I'm often asked is it possible to reverse
terrible diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's,
simply with your mind.
And the fact is, these diseases take on physical
attributes in the brain that cannot simply
be reversed with only your mind.
But what we can do is throughout life, we
can try to stave off disease.
Exercise, diet, and developing a more healthy
brain by always being the conscious observer.
Let your brain serve you; don't serve it.
Chopra: Rudy in the last few years there's
been an amazing amount of research on the
beneficial effects of sleep and how lack of
sleep is actually one of the most detrimental
things that can happen.
Tell me about the relationship between sleep
and brain health specifically because that
affects everything from our relationships
to our social interactions to our habits to
our addictions.
Tanzi: So when we consider the benefits of
sleep, you need to consider them along with
the benefits of meditation.
In meditation if you're a good meditator,
you know, you can bring your brain waves down
to theta.
If you're really good, you can get down to
delta.
So you're slowing the frequency...
Chopra: Everybody doesn't know what this means,
so delta is but four...
Tanzi: Even one or two.
Chopra: One or two cycles a second, right?
Tanzi: Yeah, with theta being more towards,
you know between five and ten.
Chopra: And then the normal waking state which
is beta and alpha?
Tanzi: Yeah.
Up around 15, 20 or higher.
Chopra: 15, 20.
So you're really slowing the frequency of
brain waves basically.
Tanzi: Right.
Chopra: Okay go ahead.
Tanzi: Now what will happen when you're sleeping
is when you're in deep sleep, what's called
slow wave sleep, which only happens for maybe
two or three hours maybe if you're lucky in
the night; during this delta wave sleep, recent
research shows that this is when all of the
sensory information you took in during the
day, that's temporarily stored as short-term
memory, now gets consolidated, registered
onto long term memory.
So the short term memory of the brain is in
one region called the hippocampus.
It looks like a seahorse, like two seas together.
Chopra: Access to short term memory because
we don't know...
Tanzi: Access to short-term memories.
Chopra: Yeah but good.
Tanzi: But as the sensory information and
the ability to recall it is sitting in the
short term memory, to now consolidate in your
long term memory regions of the brain, you
need slow wave sleep.
You need delta wave sleep.
In this country in the elderly, in folks who
are over 75 years old, a good proportion do
not have slow wave sleep.
Sleep disturbances in the elderly are an epidemic.
And even where you have decent sleep, in studies
that have been done, many elderly folks are
sleeping and not getting slow wave sleep.
But this is... when you have slow wave sleep,
this is when you are really allowing your
brain to consolidate all of the new information
it took in, so that it's now available somewhere
in your long term memory.
Now think about intuition.
At some level intuition is the ability to
suddenly have a flash, an insight, where you
have no idea how you got there.
Chopra: A creative leap.
Tanzi: Yeah a creative leap but you suddenly
just have an intuitive sense about what's
happening.
Well one contributor to an intuitive experience
is that long term memories that you don't
even know you have—they’ve been stored
during your slow wave sleep—all the sensory
input coming in during the day which you thought
just went in and out, well it's in there for
a while.
But if you want to have it available later
on in order to come to new insights, it needs
to be stored somewhere.
Or at least the ability to recall it has to
be stored somewhere.
And that's the long term memory part of the
brain.
This happens during delta wave sleep.
Chopra: So delta is the escape from the default
mode.
Tanzi: Yeah.
Now if you're stressed, and your cortisol
levels are high, delta wave sleep is not possible.
Delta wave meditation's not possible.
If you're too intellectual, and some folks,
especially those I work with think you can't
be too intellectual; I would say too much
intellect can also be a poison like stress.
We know the neurochemicals that are part of
intellect, if they’re too high, at too high
a level, they also block delta wave sleep
and achieving a delta wave state when you
meditate.
So you're short-changing yourself the ability
to store sensory information you took in all
day in your brain for use later on, for example
in an intuitive flash.
Chopra: You and I have created technologies
that actually help people go into delta by
feeding different frequencies of sound to
different parts of the brain.
Tanzi: Right.
Well during sleep, many folks think it's just
REM and dreaming that's important for the
health of the brain and the mind.
But perhaps as important or more important
is the delta wave or slow wave sleep.
This is when you consolidate your memories,
and also in terms of risk for Alzheimer's
disease as you age, it's during delta wave
sleep that you turn off the production of
the main toxin that accumulates in the brain
that causes Alzheimer's as we age.
So delta waves are a good thing for the brain.
It's possible to induce this delta wave state
by hearing a frequency that's at the same
frequency, auditory frequency that's at the
same frequency as delta wave state of the
mind.
So this can be done with auditory beats.
It can be combined with a mask that allows
you to see lights blinking at a slower and
slower rate.
So you'll be hearing beats that are slowing
down.
Lights blinking at a slower and slower rate
to bring you down from alpha beta to theta,
all the way down to delta.
Chopra: So you can literally dial in into
a dream state...
Tanzi: Yeah.
Chopra: Or dial in to a deep sleep state.
Tanzi: Yeah.
Chopra: And that's what we're creating right
now.
Tanzi: And the key is not to fall asleep.
So you have to program it so that you get
down to delta, but you don't fall asleep.
That's one of the keys to this type of technology.
Chopra: I'm really excited about the technologies
that we're creating.
Tanzi: And I think it'll be helpful for, especially
for elderly folks who are having trouble with
getting enough slow wave sleep.
And so at the same time you can improve your
memory, theoretically based on what we know,
you'll also be turning off this default network,
and in doing so you're turning off the production
of the toxins that cause Alzheimer's disease.
