Your Daily Brain

Chapter 1

6:30am

Insight or Energy: Should You Hit the Snooze Button?

You’ve heard of brain waves, and here’s how they happen. Think of the eighty-six billion neurons in your head like crickets. When one cricket chirps, not much happens—it’s not like the voice of one cricket can make you pour a cup of coffee or help you remember that snappy comeback. But your brain crickets don’t just do their own thing. They synchronize in ways that create the pulsing cacophony of a summer night.

The thing is, crickets can come into synch in different rhythms. The neuronal crickets in your brain “chirp” more slowly when you are asleep than they do when you are awake. Just like a summer night, the brain waves created by your chirping neurons are like the background noise against which other things take place. When you’re awake, everything you do or think happens against the backdrop of the pattern called beta waves. Deep sleep happens against delta waves. If you listened closely, the beta waves would sound like high-pitched chirps and the delta waves would sound like crickets bowing a section of orchestral basses. Between these two patterns—the beta waves of alertness and the delta waves of deep sleep—are alpha waves of wakeful relaxation and theta waves of light sleep.

So there are many patterns of brain waves created by the synchronicity of your neuronal crickets, and each brain wave is associated with a level of sleep or consciousness. The purpose of an alarm is to mess with these crickets, forcing them to chirp in the pattern you want. Of course, you have a last line of defense against the dictatorship of your alarm clock: the snooze button! The desire to whack snooze competes only with the need to check Facebook while driving and with the overwhelming compulsion to scratch mosquito bites on your knuckles for the top spot on the human list of temptations. The question is, should you?

Here’s the reason you shouldn’t: maybe if you set the alarm five, ten, or fifteen minutes later, you wouldn’t need the alarm at all. If you kicked the snooze habit, you could sleep a little longer, and these few minutes might be all it takes for your brain to reach a natural state of wakefulness without being tossed into the ice-water bath that is the alarm clock. If you stick to a regular sleep schedule, your body knows exactly when it’s reached the final pass through what’s called N1 sleep, and you’ll wake up instead of taking another spin through the sleep cycle. If the fifteen minutes that you usually spend hitting the snooze button would let you get into this final N1, your brain and body would be better off using this time to sleep for real instead of snoozing in the half-light.

Then again, there’s something to be said for hanging out at this N1 transition between alpha and theta waves. Have you ever been floored by an idea? Has insight ever hit you like a falling piano? When did it happen? Was it in a warm shower or in the middle of the night? The reason is that a brain coasting on the cushion of theta waves is primed for insight—when you relax in the shower or slip into the boundary between alpha and theta waves in N1, you make your brain ready to receive messages from the beyond. There you are between sleep cycles in an N1 phase or staring out the window cross-eyed at a rainy day, and wham!—it’s insight (which looks like a burst of high-frequency gamma waves in your brain).

If you need energy, forget the snooze button and work toward a regular sleep cycle that lets you wake up naturally. But if you need insight, try smacking snooze and surfing the cusp between theta waves and alpha waves—the line that separates asleep from awake. You may find your brain infusing the certainty of insight into what had been stubbornly murky before.

6:35am

The Difference Between Asleep and Awake

Why are we here? Are we alone in the universe? What is consciousness? Why do cat pictures go viral on Facebook? A satisfactory answer exists for exactly one of these questions—namely, the consciousness thing. And it explains what happens when you come back into your body in the morning.

The understanding comes from a long line of research by Francis Crick (of discoverer-of-DNA fame) and Christof Koch at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle. They started with a simple question: Is there one area of the brain that lights up during all the tasks of consciousness? If all these sensory and motor and cognitive things were circles of a Venn diagram, where would they overlap?

What they found is the claustrum, a one-millimeter-thick sheet of neurons that divides the hemispheres of the brain. All mammals have it. And it’s connected to all the major players in your skull, including the prefrontal cortex, auditory cortex, visual cortex, primary motor cortex, premotor cortex, and many other areas of functioning. So Crick and Koch went into people’s heads and zapped their claustrums to see if it would mess with their consciousness. Actually, they didn’t—due to troublesome things like ethics and morality, you can’t just fry people’s brains and see what happens. That is, outside of very special circumstances.

