humanOS Radio

Why is it that when you’re binge watching your favorite new series on Netflix, you can stay up for hours past your normal bedtime - even if you were tired before you started watching? On the other hand, if you weren’t being entertained or captivated by a game or puzzle, you’d be much more likely to be lulled to sleep at that time. Indeed, sleep and goal-directed behaviors are mutually exclusive: you can’t do both at the same time. While this relationship is intuitively clear, for the first time, scientists at Stanford have clarified the circuitry between the brain’s reward and arousal systems. In the latest episode of humanOS Radio, Dan speaks with Luis de Lecea, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine. Recently, he and his colleagues published a study in the prestigious journal Nature demonstrating that dopamine neuron activity (in the ventral tegmental area of the brain) is necessary in order to be awake. Furthermore, when they inhibited these neurons, there were able to promote what seemed like natural, healthy sleep.

Protein is really important for dieting success, right? Anyone who has interested in the science of dieting knows this, but recent research from Bettina Mittendorfer, Research Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis’s School of Medicine, and colleagues published in Cell Reports has raised doubts that protein is indeed a wholly-helpful solution. To shed light on this study and its findings, Dan invited Dr. Stephan Guyenet to join humanOS Radio for a conversation. Perhaps no other person has done more in the last few years to help the general public, and even health professionals, understand the true meaning of new research dealing with energy regulation and weight control.

In this show, Dan speaks with Dr. Jamie Zeitzer who is an Assistant Professor in Psychiatry & Behavioral Science at Stanford and at the VA Aging Clinical Research Center of Stanford University. In his research on light and the timing of biological rhythms, he noticed something curious: A brief flash of light has a greater ability to adjust body clock timing versus continuous light exposure. For instance, sitting in a room with the light on 4a can adjust your internal clock by about 35 minutes. This means that if you usually wake up at 7:30a, tomorrow morning you would naturally wake up at 6:55a (and the timing of all your other body process would shift accordingly, too). On the other hand, if you were to get 2-millisecond flashes of light every 10 seconds at 4a (instead of sitting in a room with the light on), you could advance your internal clock timing by about 120 minutes - over 3x more than simply being in the room with the light on. That would mean that getting these light flashes at 4a would make 5:30a the next morning feel like your typical wake-up time. In this conversation, we also discuss an effort by the company LumosTech to commercialize this light technology and the many benefits that can come from it.

Dietary fat is a class of nutrients of which there are many different types. Some types appear to have clear beneficial effects on human physiology in certain contexts, like for example olive oil, while others appear to impair our health when they comprise too high a fraction of our calorie intake over time. Saturated fat has been called out for decades by health authorities as something we should monitor and limit. Recently, however, this idea has been called into question by several meta-analyses, which is a type of scientific examination where all the research on a subject pooled and analyzed together to help determine what the weight of the evidence tells us on that subject. In this interview with Dr. David Katz at Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, we discuss not only the findings but also how to best interpret them so that you can continue to make good dietary choices in your own life.

Can we really stay young forever? This has been a goal of humans since the dawn of time. I know I would like to keep my peak abilities and not see those diminish over the decades. Aging is a subject that I have become increasingly interested in and it's not necessarily because I'm getting older. Understanding it can help guide how you live, even way before you start to feel old. Plenty of things we can do today can help us live longer by not dying early from disease. Diet and lifestyle make a huge difference here, but this podcast is really about something entirely different - it's about using cutting edge biotechnology to actually keep the aging process at bay far beyond what good lifestyle practices could achieve. We're talking about staying close to your peak abilities in life through the age of 130 to 150, or even longer.

Where to you get the energy to do something hard or inconvenient? It matters because so much of what's important in life comes from finding that strength. The topic of the discussion in this podcast is motivation, which can be described as the activation energy needed to do most-to-all volitional activities. Specifically, we'll be discussing the leading behavior model of motivation called Self-Determination Theory. Like most complex subjects, motivation is NOT a monolithic entity, although it's usually referred to as if it were. Rather, there are different types of motivation, and these different types have different affects on behavior. The good news is that with a greater understanding of the subject, you can better strategize when to use the specific types and, ultimately, how to use various the types together to stay engaged with something that is important but hard or inconvenient, long term.

Dan Pardi interviews Professor Stephen Hinshaw from UC Berkeley. Dr. Hinshaw is a world authority on the condition of attention deficit. He described ADHD as an 'equifinal' condition, meaning that it appears that there are multiple different biological pathways to inattentiveness. Optimal strategies to address the condition are reviewed.

Sitting has been called the new smoking. Is this true? Dan Pardi interviews Professor Travis Saunders of The University of Prince Edward Island and the founder of the Sedentary Behavior Research Network. Dr. Saunders discusses the state of the research on sitting and standing - what do we know, what questions remain, and practical ways to integrate this information into your day.

In this interview, Dan Pardi interviews evolutionary biologist, Professor David Samson of Duke University. Dr. Samson talks about his work research the sleep platforms (i.e., beds) or great apes in Africa. We discuss how these platforms appear to have contributed to deeper sleep in certain great apes, and in turn, how this deeper sleep seemingly contributed to greater cognitive abilities than compared to primates with shallower sleep.

Have you ever woken up and felt that you solved a problem during sleep? Maybe it's because during sleep our brains go through a process where neurons strengthen their connections with other neurons that fired together when we were exposed to new information during the day before we slept. In this interview, Professor Marcos Frank of Washington State University discusses the state of the science on this topic and explains how things work.