011: Van Savage

This week Van Savage enters the zone to help us understand why we spend so much of our lives sleeping. We discuss growth, repair, dreams and music and the alien artifacts (plural!) he’d hope to unearth from the Zone.

Van Savage is a professor in the UCLA Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, as well as Computational Medicine. He is also External Faculty of the Santa Fe Institute, and he serves on our science steering committee. He heads up the sleep topical track for the James S. McDonnell Foundation- funded "Complex Time" research theme at SFI.

Learn more about everything referenced in this episode by clicking the links below:

• Van’s homepage

• Complex Time: Aging, Adaptation & the Arrow of Time

• “UCLA-led team of scientists discovers why we need sleep”

• Watch Van on the “Time Design” Panel from #IPFest2018

• Ted Chiang’s Seventy-Two Letters

• Liu Cixin’s Three Body Problem

• “You’re So Cool” by Hans Zimmer

• “Don’t Look Back in Anger” by Oasis

• “Welcome to the Jungle” and “You Could Be Mine”