When we think of our health, we often consider our diet and exercise only, but we should also be considering our sleep. Because we all sleep, we can dismiss it away from our minds – it doesn’t weigh in as much as diet and exercise… right? My neighbour George says his coffee can wake someone from a coma but I think the results are still out. If we didn’t get enough sleep the night before, we charge our batteries up with coffee and put it in drive. We seem to often cope with our sleep patterns/schedules and the amounts we take in. Often a career can demand more work hours, less sleep. We’ve all heard the horror stories of lack of sleep at the workplace. A surgeon left a sponge inside a patient after the operation. At the circus, the clown car appears in the ring and 14 clowns don’t get out because they were all asleep from exhaustion. Arianna Huffington (Huffington Post) falls asleep at her desk and breaks her jaw from the impact – true story.
Lack of sleep can impair your life if you allow it. You can break your jaw or worse, fall asleep while driving. There is also the wear on your body and your mind. If you can’t sleep enough, it can impair your memory and cognitive thinking, but it can also impact your heart and blood pressure. Experts recommend between 7-9 hours per day for optimum rest but there is some wiggle room. Do humans sleep differently than animals? Do insects sleep? Can some animals in the wild put half their brain to sleep at a time, while the other half is still operating? Was the 2019 film, Doctor Sleep based on a real doctor? Some questions are best left unanswered but science is remarkable when it does uncover the more complex ones.
How the Wild Things Sleep by The Nature of Things premieres this Friday, March 11 at 9 pm NT on CBC and CBC Gem. It dives down the rabbit hole of sleep amongst wildlife and the results are pretty astonishing. Hosted by David Suzuki, with a team of writers, researchers and producers, the episode explains the importance of getting sleep, the evolution of sleep and do you still require sleep if you don’t have a brain? Mind boggling but not impossible to answer when science is leading the charge.
Shot by world-class production teams in Canada, the USA, Germany, South Africa and Japan, How The Wild Things Sleep is a revealing and engaging look into one of the great remaining mysteries in the scientific world. “The phenomenon of sleep goes back hundreds of millions of years to the very beginnings of life on our planet,” says Award-Winning documentary writer Geoff D’Eon (This Hour Has 22 Minutes).
How the Wild Things Sleep is co-produced by Edward Peill and Erin Oakes of Tell Tale Productions Inc. (Canada) and Taglicht media (Germany), with the participation of the Canada Media Fund, Canadian Film or Video Tax Credits and assistance of the Government of Nova Scotia, Nova Scotia Film & Television.
I was extremely privileged to speak with Award-Winning writer Geoff D’Eon and Dr. John Peever (geneticist) about their involvement in the documentary, the impact of sleep on our lives and if there’s a hack for that. The US Army is certainly taking it seriously. Roll the tape!
HNMAG “This was a fascinating documentary about sleep. It was very interesting to learn about the ways that animals and insects sleep.”
GEOFF “I don’t think it’s one of those subjects that people give enough thought too. Sleep is one of those things we take for granted. The sun goes up, the sun comes down, it gets dark and we go to sleep. There’s been a number of studies on human sleep that started in the ‘50’s because people had sleep disorders. In order to understand the function of sleep, we put electrodes on their brains back then and we actually now know quite a lot about the mechanisms of sleep in humans. Psychologists, Doctors and Sleep Doctors can diagnose sleep disorders, as well as describing the value of sleep to humans and what happens when we’re deprived of it. When you sleep, the brain is actually clearing out the toxins and improving the communicative ability of the synapsis in your brain. It’s storing away your memories and operating all these tasks in the background. We’ve gotten a pretty good handle on all that in the last 70 years, but sleep in insects and other critters addresses a much more fundamental question – why do we sleep? Why did Mother Nature wire all living things to sleep? It’s quite a new study of fresh research.”
HNMAG “One of the more fascinating discoveries to come out of this research, is that some seals and birds can put ½ of their brain to sleep at a time.”
GEOFF “That was one of the more interesting takeaways and one of the more interesting things that I also learned. The ability for birds and fur seals to engage in unihemispheric sleep. One half of the brain is awake while the other half is asleep. Then they switch between the hemispheres in order to achieve the amount of sleep that they need. We believe it evolved from a way to balance the need for sleep and the danger of sleep. In the wild, the danger of sleep can make you prey and incredibly vulnerable. Critters cannot stay awake indefinitely, so they have to sleep. The fur seals in the ocean and most birds seem to be able to sleep unihemispherically. When geese fly in flocks, the centuries are on the outside of the flock and they’ll rotate. The centuries on the outside will keep the eye on the outside open and the eye facing the inside closed, as they get some sleep. It’s a remarkable ability that may go to explain how birds can stay airborne for weeks.”
