Harvard Neuroscientist: Your Brain Paralyzes You at Night! They Don't Want You To Know This TRUTH!

My sleep paralysis experience definitely triggered my quest for wanting to understand the brain and how we can certainly see ghosts in our bedrooms. What's going on? I had a sense of a creature, an evil being. That felt so real. It was as real as this conversation you and I are having right now. And then at this point, I realized I was actually paralyzed from head to toe. I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I wanted to say something, but I couldn't.

It's terrifying.

It's terrifying.

Dr. Balan Jalal is a Harvard neuroscientist rewriting our understanding of sleep in the mind. One of the world's leading experts on sleep sleep paralysis.

Dr. Balan Jalal, you had trauma, or your parents even had trauma that can affect you down the line in your genetics, in your genetics. 20 years ago, we thought, well, you're born with a certain brain and that's it. But we now know that until you die, the brain can change. Knowing the principles that can make your brain change, that's a key factor.

What is one thing you wish everyone knew about their brain? Their brain? Health? To live a better life. Based on your neuroscience research, I would.

Say.

One of the things that you talk about is understanding dreams, lucid dreaming, and sleep paralysis. And I have experienced sleep paralysis maybe a handful of times in my life, and I think I understand what it is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's the part where you wake up and you can't speak, you can't move, and you feel like you're screaming. At least for me, it's like I feel like I'm screaming, but I can't move my body. But my eyes are open. Sometimes my eyes are not open, but I know I'm awake trying to move. And it's like. You're paralyzed. Would that describe sleep paralysis?

Yes, it would. I mean, sleep paralysis is basically you lying flat on your bed, you know, opening your eyes so your eyelids are, you know, working.

You're awake.

You're awake, right? Or you're partially awake, so to speak. And you can scan the room, yet you're paralyzed from head to toe. So you have the paralysis.

It's terrifying.

It's terrifying.

Is it? How many times have you had experienced it?

I've had. Many times. Many times I've had it over. Yeah. Maybe 50, 60 times.

50, 60 times.

I would say so, yeah.

What was the first time you experienced sleep paralysis?

Well, the first time, I would say the most crazy time that I had, it was kind of. I was. I was straight out of high school. I grew up in Copenhagen, in, like, a ghetto area in Copenhagen. And I was. I was sleeping on bed one morning, and I suddenly had this feeling that some monstrous creature was in the bed. So I was kind of sleeping, but I felt awake. And then at this point, I realized, actually paralyzed from head to toe, I couldn't move. I couldn't speak. I wanted to say something, but I couldn't. And this feeling got stronger and stronger with each second. So I just felt like, what's going on? What's happening? There's this ominous presence in the room. And the creature got sort of closer and closer until it was on my chest, you know, strangling me, pressing on my chest. And I saw my legs flying up and down. And it was this crazy experience. And I didn't actually see the ghost at this point, and I could just feel its presence. Interesting. So it's very common to actually feel like there's a ghost. So it's like a sense presence, but no actually visible ghost being in the room. So that's one sort of manifestation of sleep paralysis. So I felt the ghost there. The next day I woke up, I said, what do I do I tell my parents about this? Do I go tell them, like, that ghost was in my room that's trying to choke me and kill me, you know?

So you were dreaming still you weren't awake?

I was. You could say that I was partially awake. Were your eyes open or no, my eyes were open. My eyes were open. So during sleep paralysis, this is important to sort of add is that the brain is sort of part of partially, partially awake. You can say that in the brain, you have a structure called the prefrontal cortex, which is the outer layer of the brain, the prefrontal. So the outer layer has six layers. It's sort of six layers deep. And in this part is the CEO of the brain. It's the part of the brain that's active when you're awake.

The captain of the ship, it's the.

CEO, the head office, the captain. So this part of the brain turns on partially during sleep paralysis. So when you are in REM sleep dreaming, right? So you are in rem, which is the stage of sleep where you have vivid, lifelike, crisp dreams. This part of the brain, the CEO, turns off, it sort of goes into hibernation. When you are in sleep paralysis, it partially turns on. So it's sort of wakefulness clashing with the dream world. And we could go deeper into that, how it actually emerges out of REM sleep, because that's really interesting how sleep paralysis actually comes out of the dreaming world and sort of hits you like that. That's, I think, quite fascinating. But so this happened to me and I was. So I woke up and I was like, do I go to my parents? It was crazy because that was sort of the black sheep in the family. And I felt like if I go tell them about the monsters and all that, it wouldn't look good. So do I Google this? This was like, you know, 20 years ago. So what do I, you know, do I go tell my parents? How do I. How do I deal with this? So the way I, you know, I was trying to figure out what it is and. And eventually it got me to the library, reading about, you know, REM sleep dreams and all that. And actually this experience was the. The catalyst for me to go and study sleep paralysis really around the world. Yeah. So this really triggered it.

So what did you find? I mean, what was your answer? I guess after Studying this for 20 years and researching it from this sleep paralysis, demonic event that you experienced, what was the answer to it?

So the answer. That's a big question. So we go straight into the deep, deep questions. I would say, for me, what was intriguing about this experience was the fact that I had a sense of a creature, an evil being. That felt so real. It was as real as this conversation you and I are having right now has that realness to it. So this really got. This took me aback, the fact that it was so real.

Was it real?

It felt real. And a lot of people will say it's real. They will say it's ghosts, it's demons, it's space aliens. So there's all these cultural ideas around the world for what sleep paralysis is and for me to answer you what sleep paralysis is. Actually, I cannot even give you a full answer today, even though I. I've studied this in about six, seven countries. I can't tell you for sure. Sleep paralysis is this and that. Well, we can say the fact that, well, sleep paralysis, the actual paralysis is in the lower part of the brain called. There's a region called the brain stem. It's composed of regions called the pons and the medulla. For the technical folks, the ponsa medulla. When you are in REM sleep, it sends signals down the spinal cord to paralyze you during REM sleep. And this is important because you don't want to act out your dream and hurt yourself. Right.

So you're almost paralyzed when you sleep anyways.

So you are paralyzed during rem sleep.

Because you're not moving.

You're not moving. So you are paralyzed during REM sleep.

But you're not awake aware of it.

You're not aware of it. Right. And the reason for this paralysis is very, is very simple. The brain is clever. It says, look, I'm dreaming about, I'm on the moon having tea with the Queen of England and I'm jumping out of airplanes, jumping out of airplanes and I'm doing all this crazy stuff. I don't want you to, I don't want Baland, I don't want Lewis to act out these dreams that hurt himself. So I'm going to paralyze his entire body. This is a clever trick for survival. You don't want to hurt your sleeping partner either, right? So you have this complete lockdown of the body. It's sort of a physiological straightjacket of sorts. So it's very clever. So you have that during REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep. Now your eyes, of course, are moving side to side. And that has to do with the fact that there's a different circuit in the brain for, for eye movements. But that circuit for paralysis is different. That's the brain stem, that's the lower part of the brain. So the CEO is up here which is involved in higher order thinking, rational thought, you know, captain of the ship. And then you have the lower part of the brain that, that is involved in things like paralyzing your wow. Physical body. So you par. So you paralyze from head to toe during sleep paralysis. Now what actually happens during sleep paralysis is the following, Louis. During wakefulness, when you actually wake up, you have a little structure in the brain called the Lucas coeruleus. Again, a technical name for the technical folks. It sends out a chemical that's called noradrenaline. It's the chemical cousin of adrenaline. So you have adrenaline in the body when you're doing a handball, then switch sports and all that, you have adrenaline, you feel agitated and you know, you feel excited. But when you, in the brain, you have noradrenaline, you have some noradrenaline in the, in the body as well, but mainly noradrenaline keeps you sharp, keeps you focused, keeps you alert. So when I'm walking about in Hollywood here and I, and I'm. A car is coming towards me and I'm, I feel stressed out, I have a lot of noradrenaline. Now when you wake up. So during REM sleep, during this stage of sleep, when you're dreaming, no adrenaline is shut off. You have no noradrenaline. And that's why the world is so spacey. That's why things are not really sharp and focused, but everything is sort of all over the place. That has to do with the fact that noradrenaline is shut off. It makes things open. It opens the gates of exploration. Right now, when sleep paralysis strikes, what happens is that you sort of wake up, and then you have noradrenaline flooding the system prematurely. So you start waking up and tickling the CEO so it becomes partially awake, but you're still stuck in the paralysis phase of sleep.

