LIVING HERO

Interview with Robert Stickgold: Sleep, Memory, Creativity & Dreams

Welcome to the Inaugural Living Hero Podcast!

Sleep, Memory, Creativity and Dreams, an interview with Dr. Robert Stickgold

• How sleeps helps us learn • Creativity and stress • Meaning and insight • Deep sleep and consciousness • Sleep and meditation • Lucid dreaming • Symptoms of sleep deprivation

Enjoy the podcast! (you can download the mp3 file, which will play in iTunes, RealPlayer, Windows Media Player and other media players). The interview is 57 minutes. You can also listen to it right here by double clicking on the purple media player below.

AND SOME BREAKING SLEEP RESEARCH NEWS: By demonstrating that worms sleep, David M. Raizen, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neurology, in collaboration with other researchers at the Penn Center for Sleep have not only demonstrated the ubiquity of sleep in nature, but also propose a compelling hypothesis for the purpose for sleep.

They propose that sleep is a state required for the nervous system to grow and change, there must be down time of active behavior.

Other researchers at Penn have shown that, in mammals, synaptic changes occur during sleep and that deprivation of sleep results in a disruption of these synaptic changes.

Use this link for download, not the one below the player. Download this episode (right click and save)

Instructions for Windows Right click on the blue link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Click on "Save Target as". The file will start downloading. A window will pop up and the name of the file will be filled in, as well as the file format. Just choose to save it to your desktop in the left bar.Then you will have an mp3 file sitting on your desktop. Right click on that and choose Open with: iTunes (or your chosen player). Or, alternatively, open iTunes and just drag the mp3 into iTunes.

Instructions for Mac: Control click or right click on the blue link that says “Download this episode (right click and save)”. Either "Open with iTunes" to listen now or "Download link file as" and save to your desktop. Open with iTunes later or just drag the file into iTunes and play it when you like.

Listen whenever it's convenient!

Want the 21-page transcript of this first Living Hero interview in PDF format? Just ask! Please use the questions/comments box on the right side bar and leave me your name and email so I can send it to you.

Listen Now:

 Standard Podcasts [57:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Embeddable Player

jari psychology, consciousness, interviews, insight, meditation, creativity, memory, dreams, creative, sleep, stress, sleep deprivation, meaning 1 Comment » | (2 ratings)

Metaphors Are for Health

We have a biological and psychological need to sleep and dream; and in our dreams we synthesize life experience through symbolic, metaphorical and associative imagery. If denied this activity for even a few days, we become irritable, imbalanced and upset. Eventually, we will start hallucinating (dreaming while awake), dissociating from reality for awhile.

In our waking lives, as in our dream states, it is a support to our mental and physical well-being to process our experience metaphorically. In our society, however, the preoccupations of thought, the constant influx of music, TV and other media, the noise of our busy lives, prevents the active circuitry of the brain from receiving deeper, more subtle intimations of the self and engaging creatively with them.

Given the opportunity, these intimations and their imagery will surface and become active in the brain. Allowing for such opportunities, and actually encouraging, cultivating and nurturing them, brings joy, enthusiasm, understanding, and a sense of well-being, as well as bearing forth powerful new raw material for innovative, artistic and creative projects.

Lynn White, Jr., in her Frontiers of Knowledge in the Study of Man tells us "We are beginning to see that the distinctive thing about the human species is that we are a symbol-making animal, homo signifex, and that without this function we could never have become sapiens. We have not only the capacity to make symbols; we are under the necessity to create them in order to cope humanly with our experience."

This post is my prelude to our upcoming Podcast featuring sleep and dream researcher Dr. Robert Stickgold, scheduled for this Wednesday, January 16th.

jari Uncategorized, holistic health, consciousness, creative arts, education, future, human potential, culture, synthesis, creativity, dreams, creative, sleep, stress, sleep deprivation, meaning Comments (0) » | (1 ratings)