0:00

Monica H. Kang: So weve been talking about how important sleep is but im still really curious.

0:06

Monica H. Kang: How does sleep, dream and creativity our.

0:09

Monica H. Kang: Favorite topic related so todays guest I got a chance to ask all those questions youre listening to dear workplace by innovators Fox and Im your host Monica King. Im excited to invite Nicolas Decat who is a PhD student at the Paris Brain Institute working on sleep and consciousness. He records brain activities during the falling asleep period to study the link between the transition to sleep and creativity as well as the dream states and what happens. As a PhD student he has the chance to explore and use the latest AI technologies to see how he can study sleep better. And one tip that you already noticed is that because of the technology recently, theres more ways that we can study sleep and brain science, which means what we know about sleep is only the tip of the iceberg. So lets dive in and meet Nicolas.

1:12

Monica H. Kang: So welcome to the show Nicolas. Im very excited to have you. I am first curious, how in the world did you decide to study science of sleep?

1:22

Nicolas Decat: I know, I wonder myself. The question even, you know, I would say that originally I was interested in consciousness, just wondering how come you and I are conscious beings? How come can we produce this subjective experience? And then I actually understood that the sleeping brain is just a great model to understand consciousness, which is a bit counterintuitive in a way, because you might think that during sleep there's nothing going on, you're just entirely unconscious. But it turns out that actually there's so many things going on in terms of your phenomenology, as we call it. So the conscious experiences a lot of different thoughts and dreams and consciousness, and that goes also with drastic changes in brain activity. So I can actually study consciousness while we are asleep. So that's how I started working on sleep.

2:16

Monica H. Kang: Well, that's really cool. So consciousness, I mean, why were you then interested in studying consciousness as well? What does that even mean for those who are not familiar?

2:24

Nicolas Decat: Wow. Well, defining consciousness, I always try to avoid the question. You can think about consciousness in two axes, the level of consciousness and the content of consciousness. And you can then sort of puts in that 2d graph many different states with sleep anesthesia, vegetative states. But it's a very complex topic. The way I got interested in that, and particularly in the context of sleep, is through lucid dreaming. About ten years ago, I would say, I just came across this website because I was trying to see whether I could do an activity during the night that would allow me to dream what I wanted to dream about. You know, try to influence the dreams in the following night.

3:11

Nicolas Decat: And I came across that website that was talking about the idea of being in a dream and, like, realizing that you're dreaming and giving you the ability to sort of control the content of the dream. And I thought, that must be a scam. Everybody should have told me that it's actually possible to control your dreams. So that's the term, lucid dreaming. So being aware that you are dreaming while in a dream, I got super interested in that. Did my master's internship on lucid dreaming, and, yeah, I got fascinated by that. And that's actually at the intersection between consciousness and sleep.

3:47

Monica H. Kang: Very, very cool. Yeah, I mean, I think most of us, we are, as we are diving into this whole theme of, like, wanting to better understand how to even sleep better, how to make sure we sleep, but you're really introducing us to the deeper theme of, like, are we even understanding how we think about sleep, the dreams, and all of that. And I know one of the angles butcher was excited to dive into. Is your interest in that connected to creativity? Of course, innovators box is all about creativity and leadership, and so I was super pumped to hear about it. Tell me a little bit more. What is it connected to creativity? And where would you like to break down the misconception that people have about creativity and sleep?

4:25

Nicolas Decat: Well, there's a lot of anecdotes on the link between creativity and sleep, and particularly the link between dreams and creativity, and hence the term sleep on it. You know, with the idea that as you fall asleep and go to sleep, when you wake up, you'll have creative insights that you would have never had if you haven't slept before. And there's inventions that have been found through dreams and sleep, like the. I think the periodic elements, the predictable from Mendeleyev, was sort of derived from that. The experiment that led Otto Lewi to understand how neurons communicate come from that as well, a bunch of anecdotes. So we know in a way that there's a link between the two. Now, empirically, it's hard to test, because creativity is very heterogeneous. As a definition. What is creativity? How would you define that, the context of science?

5:21

Nicolas Decat: You would define creativity as something that's appropriate to a task, to a problem, and something that's original. And it's like the combination between the two that leads to creative insight. Now, if I dive a bit deeper in sleep and creativity, there's basically two sort of sleep stages that we think can beneficial for or creative insights. So generally speaking, sleep is divided into two big parts. You have non REM sleep, which is non rapid eye movement sleep, which is divided in the transition to sleep, which we call n one, light sleep, which we call n two, and deep sleep, which we call n three. Once you do the three sleep stages, you go through REM sleep. So rapid eye movement sleep. And that is where typically you have the most bizarre or perceptual dreams.

