each other. Stimulus independent neuronal activity. Now, now take those two or three neurons and make them 100 billion in our skulls, right? Dreams kick in without us asking. Dreams are cell, stimulus independent brain activity, and that's what I try to do in the book, is explain why we don't have to ask to dream. We must dream. We don't ask to sleep. Sleep demands itself.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:29:41 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:29:41 And that these are not things we have to kick up. They're things that must occur. But you can see that at the level of individual neurons in a Petri dish to help people understand, uh, what it means to be stimulus independent, meaning without poking and prodding, uh, this will happen. Without poking or prodding, uh, brain electricity will spark.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:03 Yeah. Wow. Powerful, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:30:06 Yeah. And that's, and I thank you for indulging that because that's where I'm trying to take it, from erotic dreams and surveys to the portal to yourself, which is a more philosophical point, to neurons in a Petri dish. I've tried to give it that broad look-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:20 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:30:20 ... to come up with, with insights here.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:23 I mean, humans have always tried to explain dreams.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:30:25 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:25 And there are... You've probably [laughs] come across thousands of different explanations. I, I once heard, I can't remember which culture this was, talking about dreaming as the language of the spirits-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:30:36 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:37 ... which I found fascinating. There are, I think, from, is it Native American tribes talk about dream catchers that you put above-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:30:44 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:30:44 ... your children's bed. We did that for our child. I think we, we were given it by my wife's parents. They'd come back, I think, from America. It was a gift, and I think the goal was that you, it, it catches the negative dreams so they don't go into the child. Again, which I find it's interesting, isn't it? How we try and explain these things.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:31:00 As a scientist, what I say is I see clearly why those ideas arose, because the point that we're making over and over again, how could you have such a wild night, wild journey when you're lying there asleep and things look like they're cooling off?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:17 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:31:18 Sleeping body, sleeping brain, nothing's going on. It- the thought was the brain was inactive flesh-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:24 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:31:24 ... uh, while you're sleeping, yet you went to the wildest places. So surely, that had to come from something external, gods, spirits, omens. It ma- it made sense till about 100 years ago when somebody, Dr. Berger, put stickers on somebody's scalp and said, "Oh, wait, there's electricity during the day." And then somebody looked when that person was asleep, um, and it was missed for a short while, but there was still electricity at night.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:31:51 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:31:51 And so, um- Until recently, just the question, where do dreams come from? Well, that's, that's only fifty, eighty, hundred years that we've become confident, uh, through those measurements-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:04 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:32:04 ... and through something called awake brain surgery, where you tickle the surface of the brain and a recurrent nightmare can, uh, happen to the patient. It-- only now with confidence do we say, uh, dreams come from the brain. But until we understood that at night, while we sleep, your brain is burning hot and sparking a lot of electricity, it didn't make sense that inactive sleeping brain-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:24 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:32:24 ... hibernating, uh, cooled off brain would be the source or the origin of these wild experiences.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:31 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:32:31 So they had to be attributed to something else. I don't think they have to be mutually exclusive, you know.