One of those circumstances is in the treatment of epilepsy. In epilepsy, an area of the brain misfires in a way that lets electricity “leak” into surrounding tissues, rebounding through the brain like a gunslinger’s bullet in a rib cage—sometimes with equally devastating consequences. To treat cases of severe and debilitating epilepsy, doctors explore inside the brains of conscious patients to discover the source of the problem, at which point they can sometimes cure or diminish symptoms by inserting a sophisticated electrical pacemaker. The thing is, epilepsy can live pretty much anywhere in the brain, and so discovering its source sometimes takes significant exploring.

That’s what Mohamad Koubeissi and colleagues did with a fifty-four-year-old with what they describe as “intractable epilepsy.” In a study published in Epilepsy and Behavior in 2014, they recount what happened during what’s called electrical stimulation mapping, when the surgeons just happened to be poking around her claustrum. “Stimulation of the claustral electrode reproducibly resulted in a complete arrest of volitional behavior, unresponsiveness, and amnesia without negative motor symptoms or mere aphasia,” they write. In English, this means that when Koubeissi zapped this woman’s claustrum, she became unconscious. When they turned off the juice, she was again immediately conscious. During brain mapping, patients usually read aloud or do some other kind of brain task that can show doctors how their prodding affects function. In this case, as Koubeissi introduced high-frequency electrical impulses into his patient’s claustrum (i.e., “frying”), she would stop reading and stop responding to her surgical team, and her body would gently slow into a state of deep relaxation. When the signals stopped, she would open her eyes and be able to continue reading.

In a Forbes article, Koubeissi called the claustrum the “sleep switch” and likened it to turning the key in a car’s ignition. The understanding of this difference between asleep and awake, conscious and unconscious, is still in its early stages, and opportunities to double-check the finding don’t come around so often. But here’s a cool part: now that we are beginning to understand the location and function of human consciousness, it might make it possible to not only understand the roots of our own consciousness but also replicate this consciousness. Knowing the difference between asleep and awake in your brain may make it possible for us to artificially create “awakeness.”

Tongue Slips

Outside the big switch of Consciousness with a capital C are those little slips of consciousness, like when you call your knowledgeable friend “a vast suppository of information.” Or when you turn spaghetti into pasketti. The first is called a malapropism (when you switch around meaning), and the second is a metathesis (when you switch around sounds). Listen for these today.

6:45am

Use the Power of Newness to Wake Up Your Senses

When you wake up, your brain is bored. And just because your eyes are open in the morning doesn’t mean there’s anything going on behind them. In fact, studies have demonstrated that even when researchers can show that areas in the primary visual cortex are taking things in, your brain may remain unaware. Your brain can have the physical input of “seeing” without being conscious of seeing.

The same is true of hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching: once you get used to something, you stop recognizing it. If you live near the airport, you may stop hearing airplanes. If you live near the paper factory, you might stop smelling heated pulp. And a big part of why scratching an itch makes the itch even worse is the awareness that scratching causes. Without the directed action of rubbing your fingernail across the itch, you get used to the itchy feeling, which eventually fades into the unnoticed background of your brain. Scratching the itch makes it new and makes you notice it again.

This means that in the morning, you are combating not only a brain that may have been harassed from sleep by the brutality of an alarm clock but also the humdrum habituation of eight hours of sameness in your bedroom. So if you want to wake up, give your senses something new. This may be as simple as thinking a new thought—just as you can’t go to sleep at night if thoughts of your next great invention or book idea are crashing around in your head, bringing interesting, engaging, creative thoughts into your brain first thing in the morning can help you exorcise the grogginess of an empty brain. Consider priming your brain pump with an interesting idea in a notebook left open on a bedside table.

Or you can force your brain to deal with something new in the world. A skateboard at the top of the stairs should do it. For something a bit less extreme, setting your alarm to an unpredictable radio station or investing in a system that clobbers your olfactory bulb with a new scent upon waking can challenge your brain to get online and start making sense of things.

Finally, don’t disregard the power of anticipation. If your brain is more motivated by what it is being forced to leave behind (namely, your warm bed) than it is by the desire for what it anticipates ahead (namely, a frenetic morning and a day filled with work . . .), it may resist waking up. Instead of mourning the loss of your bed, find something to look forward to, even it’s just coffee and lots of it.

