Sleep behaviors are pretty fascinating. Some people snore, some grind their teeth -- and some take a little stroll, or perhaps a drive. In this episode, Josh and Chuck investigate how sleepwalking, or somnambulism, works.
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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works dot Com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles w Chuck Bryant. It makes this stuff you should know. Um the late night edition. It's late let's go and Chuck grew It couldn't be better. How are you same? Just the same? So, Chuck, I got a story for you. Let's hear it back in in a little town called Weymouth, Massachusetts, although in Massachusetts they probably pronounced it in some radically different way than it would be spelled we Mouth woman or wooster or something weird like that. Um, there is a woman named um Marie and Bickford, and she was a prostitute. And she was discovered on October that year murdered and brutally murdered. Actually uh, and it was quickly traced back to a guy by the name of Albert Terrell Jack the Ripper. No, but it was ripper asque. Her head was severed or almost completely severed. Yeah, and it was with the knife. Um. But the the reason everybody knew it was Albert terrell was because that was her boyfriend and he had left his wife for her. He was a wealthy guy in Massachusetts and he left his wife to be with Maria Anne Bickford. Um, and he wanted her to quit the quit the job, I guess you could call it. I would say that too. Well, she didn't. She liked having a an income because she didn't have to depend on any man for um, whatever she wanted, and she refused. And ironic though, because she was depending on men. Yeah, that is very ironic actually, um. She uh ultimately died, was murdered, and it was Albert Terrelle who who admitted to doing it, but he was sleepwalking. He said it was pretty thin case. But he was ultimately acquitted, even though he had set three fires in the brothel in an obvious attempt to cover up what he'd done while he was still supposedly sleepwalking. But the jury bought it. And one of the reasons they bought it was because it was a jury of wealthy white men who weren't about to put one of their own behind bars as big of a crook as he was. But secondly because in eighteen forty five, we didn't really understand sleepwalking. We didn't understand what people were capable of, We didn't understand how sleep walking worked. And I know you sent me an article as recently as a month or so ago a guy in Arizona was acquitted of sexual assault because he was sleepwalking. Right, Yeah, it was Illinois, but um, that was today. The news articles from today even better, even more recent, which makes my point even more thorough, which is we don't understand sleepwalking too terribly much more than we did in eighteen forty five as far as explaining why it happens. Right, absolutely, But there are some really interesting aspects of this, uh, this sleep disorder which is called the paras omnia, right, yes, it's that's one of many, but it's called somnambulism. Specifically, sleepwalking is and not to be confused with no, not at all. Uh. And there's an official definition if you want to look in a mental health professional handbook called Yes, Uh, you leave your bed while you're sleeping, and uh, you find it others find it difficult to wake you when you're sleep sleep walking. You can't remember what happened afterward. Uh, you're confused when you wake up, you aren't suffering from dementia or anything else physical. It's a big one, and it impairs your social life or work life, or your life. And that's for straight up sleepwalking. There are sleepwalking can be a symptom of things like dementia or Parkinson's or something like that. But that's um kind of significant and you should think that it's found in the d S M four, which is the psychological Bible, right, so it's it's considered a disorder, a disorder of arousal, I think is what it's called. Right, Yes, so chuck while you're sleeping. Um, when does this occur? When does it take place? Uh, if you're an adult or actually kids too, I think it occurs in the first third of your sleep, which is the non R E M sleep, which is when your body is, uh, you're in your deepest state of sleep, but your body is kind of awake, so you're tossing and turning a lot, but your brain is shut down. So it's sort of the opposite of rim sleep. Right, You've got non R E M N R E I'm sleep right, and Um. Usually sleepwalking occurs during the deepest part, which is what I think phase three or four or possibly three and four when, as Katie Lambert, who wrote this article put it, um, with R E M sleep, your brains active but your body is not. With non R E M sleep, which is when sleepwalking occurs, your brain is just dead to the world, but your body is still moving around, which accounts for sleepwalking. Right, perfect recap. Thanks a lot. Uh. And you know your