Remembering Dreams: Auto-Suggestion, Sleep Entry and Sleep Exit
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:37 If we cover some more of the questions that came in, um, quite a few people have asked about whether you can train yourself to start remembering your dreams.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:32:47 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:47 And a couple of times in this conversation, you've mentioned the term auto-suggestion.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:32:51 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:32:51 What is auto-suggestion?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:32:52 Auto-suggestion is people are reporting consistently when they-- before they go to bed, that they say that, "I will dream. I will try to dream. I will try to remember my dream." They coach themselves before they enter this nightly dreaming process. And on-- when they wake up, over time, they start to remember their dreams more and more.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:13 So you're priming the brain in the fifteen minutes or so before bed. You're directing-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:33:19 Correct
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:19 ... it as to what you want. You're the-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:33:21 Incubating, feeding
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:22 ... you're the architect, right? You're, you're the driver of the car.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:33:26 You're, you're... Well, the tension-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:28 You're not at night. [chuckles]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:33:29 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:29 The car's moving, you ain't driving it.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:33:31 Right.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:31 Well, you are driving it, but you're not in control. That's true. Now I'm cheating. [chuckles]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:33:33 Yeah, I think that's a, that's a good-- that's a fair one. But maybe you're setting the landscape a little bit to where you're gonna run wild with what you're doing the fifteen minutes before you f- while you're falling asleep. That you're incubating and feeding things that may pop up in your dream life a bit more.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:33:50 That, that extends beyond dreams, I think. But many people have spoken about this idea that what you want to process and think about, you know, intentionally put that into your mind-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:34:00 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:00 ... before you go to sleep. Whether it's related to dreaming or not, it's quite a powerful idea, isn't it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:34:05 So le- let's hold on to that one. Um, and, and just like visualizing sports can improve sports performance because you're rehearsing those neurons, and I think that whether you remember it or not, if you're dreaming of sports, then those neurons go off. There is some benefit there.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:25 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:34:25 And there's people who suggest that athletes have more of those type of dreams. Similarly, down here, um, the power of belief, which was a chapter in my last book, is fundamental. Now, uh, I, I don't know about your other authors and how people have approached it, but, um, placebo is the power of belief, but it has a scientific, measurable basis.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:34:48 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:34:49 A placebo's not gonna fix a broken leg. But when it comes to matters of the mind, um, and feeling pain, feeling wellness, these things, placebos work because belief releases, uh, the neuro- belief releases a lot of things from the pharmacy of your own mind, right? That there are, uh... Belief can activate electricity in your mind. Belief can release neurotransmitters in your mind. I think the sci- the science of placebo is-- overlaps with the science of auto-suggestion and, and-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:22 Exactly
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:35:22 ... positive thinking. That there's, you know, that belief releases something. It's not just some ether in your mind. It's not just some figment of your imagination. That you actually create a process of neurotransmitter release by believing this pill will help me, even though you know it's... there's nothing in it. It's a sugar pill.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:41 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:35:42 Thought can release an, uh, neurotransmitters. Thought can release chemicals in your brain. Thought can release neurotrophic factors like BDNF. Thought can actually generate more electricity. And stay with me, thought can actually change the actual structure of the brain that it comes from.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:35:59 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:35:59 And that, this called activity-dependent myelination. Using simpler terms, that habits and thought, whether good thoughts or bad thoughts, when the brain tries to be more efficient, and it's sending those electrical charges down the axons-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:12 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:36:13 ... when your brain starts to use the same, same neuronal flows to tie your shoelaces or ride your bike or go on that walk, the neurons at that area, they wrap more of this myelin. It's a fatty sheath-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:25 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:36:25 ... around the tentacles, which are called axons, to improve the speed of conduction of electricity, as well as u- let's use few-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:32 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:36:32 ... fewer resources. So thought is powerful.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:36:36 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:36:36 Thought changes the brain. Thought can release chemicals that are housed, ready to deploy in the brain. But, a big but from, from this, for certain things. It's not-- thought's not gonna fix a broken leg. It only works for things related to the mind, and he- here it is. The biggest adventure the mind goes on is dreaming. So I do believe there is some science to support conceptually that auto-suggestion before you fall asleep can incubate feed the dreaming process. N-n-not reliably even-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:08 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:37:08 ... but you have a, you've got a shot at it. And then on the other end, waking up slowly, not grabbing your phone and going, letting the executive network kick in too rapidly, that the residue of your dreams, people report remembering their dreams more. And, and a, and a specific example, I was talking to the publishing team. They're like, "Everybody working on this project is coming into the office saying, 'Man, I'm dreaming more. Man, I'm remembering my dreams more.'"