6:20

Nicolas Decat: And the most recent research shows that both the transition to sleep and REM sleep are beneficial to creativity, which might be linked to the idea that we have conscious experiences in those two states, which is dreams. We have a lot of dreams during REM sleep, and they might beneficial for creative insights. And also the transition to sleep, which I'm mostly working on for my PhD. He's also linked to creativity.

6:48

Monica H. Kang: Those are a lot of great insights. And again, for those who are listening and trying to visualize what Nicola was just saying, like, we are going to have the visuals in the blog. Please make sure to visit. You might see a little bit of visual pop ups in our videos that we will release later. So take a look at that. But one of the things I'm hearing is just like, how much we're still learning about this science. Like, it feels kind of like weird. I mean, it's 2024. Like, I feel like there should be enough research and yet you're sharing that we're still uncovering. Like, if you have to put a percentage, like, how much do we really understand about sleep and how much more are we still trying to figure out?

7:24

Nicolas Decat: It is super hard. I can tell. We're really at a stage where we only realizing how complex sleep is as a state. So we broke it down, like I said, in service stages. Now we're trying to assign each sleep stage to a specific function. For example, non REM is more about memory consolidation, it's more about tissue repairing attention. REM sleep might be more with emotion regulation, other types of memory consolidation. So. But it's, you know, it's not as easy as just linking a stage with a function. So, yeah, it's. If I can give you a percentage, it would be, wow, I can tell. But probably below 20, 10%.

8:07

Monica H. Kang: So many. Oh my gosh, still so much to learn.

8:10

Nicolas Decat: Something I can say about it is really the way we classify sleep that limits us in getting deeper insights. So we classify sleep visually. We take brain signals. You look at brain signals in chunks of 30 seconds, and you try to visualize and identify visually some patterns in the brain and you're like, okay, there's these slow waves. It might be deep sleep, okay, there's these bursts of activity and those huge deflections. It might be light sleep. And the thing is, with the naked eye, you can't really capture all the information in the signals. There's a lot of things that are in the signals, but we can't actually capture. So first, it's very subjective to classify that visually, but also we just take only a very limited amount of information and we can talk about it later.

9:04

Nicolas Decat: With the emergence of machine learning in AI, but that's using more advanced technologies is really crucial to better characterize sleep and extend our knowledge on the topic, because for now, I guess we're not using the right approach.

9:21

Monica H. Kang: Well, we'd like to dive into it. So AI and machine learning, I mean, it's been such a hot topic in all industries. And one of the things I was indeed curious is, to your point, if we are only able to better understand about sleep creativity, what it means really, and how it helps us mentally, physically, how is AI machine learning changing how we study sleep and what we can collect and understand? Like, what's an example of? Like, because of AI and machine learning, we can do x versus, like, we couldn't do it before.

9:52

Nicolas Decat: We can take the example of, it's like self promotion. But the paper that I published two years ago on the topic, because of the limitations that I told you, the idea that we can capture much information, I developed this novel framework that automatically extracts so many more features, like thousands of features in the brain oscillations, and tried to use what we called unsupervised clustering. So trying to group this sleep data based on the properties that I extracted and see what would be the novel sleep architecture, something that we can see with the naked eye. And so that's definitely, in my opinion, a very important avenue of research to better classify it, to better characterize it, and to see it in a different angle.

10:41

Nicolas Decat: And the idea of conscious experiences as well is super important, especially given that just based on brain activity, you can't really tell whether someone is dreaming or not. It's hard to tell. The reason for that is because we're not, in my opinion, using enough information to tell whether someone is having a conscious experience or not. And so using more advanced techniques to better extract more properties and cluster it in a different way is just, I think, crucial to characterize sleep also in terms of dreams and other stuff.

11:19

Monica H. Kang: I mean, it's really eye opening because I feel before this research process that I've even been eye opened is just the realization of, like, as a non expert, as an individual. It's like the thing that I will look at is like, how much sleep should I have to get? Or like, how do I sleep better? Like, I feel like in a way what you're reminding me is that maybe the questions I'm asking is even too naive, like, too simple, like, and it's making me curious. I mean, but like, what are maybe a better question I should be asking about my sleep to improve my sleep quality. And that actually is healthier and also helps me be more creative.