The backside of the brain that's controlling the paralysis still is still holding on.

It's holding on. It's almost like a clash of wakefulness and dream and the dream world. It's sort of clashing in this. In this weird, weird world where these two.

That's so interesting because it's only happened a handful of times for me, but every time it happens, it feels like. I don't know what the feeling is for me. Almost like you. It's almost like you're suffocating, and you feel like it's gonna last forever. You're like, I can't move. And what if this is stuck forever like this, right? And I'm paralyzed forever.

Yeah.

And it probably only lasts, like, five to 10 seconds, but it feels like five hours of, like, wake up. You know, you feel like you're screaming.

Exactly.

Wake me up. But nothing's coming out.

Nothing coming out. Yeah, but the same thing for me. I mean, the times that I've had it, the first time I thought, I'm gonna die, I was sure. So I thought, I'm sure I'm gonna die. And it felt like an eternity. And that's when. When we interview people around the world, they will say, like, it feels like it lasts for hours.

And it might be seconds, right?

It might be seconds. And in fact, it turns out when you sort of compare cultures where there are certain cultural ideas for it. So I've done research in Egypt, for example. Done it in Egypt. And people would say it's the evil genies, like, of a Latin. You know, comes out of a lamb. And they can kill you. But it's not the good ones. Like, the good about granting you wishes. It's not Robin Williams, right? It's the evil big, you know, terrifying ones, right, that want to control you. Want to control you and kill you and all that. So in Egypt, they will say it's the genies of Aladdin. They will kill you, potentially terrorize you do all kinds of horrible things to you. And it turns out when you have this cultural idea, it can change the way it sort of unfolds. So one study we did, we did one study in Egypt and compared that to sleep paralysis. And you know, in Denmark, my home country, in my home country in Denmark, people will say it's just the brain, it's distress, it's just physiology, there's no spirituality there at all. And so in our study we had deep in depth interview asking people, what do you think sleep paralysis does to you? How do you think it can affect you? Can it kill you? Can you die from this? Is there a monster? What's the name of the monster? And invariably we found that in Egypt people will say it's the genies, they can kill you, they could do all.

These horrible things to you, cast spells on you or something like that.

Spells on you. And so just the whole idea was crazy. But then more than that, we found that this cultural idea for what sleep paralysis means trickled into sort of a, what you'd call a salience of an experience becoming amplified, the whole experience becoming much more real in a sense. So they would say it lasts much longer. So the experience was amplified in this way in Egypt. In Egypt, exactly. In Egypt versus in Denmark, it's just like a few seconds, it's nothing. It's just like, it's just over like this. Right.

So it's almost their perception of what it is.

Their perception shifts completely. Exactly.

Based on the meaning they give it.

Based on the meaning, based on that.

If it's a religious, spiritual, demonic undertone.

Exactly.

And through thousands of years of cultural imprints, then it's like, oh, we believe this to be true based on our history, based on religion, religion or spiritual beliefs. Whereas in Denmark or other cultures like Denmark without that history, it's just, oh, it's just a defect in the brain that happens every once in a while and you just move on or something.

Absolutely. That is exactly correct.

There's less emphasis of the power it has. Right, Interesting.

This is very true. And then they would say not only that, we fear it much more. To the extent that this is the Egyptian speaking, we can die from this, it's potentially fatal. Right. And then they would say the paralysis is. So we say it's much more. Oh, it's much more frequent as well. So this is it. So it's first of all, it's much more fearful to the point it can be fatal. The paralysis lasts much longer. But also it's much more frequent in Them. In other words, if you are an experiencer in Egypt who has sleep paralysis, it occurs three times more than a Danish experience. And I'll tell you why we think this is the case. I'll give you this anecdote here, actually. It's sort of a fictitious story about a girl I call little Lisa. She lives on this fictitious island. And on this fictitious island, her grandmother will tell her about these monsters that come at night. They will kill you potentially. They can do all kind of sexual molestation to you. By the way, sexual molestation is. It's common, the idea of feeling like you're being raped during the experience as well. And the grandmother will tell little Lisa the monster looks like this and that it has these features. Be careful when you go to sleep. And mind you, little Lisa has never had sleep paralysis before.

Oh, man.

Now little Lisa, completely unexperienced, no sleep paralysis ever goes to bed and lo and behold, she has sleep paralysis the first time in her life. Not only that, the monster looks exactly like the grandmother was telling her. So it has all the features, all the characteristics, you know, the long fangs, everything. All the, all the traits, right? Freddy Krueger, like monster is appearing.

The boogeyman.

The boogeyman. Next day, she wakes up, she's anxious, terrified. She has it again three days later, she has it again a week later, she has it again a month. It becomes chronic all of a sudden. And, you know, and she. And she start developing PTSD and anxiety trauma from, you know, trauma as well, and tells her friends about it who start having it as to now, Luis might be asking, what's going on? What's happening? Why would this, have this effect? And it turns out when you have sleep, when you are fearful, first of all. So little Lisa, she had anxiety and fear when she went to bed. And that will cause her to have what's called nocturnal arousal, meaning it's a fancy name for in the brain, you have a structure called the limbic structure, limbic center tucked behind your ears. That's the emotional part of the brain when you go to bed and you have a lot of emotion and emotionality tickling and, you know, titillating other parts of the brain, especially the CEO, the cortex, that can lead it to become prematurely aroused and wake you up during REM stage of sleep. So it's almost like a priming effect. So little Lisa was primed. Next she will have what's called a self conformatory behavior, meaning she's lying there and she goes, is there any monster holding me down? Is Anything holding me and squeezing me, like my grandmother was telling me.

And she's sort of living in fear.

She's living in fear and kind of self monitoring, right? In this way. And then obviously if she does this in REM sleep and tries to move, what will she encounter? Paralysis, right? And it would feel like something's actually holding her down and she start to wake herself up. So that's step number two. Now she's paralyzed and she's waking herself up. Here comes the third part. Now, because sleep paralysis emerges out of REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, it's obviously a REM dream phenomenon, meaning the REM part of the brain can trickle into the experience. It could spill over almost like augmented reality, like goggles. And the dream world is coming alive before your eyes. And this is kind of think of the, during the dream, when you're dreaming, certain parts of the brain are more active than when you're awake. So for example, the hippocampus, meaning the memory part of the brain is more active. It kind of becomes, it blossoms with activity, dances with activity. And this memory part of the brain, if it's active during this sleep paralysis stage and during this kind of half, half, half dream stage, all the stuff the grandmother was telling her about, the mantra, looking this and that, can then start to go into the experience. So she starts seeing what the grandmother was telling her. The mantra will spill over in a dreamlike fantasy, an imagination of sorts. So she'll have that. The emotional part of the brain, the fear centers of the brain are hyperactive when we're dreaming, about 30% more active in the dream state. So she'll have that. By the way, when we're dreaming, the parts of the brain that has to do with a sense of a body image, the feeling like I occupy this body and I feel anchored in this body, balance, body, this is, I feel anchored here. That part of the brain also becomes dysfunctional. So you feel like your sense of body image is kind of all over the place. And so that can trickle into the experience. So you feel like your sense of self is shut. It's weird. You may have an out of body experience while the ghost is there too. So she might have that too. And everything, all you can imagine from the brain is kind of, it's going into the experience and she's seeing the monster that her grandmother was telling her in perfect detail. Now she wakes up, she's anxious and terrified, extremely terrified to go to sleep. And we actually see a lot of people with sleep paralysis. They feel like that. They have fear of going to sleep. Sleep itself is something that's terrifying. And so because of that fear and anxiety now she'll even be even more predisposed to having sleep paralysis. So she goes to bed, has it again. Three or four days later, as we said, she had it again. And the reason why it becomes so chronic now is because the whole meaning point that you, that you brought up in the fact that the monster is not only attacking me once, it's a personal thing. Oh man, I'm being, I'm possessed now. It's, it's completely like it's being chased.