brain is is also resistant to arousal when you're asleep, So that explains why it's hard to wake somebody up when you're sleepwalking. But it's not dangerous necessarily. No, And that's a question that we should probably just go ahead and answer. Should you wake a sleepwalker? You've you've heard warnings against that kind of thing, I think on everything from the Brady Bunch to Hawaii five. Oh. Let's say, okay, uh, myth Yes you can wake a sleepwalker. But the rule I put in is wake a sleepwalker like you would want to be awakened just from bed. Don't go shaking them or anything. You wouldn't do that somebody laying in bed asleep either, they'll probably have a heart attack, so be gentle and try and guide them back to the bed. If they wake up, that's fine. But it's not it's not like a danger. They're not gonna have a heart attack if they and die if they're awake from sleepwalking. No, but you could arouse their startle response, and um, they are going to be confused and not know what's going on. That's, like you said, one of the symptoms of sleep walking. Um. But if you do manage to get the sleepwalker back to bed and they lie back down and that's it, you can pretty much rest assured that there's not gonna be another incident like that because most people sleepwalk only once per night. Interestingly, that's what they say, and thirty seconds to a half hour. I've heard it even longer than that, because it very much depends on what's going on or maybe what you feel like you have to get done while you're walking around in your sleep. You're gonna be sort of zombiefied, but you're not gonna be walking around with your arms out in front of you like in the movies. That's a bunch of bunk um, and you're probably gonna be pretty clumsy, but you can still perform activities, which is kind of the weird thing about it. One of the weird things about it, right, you just perform them clumsily or you oddly. I guess there's another way to put it. UM and sleepwalking is one of these. It's a hilarious disorder really because it's not generally that dangerous, so it doesn't have to be that dangerous, although it can put you in dangerous situations, and people have been hurt um in sleepwalking. But the idea of just, you know, interacting with somebody with a glassy eyed look on their face who's clumsily playing the guitar, it's that's a funny disorder. It's funnier than chance. I haven't either. I've never been much of a sleepwalker. I don't think I've ever sleepwalked. I've sleepwalked, but I've never interacted with someone who was sleepwalking. So yeah, I've done it myself. Though. It's good. It's a lot of fun. But it's one of these conditions where we have all this evidence, in all this data, we just haven't been able to fully put it together to figure it out once and for all, which makes for a better podcast for us. Right. Um, A little bit more data that we have on at Chuck is that um sleepwalking tends to run in families, children sleepwalk more than adults by far. Yeah, you're ten times more likely if your family, Uh, if you have a family member who has sleptwalked to be a sleepwalker yourself. So is it slept walked or sleepwalked slept walk Sure, that sounds good to me. We'll just call it s W past tense. Uh. It more often is founding kids. Obviously it's something you usually outgrow. Uh. More often identical twins, which I thought was pretty interesting. Yeah, well, gene expression at all. And uh, I think they said adults two point five to four percent of adults sleepwalk, and this is they're almost always adults who sleptwalked as children. And if you start sleepwalking for the first time as an adult, you might want to get that checked out. You definitely want to get that checked out, because again, it can be a symptom of another another problem like UM, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's UM. Severe stress I think has been associated with it, not just in children or not adults, but children too, which I'm I was kind of like, if you have a child who's suffering from sleepwalking and it's stress related, what are you doing to your poor kid? To where you the kids suffering from such stress that he's running around at night. Absolutely, I wonder what I was stressed about. I don't know, man. I find it odd that you haven't asked me about sleepwalking yet, even though I said three times that have slept walked. And I'm trying to drum up the tension. Uh. They used to think that, um, it was like an epileptic thing or hysteria. Well, it still is associated with epilepsy. Actually, hysteria is kind of about the window though. Yeah, they still think it's caused by epilepsy, though it's associated with it still. Yeah, I did not know that we should change this article. Uh. And like you said, no one knows exactly why it's happening, um, but they can just say kind of what goes on when it does happen, right, right, We have all this information that hasn't been fully put