11:53

Nicolas Decat: Yeah, well, in that case, you need to go back to the basics. And it's about, like, tips that you've probably heard many times before when it comes to optimizing sleep. So to better fall asleep, have a more stable sleep with as few awakenings as possible and to feel refreshed when you wake up. There's, in my opinion, three tips that are important. First one is consistency. It's regularity. It's going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time every time. That's super important to then fall asleep more easily and have more stable sleep. Second tip that I can give you is to keep it dark. Try to have to dim the lights a little bit before going to bed. You can, you know, turn off the main lights. Just keep some ambient lights. It's very soporific.

12:49

Nicolas Decat: You won't even realize that, but you feel just sleepy. By ending your day in a dark environment, that's going to allow you to secrete the melatonin earlier and so trigger sleep earlier as well. And last one, which is a bit less known, is to keep it cool, meaning to decrease the temperature because your body needs to have a lower temperature to trigger sleep. Your body needs to lower about one degree celsius, or two or three degrees fahrenheit to fall asleep and also to have a stable sleep throughout. And so the idea is to have maybe around 16 to 18 degrees celsius in your room.

13:36

Nicolas Decat: You could, for example, take a very warm shower or bath right before you fall asleep, which is counterintuitive, but the response of your body to that is going to try to cool down its own temperature to overcome the heat that it got. And so it's going to reduce the temperature and it's super effective to sleep faster and have deeper sleep afterwards.

14:01

Monica H. Kang: I didn't know about especially the last part. I always thought it was rather the heat of the shower that helps you. But you're saying that because of that it helps your body cool down.

14:10

Nicolas Decat: Yes. Monica H. Kang: Tell me also building on that, if we can kind of do a little rapid fire and some, like, practical tips, especially for our listeners who's tuning in for, like, actionable things. So, for instance, like me, I travel a lot. I go through, unfortunately, a lot of different time zones. Sometimes in a given month, given week. I would like to have a consistent schedule, but it's always not going to be easy. Like, what can I do then to better manage my sleep, even though my time zone is changing and sometimes flipped completely from us to Asia?

14:41

Nicolas Decat: Yeah, I mean, there's no magical tricks, unfortunately. Well, so the reason why you have such struggle to fall asleep is because. So you have what we call the circadian rhythm, sort of an internal clock that tells you when you should go to sleep. That internal clock, it is entirely modulated by the environment, by external factors. It's mostly light. So how much light you get in your eyes, it's the temperature, it's the meal times when you have lunch and have dinner. But when you go from the US to Asia, your body is not expected that suddenly it's pitch dark or suddenly it's super bright. 03:00 a.m. In your original country, and so it has a hard time adjusting, and it doesn't understand what it should do. So there's not much you can actually do at first.

15:34

Nicolas Decat: But the idea is really to adjust your body to this new environment that you have. So to kind of adapt your meal times to the country that you landed, get as much light in the morning and, yeah, just basically adjust to it. There's the idea of using melatonin supplements, which I've personally never really used, but I've came across a meta analysis on the use of melatonin for better sleep, and it turns out that it's actually not super effective. You might be able to fall asleep a little bit faster, but that's it. Because melatonin is just the factor that will tell you when to fall asleep, but then it does not intervene with the rest of sleep. So not the most effective, unfortunately.

16:24

Monica H. Kang: So another example is, like, sometimes I might be in a really good creative group, and I realize that even though I usually go to bed maybe, like, before midnight, it's, like, way past midnight. Like, is that better? Because, like, I'm actually being creative. Like, I'm staying up, but, like, maybe I'm gonna not have enough sleep the next day. Like, yeah, I'm curious. Like, that balance of, like, sometimes for certain reasons, you do stay up late, whether it's for work or creativity or certain aspects. And I feel like there's been a mix of, like, there's also night owls, there's like, early morning person.

16:57

Nicolas Decat: Absolutely. That was. That's what I was about to bring up.

17:00

Monica H. Kang: Yes, please. Yeah. Nicolas Decat: The preferences in either going late to bed and waking up late or going to bed early. Waking up early. I'm a morning person, so I'm usually very productive and more creative in the morning, so I tried to wake up earlier. This current n type thing is mostly, I think, driven by genetics. This actually, you are designed as a night all to go to sleep later and to wake up later. So don't feel bad for that because it's ingrained in your genetics. So far, I think we've identified nine genes that are responsible for anything that has to do with the chronotype. So if you're a night old, which you can know by using a questionnaire, there's questionnaires that you can use to see whether you're more of a morning person or an evening person.

18:00

Nicolas Decat: But I'm not surprised at all that you tell me that you are actually more creative and more productive around 11:00 p.m. Or midnight because you were designed that way. And there's actually been studies trying to switch that. And if you're an evening person, they try to make a group of evening persons be a morning person ineffective. Well, it was a three week program, which at some point people were switching a bit their schedule, but it's when you genetically designed for that, it's really hard and the habits come back.