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:32 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:37:32 And these are, these are rigorous publishing types who read a lot of books, right? And think about the effect it had on the office.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:40 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:37:40 And so I love that as a, as a ground example of, yes, I do believe-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:44 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:37:45 ... this is possible.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:37:45 So in terms of something practical for people to help them perhaps start remembering more of their dreams, I guess you could call this feeding your dreams. The time before bed, what, what are we saying? 15, 20 minutes? I know there's no trial on this-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:00 Exactly
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:00 ... but what, what are you, what are you recommending for people?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:02 Um, so what Salvador Dali used to do for creative processes, he felt like it was last 10, 15 minutes before he... There's actually-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:09 Before he goes to sleep.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:10 The-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:10 The final 10, 15 minutes.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:11 Yeah, the transition, the hybrid state-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:13 Okay
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:13 ... from waking brain to dreaming brain. Christopher Nolan talks about Inception. Edison mentioned it, that just right when he's about to fall asleep, the thoughts that he's having at that time are interesting, and the thoughts he wants to dream about, w- he would try to have them at that moment. So that's sort of your portal to extract and introduce.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:33 But you can't know the exact moment that's gonna happen, so perhaps-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:37 So it's, so it's a ritual you create to s-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:39 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:39 ... if, for those who have the luxury of a bed and the time to do that, right? 'Cause it's not access- that, you can't always have that-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:46 Yeah, for sure
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:46 ... calm, quiet moment. But it's a ritual in my life for a complex operation to run through the images. You know, I flip through the images, and I really think about, like, the branching arteries of the brain. I try to-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:56 So you do that the night before an operation.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:38:58 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:38:59 A visualization-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:39:00 And we-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:00 ... type technique.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:39:00 And I've done this for a long time, wrote about it in the first book.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:03 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:39:03 That, and whether... And this was interesting. I had, somebody interviewed me. He's like, "Do you ever dream of the operation?" I was like, "Never." But I do dream of, like, scuba diving or walking through forests and stuff like that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:14 [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:39:15 And then he, he... Somebody else, this was somebody from the Times, he, he picked up on that. So he's like, "So again, that fits. It's a metaphorical, symbolic, visual-spatial navigation 'cause you're working on a visual-spatial project the next day." And I, and I like that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:29 Yeah, I-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:39:29 That's not science, but there's some connection there that I think is real.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:32 I love that. I, I, I circled before about this whole idea about creativity.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:39:36 Mm-hmm.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:39:37 Because you, you made the very powerful case that dreaming helps us be more creative, which kind of makes sense. You know, we are going on these wild journeys and exercising our creativity muscle when we're asleep. But I think there's another component as well, isn't there, which really speaks to this idea of the mind and perception and interpretation. So number one, I can see why dreaming helps creativity in a direct fashion. But secondly, if we start to pay attention to our dreams-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:05 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:05 ... and we get creative with how we interpret them-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:08 Mm-hmm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:08 ... using these metaphors, that's also kind of feeding creativity, isn't it? So I think it works on both of those levels.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:15 I agree with you. The... I, I just think, uh, uh, first of all, it's great because we're talking about science.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:24 [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:24 We're talking about surveys. We're setting some... We're, we're leaving a lot of room for people-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:29 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:29 ... to, to, to get what they can from this. And what I would say is, um, just at a common sense level for me, when I have a good idea during the day, it's not 'cause I'm, like, on my fifth espresso and just trying to push through the problem. It almost arrives to me-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:47 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:47 ... when I'm slightly distracted.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:50 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:50 Right? And-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:40:51 Exactly