together, which again I find fascinating. Yeah, absolutely so, Chuck. Um, what are some of the I guess competing theories for why we sleepwalk? Uh, Well, it's a lot of people think it's just like you're in a transition stage between being awake and being asleep. So if you've got a dead brain, we'll not dead. If you've got a very sleepy brain and a very wired body, uh, you could potentially get triggered. They think a lot of times. I saw this one study where um, they took ten sleepwalkers and um they they kept them awake for more than twenty four hours and then allowed them to sleep, and they found that a buzzer going off. All ten people got up and slept walked when they heard this buzzer. Weird. After sleep deprivation and before during just regular sleep, three out of ten were triggered by the buzzer. So they think that like any noise like a dog barking outside could like wake you up, wake your body up, and send you doing whatever. Uh. And sleep deprivation is a magic term as far as sleepwalking goes. They found that UM sleepwalking increases dramatically and in studies when they're sleep deprived, when the person sleep deprived first. And they recommend also that if your kid um is sleepwalking, you should not only decrease their stress somehow, maybe let them give up the trumpet if they really hate it, um, but also to get them on like a regular sleep schedule too, that that could be part of it as well. That they may just be sleep deprived and stressed out. Yeah, adults kids for show. Um. Another theory with the kids is that there's all kinds of crazy hormones being shot about the body during the night and that that may disrupt the kid And that's why that would explain why it like tapers off after puberty. Yes. Um, have you ever liked done something to say, driving or walking or doing anything where you realized you got somewhere and you hadn't been paying attention. You didn't really It wasn't like you're blacked out or you're drunk or impaired or anything, but you were just distracted or doing something else, daydreaming. Absolutely, So I would imagine that that has a lot to do with how we could possibly sleepwalk. It's like maybe more basic part of our brain is activated, like the brainstem with that controls like breathing, walking, that kind of stuff. Correct, So maybe it's all brainstem makes sense to me. Uh, people have actually killed people in their sleep, like you said the first guy, Uh, there was someone else too, And it kind of depends on the case. From what I've seen, some of them get acquitted, some of them get convicted. One guy stabbed his wife forty five times and he was convicted. Another guy I murdered his father and he was acquitted. So I guess it's sort of a crap shoot. There hasn't been any You can't go to a law book and say, well, we gotta we have the sleepwalking defense, like the insanity plea. No, but um, I think that, uh, you could probably find the same um state witness or defense witness in the acquittals or or um convictions. But there's some like great professional witness out there, like can convince any jury that actually, if you're sleepwalking, can't You can't possibly know what you're doing right. Well, the guy from Illinois last week that was acquitted was I think they proved that he had a long history of sleepwalking. And this was some friend of his. He like went out drinking with her and slept crashed on her couch and then he said he woke up to some guy punching him in the face. She said that guy was the guy I called because you were assaulting me in my sleep and he was like, I didn't mean it, and they said, okay. Yeah. It took him like a couple of hours or something to decide. The jury Yeah, that was really fast too. That's what I'm saying. There has to have been somebody who convinced them and just laid it all out for him, because it's not like the average juror knows a lot about sleep walking. It's all you know, the cabinet of Dr Kelgary or again the Brady bunch. Yeah, who Who's who was that? I don't remember. I just remember there was a sleepwalking episode, and it seems like I could be making it up. You talked about injury, and I saw a study in England that eleven percent of people that responded sleepwalkers said they have been injured. And it's usually like bruising or cuts, but I think eleven percent of that eleven percent actually broke bones well, which is not a happy way to wake up up with its um chuck. Sleepwalking is not the only paris omnia. Remember we called it paras omnia. It's a sleep disorder. There are other parasomnias, and the first that I think we should talk about is called somnambulistic sexual behavior inexplicably um abbreviated as SPS. Yeah, that's weird. I wonder what the beast stands for. I guess that's part of the ballistic Maybe that's the Spanish um. The Spanish abbreviation it's somnambulistic behavior sex you all. Yeah, so sleep sex or sexsomnia is um. Like Katie says in here, it's pretty much