The Science of Sleep: Melatonin to Neural Pathways

Russell Foster, Debra Skene and Stafford Lightman discuss the science of sleep. Why do we need sleep and what are the physiological processes driving our circadian rhythm? When is our circadian clock disrupted and how does this affect our health? Cognitive neuroscientist Vincent Walsh chairs the debate.

The science behind sleeplessness can help us understand our rhythms so we can live better and healthier lives. While hormones, such a melatonin, play a role in driving our circadian clock, the amount of sleep we get and our sleep cycles also affect our hormonal release patterns, with far-reaching implications on our health.

Cognitive neuroscientist Vincent Walsh chairs a discussion with a panel of experts who specialise in circadian rhythms. They explore how light detection plays a role in our sleep-wake cycles, how hormone release is regulated and the implications of changes to our circadian clock and sleeplessness over time.

This event was supported by British Psychological Society and Society for Endocrinology.

Russell Foster is Professor of Circadian Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. The research interests of his group range across visual neuroscience, circadian rhythms and sleep.

Debra Skene is Professor of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Surrey. She leads the research group 'Sleep, Chronobiology and Addiction' and her research focusses on links between human circadian clocks, sleep and metabolism in health, circadian disorders and metabolic diseases.

Stafford Lightman is Professor of Medicine at Bristol University. Researching the mechanisms of stress-related disease, his research has particularly looked at how neuroendocrine rhythms signal to other tissues in the body.

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[hosoiarchives]

5:32 chemical process for cortisol
15:48 oscillations
17:55 pineal and melatonin

[garypuckettmuse]

Love everything The Royal Institution puts out and so grateful to find such high quality presentations available to the public on youtube.

[afterthesmash]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[stroborobo]

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

[zack_]

7:11- Remarkable confirmation of a key physiological phenomenon, the pulsatility for many metabolic activities such as insulin secretion pattern or heart rate variability, ... also pulsatile. So rhythm is a fundamental life mechanism. Some of them are just feedback responses, others may be just a intrinsic property.

[MayasDream]

Thank you for this research; it is desperately needed and your hard work will transform lives.

[betulipekozturk]

"Burns and Smithers" was a very helpful way to explain what was going on! Thank you!

[Metalkatt]

I wonder if some of the lethargy/oversleeping of the depressed brain is an attempt to shut off the cortisol that never seems to stop flowing when one is awake. When my depression gets really bad, I just want to sleep--being awake and dealing with things is just too overwhelming and stressful. Sure, the dreams can get bad, but it's better than being awake.

[MartiniComedian]

Watching this after a sleepless night.
Hopefully it will help! :)

[sleepsciencevideos]

Sleep is so vital in the maintenance of good health.

[alyssabupp]

He looks like a friendly version of Simon Cowell.

[ik]

Don't watch past 40 min mark if you have insomnia. Your anxiety will go through the roof and you won't sleep at all

[scarakus]

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

[swen]

Skene is not integrating 2 key concepts into her study of the blind and the conclusions drawn. One is that there are two layers to the retina, one layer we know as rods and cones for detecting visual light signals, and one for detecting light signals from the invisible spectrum where all the clock signals are generated. One could be blind and still detect non visual signals from light hitting that layer. Also, one of the photo receptors in that layer, melanopsin, is also found in the skin. Yes, our skin is also a perceiver of light, just less so than the retina. If a blind person has a totally defective retina, they can still perceive light. As an addendum, I was writing that as she mentioned taking melatonin while wearing sunglasses. Not only does that ignore the input of light upon the skin, but it also suggests a behavior that blocks your eyes from the only valuable source of melatonin; that is, from sunlight into the retina and sans clothing, onto the skin.

[SomosLaNuevaEra]

Musica curativa para Sanacion y Meditacion‚ eleva tu espiritu y Sana tus Emociones diariamente ❤❤❤️

[thomasstevenrothmbamd]

The medical industrial complex's failure to properly research and diagnose and treat microbiome and sleep and vital nutritional deficiency issues (including those related to Vitamin D3 and Vitamin K2 and Magnesium deficiencies as well as iatrogenic prescription medication usage) is a major reason why psychiatric iatrogenesis is a primary contributor to the third leading cause of death in the U.S. (which is iatrogenesis in general). If the U.S. spent just a fraction of the over $40 billion each year it spends just on iatrogenic psychiatric drugs alone, on properly researching the issues discussed in this and related YouTube presentations we would probably, Lord willing, achieve an absolute revolution in medical efficacy improvement and iatrogenesis reduction.
Thomas Steven Roth, MBA, MD
Christian Minister for Biblical Medical Ethics, and therefore, Scientific and Religious Refugee from the Clinical Practice of Psychiatric Standards of Care

[defunkdafied]

Listening to this as I can’t sleep. My partner works nights and when he isn’t here at night I can’t relax, I get about 3 hours of sleep and wake up throughout them. When my partner is here I fall asleep easily by 9.30pm (I get up at 5.30). The cortisol-based segment made me wonder how physical touch affects cortisol

[izmirfication]

Everytime explanation about the mechanisms, but no effort to dig in for curing problems with some meds, or any new meds as usual, It feels good to give speech to people like a professor, self satisfaction, not a tiny tip or idea to correct or cure some problems, this speech very
empty inside.. We have internet now, you did not hear it yet I guess

[KWLLS]

I like the way she says bilactically enucliated.

[accountantas]

thank you guys for this amazing video!