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:40:51 ... and, and it's hard for me to think that the, that the extremely imaginative and liberated six, seven hours I'm spending every night are, in some ways, not contributing to my aha moments during the day. They're not arriving from the heavens.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:41:07 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:41:07 I think the dreaming process is, is feeding my solutions and creativity during the day. That's my hunch that, um, that, that just like you, for poetry, you have to have divergent creative thinking and then executive function to evaluate what you've thought of. Is it a good idea, or is it just an idea, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:41:28 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:41:29 I feel like the 24 hours in my brain does the same thing, as you were mentioning, or this book. You know, like, there's all this task on thinking about the world during the day, and these are conceptual conversations. These are my, these are my opin- opinions. But task on during the day, and then at night, you know, it's divergent thinking, and they're both feeding each other. The problems of my day, the op- complex operations or the creative, the idea generation now that I'm, that is, is a part of my career. I'm thinking about it during the day, then I go to bed, and then my dreaming brain has a chance at it.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:00 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:42:01 It's playing with it in whichever way, whichever degree. And then the next day starts, and my dream, my waking brain is again on, on those problems.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:08 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:42:08 But there has been some contribution [laughs] from the seven hours of sparking electricity and metabolic activity. I can't prove to you, uh, through a, a test, but doesn't that make intuitive sense-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:19 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:42:19 ... that, that, that dr- the eight, seven hours of dreaming were, are not, uh, separate, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:26 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:42:26 It's, it's my life being played out-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:29 It's all one
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:42:29 ... with the waking brain and dreaming brain, and my waking life is feeding my dreaming brain, and my dreaming life is feeding my waking brain. It's 24 hours in my head.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:42:39 So is this something you've changed since doing this research and writing the book, what you do before bed to try and auto-suggest the dreams that you're gonna have? Is that something you've changed? 'Cause you've also spoken about the first five, 10 minutes of the morning as well, right? The kind of as you're going into sleep and as you're coming out of it in the morning. If we wanna train ourselves to remember more of our dreams, we need to pay attention to, to the morning as well?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:43:05 Right. So the, uh, the habit of thinking about things when I, f- uh, during sleep entry, waking brain to dreaming brain. Let's give it a title. Sleep entry, 5, 10, 15 minutes. The electrical activity shows both sort of a hybrid state of, of waking and dreaming a little bit. That's, um, that's there.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:43:23 But on that, though, if, if you are in your bed on Instagram consuming other people's content in this, um-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:43:30 That's the right question. Are you feeding that into your head?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:43:33 Yeah. It's like, what are you feeding [laughs] just before you go to bed?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:43:36 The only comment I can make, that is a very good point. Also, by being always on a task, you're not letting your imagination network have chance to play-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:43:45 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:43:45 ... or warm up. These con- these are conceptual things, but what I will say is the, uh, erotic dreams that tend to be about the narrow characters in your life, and s- and celebrities fit into that, so maybe we see them as family or within our tribe. For now, social media celebrities have not... There's one study that said social media celebrities are not popping up i- in erotic dreams. So I don't have a specific e- example or answer for the role of social media in dreaming, but oh, that's gonna be great to look at over the next 10, 20, 30 years, right?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:16 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:16 As we get a lot more track record in it. Sleep entry I've been doing for a while, then I found the science that showed it was interesting. People should look that up. Salvador Dali, Edison.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:25 So that's what we're talking about.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:26 That's what I'm talking about.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:26 The 10, 15 minutes feel bad.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:27 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:27 Okay. And then?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:28 Sleep and au- auto-suggestion i- i- and incubating and feeding creativity all fit together.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:34 So that could, could that even be writing things down saying, "I want to dream about this topic"?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:38 That's what the... That's what, that's what people suggest, yes.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:40 So you're literally feeding that intention.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:42 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:42 Okay, so that's really practical.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:42 Imperfectly, but, but, but you can influence-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:47 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:47 ... your dreams.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:44:47 That makes sense. When you understand the power of the mind, that completely makes sense, and then so when you wake up-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:44:52 Uh, that's very interesting. So that's a new thing that I've been doing, um, and lucid dreaming fits into that a little bit, but, um, the sleep exit is also not a pers- you know, crisp process. It doesn't happen in a millisecond. It's, it's also sort of a hybrid state, and what's happening is your, your adrenaline is coming back in. Your serotonin is coming back in. Your brain is switching to waking brain, right? It's gone from-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:45:20 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:45:20 ... dreaming brain, and now it's coming to waking brain, and during that time, the switch isn't crisp. So if you have the luxury of bed and a time and not setting an alarm-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:45:29 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:45:29 ... trying to linger, slowly wake up, and people report not opening their eyes immediately, not reaching for something immediately. I, as a habit, don't check my email or social media first. I go to my notes app, and I jot down a few thoughts I've had, and then I leave it, and then I look at it the next day. I have a whole notes, uh, notes sheet now on, on one of my apps where it's just sort of like morning thoughts.