what you think. It's being asleep in the middle of the night and either you know, masturbating or doing something to whoever is nearby, right, sexually, yes, and again that can lead you to an assault conviction, or you can wake up very happy, depending on the situation. Right. And then of course there's the very very famous sleep eating, which one generally associates these days with the sleep aid ambient right, Yeah, eating all kinds of crazy things with ambient cigarettes and raw meat. I think we've talked about it before. It seems like, yeah, we've talked about it. Kristen Conger rode article on it, and um, apparently the chemical zolpidem in ambient like crosses the eating and the sleeping wires and like one in a thousand people and they don't know why. But I also found another stat that said one and one percent of people have sleep eating disorders anyway, so I can't you know, Well, there's reports of people who have been on ambient and then switched to another similar drug, and it said that it all went away. There, sleep eating, abnormal sleep behavior. And then there was the first case of well the first documented case of a woman who is on ambient UM who sleep emailed and I can't stand the um the term the media gave it, but z mailing with three ze. Yeah, it's completely awful. Uh yeah, that was pretty cool because she emailed. She fired up her computer in the middle of the night, logged in to the internet. Onto the internet, she had to UM user password to use her password, and sent several emails that apparently were a random mix of upper and lower cases, and they were written in some strange language. Although when I read the first email, it didn't seem very strange to me at all. Uh No, it said, um, this is a quote, come tomorrow and sort this hellhole out. Dinner and drinks four pm. Bring wine and caviare only it seems like a very normal email to me. I've sent that same very same email before. What about the second one? Yeah, one said what the dot dot dot? I think, but it was the mix of all caps in lower case that really just kinda that had to be a little off putting to see that. It looks like brain damage, you know, it's like brain damage and text form. She's probably seen a doctor by this point, I would say, although she was on ambient right, yeah, okay, well that probably explains that zolpi um like you said. And then also, uh, this week, very sadly, a guy fell. He basically walked off of his third story hotel room in Majorca and just like broke a leg and hit his head too, and hit his head and his girlfriend just like this, she woke up to find her boyfriend had gone out the window. Awful. That's more than a bruise, my friend. And if you like connecting podcasts, there was a guy um in England in hart old Pool, right and on um Holy Island, at the Crowning Anchor on Holy Island off north the Northumberland coast. He woke up in quicksand actually he's sleep he's he drank too much. But then he's he sleepwalked. He s w pass tensed um into the marsh land and found himself waking up in the sinking and quicksandard and trapped in quicksand crazy. And the guy was smart enough to know that you stopped struggling and lie flat. And if he would listen, was a fan, wouldn't that be something It's possible, Chuck, because this just happened, right, it was m August eleven. H I wonder so, as sleepwalker Stephen Rook, if you listen to this podcast, let us know if we saved your life and put the bottle down in the stakes. Yeah, well, he said he did. He said he spent the next day in bed and uh, he was avoiding alcohol for a long time and wants to thank everyone. A friend said, yeah, he'll be back on the sauce this weekend. Totally. I've said that before too. My uncle, actually it was a famous sleepwalker in my family. He um, my uncle Steve, who you know as the guy who's helped us out before with some stuff, the guy we bought Scotch four a k A. Uh. He had a few incidents is when he was young, and one time they found tracks in the snow leading from his house, so he went Apparently he said he went outside see if it was snowing. Another time he fell asleep on a couch after school, got up an eate dinner, and then later on woke up and said, Hey, what's for dinner tonight? And they're like, you just had scallops? And another time specific that's what he said, I asked him today. Uh. And then another time he was going to the store with my grandfather and he fell asleep in the car on the way to the store and then woke up like in the shop that they were going to, like at the counter paying for something weird. What was he buying? I think he said tickets to like a Danny Thomas benefit show or something. It's like the early sixties. Yeah, that's pretty much everybody was sleepwalking in that line. Yeah, that's a hot ticket in MEMPHISO back in the day. Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, And I used to sleepwalk, all right, let's hear well. A couple of times I'd gotten up and just gone out to my We had a split level, so I'd go out to the banister overlooking our den and just start yelling things. And um, another time I specifically remember I got up. I mean I remember after it, obviously, I got up and I got ready for school and took a shower and got dressed, and then I woke up the next morning. I was like, that was weird. I must have dreamt that, and I saw like the wet towel in my clothes on the floor down your head, your saddle, shoes on your like don d I was like clutching shampoo. So I don't sleep walk anymore. Them I sleep talk, though, do you? So? It's Emily. I think a lot of people sleep talk. That's not a big deal. Yeah, what are you say in your sleep? Um? You? Me actually likes to use her iPhone to record me sleep talking, and she loves to share it with everybody who will listen. Has actually emailed the sound clips to people before. But there's this one of me like just muttering and all of a sudden I go do the real pop and that was I have no idea. Why why am I not on that email? That's disappointing. I don't know. I'm sure I could get it for you. Um. Lastly, Chuck, there's one a point that I found it fascinating, which is people have always thought and still probably think because for dumb that um you act out your dreams while you're sleepwalking. Not true. The point that Katie Lambert makes is your brain is not really active, It's it's in the slow delta wave that you couldn't possibly be dreaming in, so you're not actually acting out your dreams. But there is a disorder called R E M sleep disorder where you actually are acting out your dreams. It's the it's a sleepwalking that occurs in that in that phase of sleep, the R E M phase where your brains active but your body is not supposed to be, So you are really wound up. If you have R. E M sleep disorder, you really need to give up the trumpet immediately. Yeah, that's when you wake up in your your dreaming that you're, you know, cutting wood for the fire, and you're like chopping your wife's leg with your hand exactly, and she guess, what are you doing? That's not what she's saying, Sam cutting wood, babe? You say, I'm correcting you. All right, Well that's it for sleepwalking. UM. I can virtually guarantee you guys will email us your sleepwalking story. So please, do you want to learn more about sleep walking? And read a page that didn't make it into this podcast at all about sleepwalking in the organically did not make it in. I guess you could call it organic. Well we didn't say, let's not include that. Just go ahead and type in sleep walking that's one word, or try s w past tense and see what happens. Um into the handy search bar at how stuff first dot Com and I said I wasn't going to use handy anymore either way. This we arrived at listener. Now that's right, Josh gonna call this uh pot growing Granny And this is from KM that's cryptic. Hi, guys, I literally just finished listening to your how grow houses work and I couldn't resist sending in this story. My grandmother has always been an avid gardener and avid gardener. She's very interested in pretty plants and had learned at some point that marijuana was a very beautiful plan in so she decided she wanted to grow some just for the sole purpose of seeing what it looked like firsthand. Now, where would a middle aged woman in eastern Pennsylvania get seeds to grow pot from my college age mother? Of course, my mom, though, was not a smoker by any means, so when she asked to find she was asked to find pot seeds, she of course pawned the task off to to her frat frat member boyfriend, who later would become my father. My father was also not a smoker, but he had a frat brother that was known to partake in this particular lifestyle, and he has always only been known as Bob Oh and my family, which I think is pretty cryptic. So Babo got him some seeds for the grandmother. She planted him began growing pot in her yard, to the dismay of my grandfather, who was good friends with the chief of police and the mayor. The plants grew beautifully in the open air of my grandmother's garden. They lived pretty close to the center of the city. As far as I know, there was no attempt to obscure them from being seen. Uh. The plug was pulled though, when my grandfather decided that come winter the world. The grandmother said, we gotta bring him inside this winter, and granddad says, no, we're not bringing those inside. So they went through the compost pod or that's what That's what the kid was told in her glaucoma got much worse, right. Yeah, well, thanks for that. Who wrote that, km KM, Thank you k M for your cryptic email. We appreciate that one. Um. If you have a story about your grandmother breaking the law, we want to hear it, uh, Send it in an email to stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works dot com. Want more how stuff works, check out our blogs on the house. 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