Did you know that birds and aquatic mammals have the ability to sleep with one side of their brain wide awake? They do. It's called unihemispheric slow-wave sleep. It's why ducks can sleep with one eye open and why dolphins don't drown while taking naps. Land mammals seem to have lost this ability, maybe because we've learned to build safe enclosures for ourselves, or we sleep in packs, or because sleeping in water is just so annoying and makes our skin prune.

Okay, here's another: have you ever spent all day trying to learn something—a piece of music, for instance—and you just can't seem to get it and then you sleep on it and the next day you can play it perfectly? One theory as to why this happens is that there is a little janitor crew inside your head that comes in and washes your brain clean while you sleep, getting rid of the garbage and leaving behind the important stuff. And the theory makes sense. Figuratively, of course. Though I really wish it were literal, because I went ahead and named my janitors: Elvis and Bigsby.

Oh! Then there's this: have you spent all day doing something like surfing (the ocean variety, not online), and then find yourself dreaming vividly about it that night, so much so that you can actually feel the water against your body? It's your brain's way of making sense of those new problems it was tackling all day (the waves) and what's really interesting is when it takes those problems and mixes them with other problems you've encountered in your life and creates new situations out of them. Which is why you might have a dream about doing yoga on a ski slope. Or riding horses in the middle of the ocean.

If any of this interests you, you might like to listen to last year's May 25th Radiolab episode on sleep.

But be careful, because you might subscribe to their podcast and get sucked in and wind up listening to every episode, back-to-back until your head explodes. Which, luckily has not happened to me, yet. But I'm skirting a very fine line. Because Radiolab is definitely my new favorite show. And I've listened to a good many episodes over the last week. It's sort of like This American Life in that each episode consists of stories; however, all the stories have a scientific slant. Many seem to focus on some aspect of neuroscience, and how studying the brain can shed light on topics such as Stress, Laughter, or "Who Am I?"—all of which are actual episode titles. But there is also an anthropological and philosophical bent to the discussion. (Is laughter, by necessity a social phenomenon? More importantly, is laughter the thing that makes us human?) And sometimes a little physics works it's way in there too, such as the episode on "Time" where they discuss relativity, and how time can slow down or speed up depending on who you are and what you're doing. Not figuratively, but actually.

Or course, this might all sound kind of nerdy and a little too intense for leisure-time listening. But the way the show is done—as this sort of ongoing casual conversation between host/producer Jad Abumrad and co-host Robert Krulwich—it doesn't come across that way at all. Instead, it seems like the hosts are learning (and really struggling with) the topics along with you and you feel a part of the conversation. It's entertaining and—gasp!—informative at the same time. Indeed, Radiolab is helping me to evolve ... in all kinds of ways. Pretty soon, I'm hoping I'll be able to sleep with one eye open again.

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