Why We Sleep
With two appearances on CBS This Morning and Fresh Air's most popular interview of 2017, Matthew Walker has made abundantly clear that sleep is one of the most important but least understood aspects of our life. Until very recently, science had no answer to the question of why we sleep, or what good it served, or why we suffer such devastating health consequences when it is absent. Compared to the other basic drives in life—eating, drinking, and reproducing—the purpose of sleep remains more elusive. Within the brain, sleep enriches a diversity of functions, including our ability to learn, memorize, and make logical decisions. It recalibrates our emotions, restocks our immune system, fine-tunes our metabolism, and regulates our appetite. Dreaming creates a virtual reality space in which the brain melds past and present knowledge, inspiring creativity. In this “compelling and utterly convincing” (The Sunday Times) book, preeminent neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker provides a revolutionary exploration of sleep, examining how it affects every aspect of our physical and mental well-being. Charting the most cutting-edge scientific breakthroughs, and marshalling his decades of research and clinical practice, Walker explains how we can harness sleep to improve learning, mood and energy levels, regulate hormones, prevent cancer, Alzheimer’s and diabetes, slow the effects of aging, and increase longevity.
Stats for nerds
202recommend
479mentions
378people
2017–2026years
51% recommend35% neutral15% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Matthew Walker’s Why we sleep book and his podcasts changed my perspectives on the importance of sleep - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/34466963-why-we-sleep
- I haven’t read it yet, but I don’t think the value of a book is defined on weather the main claim is already known. Knowing that something is good or bad doesn’t undermine the value of a book about it. You can get value by having an additional perspective, understanding the strategy, modus operandi, or the mechanics behind it.
For example, I’m currently reading 'Why We Sleep'. Obviously we all know that sleep is good for health, but reading the book gave me better ways to understand how good it is, analyze my own sleep quality and what I can do to improve it, and very importnat: show me how I can use ti to leverage other parts of life, like learning or emotional regulation. It’s not just “sleep 8 hours a day.”
So I imagine something similar might happen with her book, even if you already know some companies use questionable tactics, it can still be useful to understand those tactics, how companies avoid getting caught, how similar patterns might appear elsewhere, etc. It can also make you reflect on which limits are acceptable or unacceptable, depending on your political views.
- I think that's also consistent with the idea behind a hot shower. The shower doesn't help by increasing your body temperature, in fact it does the opposite. The hot shower induces the body to try to cool down, so near-skin blood vessels swell, and that dumps heat into the cold air, which reduces your core temperature, and a reduced core temperature helps you fall asleep.
I think where I read about this was Why We Sleep from Matthew Walker. But he suggests just washing your face with warm water, as opposed to a shower.
- It's clear to me that perhaps it was also that the experts understanding of the science that was wrong as well. Therefore perhaps these "scams" weren't scams but a product developed based on science that was promoted and later corrected.
In the linkedin post where the team unveiled their documentary they quote the involvement of the author of Why We Sleep (great book) and the decades of sleep research, who in their famous book actually did say that blue light impacts melatonin and is crucial for sleep, he even promoted blue light blocking filters. He later retracted that statement and changed his stance.
So were bluelight blocking glasses a scam, or perhaps a product that was informed by a misunderstanding of science. If I read a book based on a renowned sleep scientist who promoted blue light filters and I made glasses to help block blue light, if that understanding of science changed, am I a scammer?
If this is in fact true then this goes against any product or feature that markets reducing blue light such as not to impact sleep. Extending to include Apples marketing of Night Shift.
- I have just read this book and found it very interesting and helpful:
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Why-We-Sleep/Matthew-...
- Certainly pop-sci but great on this topic:
https://www.waterstones.com/book/why-we-sleep/matthew-walker...
I'm not as optimistic as you that sleep will be a cure, but I'd be very surprised indeed if sleep quality weren't preventive. (Proving this might be more difficult, though - correlation/causation).
It's almost an argument by process of elimination - why else would literally every living thing with a brain need to spend so much of its time asleep? How is it that we still don't fully know what sleep (as distinct from either rest or unconsciousness) is actually for?
Multiple studies show that night shift work is bad for the brain - and for those with a habit of working nights (probably quite a few of us on HN, from time to time), if a recreational drug made your brain feel as bad as an all-nighter can, that would surely be one you'd put in the "treat with great caution" category, no?
No doubt the glymphatic system (a central part of higher animal physiology which was only discovered in the last 25 years) has a role to play. It may be that, as with cancer, once the degenerative process gets beyond a certain point, it's hard to stop - but I'm hopeful that science will unlock a good deal of understanding around prevention over the next decade or so - even if that's not much more than an approach to sleep hygiene analogous to "eat your 5 fruit and veg a day, don't have too much alcohol or HFCS, and make sure to do a couple of sessions of cardio and a few weights every week".