HNMAG “Definitely an interesting subject. How did you get involved in the project?”
GEOFF “At the genesis of this documentary, there was a German company working on it, Taglicht Media. They hooked up with CBC senior documentary producer and expressed the desire to do a co-production with a Canadian company. The CBC executive brought it to The Nature of Things who then brought it to a company in Halifax, Tell Tale Productions that agreed to partner. The Germans would shoot some of the chapters and the Halifax based company (Tell Tale Productions) would shoot other chapters, and then everyone would share everything. The German company would do a long version and Tell Tale would adapt it for CBC purposes. I was hired as the director of the Canadian components. I was about to get on a plane to Indianapolis to go see the orangutans, somewhere around March 20 and then Covid reared its ugly head. I had established good relationships with the zoo, so I called them up. I told them it was going to be a big cost to bring me and 5 other people out there. I had asked, if they could guarantee that we would be able to finish the shoot even if they get closed to the public… and they said no. We had to pull the plug and with every passing day, it became clearer that we wouldn’t be able to execute these shoots. We had to look for ways to get it shot. It’s a miracle this film got made at all. Local crews were hired at each location and were directed remotely by telephone. I had been moved to another project but then the production company came back to me to ask if I would write and adapt the film, which involved shortening it.”
HNMAG “There’s a lot of science revealed in this documentary. Was it easy to translate all that data into something the public could easily digest?”
GEOFF “I’d say yes. The job of the writer/documentarian is to take complicated esoteric scientific research and translate it to make it accessible to the average viewer. It’s really much like being a translator, which is what journalism is. We find the information and then tailor the material for the audience we’re trying to reach. I started doing that when I was a news reporter. I later became the news producer, which is essentially translating, interpreting, distilling, condensing… it’s what TV news does. In 1993 I ran away and joined the circus with This Hour Has 22 Minutes. I was the news producer, which was incredibly liberating. It was an entirely different way of conveying current affairs with an incredibly talented cast that had an appetite for it. I learned the importance of entertainment value from working on 22 Minutes. No matter how dry or esoteric the subject matter is, the job is to communicate it in an interesting way. As documentarians, our job is to explain in a way that engages. The 3 pillars of broadcast documentaries are – enlighten, engage and entertain. It’s what I always strive for.”
HNMAG “How much time would it have taken to put a documentary like this together?”
GEOFF “From the time that a broadcaster says yes to the pitch, a year is pretty normal. You start to identify the casting and who you’re going to find to talk about bees, elephants, sea slugs and pets. That might take a month, then you move onto planning the shoots. There were shoots in Germany, Africa, North America that were done in blocks to maximize efficiency and budget. A director/writer would then be given 6-weeks to look at all the material and write it. After that they’ll be given 6-8 weeks to do an off-line, where you sit with an editor and make sense of the material you have. The writer/director does a paper edit, where they take it into an edit suite with an editor and put a rough assembly together. The producer will come in and tell you what’s working and what’s not working. You execute the notes, and within a week of 5 days, you end up with a fine cut. Once you’ve got picture lock approved, you start working on the music. After that, it’s the voice-over work with David Suzuki. He lives off the West Coast, so he’ll come into Vancouver and do one or two sessions at a time. I’m in Halifax and David would be on the line in a studio in Vancouver. When I write it, I have David Suzuki in my head and I’m always trying to anticipate what it’s going to sound like when he says it. His notes are very good – he’s been doing this a long time.”
HNMAG “What draws you to documentary writing?”
GEOFF “Discovery, revelation, learning, new experiences, all of those things. The best documentaries are eye-opening. I like to write in all shapes and forms. When I wrote for the news, it was like writing a 90 second film every night, you make it the best story you can. The next night, when you come in – it’s gone and you’re doing another one and another and so on. You do 5 or 6 per week and you get good at it – the shaping, the distilling, the crafting of these stories. It really comes down to the love of story. As human beings, we’re all wired to love story. It’s an innately interesting instinct for us to learn about other people’s experiences and to learn about the wider world through story. I consider myself incredibly fortunate and incredibly lucky to get paid to tell stories – I count my blessings everyday. What a sweet gig.”
