How Pinealon Might Improve Sleep & Cognitive Function | Dr. Abud Bakri & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Pinealon & REM Sleep Effects

00:00Let's talk about pinealon. Yeah, pinealon is one that most people probably haven't heard of. I'll just go on record saying I've tried it a few times or more. I don't take it regularly, but I tried it before sleep. Yep. If I take it at the beginning of the night, it reduces my deep slowwave sleep and gives me far more REM across the night.

00:18Not a great situation. Yep. Great situation is if I go to sleep, get my usual ration of deep sleep. If I happen to wake up in the middle of the night to use the restroom once or so, not uncommon, if I do a very small injection of pinealon at that point, the one and a half hours of REM that I would get in the final hours of my sleep, now I'm getting three hours in the same amount of sleep.

00:40It's just a higher fraction of REM. Yep. Sometimes wake up feeling a little groggy, but it is a whole other life to get that much REM. Don't do it regularly. It's not, you know, I would say maybe three times a month, but here's the interesting thing.

00:52It improves my percentage of REM on all the other nights in between those three injections. So I'm coming clean here. Lingering effects. Very cool. You're interested in pinealon for a whole other set of reasons. But first of all, what is pinealon and where does it act?

01:08Does it have a known

History Of Pinealon

01:09receptor? No known receptor. So pinealon is a tripeptide edr discovered by the mentioned of Dr. Vladimir Cavinson. He's a Soviet researcher that comes out of this Soviet era research to make soldiers, astronauts, and pilots uh better. There's concern that the US might be using lasers to to shoot at soldiers.

01:26So, the Soviet Union um tasks him with identifying peptides to defend soldiers, their eyes, and then they're aging because what would happen is they'd be in a submarine for a few months, there'd be a nuclear sub, and they'd they'd come back to shore, and they'd be like, you know, these submariners, let's call them, would look 10, 20 years older.

01:43also happens to astronauts. Yes. So then the same the same thing as the astronauts are coming back they're they're aged. So Vladimir Cavson is looking at this and he's like hey there's there's got to be a solution for this. There's been literature about using extracts of other tissues notably the pineal gland and the thymus from you know late 1800s till this this 1970s uh point that we're you know starting our story.

02:05And he starts grounding up these um extracts and injecting it into these people and then undoing a lot of these aging effects through pineal extracts and thymus extracts because these what do these soldiers have? They had very bad circadian rhythmicity.

02:18So they they can't couldn't sleep properly. They had terrible immunity. They'd get sick often. They'd be uh have autoimmune problems. All these conditions that come with it. And then they were able to undo this using these organ extracts. So Vladimir Cavson takes it a step further.

02:34He looks like, hey, what's causing this effect in these in these tissues? Like people have been injecting pineal glands in different research models or taking out pineal glands from rats from the 1800s onwards. He finds peptides in these extracts.

02:45He's like, "Huh, I wonder if these effects are from the peptides, not from this the gland itself." So then he sequences from the pineal gland epialon and from the thymus gland a couple different peptides vyon thyogen cristtogen that you'll be hearing about in the next few years that on their own do a lot of the effects that the whole extract would would do.

03:06Now you're talking about epialon but pinealon and epilon is not from the pineal gland is not from the pineal gland even though everyone no I think it's called that because there's there's as far as I understand please correct me if I'm wrong there are animal data suggesting that pinealon can help either regenerate or enhance the the general functioning of pinealytes so

Differentiating Pinealon From Epithalon

03:25it's having an effect on the pineal when c like you take cultured pineal glands like little pi gland you put in a dish and you dissociate the cells or keep it you know as a little p-sized thing and then you give it pinealon and seems to improve the timing and perhaps even the amount of melatonin output from the pineal these kinds of things.

03:41Epalon does that. So that's a big confusion. I don't know why he named them the way he named them. If anyone knows, please let us know. But epialon is from the pineal gland. Pinealon comes from a groundup brain extract called cortexin. And brain has a pineal in it.

03:55Yeah. But it was the cortex specifically, not not the subcortical regions. So he specifically not the subcortical regions. Sure. So Cavington identifies he makes a drug in Russia. It's called epithalamin which is the pineal gland extract and had great effect on circadian rhythmicity and melatonin because it's rich with melatonin.

04:11There you go basically giving people melatonin but also you up enzyme that creates melatonin from from serotonin to acetyl serotonin to melatonin. So like um when he gave it to young monkeys the monkeys had no effect but he gave it to age monkeys that have decreased melatonin and you know from puberty onwards your melatonin levels dramatically decrease.

04:29He was able to restore melatonin production in these aged animals and eventually replicated it on humans. I want to talk about thymus because it's fascinating and you're truly aversed in this. But before we do that, so pineal comes from the cortex, not the pineal.

04:44That's annoying. Yes, very annoying. Um, maybe we just rename it today. I'll let you do the renaming. We'll call it EDR. EDR. That's the three amino acid sequence. Great. We'll call it EDR so people don't get confused. What are some of the known effects?

04:54or am I just imagining this REM increase? Because

Improving Your REM Sleep

04:58I can't change what's happening to me during sleep. Y that would be an amazing placebo effect. And the reason I say amazing is there are many things that one can do to improve the amount of slowwave deep sleep, not eating too close to bedtime, doing some exercise early in the day, etc., etc.