It's haunting.

It wants me for some reason. It's after me. And so this is the whole, this is the whole sort of thing that, the conclusion you mentioned, right? What's, what's sleep paralysis? This is the whole idea. And then you can potentially become highly anxious and even traumatized from this.

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How is a big one?

As a neuroscientist researcher, what have you discovered?

What have I discovered? So there's me, there's the person, Baland, the scientist, and then there's the science. Personally, I'm a spiritual person. I'm a Muslim, and I believe that there's a spiritual world. There's a world that we cannot see, an unseen world. And many of my scientists, colleagues, I've worked with some of the. I've been fortunate. I wasn't even of my doing. I was just blessed to work with some of the greatest scientists. And behind closed doors, they'll believe in things like prayer and God and things like that.

So even though it's not science, based on.

Even though it's not science, they still.

Do it because they know the benefits of it.

They know the benefits. But also, who says. Who says it's not real? Right, Right. And I think that when you think about it, right, a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, if I was telling you, Louis, on your body right now, there's all these small animals crawling, trillions of them on your. On your skin.

And they said, you're crazy.

I said, you're crazy.

But we know there's.

There's a microscope, right?

It's a microbiome and. Yeah, yeah, yes.

And we developed, and we invented the microscope, and now we know that they're all this. Right? So before the advent, like before we invented the microscope, there was. It was insane to say this. So same goes with a metaphysical reality around us. Spirituality, God, whatever, the unseen world of, of. Of. Of sorts. And who says it doesn't exist? So science cannot answer whether there's actually spirituality. Now my work has been, ironically, even though I believe in spirituality, the fact that has been to understand why do we see ghosts and what's going on in the brain, I have to be truthful to the science and say, well, look, when I zap this part of the brain called the tpj, if I zap it with an electrical current, you will feel like there's a ghost behind you, mimicking your postures and movements. So we can create a ghost.

This part of your brain.

This part of the brain, a little.

Structure, electrical shock there, it could even.

Be a magnet just stimulating it. And you will feel, like, disrupted. When it's disrupted, you will feel like there's a ghost behind you. It's mimicking you. So if you move like your hand like this, it will also Move its hand so it kind of feels like you. In fact, we scientists say it is you. We just created a double of you. It's a copy of you.

That's interesting.

And that has to do with the fact that a sense of self is created in the brain. Your brain uses sensory modalities like touch, vision, hearing, and then weaves together a sense of a self comes about in those regions in the brain, the TPJ and the parietal. This kind of multimedia media studio, kind of like your studio, we have it up here. And that creates a sense of a self. It weaves it together. You can disrupt that, and then you will feel like there's a ghost in the room. Some of the same structures are disrupted during sleep paralysis as well. So that can explain why there are ghosts there. I have a whole theory. I spent 10 years writing about how these structures can affect, you know, make you see ghosts in the room. But that doesn't change the fact that that could be energies from other dimensions and galaxies and worlds that we cannot see. Spiritual dimensions that I cannot negate. In fact, I may even believe it personally, that, you know, that there are things like that. So we just. When I go and do it, when I go and do my science, I obviously don't think in those ways because I have to be truthful to the knowledge that is currently present. I don't have a microscope to, you know, peer into the spiritual world. But I can tell you this is the brain. This is the area of the TPJ that's disrupted. This is the prefrontal that's shut down. This is. This is the lower part of the brain that's paralyzing you. So that I can say. And that's my job to say. And some, you know, often you'll feel like, you know, when people learn about the scientific basis of sleep paralysis, the fear vanishes as well. So that's very helpful.

Yeah. Yeah.

But you asked about meditation and meditation therapy, maybe. So maybe I can go into that, because that's a very practical way to deal with it. The way I came, you know, this. Invented this therapy. And this was during my grad school years when I was in Cambridge, England. And, you know, over there, we. We spent a lot of time thinking about new ways of doing therapies and all that. And I was thinking about, like, how can I help people with sleep paralysis? What's the way to help them? And I noticed that a lot of people with sleep paralysis will say, when I'm. When I have the experience, I pray to God. And it actually helps the monster seems to dissipate myself too, when I was there. And to be honest with you, you know, I started to pray too, because I thought I was going to die. So I was like. A few times I was like, God, help me, what's going on? You know, I tried to do that. And it kind of seems to help to pray to a deity or having some kind of belief and hope in something greater coming and rescuing you. So I wanted to bring that element into the experience. So the therapy is four steps. The first step is the following. It's called cognitive reappraisal. That's the fancy name for it. And it's basically a mental shifting of the experience. So you say, I know I'm having sleep paralysis right now. I know I'm being attacked by something. But because it's just sleep paralysis, I should. There's no reason for me to be scared. You know, there's no reason for me. People all around the world are having sleep paralysis now. Nobody's dying from this. So I'm doing a cognitive restructuring of the whole experience. So it's sort of a mental interpretation shifting. That's the first element. Next, the next step that you do is it's called emotional and psychological distancing meaning. Given that it's the brain, given that it's the mind playing tricks on you, there's no reason for me to be scared. So I psychologically distance myself from it. I just gonna think of it as something that's far away, and I won't actually let myself get absorbed into it. That's the second step. Now here comes your meditation step. We know that the brain has very limited attentional capacities at any given time. I can only attend to so many things in the room. I don't have infinite attention. It's the frontal, frontal and parietal regions of the brain, the front and this part that's involved in attentional capacities. Have you seen that YouTube clip of the. You know, there's like. There's somebody playing with a ball and then there's a clown going moonwalking. And then you can't. You don't notice it because you're so. You're focused on counting the ball. So attention is very limited. Right.

It's what magicians do very well. You know, sleight of hand. It's perception. It's grabbing attention here and something else happening there.

Absolutely. So I wanted to incorporate that by hijacking your attention to something positive. So it goes something like this. You focus all your attention on something extremely positive, like God, your mom's face, you know, your niece's face. Whatever brings you a joyful memory, you bring it to light, you bring it to mind, and you think about it in an intensely focused manner. So it's a kind of a focused attention meditation. Now, the powerful thing about this is that not only are you redirecting your attention away from thinking about monsters and all the memory parts of the brain, all the grandmothers talk about monsters, hijacking the experience, you are sort of shifting the focus of the emotional core of the brain to something positive. And we actually know that there are circuits in the brain from the emotional part that goes to the visual part, and they can tell you what to see in the world. Literally. Meaning that if I have a fearful mindset, if I have fear centers in my brain bubbling away, it can affect what I see in the world versus having a very. If you're very calm, soothed in a very relaxed, positive mindset, it can also affect your world and worldview. And so in that way, I'm trying to also bias the visual parts of the brain. So you have that as well. So you focus on something extremely positive. And then a fourth step will be to then what's called a muscle relaxation. You don't try to move or try to act out the paralysis sensations. You kind of stay in a mindful, non judgmental, a thought, you know, mindset about that. You don't really do anything. You don't try to move or try to become agitated and oh, I'm gonna scream and I'm trying to try to do that. You know, I'm just gonna stay mindful and just let it slide, kind of. You do these four steps during the sleep paralysis experience. And as you say, we were very fortunate to see a 50% reduction in sleep paralysis. Now, this was a small pilot study. We always have to start small and then build up. But it was very promising.

That's great. So the four different things. Is mental shifting or mental restructuring just a kind of like rewriting the story? What I'm hearing you say, if you've experienced this in the past few times, how can you rewrite the story? Reshift, restructure mentally what has happened to create more meaning from it and less fear from it. The second one, creating emotional and psychological distancing, which I think is really powerful. It's almost like compartmentalizing in a way, but allowing yourself to not be attached mentally or emotionally to the experiences.