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:45:52 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:45:52 And I've, I've created this process of coming to rise slowly or sometimes waking up a little bit earlier than I plan on and trying to drift back into sleep, trying to ride those sort of hybrid liminal states, and I've... When I have good ideas, they tend to be at that time.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:08 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:46:09 Because you're... Again, it's trying to remember your dreams, um, works if you give yourself that time in the morning during sleep exit.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:20 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:46:20 You can't say, "I wanna remember my dreams," and then... I mean, we all have to set alarms, but if alarm goes off and you're on your ph- phone, the baby's crying, that's not necessarily a time that you can, um, fully use that process.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:33 It kind of speaks to this idea, though, that, that, that time when we've just woken up is quite a powerful time. There are possibly insights there about our dreams or about other things in our life that can happen there if you, again, have the luxury of doing so, and you give yourself a bit of-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:46:54 And the interest and the time, yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:46:54 ... time and space there, which of course not everyone can do. A- and I know myself when I can be quite disciplined on what I do first thing in the morning and when it's not receiving inputs from the outside-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:47:06 Mm-hmm, sure
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:07 ... news, social media. When it's, when I'm just left with myself, things come up, you know. Sometimes great ideas. I'm writing, you know, I'm writing my next book at the moment, almost finished it, and a lot of the insights come then if you allow that space. But you almost, to me at least, by going on Instagram or the news at that time, you almost close that window.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:47:31 You absolutely do because to go on that means you've brought the executive network back on even faster.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:36 Yeah, so you've lost that little magical window, and y- you may not get it back till later.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:47:40 And the science says executive network is gonna s- is gonna come up, right? It's gonna take a dominant role, right? The wake-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:46 Once that's on, it will take a dominant role.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:47:47 Because it's the waking brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:49 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:47:49 You want the waking brain to come on as slow as possible, so you have the longest window to hold onto the, the residue and thoughts of your dreaming brain.
Quick-Fire Questions: Recurrent, Premonition, Food and Lucid Dreams
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:47:56 Let's go through a few of these questions, quick-fire if we can. Uh, I think we've covered most of the themes that people asked about. Uh, here's one. Do recurrent dreams have more significance?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:48:08 Not more significance, but they have a very, um, well-established neurobiological basis. They're neuronal loops. They're electrical flows like dominoes that get taken over within almost, almost like seizures. And so during awake brain surgery, if you sur- if we tickle the surface of the brain, some of my patients said, "Oh, this is a nightmare I've had since I was a kid." So the meaning I think is, uh, uh, is not there if I were, if I were to be so bold to say, I don't think it's about meaning, but it's a, an electrical activity-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:48:37 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:48:37 ... that's stuck on loop in your brain, much like a flashback.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:48:40 Does stress decrease your ability to have dreams?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:48:43 I don't know. I mean, I think, um, um, I think stress shows up more in your dreams if I were to lean it more likely to dream with stress and different types of dreams as we've discussed.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:48:56 Is it unusual to dream in color?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:48:58 No, it's common, especially when... And it was, uh, when color TV arose and color magazines, the re- dream reports, they called it technicolor dreams, that more and more and a lot more people are saying, "I'm dreaming in color now," even though life was in color.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:49:13 Exactly. That's the crazy thing. Life was already in color, right? [laughs]
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:49:16 That's a, that's a s- That's, that's a survey that I offer you with the references in the book-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:49:21 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:49:21 ... and the interpretation is ours.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:49:23 What does it mean to dream about my father who died six years ago?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:49:28 That's interesting. I was, uh, speaking with somebody about grief, and at least in my own experiences and others that I know, uh, it tends to be that the, the loved one who's passed away, they arrive in parallel to the way you're mourning. Like, in the beginning-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:49:44 Mm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:49:44 ... they tend to be, um, painful memories, difficult memories, and as people grieve and move on, then, uh, memories arrive that are more routine or, um, even mundane really. They just become features of their lives-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:00 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:50:00 ... in their dreamscape. So again, depends on which stage you are with the, the loss of your father. Was it recent? Was it, uh, something you're struggling with, or was it a long time ago?