Doctor John Peever Q&A
HNMAG “Great film John. Your research was very interesting. Is this the first time you’ve been involved in a documentary?”
DR. PEEVER “No, I’d done something similar to that before. I have to be honest; I haven’t seen it yet.”
HNMAG “How long have you been a sleep doctor?”
DR. PEEVER “Since 2001.
HNMAG “Have you studied the sleep habits of family pets in the past?”
DR. PEEVER “No, I’m actually a geneticist. I study genetically modified mice and how they sleep. They are family pets (laughing).”
HNMAG “As a geneticist, what turned your focus to the study of animal sleep habits?”
DR. PEEVER “The types of questions my field of research is aimed at, is understanding how the brain controls sleep. I’m fundamentally curious about the parts of your brain that cause you to go into sleep, out of sleep, what cells are there and how they talk with the rest of the brain? It’s what sparked my interest in that line of research and understanding the principal mechanisms that generate sleep. I did a lot of my research at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA in Los Angeles. It’s where I became acutely aware and interested in trying to understand the brain mechanisms of sleep, particularly in dreaming sleep.”
HNMAG “Would you say that all animals dream?”
DR. PEEVER “That’s a question that people always ask – do animals dream? It’s almost impossible to tell because a dream is an entirely subjective event. It’s only experienced by the dreamer themselves and the world of the unconscious. Although it’s almost impossible to answer if animals dream, we certainly have pieces of evidence to prove that they do. The activity in an animal’s brain during REM sleep is almost exactly the same as ours. Their eyes move back and forth, their muscles behave in the same way, there are changes in blood pressure, heart rate and breathing. All of the evidence of animals having dreams while they sleep, are well in line with what we can record from the brain in the body of animals. I suppose, one could also ask, ‘why wouldn’t they be dreaming’? If you really want to pull it apart through revolution – mice, cats and dogs are more ancient in their evolution than we are. We’re more modernly evolved than a cat. It would make sense that we didn’t develop dreaming and that it developed through our evolutionary connections with our distant ancestors.”
HNMAG “Science seems to suggest that sleeping has existed for millions or even billions of years and that it’s part of our evolution?”
DR. PEEVER “From the current scientific literature, everything that scientists have studied, seems to engage in something that looks like sleep. From an evolutionary perspective, it suggests that sleep is an ancient behaviour. Breathing is an ancient behaviour and if they didn’t do it, they wouldn’t be alive. We should think of sleep as the same uniquely positioned behaviour. Why wouldn’t everything be engaged in sleep, because our fundamental knowledge of sleep is based on the fact that it helps us rejuvenate from the day’s activities. The scientific data points toward sleep being an ancient behaviour.”
HNMAG “There are some very smart people, such as Einstein, that supposedly only slept 4 hr/day on average. Is there any science that says sleep deprivation is capable of activating part of the mind?”
DR. PEEVER “I think the vast majority of people only getting 4 hrs of sleep per night would not be functioning like Einstein. In fact, quite the opposite happens and you’ll actually perform more poorly on 4 hrs of sleep. Some people need 9 hrs of sleep per night to function and they’re equally intelligent humans in comparison to Einstein. There are some people that don’t need a lot of sleep and that’s a normal variation that we see across a population. Some people can look at a donut and gain 10 pounds and some people can eat 10 donuts and gain 0 pounds. The point there is that some bodies use calories differently between people. Some people can eat a lot and not gain weight and the same thing applies to sleep. Some people don’t need a lot of sleep and 4 hours might provide the same benefit as someone that requires 9 hours of sleep to accomplish. We don’t know if Einstein had naps during the day, but I think it’s a curious thing that he’s been pinpointed as a pillar of sleep. Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post was running on no sleep or very little, for a good chunk of her life. One day, she was literally sitting at her desk on her computer and she fell asleep and broke her jaw. She was a super productive amazing journalist that helped establish an entire empire but went on very little sleep for a very long time, until her body and brain said enough is enough – you’re going to sleep now. It changed her entire life and she wrote a book on the importance of sleep. In conclusion, different people can survive on different amounts of sleep, as can animals.”
HNMAG “What would have been one of the most interesting things that you’ve discovered in this study?”
DR. PEEVER “I think some of the most interesting elements to come out of this documentary are really focused on the biology of animal sleep. Neils Rattenberg from Germany has shown that birds can actually spend countless days out at sea where they cannot sleep because they have to fly and they’re over water. They’re not the type of birds that live in the water… and they can sleep with one part of their brain at a time. That discovery is critical because it really flies in the face of how we ‘envision’ sleep.