Right, right.

Third thing, focusing your attention on joyful memory, positive moments so instead of focusing on the fear of it happening again, what if this happens again? Put your attention on your mother's face. A joyful moment with your family, a loved one.

Right.

And the fourth one is like not being clenched in your body, but saying, how can I fully relax and rest and be peaceful? Body muscle relaxation. Right. And it's something that happened to me when I had sleep paralysis maybe for the fourth or fifth time. Instead of living in fear around it.

Yeah.

I decided to fully relax when it happens. Supposed to like screaming with nothing coming out.

Yeah.

I just said, okay, this is happening. Scary. Let me relax. And I was almost able to come out of it quicker and not live in the fear of it.

Yeah.

And I haven't had that experience since I did that the last time, maybe a few years ago.

Yeah.

I haven't felt sleep paralysis since then.

How many times have you had it?

Maybe five or six, maybe that I can remember. Maybe a handful. Not like 40 or 50 times, but like handful of times. Maybe it was a little more, a little less, but probably five or six times. And the last time I remember not trying to scream or move to wake up, I was just like, I'm going to relax and almost enjoy the moment. Like ride the wave.

Yeah.

And by riding the wave, like, I started to be able to like move my hands and I like kind of just gently woke up eventually.

Right.

Knowing that I've always woken up. I'm not going to stay stuck like this. So it's almost like I trained my prefrontal cortex captain to say, let things come back on slowly, then you can take back control when it does, as opposed to overriding something that is, you know, creating paralysis in you.

It's a great point. And it kind of makes me think of. So the reason why I came up with the fourth step of not trying to move, it's kind of, it's, it's has to do with the fact that when you are in a sleep paralysis and experiencing this, your motor parts of the brain, there's a strip of, of tissue here in the brain that's involved in movement. Normally when I'm awake, I move my hand from A to B in space. I send commands from the movement parts of the brain and motor cortex down to the brain stem, spinal cord, and I move. Now, during sleep paralysis, this is. You send many commands to move, baland move. It's not working, but it's not working because you're paralyzed. You're sending, you have a simultaneous signal saying, don't move. And that's overriding that movement signal. Right.

It's interesting.

It's very interesting. So you're saying movement, balan move. But there's no but you can't move. Now at the same time, when I'm normally when I'm awake and I move and I move my hands around, I want to make sure I get this right. You have what's called a proprioceptive feedback, meaning simply there's feedback coming back from the skin, joint, muscles telling your brain how to build a sense of a baland, how to build a sense of a lewis that comes about from, believe it or not, in the skin and muscles, sending feedback back to the brain and to that parietal, that multimedia studio I told you about before telling you, oh, create a sense of baland based on the information coming back right now, that part of the brain obviously is not, it's not getting feedback because you are not moving, you aren't moving, you can't move. So you're paralyzed. So there's no way to create a sense of a self. In other words, you're sending commands to move, but there's no feedback coming back from a moving body because you're paralyzed. In other words, there's a gap there and that gap the brain is trying to fill in with hallucinatory movement. And I always want to make sure this is clear because when I tell this during lectures, people sometimes, you know, can what are you talking about, Baland? I want to be sure the brain hates any incongruencies, any gaps in information. And whenever there is a gap, whenever there any incongruency there, it will fill in the blank. Sort of like Google auto correction, it will sort of you when you put the first words of like so it will finish soccer, for example. The brain does the same thing. If it has a gap, a lack of information, there's a lack of information, it will fill in the blank. And so that's why we believe that you might see your legs fly up and down and you see your limbs shifted in space. And I want to avoid all that. And that's why I tell the people, don't try to move because you don't want to have all these mismatching signals and your brain trying to create the story for you.

It's so fascinating because as a, as someone who loves to study these ideas more so not as a researcher or scientist, but as a human being who's trying to live my best life and trying to lead my life as an example for the people around me to live better, hopefully and Live more harmonious and fulfill their dreams and have beautiful relationships and have a healthy lifestyle. That's what I'm coming from. And as an athlete who's always looking for the edge and thinking of how can I train my mind and body to perform in the hardest of conditions, in the highest pressure moments, how can I make sure that my mind and my emotions don't get the best of me and I'm more calm instead of chaotic, all these different things. I'm always looking for the edge and by no means am I perfect at it, but I'm always trying to improve. Something you shared just now really is interesting for me. Where you said the brain hates incongruencies and there is this. There's a world that so many people live in where they build a self image of self. You've been talking about self image, a Milan A. Lewis. An identity where the image and identity that people build most people is so limiting around how they think, what they believe and how they feel. And the stories that they tell themselves are the stories they believe that others tell themselves about themselves. And when we are. When the. You said the brain hates incongruencies. I believe we're all created to do something beautiful. We're all meant to live in alignment of self.

Yeah.

But when we as human beings say, create a limiting self image and say, I am stupid, I am ugly, I am not smart, I'm not good enough, I'm not talented. When we build a self identity and self image mentally implanting these ideas in our being, it limits us. And the brain is incongruent with that somehow. We're believing, we're trying to believe it, but I believe we're all built to be more beautiful and more empowering and reach a higher self identity rather than a limited identity. So I'm curious, as a neuroscientist, how can we start to train our self image and self identity to be more empowering and reach a higher version of ourselves versus a limited identity and limited self that is out of congruency with ourselves, which keeps us small. How can we start to build this? This is a big question, but I'm fascinated. Based on your research, what you come up with or what you've seen, it's a great question.

And I want to answer this. I'm trying to answer this in a. In a fashion where I so talk a little bit about myself. So I came. I'm Kurdish, I told you. I'm originally Kurdish from Iraq. Grew up in Copenhagen. And my parents were actually refugees. They escaped the War in Iraq. And my mom, terrible traumas. You know, she would. Her grand, her father died in front of her, had a heart attack and it was horrible, like the body. So the way it happened was one day she. The. My granddad just came out. They had like small rooms. They didn't have a lot of rooms. So it's just like one big room.

In Iraq.

In Iraq. He just came one day. He just came out and said, look, called my mom, said look, go call your mommy, go call mommy. And mommy would come in and he said, forgive me for anything I might have done in my life. I think I'm checking out. So right on the spot he died from a heart attack.

Wow.

And my mom, 11 years old, loved her, loved her dad like her dad was the best. Okay. My, her, her brother, her older brother rushed into the room, saw her, saw his dad lying dead. They had a tumultuous relationship. So he was shocked and traumatized by that. So he took a glass and smashed it into its head in utter shock. Now blood was gushing from his head. My 11 year old mother was watching that, looking at my mom that was shocked too. And my grandfather was just lying there dead, dead. Now at this point in Iraq, it was like during COVID there was quarantine. They couldn't go out because of all the war. So often they would tell him people don't go out until 4, 5, 4 or 5am next day. So the body was just there. So they couldn't take him anywhere. So my mom was witness to this.

As an 11 year old.

As 11 year old growing up without, and then grow up without a father in Iraq, seeing her father die like this. My father had a similar story. His, his dad also died when he was very, very young. We had to do hard labor. Very, very, very hard. Traumatizing background. Now both of them came to, escaped to Copenhagen first went to Bulgaria. I was born in Bulgaria, but did.

They meet in Bulgaria or meet in Iraq? They met in Iraq and they escaped together.

They escaped together. My actually my dad was called into Duna. Saddam Hussein, in all the wars and all that, he was. Saddam's army was calling my dad to go fight for him. He wouldn't. He wouldn't. He said I'm not going to do that. And so he escaped actually that it was good he didn't do that because that group of people that you know, that were supposed to go through, they all died from a attack, from an air attack and they all died on a bridge. So he was supposed to be in that among that group came to Bulgaria, I was born, came to Copenhagen. Obviously we had to start all over in the ghetto, like area. That's when I, where I grew up in a very tough, hard neighborhood, refugee camp initially. Then in the. Seeing the worst things, my, my best friend was shot at, stabbed 13 times, my neighbor was shot in the head. All these kind of things. Now I do research at Harvard and lecture, but I came from the, the worst of worst. Like, I literally came from the worst.