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:10 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:50:10 And now they're just a memory that pops up.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:13 And again, the meaning is subjective really, isn't it? It's very hard-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:50:16 It's, it's more than subjective. The meaning is personal, but-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:18 But we've got the agency to put the meaning that we want onto these dreams, don't we?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:50:23 And that is... That, that's the power of reflecting on your dreams.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:26 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:50:27 That the process itself is self-exploration, right? What is therapy but guided introspection? Well, well, dreams are your best therapist.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:50:34 Yeah. I love that. Uh, can certain types of dreams signal mental disorders or imbalanced brain chemistry?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:50:42 Um, there is a unicorn, uh, that proves, um, dreams can predict the future. There's one case, it's a medical scenario. It's called, and people can look this up, it's called REM behavior disorder, which I prefer to call dream enactment behavior. Greater than 90-something percent of men in their 50s, if they act out their dreams, 10, 15 years later they'll develop Parkinson's. So abnormal dreaming is the first warning sign of a brain degeneration that will happen 15 years later, and that's called, uh, REM behavior disorder. People can look that up. So in that way, dreams do predict the future, the future, uh, neurological deterioration of the human brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:27 So per-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:51:28 That's powerful.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:29 So perhaps there may be some scope for early intervention at some point in the future.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:51:34 Sure. But just as a concept, in one example, dreams are your warning flare for disease that's gonna come 15 years later, quite a bit later. So whether that extends to anything else, I just love the fact that there is one example.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:47 I mean, to continue that theme, some people will say that they've had premonitions in their dreams. They've dreamt about something that has-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:51:51 Precognitive dreams. Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:51:52 ... that has then come true. What, what's your take on that?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:51:57 I've not seen ev- any evidence that dreams can predict future events.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:52:02 Mm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:52:03 Even though that is the, uh, feeling that many people had when inactive flesh had brilliant nightly adventures. They thought, "Well, surely these are f- this is from the gods, from the heavens, and maybe there were messages that predicted the future." I totally get that. I would've thought that. Right now, I don't see any evidence for that. But there is one case where a certain type of dream predicts the future deterioration of the brain, not the future lottery numbers or the future lover you may encounter.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:52:33 Yeah. Does eating certain foods stimulate odd dreams? And this particular person said when he has Chinese food, he gets particularly bizarre dreams.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:52:43 I'm sure you do, and that's happening. I just didn't find any evidence. Historically, there's, there's been mention of from cheese and different things people say they, they steer dreams a certain way. Maybe. I just, I can't find a pattern or a science to support that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:52:58 You mentioned some lucid dreaming a couple of times. I don't think we've got time to go into it in detail. There are two whole chapters [laughs] on-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:53:05 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:53:05 ... lucid dreaming in your book. But could you just explain what it is, and should we be worried if we experience it?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:53:13 Well, it seems like most people are delighted. So lucid dreaming, uh... So we talked about sleep entry, and we talked about sleep exit. Lucid dreaming is the re- return of awareness of being in the dream w- during the middle of sleep. So most people, the... It's on the back end, you look back and you say, "Oh, that was just a dream." Lucid dreaming is I'm, "Oh, I'm in a dream," and it's happening while being in the dream. So there's a return of-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:53:40 Mm-hmm
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:53:40 ... awareness of the dream, um, for the dreamer.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:53:44 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:53:45 And I thought this was gonna be something on the fringe, but there's a lot of robust evidence for lucid dreaming, just briefly. Uh, a third of people seem, roughly a third of people seem to lucid dream. It is inducible. There are techniques for it. There's a way to prove you're lucid dreaming in sleep laboratories with controlled eye movements. Not random eye movements, but the opposite, controlled-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:54:05 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:54:05 ... movements to prove that you've entered a lucid dream. I was surprised. The... There's a drug, galantamine, that increases lucid dreaming, and if you take a higher dose, there's more lucid dreaming, so it's a dose-dependent escalation, which is proof of causality in pharmacology. And lastly, those brain scans show a little bit of that executive network coming back online, if you will, casual phrase there, um, in people who have, uh, return of lucidity, uh, while they're dreaming. So r- robust science on lucid dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:54:37 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:54:37 Actually, the most robust, uh, dream science, if you, if there is such a thing, is on lucid dreaming, so it ended up being two chapters out of nine.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:54:44 And can some people, once they've got a little bit of awareness that they are in a dream, can they take that next step and start to influence what actually happens in their dream?
