Matt: If you're using any compound, be it alcohol, be it a sleeping pill, which are...sleeping pills, by the way, come with deathly consequences and higher risk of cancer. Or you're using...

Rhonda: Really?

Matt: Yeah, markedly increased risk.

Rhonda: Is that because there's something directly the sleeping pills are doing, or because the way it affects your...? What does it do to your sleep, sleeping pills? A lot of people take Ambien.

Matt: So in the past month, 10 million Americans have swallowed some kind of sleeping aid, either a prescription or over-the-counter, monumental amounts. You know, I often joke that I think, it's not really a joking topic, but, you know, it took George Lucas about 40 years to amass $4 billion in profit from the Star Wars franchise. It took Ambien less than 20 months to amass $4 billion in profit. That tells me everything about the insufficiency of sleep and the desperate need for sleep in this modern 21st-century era.

But the problem is Ambien isn't part of that same class of drugs that alcohol is. It's what we call a sedative hypnotic. It works on the same receptor, which is the GABA receptor. Now it tickles the GABA receptor in a different way to that which alcohol does. But what we found is that sleeping pills, and I won't name any names but including the one that you described, they are sedating the brain. You're not going into naturalistic sleep. If I look at the electrical signature of your sleep when you're on a sleeping pill versus natural sleep, it's not the same.

Secondly, what we found is that those sleeping pills can often come with a grogginess in the morning and some forgetfulness. Third, what we've found is that in animal models, and this is work that was done by Markus Frank, who's a wonderful friend and colleague, he was looking at how the brain rewires itself during sleep. And the brain does, particularly during the development.

And he has a model in animals, where, if you sort of put a patch on one of the eyes when the visual cortex is developing, the visual cortex shifts over to developing more wiring to the eye that remains open. And it's called the monocular deprivation paradigm of brain plasticity, and it's a very well worked out model of brain plasticity. If you give those animals some exposure once you patch the eye to the eye that remains, you drive learning and plasticity, and then you allow it to sleep, sleep will strengthen the synaptic connections that have been made during the day by about 100%.

Rhonda: Wow.

Matt: So sleep is almost as powerful as experience during the day. That's how sort of strong and powerful it is. But what he then did was a study where he dosed those animals with Ambien. Now it turns out that those animals slept even longer, if you look at the data, than the animals who weren't dosed on Ambien. And the prediction would be, surely, they would have as much if not more of that wonderful brain plasticity. The opposite was true. Ambien-induced sleep resulted in a 50% unwiring of the connections that have been made during day rather than potentiating them.

That frightens me. Because if you look at the prescription age of sleeping medications over the past decade, it's coming down and down. I don't know how long it's going to be before prescription medication comes in to a pediatric realm. And if those data hold up, it makes me worried.