Now.

I think that. So you can, obviously you can overcome that and a lot of people do. So I'm not the only one. It's not like I'm special. But we do have some what's. And now I'm going to sort of weave into science here. We do have something called epigenetics. And that's, that's if you had trauma or your parents even had trauma, that can affect you down the line in your genetics. In your genetics. So let me give an example.

In your nervous system.

In your nervous system. So I give. So. So for example, there was these ladies who witnessed. They were pregnant and they witnessed 9, 11. Obviously they, some of them developed PTSD trauma from witnessing and seeing the attack. Horrible.

You pass that down to your children.

You pass that down to your children. So the children that were born and obviously didn't witness 9, 11, they had cortisol changes similar to the mother, signaling trauma from the experience. Right. You had cortisol systems damaged and, and out of balance. One example, another example, you may know this experiment too. Rats that are exposed to a certain smell, for example, and then you give them an electric shock. Their kids, their babies will fear that smell even though they haven't had that electric shock.

So we know that they smell it. They're just going to be, they're going.

To be agitated and reactive, and it turns out, even their children.

Wow, that's interesting because you pass that through your epigenetics.

Epigenetics. So inside the gene, there are certain methyl groups and atoms that sits on genes and turns genes on and off. And so depending on our trauma or our parents and our grandparents, trauma that can be passed on. And so you have all, you have all this. Right. Beyond this, the brain of a child, right. Is the synapses. In a baby's brain, there's about 50% more synapses. Synapses are simply the connections between neurons. You want to have a lot of these synapses and then you want to be able to shape your brain as well as possible. So a baby's Brain is extremely plastic. It can change in various ways. And if you have a lot of trauma in your childhood, if you are raised in a poor neighborhood and you have, like, you know, that can affect how the brain of a child then develops, limiting your potential, you know, as a. Having a less, you know, less effective brain. Growing up now, I was lucky. My mom and dad were very warm. They took good care of me. So even though it's kind of a buffer, so even though I was in that refugee camp, my mom was always hugging me, playing with me. Very loving parents. So it kind of.

But you still had the trauma in your epigenetics.

Yeah, it was kind of a mix. Right. From the whole trauma, from their experiences.

Kind of like sleep paralysis, you know, the captain trying to, like, control. But you had the other guy, the trauma, paralysis. You're like, ah, I feel love, but I'm scared.

It was a mix of that. Right. So.

Interesting.

Yeah, So I had that. So. But there was the epigenetics. But my. But. But because of the love. And you know this from rats, by the way, Rats who lick their babies more. They will be more. They will be more resilient towards stress later in life.

Interesting. So by having those having more love and affection.

Love and affection. Caring for the child and all that. So.

Wow.

I was like. In that way, the brain is extremely malleable and plastic. It can change shape from. Based on these. On these epigenetic commands.

And so it's almost like everyone has experienced some type of epigenetic trauma.

Yeah.

Through their parents. Oh, yeah. You know, we all have been passed down. Some type of genetic trauma.

Yeah.

Through generational.

Right, right.

Like, no one had three generations of perfect parents that were, like, healed and calm and relaxed, loving. There was trauma somewhere that's been passed down through generations.

Through generations.

And it's not our fault, but it's our responsibility to start to notice it and create awareness and say, how can I be the one to break the generational trauma? If we choose to live a better life, if we want that, it's not our fault, but it is our responsibility.

It's our responsibility. It's hard. Exactly. It's hard work. And so. And it brings me really, to what my research in recent years has been focused on, which is neuroplasticity and the fact that the brain can change. The brain is extremely malleable. You know that we thought, like, 20 years ago, we thought, well, you're born with certain brain, and that's it. It can change, maybe in childhood. So we know that the baby's brain is more malleable, is more plastic, meaning it can change shape more, you can grow more synaptic connections. But we now know that until you die, the brain can, can change. If you had a stroke and you left complete, you know, so the brain, the everything on the left side commands the right and everything on the right commands the left side, for example. So if you have a stroke to the left hemisphere, your entire side can be paralyzed. But we know now by with extreme X training and we have rehabilitation, rehabilitation, you can actually do a lot of progress. Much more than we thought was even possible a few years ago. Point of all this, knowing the principles that can make your brain change is vital. Knowing what, what's involved, it's, it can help you reach your potential. So for example, there's a chemical in the brain called acetylcholine. Acetylcholine, it's sort of the attention part of attention neurochemical. It comes about in a part of the brain called the Lucas. What's it, I forgot the name escaped me. Right now it's in sort of in the middle part of the brain. It produces these neurons that create this acetylcholine. And it is, it's, and it's attentional. So whenever you focus on anything, acetylcholine turns on. And you need that for neuroplasticity, by the way. If you just go around in Hollywood and greet people and just, you know, you won't have a lot of neuroplasticity. Why? Because you need acetylcholine. You need to be hyper focused in order to have neuroplasticity. So this is a key factor by the way. That's why whenever you break a routine, whenever you do something novel, whenever you sort of, for example, me coming to this area right here where you are, it's kind of. I haven't really been here before. It's a novel. So I have actually a lot of neuroplasticity. My brain is changing a lot and it's becoming more malleable because everything is novel. I'm paying attention to figure out where.

Am I going, I don't know the directions and this, what do I get? Yeah.

And it came about because the brain says, look, whenever I encounter novel thing, novel things, I better write it down because it's important for my survival. That's why you have a lot of neuroplasticity when you travel, because your brain needs to know the new roots and everything. So attentional attention is important for neuroplasticity so if you want to have a more plastic brain and more malleable brain, do new things, challenge yourself by doing novel things. And that will trigger the nucleus basalis. That's the part of the brain image, nucleus of basalis system. And then you will have a lot of plasticity. So that's a key factor.

Okay, this is a side note.

Yep.

You don't have kids, right?

No.

From all the research you've done as a neuroscientist studying the brain dreams, neuroplasticity. If you could give parents three pieces of advice when they have kids, from the moment they come out of the womb for the first few years, what are three things you would say, whether it be from a neuroscience standpoint or just a practical personal standpoint, that if parents did these three things, they would give their kids a much better chance at a better life later on?

Deep question. I would say, first of all, give them affection. Hugging, caring, taking, sort of being physical with. With children, we know that when you touch, just by merely touching, you have a lot of things like oxytocin and a lot of. And a lot of these endorphins we call them, and neuropeptides are involved in neuroplasticity as well. So very, very good to have a lot of that. So being affectionate around your children, hugging them, kissing them, it's very important. A baby's brain, we said, has about 50% more synapses. But what happens though, in a baby's brain is there's something I'll call a pruning process, meaning that the brain of a child is hyperconnected. So everything is almost connected, everything's floating with everything. There's connections everywhere. And so as time passes, there's a gene that says, look, we don't need all these connections. I'm only going to take what the brain is actually using. So it's kind of a use it or lose it brain. So whatever I'm not using, whatever skill I'm not using, it will just shave it away. So you want to definitely optimize for using the brain in various ways. So this. So you kind of don't just shave off all the good connections. So stimulate, stimulate, stimulate. This is what you want to do. So stimulating a baby's brain, hyperconnected in this way. So you want to stimulate them.

Affection, we said, I'm assuming, not stimulate through like screens and iPads and cell phones, but other ways.

In other words, that's a great.

You can stimulate with an iPad all day long.

Stimulate. That's the wrong kind of stimulation. Exactly. That can lead to addiction and too much dopamine in the brain and too much of addictive cycles. You don't want that.

So what type of stimulation should babies be having to intellectual?