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:54:54 That's what they report. They take control of that steering wheel of that car we were talking about. They're in the driver's seat, and now they can steer it. But they are reporting that.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:02 So they become the director of the movie at that point.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:55:05 A bit. A bit, yeah. And I, I don't know how to prove that, so I, I... But I trust them, but I would leave it at that. And then athletes tend to have more lucid dreaming. People who do a lot of visuospatial tasks have, naturally have more lucid dreaming.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:16 Wow.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:55:17 But I think it points to the fact that we have hybrid states. S- Sleep... Wake... We've started with waking brain and dreaming brain, then we add a little sleep entry. We add a little sleep exit, right? In the middle, we're putting lucid dreaming, which is a hybrid state of aware- uh, you know, awake-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:32 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:55:32 ... within a dream. And then during our day, we add a little mind-wandering, so we're not just so much... And, and then, you know what? But that makes sense to me. Whether in a Petri dish or the way our bodies function or in nature, things aren't on/off. They're not wired. There are always strange flows and-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:50 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:55:50 ... states and hybrid states and liminal states, and understanding the mind through dreaming has really opened my eyes to that.
The Brain at Death: One Last Dream
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:55:57 Well, talking about strange flows, let's close down this conversation with something that we opened it with, this idea that the reason we sleep is so that our brain can dream. It's really, really powerful. It's been a theme throughout this entire conversation, and you hinted at something that happens-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:56:17 Mm
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:56:18 ... at the end of life Which makes you even more convinced that dreaming is really, really powerful. So perhaps it'd be a good one to close on.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:56:26 Yeah, I, um... How, How the Brain Dies is, is powerful, and, um, it, it really has affected me because there's a measurement that shows something very dramatic. So what I'm about to share with you is that, um, there are patients who are passing away, and they have the stick... Tying it all together, right? The stickers are on the heart. You have an EKG read. Typically, we used to think of death as flat line, meaning that there's no signal coming from the heart, no electrical signal. And, um, some of these patients now, as EEGs, those brain surface, uh, skull surface electrodes are a lot more common now. That's giving a readout. So you have electrical ac- activity from the brain, and you have electrical activity from the heart. Um-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:57:16 So the patient's alive, the patient's alive, and at that time, you can get electrical activity from the heart and from the brain.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:57:22 And then they have a heart attack.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:57:24 Then they have a heart attack.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:57:25 And they've left instructions that they don't want to be paddled, and zapped, and resuscitated, DNR, do not resuscitate. When you look at the monitor, and the brain is, uh... and the, and the heart has now stopped, and it's a flat line. The brain electricity is still going. So the first minute or two, few minutes after cardiac death, the brain electricity is not just going. There's a massive explosion of activity similar to dreaming brain waves, similar to expansive memory wa- uh, brain waves, that the first few minutes after our hearts stop beating, where historically we have thought this is the time of death, the brain is having its final moment, maybe its best moment, a massive release of neurotransmitters. The brain is not going out in a whimper. It's going out in an explosion of activity, and that by itself shows us that we should be holding that loved one's hand longer than we have been. And then for me, it starts to explain things like near-death experiences that in patients who have been brought back, maybe this explains why they, why they say they had memories of their whole life, like a film strip playing in their mind.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:58:38 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:58:38 That the brain is, um, a salvo of electrical and chemical activity is the way it, it says goodbye. And to me, that those brain waves look a bit like dreaming brain waves, that maybe death, maybe brain death in itself is our... is the one last massive dream, points to me feeling like dreaming is not a glitch.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:01 Like, I'm tingling all over-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:59:01 Yeah
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:02 ... my body.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:59:02 And-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:02 That is-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:59:04 And I'll send you the references for that and look up a... The Guardian had an article about this. This is a massive thing-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:09 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:59:09 ... that's coming down the field. Um-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:12 I mean, some nurses say, don't they, that they will continue speaking to patients-
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:59:17 Mm, well, then they, then they've been right all along
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:19 ... after cardiac death so that they know they're not alone.