18:36

Monica H. Kang: Well, I'm gonna say my husband's gonna really be happy to hear this because he's the night owl and I'm the morning one. Yeah. But I sometimes still have a late night workshift because of the work that I have with different time zones. And so we definitely have this conversation. And I'm even more tired when I don't get my evening sleep and he's even more tired when he's needing to wake up early in the morning. It's good to know we can't just blame on the normalization that people have one system.

19:03

Monica H. Kang: And to your point of having nine and just learning more about it brings to the bigger question of, like, you shared a lot of great tips, but as we wrap up already, like, what are, I guess, final misconceptions that you would want our listeners to, like, debunk about sleep and dream and creativity in general and have them walk away with?

19:26

Nicolas Decat: Well, one thing that I'd like to highlight is napping. And when I recommend people to take naps, they tell me naps is a waste of time. I don't need it. I'm just gonna go on and work. You know, nap is nothing but a waste of time. To me. It's an art in a way that you have to nap in the correct way, meaning below 20 minutes is the best. Otherwise you will feel more groggy and it's hard to emerge back to wake. But below 20 minutes before 02:00 p.m. Is the best, so that you don't really affect your nights during the night. And, yeah, I mean, napping is just a great tool for productivity, for creativity, as recent evidence shows. It's an effective tool for that, for attention, for mood regulation, emotional regulation.

20:19

Nicolas Decat: And that is for 20 minutes, something that you can do that's totally free, that does not require any equipment whatsoever. You just take a chair, a bed, you doze off for 20 minutes and you have those huge benefits. So I really wish I can contribute to sort of implementing nap as a tool in schools, institutions, in companies, and see that as a real tool for creativity and productivity. I think that would be, I guess it's kind of a cultural shift. It is, because I know that in Asia or in Greece, for example, that's a big thing and that's really used as a tool. And, yeah, I'm just trying to expand that and make more people take a nap like I do.

21:03

Monica H. Kang: Yeah, I think that's so great. I mean, employers and like bosses out there, like, next time when you see your employee needing a little nap, just let them take a nap. They're gonna be more productive later. But we got the message. That's so good. Now. Thank you so much. One final word that I would love to hear from you is like, what is something that you've changed because of all your sleep research? I feel like trying to navigate all of it. Is there new habits and routines you built for yourself sleep as a result of all of this?

21:31

Nicolas Decat: Napping for sure. Honestly, since I worked on sleep, I just take naps very often. So that would be mostly the main thing. And also as part of my research now, I try to remember my dreams a bit more, especially when I take naps. I try to interrupt myself and notes on a journal what I dreamt about, but it's mostly a way for me to be more familiar with my own experiences and try to better design my own experiments as well.

21:59

Monica H. Kang: That's really cool. Well, what's the best way folks can follow up with you and stay in touch.

22:06

Nicolas Decat: Well, I'm, I think, mostly active on LinkedIn so people can contact me through that. And I'm also like building a website, which I'm gonna make public, I think, soon. So I will let you know when it is. It is ready.

22:21

Monica H. Kang: Perfect. And when we do, you know, we'll have it in the show notes, so find it there. But definitely reach out to him on LinkedIn. That's actually how we connected. So really appreciate how we got to have this conversation. And so thank you so much for folks. We'll continue the conversation and we'll see you soon. So thank you. Bye bye.

22:40

Nicolas Decat: See you. Monica H. Kang: Well, I agree, I'm going to definitely be taking more naps after this conversation in put that into the routine. And in fact, I think honestly, it has helped me a little bit. I feel a little bit more rested and better. You're listening to dear workplace. I'm your host, Monica King. Have a great day and see you next week.

23:10

Speaker 4: Thanks so much for tuning into today's episode at Dear Workplace, where we untangle your questions about the workplace. I hope you enjoyed today's conversation. Please send us your questions, feedback, suggestions at info@innovatorsbox.com or dearworkplace.com because we want to know how to continue to dive deeper in navigating those questions with you. This show, of course, is possible thanks to the amazing podcast team at InnovatorsBox Studios that I want to do a little shout out. Audio Engineering and producing by Sam Lehmart, Audio Engineering and assistance by Ravi Lad, website and marketing support by Kree Pandey, Graphic.Support by Lea Orsini, Christine Eribal. Original Music by Innovators Fox Studios an executive producing, directing, writing, researching, and hosted by me, Monica Kang. Thank You again, for your support!