It could be emotional stimulation. It could be teaching them how to interact with other people. So for example, some. Nowadays people are becoming less good at human interaction. We're becoming like robots. You know, we don't know how to read facial expressions, emotional cues. What is. So we actually have neurons in the brain called mirror neurons, or some people call them perceptual action neurons. They're involved in, you know, what is Lewis thinking of right now? What is his agenda? What is he up to? I can sort of do mind reading. These are the medial part of the prefrontal lobe. And these neurons can be titillated and activated and the circuits can become strengthened by us engaging with other people and learning. Like during the COVID era, I was. I'm pretty isolated generally as a scientist, I don't do enough. I don't do enough social interactions. But especially during COVID When I came out of COVID I couldn't interact with people. I was just like, how do I do.

How do I.

Just. Completely handicapped, like Sheldon from Big Bang Theory kind of scenario. You can train these circuits and the more you use them, the better you become.

Gotcha. Okay. Stimulate.

Yeah. So you stimulate in that way.

What would be the. What would be the third physical?

I would say physical exercise. So we know that when you do physical exercise, when you go out and do sports, when you. When especially cardiovascular type exercise, obviously you don't want to take your kid to the gym and start lifting weight. But we know generally cardiovascular exercises, the type of exercise that can lead to the growth of or certain proteins called neurotrophic factors like bdnf, gdnf, just fancy names for fertilizers in the brain that will cause the brain to create more synapses. So generally, not only for kids, but for all of us, doing more of play and exes like exercise running for kids. Take your kid to the, to the, to the playground and let them run around. They always. They obviously do this a lot if you just allow them to instead of sitting on the iPad. Yeah, I would, I would definitely encourage that. Teach them things, you know, take them to the zoo and let them show them different animals. What is this animal? Stimulate their brains intellectually, make them curious and passionate too. It's not only the brain, it's also just. It is the brain, but it's also thinking about, like, how can I make. How can I convey passion to my king? So for me, the way I became passionate about the brain was the fact that I had mentors that were extremely passionate about the brain and fascinated about the brain. And so that fascination and passion, you know, was passed down to me. So you do that with your kids, you know, you show them. Interesting.

Yeah, yeah. Convey passion. I like that. A lot of people are curious about this idea of lucid dreaming. Can you explain what lucid dreaming is, what causes it? And it is something we can control.

Very interesting. So lucid dreaming is the state where. So you are in. You have. And I may just want to maybe take you to this, because there's a whole. There's a whole line of. So when you start, when you initially sleep, you enter sleep. You are in stages one and two. And during this stage of sleep, when you are. The brain waves are sort of slow and big and your things are very. Just kind of coordinated. And you have these big waves. You enter REM sleep, you have these wakefulness waves, it's called beta waves, go like this. You have these quick waves. And this is characterized. This is the same kind of waves you have when you're wakeful. So it's kind of the wakefulness waves as well. Right. So the brain, when you are in REM sleep and you're having dreams, the brain looks very much like a person who's wakeful. In fact, if I was to eavesdropped on the activity of neurons during somebody who's in REM sleep and somebody who's awake, the brain would look indistinguishable. Their brains look very much alike. Now, during REM sleep, you have vivid and lifelike dreams, as we said. But occasionally, what can happen during dreams is that the CEO, your captain of the ship, can become prematurely activated inside.

The dream in a lucid dream.

Inside the lucid. Inside the dream. And that makes it become lucid. You see. Now if. If you're not fully awakened from that, this is. I want to say. So the difference between sleep paralysis is that it's. It's become so much awake that it kind of wakes you up. That's when it becomes sleep paralysis, which is another borderland state between wakefulness and dream and wakeful wakefulness and rem. During lucid dreaming, you simply have this CEO becoming partially awake, but you're still asleep. But you're still asleep. So that's when you are.

It's like the opposite almost of paralysis. Almost. Right?

Almost almost opposite. Exactly.

Interesting.

Now, so when you have this, huh, The CEO of the brain, because it's active during. During the REM and the dream world, that's when you start becoming aware of yourself in the part.

But you're still asleep. But you're aware that you're asleep.

This is important because, Louis, in, in the. When you are dreaming in REM sleep, this is, this is this part of the brain, it's called the pre. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. A mouthful. These are the regions out here on the sides of the captain and the CEO. This part of the brain is involved in things like knowing that I'm aware of myself, a sense of a logic, a sense of a serial thinking of a sense of a me balaam being in the studio. There's a wall, there's all these things.

Those are activated when you're awake, right?

Those are activated when I'm awake. They're turned down when you're asleep, when you're. When I'm dreaming. But then they become partially active for some reason. For some reason. And that's when you have lucid dreaming.

Interesting.

That's when you have lucid dreaming. And, and we actually know the more it activates, the more this part of.

The brain wake up.

Absolutely. If it's fully activated, you start waking up. But the more it activates, even without waking you up, the more lucid you become. So some lucid dreams, you merely are aware of yourself dreaming. This is the sort of. Not the highest level. But then you have certain lucid dreams where you can fully control the scenarios. Those are the crazy ones where you can.

I'm flying around and I can tell myself where to go.

Exactly. These are the, the most extreme examples. But that's when the prefrontal cortex is very activated. And so that's what lucid. Lucid dreams are about. So about 50% of people will have had one of these experiences. You become aware of your surroundings. Typically it can emerge if you see some crazy person that you think, oh my God, Shakespeare is in my dream. What is Shakespeare doing? I'm not supposed to meet Shakespeare right now. And then that can tilt you to become lucid. Those are the triggers of lucid dreaming. They are very vivid in the sense that they are more vivid than a normal. Normal dream is already very vivid and lifelike and all that. But this is even more crisp, so you have that as well. People often engage in, as you can imagine, erotic fantasies and sexual fantasies, and flying is very common. So this is what lucid dreaming is about. Do you have, you had any lucid dreams?

Maybe a few where I'm like, more aware of it, but not something that happens frequently.

Right.

But something I am curious about also is my wife Martha has premonitory dreams. And I don't know if you've studied this at all or if you're. Have you ever had any?

Oh, yeah.

But she'll have dreams where she'll tell me, like, she has a dream book where she writes down her dreams. And some of them are just, I guess, meaningless. Maybe there's some meaning to them, but they're just like, okay, this weird dream, I'm flying at this, or whatever. But then she'll have a dream where she'll say, it doesn't happen often, but she goes, there was a different quality to the dream, and it's not lucid dreaming, and it's not just a normal dream and it's not a nightmare. She calls it premonitory dreams. And whenever she has this, she wakes up, she writes it down. It is so vivid, but it's almost. This may sound weird, but it's almost a signal to what's going to happen in the future. And for whatever reason, every dream she's showed me in the past that she's written down of this quality comes true. And who knows if it's her mind that's influencing her to go manifest these things. But some of them are predictions of what's happening in the world. And it's almost like she's like, there's a spiritual quality to it that's hard to express. There's a light being quality to it that she knows when it's happening. And it's almost like a premonitory, predictive dream. And I don't know if you've studied that or if that's a phenomenon or if there's science behind that, but I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Oh, yeah.

Is that lucid dreaming? Is that premonitory dream? Is that some spiritual intuitive connection? What is this?

Exactly. Exactly. So this is.

Have you heard of this?

100%. I hear it all the time. I really hear it from students when I lecture. I hear it for myself. I have these dreams myself.

Like premonitory dreams, premonitory dreams, Premonitions.

Yeah. So they are common all around the world, and they have been in cultures, have talked about this throughout history. So people in various places, I mean, prophecies and prophetic dreams. And Joseph in the Bible, you know the story. And John, he saw his moon star and the moon was bowing and all that. And so this have been. People have reported this throughout history. Now, what are these? Are these. Is it the brain? Is it. What's going on?

Spiritual connection.

Spiritual connection. Now, I tackled this because this gets into some of the craziness where I need to be careful between science and spirituality. But I'm answering this in this way. I'll say that. I personally have these as well. And I don't talk about it often.

Do they come true?

I feel like they come true. I feel like I have a dream of certain things that might happen and they sometimes come true.

Yeah, right.