05:11Very hard to increase REM except by heating your sleep environment in the last third of your night. And maybe some alpha GPC in the late day can bump it up a bit. Or you can rem deprive yourself or you can smoke cannabis for 10 years then quit and then you'll get a lot of REM because you got no REM for 10 years.

05:26Do not recommend that protocol. But for me it was just striking. So why would EDR tripeptide with no receptor, right? Previously called pineal but from here uh here forward EDR why would that have this effect on on REM sleep? Yep. And and I actually searched through all of the literature from Cavinson.

05:45He never mentions REM sleep once in his studies. He studied pinolon quite extensively on different neuronal tissue extracts, animal studies, even in in athletes and never mentions the REM sleep. They weren't having they didn't have whoops in the 1970s in the Soviet Union.

05:59They didn't have an eight sleep. You're kidding me. No. Yeah. So, they didn't have, you know, sleep trackers in the 1970s uh when it came to to these. So, there was no reports on on that. But what seems to be happening, let's see, what is this on this edr?

06:11It's a tripeptide that um meets the groove of the DNA of different key regions and helps the promoter region be exposed. So then that DNA transduction can happen. Trans uh translation transcription. So you get it's turning on genetic programs.

06:26Yes. Acting a little bit like a transcription factor. Yeah. Yeah. Almost like that. Or maybe assisting transcription factors in accessing the DNA in the right places.

Optimizing Brain Metabolism

06:33So pinealon in one sentence it's leading to better brain metabolism through modulating all these different pathways. for example GDF11 sod one sod 2 uh iris PPR alpha PPR gamma so what seems to be happening so he made pinealon as a anti-stress um cognitive performance compound uh and it was available orally in like Kazakhstan to that I'm taking it before sleep I should be taking in the morning yes so if you take a high enough dose there is sedation from it but if you take it in the morning or prehit workout you get quite an interesting effect so he studied this um compound on athletes

07:08and he would uh do have them do their training session, go to exhaustion and then do a test afterwards. And there's two groups, pinealon and the placebo. The pinealon group could keep the performance up despite uh being maximally exhausted from their training.

07:21I feel like such a dummy. Here I am having like these elaborate dreams I don't really remember or care about when I could be actually thinking better during the daytime. Yeah. So a lot of people report less brain fog, you know, better thinking.

07:29Uh there's a friend that has a a you know, nine figure company. He has all of his employees on pineal on. They're taking

Dosage & Administration Tips

07:37in the morning. In the morning uh or at night depending on Do you know the dosages? Not that we're recommending it. Orally people will take anywhere between you know half a milligram up to three milligs is what where people um settle in. Um the cavin ones that that that come from Russia are like 200 micrograms.

07:53Some people are injecting it. Some people are injecting it. It goes systemic. Ego systemic. It's orally available through these uh Latin pep transporters. Crosses the bloodb brain barrier most likely. Yes. Okay. Okay. Cuz it's coming from cortex, but otherwise we're the way you're describing it, we're putting no one's infusing into the brain.

08:07No one's so we're assuming it's small enough. It's a tripeptide to cross the the bloodb brain barrier. Have you tried it? I took some last night, but Okay. At night. Yeah. So, I I will take larger dosages uh if I want to get good sleep. I'll describe as 8K.

08:19Some people it will cause them to have a little bit of awakening. Um at first, that may be why your deep sleep is going away. I'll say this. If I take half of what was recommended, I'm great. But I'm very sensitive to everything. I'm just sensitive.

08:34If I take what was recommended, I fall very deeply asleep. I have elaborate dreams and I wake up. Yeah. And I couldn't tell if that was a disruption in sleep architecture. I just found and and granted I'm only doing this three times per month maximum.

08:46And I often forget and then I go months and months and I was like, "Oh, maybe I'll take a little pineal." Whoa, this is wild. and then I'd stop taking it because because I don't know enough about it. Now I know it's cleanly sourced because I trust the compounding pharmacy it's coming from, but I should ask are there any known risks of EDR so far?

09:04Nothing in the Russian

Safety & Side Effects

09:06literature. So big caveat, it's Russian literature. It's not gold standard American research that we love here. Um so there's nothing that's come up as a you know clear sign cuz what what it seems the big theory of cavin is that as you're when you're younger you make a lot of these peptides naturally these tri die tri and tetropeptides and as you age they go down in function and quantity and by replenishing these peptides you're restoring some aspect of youthfulness something similar happens in America with GHK copper which is another tripeptide that's technically like the

09:36collagen regulator so is the brain regulator and GHK copper is collagen regulator. But so far the the side effects we've noticed we have the probably the biggest anecdotal uh compilation of N equals one every every day I wake up someone text be like hey pinealon did this to me some people have a little drop in blood sugar because it activates PPR alpha PPR gamma so it'll have positive metabolic effects so that's something to keep an eye out and some people even had their A1C's drop so hypoglycemics and other people blood sugar issues take extra caution and then very vivid dreams for some

10:07people that could be disheartening if they have like you know nightmares or something like that. But very very vivid dreams uh as a result of a pinealon especially like the the color and the the quality of the dreams is very different than you normally expect.

10:21What seems to be happening is like just like you know psychedelics change the redux state of the brain. Pinealon is doing something similar where you're getting more alertness during the day like you don't wake up with as much brain fog uh at least anecdotally.

10:33uh you get better performance during like high-intensity interval training and then you get more REM sleep at night um because the the neurons are in a better oxidative state thanks to the PPR alpha PPR gamma iris and all these different pathways that it's modulating um with no clear one you know receptor that it's doing it through