Wake Up with . . . Stress!

If a new thought, new sensory experience, or something to look forward to doesn’t wake you up in the morning, try stress. A study of British civil service employees showed that stress-induced cortisol levels in the brain made people able to get up early for work. But it’s a dark magic: too much stress-induced cortisol may degrade the brain over time.

7:00am

Do You Crow with the Roosters or Hoot with the Owls?

You know, I know, we all know that the whole “morning person” vs. “night owl” thing is all in the brains of people who happen to like late-night talk shows or love those ninety minutes in the morning before the kids get up. Science agrees: it is all in their brains. But that doesn’t mean it ain’t real. For example, folks who consider themselves morning people literally create the chemical experience of “awakeness” faster than people who consider themselves night owls. It’s all about the chemical cortisol—morning people have higher saliva cortisol levels than night owls an hour after waking up. This is true even when night owls and morning people get exactly the same amount of sleep and report the same quality of sleep.

And check this out: according to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average start time for public U.S. high schools is 7:59 a.m. You’ve probably heard that this start time is cruel to teenagers, and if you look in teens’ brains, you can see why. Just alongside the area of the teen brain that stores incomprehensible text message abbreviations and the area that keeps hyperactive track of how to look hot is a perfect storm of factors that makes early rising not only inconvenient but diabolically cruel for people suffering from being between the ages of twelve and eighteen.

We are all at the mercy of circadian rhythm: no matter how much we have slept or haven’t slept, your brain wants to sleep when it gets dark and wake up when it gets light. There are two ways we can see circadian rhythm making you sleepy: an increase in the hormone melatonin and a decrease in body temperature. Put the two together and you have a darn precise picture of when the body wants to go to sleep.

And melatonin goes up and body temperate goes down in teenagers’ bodies later than it does in the bodies of normal human beings. That’s the first gust of the perfect storm. The second is that teenagers need more sleep than older or younger humans, about eight and a half to nine and a half hours per night, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). If a teenager who needs more sleep is physiologically blocked from getting to sleep until 11:00 p.m. and then has to get up at 7:00 a.m. in order to make the 8:00 a.m. bell, there’s no way outside time travel to get enough sleep. The teenage brain is already wired for impulsivity. Now add chronic sleep deprivation and, again according to the AAP, you’ve got a recipe for depression, obesity, low test scores, and, basically, a scenario straight out of one of the post-apocalyptic novels the kids are all reading these days.

If it weren’t for the mechanics of the adult workday that make it so much easier to have kids in school at 8:00 a.m., and the need for teenagers to be at home watching television by 4:00 p.m. at the latest, any rational and compassionate person would start the school day later—say, 9:00 a.m. at the earliest.

The thing is, there may be a teenager hiding out in your brain no matter what age you are. In other words, it’s unfair to say that all adult-ish people can get up early while it’s best for all teenagers to stay up late. These are just the broad brushstrokes—your experience may vary. And if you simply can’t seem to wake up in the morning, it very well may be that your brain wants you to be a night owl.

That said, there are some good things about being a morning person. Studies show that morning people are generally more stable, responsible, agreeable, and optimistic, but then there’s that old chicken-and-egg question: does being a morning person make you agreeable, or do agreeable people happen to be morning people? This means that if you’re wired to be a night owl, maybe waking up early in hopes of making yourself optimistic and agreeable is only going to make you an unhappy, sleep-deprived night owl. If you can’t bend your brain to your life, ask if you can bend your life to your brain. If you’re a night owl, can you admit your needs and sleep in a little? Try telling your employer that inside your head lives the brain of a teenager. When that doesn’t work, ask how you can streamline your morning so that you can let your night owl self stay in bed just a little longer.

Melatonin for Jet Lag?

Your circadian rhythm adjusts to when you eat. A Harvard study showed that you can reset your circadian rhythm by fasting for twelve to sixteen hours. Then when you wake up and eat, your body jumps back online as if whatever time you wake up is the natural morning. You can also hack your melatonin level. A study in the British Medical Journal found that taking a melatonin supplement for three days before traveling at exactly the time you will be going to sleep at your new destination can help you adjust to jet lag.