Dr Rahul Jandial 1:59:24 Yeah. And, and that, and that's interesting that I want people to know that when... for when I did transplant surgery within the heart, it, it, it flutters, it whimpers. It's a decremental activity. The liver is, is decremental. But the brain, um, and this is how it really goes down, is the heart squeezes one last time, and then the, the last, uh, ejection of blood goes preferentially to the carotids in the neck and not so much to the body 'cause it, the artery is shut down in a certain way, much like in trauma.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 1:59:59 Mm-hmm.
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:00:00 And so that last squeeze of blood lands to the brain. The heart is stopped, but that blood is carrying glucose that keeps the neurons still, uh, sufficiently powered for a minute or two. And what does the brain do at that moment? Um, it fires everything in its arsenal and gives you your biggest dream yet.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:00:21 It's just making me think back to-
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:00:23 And I'll send you the link to put on your website-
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:00:24 Yeah
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:00:24 ... so people see, like, that's not... That's a measurement. That's a beautiful thing to say right there.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:00:29 Yeah.
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:00:29 That's a measurement. I'll let people interpret it that, interpret that the way they want.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:00:33 Well, where my mind goes to is just over eleven years ago, when my dad died, I was with him at the time of death. I was with him for hours beforehand. I was with him, along with my mum. When Dad died, we were both holding his hands. And I can't remember honestly what happened in the immediate moments after cardiac death. But we were there. I imagine I was crying. I don't know. But it's interesting to think now, actually, what was going on with Dad?
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:01:05 Yeah.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:01:05 What was going on? Did he know? Was he experiencing, like, his whole life playing? You know, what was going on? As you're saying, we know that there's electrical activity, so something's going on. Just 'cause we can't explain it yet doesn't mean that it's not powerful. And I think the door that that opens [chuckles] as to the purpose of our brain, the purpose of dreaming, what this electrical activity being measured in the brain, what it actually means is truly profound.
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:01:36 I think so. Thank you. Yeah, it's... uh, you've captured it well. For me, it's also comforting as a cancer surgeon, um, to occasionally start to share this story with my patients that there... not only is there a genius built in every night for us with the dreaming brain that keeps us adaptive, and creative, and adventurous, and open-minded, that in your final moments, a dream-like robust activity, uh, will be there for you, um, to comfort you and to celebrate the life you've lived. Like, to be able to have that interaction built off of a measurement, um, it's been a wonderful addition to my practice and my engagement with my patients, as well as just, once again, a sort of rebirth that, um, I'm just starting to look at the brain, the mind, humanity, behavior, art, all through the lens of the dreaming brain.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:02:36 I have so enjoyed our conversation.
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:02:39 Thank you, Rangan.
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:02:39 A journey through neuroscience, neurochemistry, magic, mystery. This Is Why You Dream: What Your Sleeping Brain Reveals About Your Waking Life. It's a fantastic book. Rahul, thanks for coming back on the show.
Dr Rahul Jandial 2:02:53 Thank you, brother. [upbeat music]
Dr. Rangan Chatterjee 2:02:55 If you enjoyed that conversation, I think you are really going to enjoy this one about how the first thing you do each morning can set you up for the rest of your day.
Guest 2:03:03 There's two times the door to the subconscious mind opens up, when we wake up in the morning and we go to bed at night, and it's simple brain chemistry and simple physiology
Episode duration: 2:03:14
In the uListen app, the transcript lights up word by word as you listen. Get uListen
Transcript of episode G6yBbzz3u_U