Some scientists will say it's just, you know, you're just biased. You selective. Selectively remember certain things from the dream. And you think like, you know, that then comes true and all that. But look, for me, subjectively, it feels very real. And who can deny you of your subjective experience? People have had this all over the world. People have this. How can you deny them their subjective truth? And this is what I always emphasize. The fact that you can't deny. You can't use science as a way of just, you know, denying people what seems subjectively real to them, a real thing.

I mean, there's medical miracles all the time. I can't explain how this cancer went away. The science can't prove this. But it happens. Right.

So I will say. So I'll say this. We have no scientific evidence, obviously, of being able to predict the future the full stop. It goes beyond the realm of science. Anything supernatural goes. Or spiritual goes out. But it doesn't mean it's not true.

And in quantum physics, you know, an atom can be in two places at the same time, I think. Right. So how can it be in two different places at the same time?

Yes.

In two different moments at the same time.

Oh, yeah.

Of time. That's. So it's like, how are we able to do this?

Look, I've. I've been fortunate to work with and know some of the greatest dream researchers of that we know. And they will tell you what's going on in the brain. I will tell you, this is my area of focus. And we know these parts of the brain turn on these, turn off these neurochemicals, you know, are hyperactivated. These are not. But that doesn't mean that a spiritual world is not true and that you cannot have premonitions of the future. It's simply not. We just don't use it as we do science.

Yes.

It's not in science books. It's not in my scientific articles or anything that I write or my books or Anything. There's nothing about that kind of thing there.

But people still experience it, and I.

Experience it and I. And I believe it. So what? My scientific colleagues can believe whatever they want. You know, as long as you're truthful to the science, doesn't matter. But. But I'll tell you this, I do feel like, I do feel these, and I do believe in these things. And there's nothing, I'll tell you, there's nothing in science that can negate the fact that you can have these kinds of dreams.

Wow.

But just don't count on them for, like, winning the lottery or.

Now, do dreams have meaning? And can our environment and our external world influence the quality of our dreams?

Oh, yeah. So definitely. So dreams do tend to have. They seem to have some meaning. And let me answer the meaning question. Second, are there influences from the outside world? This is the. Let's answer this first. So first of all, having a lucid dreaming, having a lucid dream, for example, or just having any dream with any person you want to meet in your dream, you can do dream incubation, meaning you think about it during the day. So I've had that before.

It will influence the dream of a happy birth.

That will influence. So exactly. So you go to bed. I wanted to fly like Peter Pan. So I was like, I was a kid, you know, Balan, fly. Balan be Peter Pan, fly, Balan fly. And I ended up flying at night. At night. So you can incubate or I want to meet this person or I want to become lucid. So, you know, we can do this.

The more you put your attention on something during a day, the greater chances you're going to influence it at night.

100%. You're biasing the circuitry. So this is one point. Second, when you are inside the dream, then. And you are, let's say you are in a cold room and you're dreaming first of all, that you are. Let's say you were dreaming that. Just a regular dream. First of all, it can be anything. You're walking about in Glendale, for example, you're walking about there, and then in Glendale, suddenly you feel like it's cold. Well, that could just be that. The room and the place you're sleeping, the window is open and you're feeling cold. So things can spill over into the dream. Or if there's like a smoke from the neighbors barbecuing, for example, that can also come into the experience. And you feel like maybe there's a fire in Glynde, one of the houses on Fire. So we know this, this is well known phenomenon that things from the outside world can influence the actual dreaming state. So we know that. Then. Then what's the meaning? How does the brain create meaning out of dreams? It's very deep. It's a very deep one. Because first of all, you have some of the creative networks in the brain that has to do with creativity becoming hyperactivated. It's called a default mode network and whatnot. But it's just a creativity part of the brain. They're also active. When I'm daydreaming during the day, it's kind of. Yeah, things are very spacey and all that. We said no adrenaline of the part of the brain that's involved in focus attention shuts down during dreams. So things are even more spacey and bizarre and exploratory. So you have that. Yep, we said that during the dream state. And I'm coming to the punchline. During the same dream state, you have parts of the brain involved in a sense of balance. It's called the vestibular sense system. It's sort of. You have it on the both sides of the brain. Next to the ears, it's involved in sense of balance. That part of the brain also becomes hyperactive. And that's why you feel like at one moment you're here, then you're on a spaceship and things are just floating and crazy that you have. Emotional part of the brain is 30% more active. Know that the CEO is down, so things are logical. So you have that hippocampus. Memory part of the brain is hyperactive. So you remember all the craziness. Now this biases your brain. This state of all these centers being active and this being deactivated. It just puts your brain in a state to think in a certain way. And that will influence the narrative. You cannot avoid having that influence. This is actual theory about how dreams are based on the state of the brain. And you'll have dreams in this way. So that's the meaning. The meaning is the brain is trying to make sense of all these centers being active at the same time. The memory part of the brain influencing things. The environment, your hormonal state from the few last few weeks. All this will bias what you're dreaming and make you dream about certain things. But at the same time it could still be. And this is where we're going to do the spirituality again. It could still be some spiritual influences as well. So you don't want to close that gate completely. But I'm saying there's a Brain baseline state that makes you dream in a certain way and be more inclined to have certain visions and see certain things. But at the same time, there's so many other things that could be going on as well. So that's the meaning part of what dreaming is all about. You know, the. Yeah.

Wow. And why do some people not remember their dreams where others remember everything?

It's a good question. So one of the ways you can make yourself remember dreams more is by having a big glass of water.

So before you go to bed, isn't that going to make you wake up in the middle of the night because you have to pee now?

Exactly.

Maybe not right before, but a little bit. Yeah.

Yeah, that's exactly the point. When you're having a big glass of water, you will have more fragmented sleep. So your sleep will be more choppy and then you just wake up and you're more likely to have you remember your dreams more because you wake up during the REM stage of sleep and you have more chance of remembering your dreams. Remember. So the way dreams work is that during the entire night, during all the stages of sleep, you remember dream during the REM stage and you have like four cycles of complete where you go through different stages and where REM is sort of about a 25% of this time. So the more you go in and out of rem, the better chances you are you remembering your dreams overall. Now, why certain people remember their dreams more? I think so creative people tend to remember their dreams more. Perhaps they are activated, activating more of their creative networks during the day as well. So they're just more in sync and in tune with their creative minds. So those I would say are. And so some people just don't remember their dreams. They may not be, as I want to say, creative. They could be just be they're not.

Activating as much or something.

Those centers. Exactly.

Yeah. That's interesting.

Yeah.

What is one thing you wish everyone knew about their brain, their brain health to live a better life based on your neuroscience research?

Okay, that's. I would say avoiding stress. Stress and cortisol. Obviously you need cortisol. Cortisol is important, but too much cortisol can inhibit some of these growth fertilizing factors we call BDNF and gdnf, these things that the brain uses to grow new synapses and connections. Stress directly dampens that. So having a lot of cortisol, too much cortisol to the point that you can't sleep well, that will directly make your brain less Plastic.

Yeah.

Improving sleep. Understanding that sleep obviously is a phenomenon where you have all this, these crazy dreams, lucid dreams, sleep paralysis, but you also have deep sleep. Deep sleep is the stage before REM that's involved in things like memory storage, generate sort of replenishing of the cardiovascular system, the immune system, the blood pressure regulation, glucose. All this happened during deep sleep. The stage before rem. Skin rejuvenation, hair. You want to, you know, be pretty for a photo shoot or something. You know, you want to. This is all in deep sleep. So you don't want to neglect deep sleep and you don't want to neglect sleep overall. So having that is crucial. Meaning taking care of your sleep, having good sleep routines, good sleep habits. Sleeping at the same time each day and waking up at the same time is a good way to keep your circadian clock. So in the brain and the hypothalamus, part of the brain, a little region that's involved in. You have a biological clock there involved in setting when you feel awake and when you feel asleep. So having good sleep, routine and habits, reducing stress, exercising regularly is crucial. Cardiovascular especially, but also strength. It's good for your brain. Social connections, getting out, away from those laptops and those iPads, going out and meeting people, connecting with your family, your parents, gratitude to your parents, what they've done for you, all their sacrifices, loving them deeply. That kind of gets all the endorphins and the oxytocin and vasopressin, all the love hormones to make your brain and nervous system more healthier, optimized. Avoid loneliness. I mean, it kind of goes with the social interaction, but just loneliness is horrible, man. We weren't. We didn't come about to be alone. And a lot of us think our AIs and all that is our humans. They're not humans. And God and connect with people.

