August Kekulé

...

he wrote this beautiful essay called The Kekulé Problem.

Yes.

Right, the discovery of the structure of the benzene ring, and that was kind of a dreamt solution.

Mm

... eats its own tail.

And so Kekulé wakes up and he says, "Wait a minute.

What's going on? What are you trying to tell me? Why can't you just tell me?" And the unconscious says, "I don't do language, you moron." Right.

The painter Salvador Dali did the exact same thing, to harvest surreal imagery for his art, but he used a heavy metal key over a plate.

Even in modern science, the chemist August Kekulé famously claimed he discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule, a massive breakthrough in organic chemistry, because he was dozing off by a fire and had a hypnagogic vision of a snake eating its own tail.

So it's a space of incredible creative potential.

But this liminal space isn't just for geniuses trying to invent things.

The fact that sleepiness exists in creatures as simple as fruit flies suggests that the biological mechanisms behind drowsiness are extremely ancient, possibly hundreds of millions of years old.

Some scientists believe the basic chemistry of sleepiness may have evolved before the brain itself in single-celled organisms that needed to alternate between active and resting states.

In humans, the timing and intensity of sleepiness is controlled by two separate systems working together, which scientists call the two-process model of regulation.

This model was proposed in nineteen eighty-two by a Swiss researcher named Alexander Borbely, and it remains the most widely accepted framework for understanding drowsiness.

The body's peak nighttime level is typically equivalent to about zero point one to zero point three milligrams in the bloodstream, making even a one milligram supplement a supraphysiological dose.

Unlike prescription medications, melatonin does not appear to be habit-forming, and stopping supplementation does not cause withdrawal symptoms or rebound.

The history of prescription medications for this purpose is a story of progressive refinement from dangerous, blunt sedatives to increasingly targeted compounds that work with the brain's own chemistry rather than against it.

In the nineteenth century, substances like chloral hydrate, potassium bromide, and even chloroform were used to induce rest in patients who could not achieve it on their own, and all of these carried significant risks of overdose, organ damage, and side effects that were sometimes worse than the insomnia they were intended to treat.

Hi, I'm Deboki Chakravarti, and welcome to Crash Course Organic Chemistry.

The German chemist, August Kekulé, is one of those people who's often considered a founder of modern organic chemistry.

In a speech at a symposium in 1890, he told the audience that 30 years earlier, he was dozing near a fire in Ghent, Belgium, when the image of a snake devouring its own tail came to him.

This dream, he said, was what led him to the chemical structure of benzene, a flat ring of six carbon atoms with the formula C6H6.

The author was Auguste Laurent, but the work was actually published after his death by some of his colleagues.

Laurent is probably most famous for his work developing the functional group nomenclature that we still use today, that whole business of alkanes ending in ane, alkenes in ene, and so on.

Other scientists have speculated that Kekulé chose to describe his revelation as a dream to avoid sharing credit with his colleagues.

Perhaps that's true, but for now, it's his name that we find in textbooks.

We experience stories.

And in fact, there are various stories of someone discovering something in dreams, like Kekulé thinking of the structure of the benzene ring based on a dream he had of two snakes biting each other's tails, or Paul McCartney dreaming the melody for the song Yesterday.

So what's up with dream content? The key is that the brain is a storytelling machine.

Your brain is deeply carved with roadways that represent your experience in the world, and these are stored in what are called associative neural networks, which means that everything connects to other things based on how they relate.

...

he wrote this beautiful essay called The Kekulé Problem.

Yes.

Right? The discovery of the structure of the benzene ring, and that was kind of a dreamt solution.

Giving us words like sulfuric acid, which came straight from French sulfurique acide and carried over into English with a slight twist.

Similarly, benzene was coined by the German chemist Friedrich August Kekulé in eighteen sixty-five, but its name made its way into English almost immediately because of the booming industrial use of aromatic compounds.

These terms illustrate how scientific communities were not just inventing new substances, they were also seeding the language with precise labels that would become standard.

Transportation was a whole other linguistic frontier.

The fact that sleepiness exists in creatures as simple as fruit flies suggests that the biological mechanisms behind drowsiness are extremely ancient, possibly hundreds of millions of years old.

Some scientists believe the basic chemistry of sleepiness may have evolved before the brain itself, in single-celled organisms that needed to alternate between active and resting states.

In humans, the timing and intensity of sleepiness is controlled by two separate systems working together, which scientists call the two-process model of regulation.

This model was proposed in nineteen eighty-two by a Swiss researcher named Alexander Borbély, and it remains the most widely accepted framework for understanding drowsiness.

The body's peak nighttime level is typically equivalent to about 0.1 to 0.3 milligrams in the bloodstream, making even a 1 milligram supplement a supraphysiological dose.

Unlike prescription medications, melatonin does not appear to be habit-forming, and stopping supplementation does not cause withdrawal symptoms or rebound.

The history of prescription medications for this purpose is a story of progressive refinement from dangerous, blunt sedatives to increasingly targeted compounds that work with the brain's own chemistry rather than against it.

In the 19th century, substances like chloral hydrate, potassium bromide, and even chloroform were used to induce rest in patients who could not achieve it on their own, and all of these carried significant risks of overdose, organ damage, and side effects that were sometimes worse than the insomnia they were intended to treat.