Seals do the same thing; in the past I had a PhD student, Dr. Jenn Lapierre that studied sleep in seals. We found that seals sleep with one half of their brain at a time, when they’re in water but they don’t do it when they’re on land. Sleep is malleable and can morph itself based on need and the environmental circumstance an animal is in. It speaks to the incredible versatility and flexibility of sleep. It may not be as hard wired as we once thought it to be.”
HNMAG “What is the smallest living organism that you’ve studied sleep patterns on?”
DR. PEEVER “That would have been C. elegans, which is a nematode – a tiny little worm that lives in your grass. In order to see it, you need a microscope. These nematodes actually go through a process that is reminiscent of sleep. That would be the smallest organism, but now everyone is going to start looking at amebas – a single cell living organism to see if it sleeps? It’s not something that I’ll be doing, but I’m very curious what my colleges find out. Discovering that an individual cell engages in sleep, would be a revolutionary concept.”
HNMAG “This seems to suggest that you don’t need a brain to sleep? That it’s built into the DNA?”
DR. PEEVER “There’s some old studies suggesting that plants sleep. Plants don’t have a nervous system. A college of mine at Harvard, quite wrongly made the statement, ‘sleep is of the brain, by the brain and for the brain. I.e., sleep is all about the brain’. There is ample evidence to suggest that sleep benefits the entire organism. We know that sleep is important for cardiovascular health and gut health. I think sleep is serving multiple functions. Therefore, it’s not surprising that animals without a central nervous system, such as a jellyfish – would engage in sleep because it still has a body and still needs to go through some sort of restorative process to recuperate from its jellyfish day, whatever that may be.”
HNMAG “How much sleep per day should we be getting?”
DR. PEEVER “There’s a range in sleep amounts that people need but scientists look at a variety of measures – one being life span and the other being cognition. We can all agree that Jack/Jane needs between 7-9 hours sleep per night. Once you go below 7 hours, the average person suffers. There may be some impairment when trying to focus or remember things. The other side to that is, people that sleep too long have a shorter life span. Too much sleep can be a negative thing.”
HNMAG “How would sleep patterns change for a person in their 20’s in comparison to someone in their 70’s?”
DR. PEEVER “Sleep changes very much across development. Newborn babies spend virtually their entire first few months sleeping. They’re in a state that looks like REM sleep and then as they age, that amount of REM sleep goes down and then wakefulness and deep sleep starts to build up. By the time you hit 20, it plateaus for a while and as everyone knows, the older you get the messier it gets. You tend to get different amounts of sleep, you have less deep sleep, restorative sleep and REM sleep. The quality of your sleep declines as well, meaning that you spend 9 hours in bed but you only sleep for 7 hours… because you can’t fall asleep and you can’t stay asleep.”
HNMAG “Are humans capable of putting half of their brain to sleep, like seals and geese – with practice?”
DR. PEEVER “That’s a big question. I can tell you that the US Army has spent millions of dollars trying to answer that question… can you put a soldiers’ brain to sleep one side at a time? There’s a good idea that it could be very advantageous. You can have soldiers that could go on forever. The answer is, I don’t know but the other answer is why not? If seals can do it, as well as certain types of animals, such as the frigatebirds, then why wouldn’t it be possible to imagine that it’s a doable scenario? Has anyone achieved it? Not to my knowledge. Is it on the minds of a lot of people? Absolutely!”
HNMAG “How can you use this data collected throughout the documentary and apply it to our lives?”
DR. PEEVER “The way that I like to view these things is – the more we know, the more we’re prepared. One analogy that I like to use is the diagnosis of cancer. Everyone has pretty much adopted the mindset that the earlier you detect cancer, the better your outcome. The same thing needs to apply to sleep. We know so much about the negative benefits of poor sleep. Insufficient sleep is linked to increased risk of car accidents. The more we know, the more we can prepare for your lifestyle. I love the quote – sleep is just as important as diet and exercise, only easier. There’s no data out there to indicate that the right amount of sleep is bad for you. The evidence is centered on understanding sleep, so we can translate it into benefits for people.”
Fun Sleep Facts:
Dogs are better at sleeping than humans.
When sleeping in water, fur seals keep one half of their brain awake at all times.
It’s believed that Canadian Geese—who fly up to 2400 KM a day—can sleep while they fly.
An eye-opening interview that educates and helps to better inform ourselves is all in thanks to The Nature of Things and all the incredible people that make it all happen.