Here's a question for you.

Yeah.

How bad is social media use for people's brains? Obviously, there's some benefit for social media to get a message out and there's entertainment, but when it's overused, what is it doing to our brains and our brain health? As a neuroscientist.

It does a lot. I mean, first of all, all these Ferraris and all these mansions you're seeing, I mean, 90% are not real. I mean, you shouldn't feel bad about yourself wherever, wherever you are in life. If you don't like life, people will portray a life for you that's not real.

Yeah.

So a lot of anxiety and depression. People feel they're not enough. They don't feel complete. They feel like the sense of gratitude, which is important for just brain health and nervous system health and mental health, kind of goes out the window when you just kind of completely engage in this completely irrational social comparison with people that you just feel like everybody owns a Ferrari and you don't. And so therefore, you are not good enough. Forget all that. There's so much more to life. Go out and touch the grass, get some fresh air, you know, and so that's a huge part of it. Second, I would say these social media platforms were intentionally designed to be very addictive. Creating behavioral addictions, making you just crave likes and crave social attention. Nothing wrong with that, you know, having, you know, using that for social connection. But you can become addicted and just feel like that's the only thing you want to do. And the addicted brain is a. It's a brain that it gets dopamine. Addiction, basically, in a nutshell, is when you get dopamine from one source only. And when you're not having that source, the amygdala, the fear part of the brain, and the emotional part of the brain are screaming for more of that drug. And then the more of that drug you have, the more you need in order to get fulfillment and get the addictive cravings off. And so I would say addiction is another part of it. So those are the main two things, the social comparison and the addictive aspects. It's not real. I mean, so much of it's not real. People are forgetting what life is all about. And I think that's. That's the problem with social media. It can be dangerous. And some people are. You know, there's actually the genetic component to addiction too. Some people are just more likely to become addicted to drugs. So you have. Actually knowing where you fall on that scale is great.

Is there a test you can take to see how addictive you are?

No, but I'll tell you this. So a study that was done by mentors when I was at Cambridge, they did early studies when they would have people look at their genetics and then they would see who would become. And then measure their genetics and look at their lives 20, 30 years later or something. It's a very long, long study. They found that certain people were just more likely, based on the genes, to become drug addicts and addicted to stuff. So there's a genetic predisposition that has to do with part of the brain calls. I don't want to all these names, but it's sort of nucleus accumbens. And the dopamine parts of the brain. If you have certain receptors. Certain receptors more than other receptors, you. You are genetically predisposed to become more addictive. Now, I can tell you this personally, I have that addictive personality. So if I use social media a little bit, I suddenly find myself clicking and clicking.

All of it? Yeah. You're all in.

I can't, like. So I know for my own self that I have to be careful. So I think it's. Although there might, you know, you can do certain personality tests or see a shrink. You kind of know. If you have that. Are you the guy that just takes, you know, a cookie and then you can't stop?

Like, I'm all in or I'm all out. That's why I try to be all out of the bad stuff and all in on the good stuff.

That's me. Right. That's me too.

So it's like my. My. My crutch is sugar. Right? Exactly. And, yeah. I can't just do once in a while.

Yeah.

It's like once in a while becomes, all right, this is all day today. Now this is like a weekend now. This is like a month.

Right.

And then I either need to be all out or I'm all in.

Exactly.

And it's. That's just kind of how I learned to manage my life.

Right, right.

And maybe once in a while I can do it to, like, kind of manage it. But it's really. I have to put my attention on the healthy habit of eliminating certain things. Or it's just hard to manage balance with certain things that are more addictive for me.

Yeah.

And I'm glad that I've never gotten into alcohol or drugs or smoking, because I'm sure I would have more of an addictive personality with that. So I've just been zero for all of that. Never been drunk or high.

Yeah.

And so for me, it's like, you know, just trying to know where I'm at.

Yeah.

And live in accordance to that.

But so it seems like you fall in that genetic predisposition for sure.

Yeah, probably. I mean, I've been doing this show for every week for 12 years. I have an addictive behavior to doing something good.

Yeah.

Yeah, towards this. So I try to put my energy into the good things as opposed to the. The negative things, but.

Right.

I've got a couple final questions for you. This has been fascinating. I appreciate it.

Of course.

I'm curious. Why did you decide to pursue the field of neuroscience? Was it because you were having sleep paralysis? Was it for some other reason.

So I think for me it was my sleep paralysis experience. Definitely triggered my quest for wanting to understand the brain and how we can certainly see ghosts in our bedrooms, what's going on. And that really took me on the journey to wanting to understand things and get out of my little bedroom there in the ghetto and in the poverty stricken neighborhood and go out there and study the brain. In traveling to various countries, went to Egypt initially and then came to the US and went to England and all that. So Maoistly paralysis definitely affected me. But also wanting to give back. My parents were so good to me. They sacrificed so much for me to have a good life. I saw my dad work in a pizza shop an entire life and have no college education, just kind of working away in the pizza shop. And I wanted to give back. I saw them and so I needed to work hard. And so that was what really pushed me. A sense of purpose, wanting to give my parents a good life but at the same time being utterly fascinated about the brain.

Yeah.

So those were the two things that.

That's cool, man. Yeah, you're doing good work, man. I want to acknowledge you belong for doing the research, sharing the research and trying to educate so many people on a complicated thing which is the brain dreams, neuroscience. Like it's hard to understand these things, let alone understand day to day life. So I acknowledge you for going through the challenges and the pain you've gone through to want to say, how do I find solutions to this pain to serve others. And you've been doing a great job with it. You also have a great course out on Peterson Academy, Jordan Peterson's online academy.

Yeah.

And people can go to petersonacademy.com and check out Intro to Neuroscience. You've got a course there that teaches more about neuroscience dreams, understanding this deeper.

Right.

So if people want to go there, we'll have that linked up as well. Petersonacademy.com Go to the courses section. You can see Baland's course there. You're also on social media, Baland, jalal, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all these different places where you're sharing more content, where people can follow you there. How else can we support or follow you? Do you have a website as well?

Yeah, I have a website. Belangela.com it's not very high, very active on it, but there's some.

Social media is your spot.

Yeah, I'd say so, yeah.

Okay, cool. Yeah, yeah, awesome man. Well, there's a lot of great content online that you're sharing. Thank you. I've got, I've got one final question for you before we got to wrap things up. You've shared a lot of great kind of truths already and insights and I'm going to be a dad here in the next few months. So that's why I was asking you about, like, what, what should we be teaching our kids as a neuroscientist? But I'm curious, final question for you. What's your definition of greatness?

Yeah, that's. That's a deep. That's a deep one, I'd say. Definition of greatness is kind of what you're doing, right? It's showing up week after week. Right. And that's why I have to acknowledge you as well. Right. You come up week after week doing these great shows and I've enjoyed watching your show over the years. Very insightful. And that's what greatness is about, excellence. It's putting in your heart and brain into all that you're doing and following your heart and passion, not being afraid of being who you are authentically, which you're a master at, and not closing yourself up to the world and having an open heart. And so I think that's what greatness is about, being truly yourself. So I think that that's greatness.

Juan, thanks so much for being here.

Thank you, brother.

Appreciate it.

The waking brain and the sleeping brain are doing a 24 hour cycle for as long as the run you have on this.

Interesting. That's the first thing that cycle.

It actually, you know, there was like.

I love this topic, by the way.

Like this, like go.

There are like people who go into canes for like six months. It's still in a cycle.

Like it's not based.