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Penguin Books UK

Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

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Arrives May 27 – May 29
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Format: Paperback


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BRAND NEW, Exactly same ISBN as listed, Please double check ISBN carefully before ordering. Read more


Language ‏ : ‎ English


ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9


ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 69


Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 9.5 ounces


Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.08 x 0.83 x 7.8 inches


Best Sellers Rank: #19,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #3 in Medical Psychology Reference #21 in Medical Neuropsychology #45 in Popular Neuropsychology


#3 in Medical Psychology Reference:


#21 in Medical Neuropsychology:


#45 in Popular Neuropsychology:


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Top Amazon Reviews

    • Two-thirds of adults do not have the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep
I bought this book out of general interest. It is an international bestseller by a former professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, and is currently a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. Here is why I am reviewing this book in a business newspaper. I believed, as you may, that “pulling an all-nighter” was a badge of honour, a clear sign of commitment and fortitude. President Trump brags of sleeping only 4 hours a night. Just last week a client told me with an element of pride, that he sleeps less than five hours a night. And he wasn’t the first. With what we know now, this is about as absurd as bragging that you are a wife-beater, and that you drive drunk! Consider the facts. Driving without having had sufficient sleep is the cause of hundreds of thousands of traffic accidents and fatalities each year. In the US, one person dies in a traffic accident every hour due to a fatigue-related error, exceeding road deaths caused by alcohol and drugs - combined. “Every component of wellness, and countless seams of societal fabric, are being eroded by our costly state of sleep neglect: human and financial alike,” author Matthew Walker explains. Just to get your attention, consider that reams of reliable research indicate that routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, and more than doubles your risk of cancer. It is a key lifestyle factor determining whether or not you will develop Alzheimer’s disease. Sleep deprivation increases the likelihood of your coronary arteries becoming blocked and brittle, which boosts cardiovascular disease, stroke, and congestive heart failure. Less dramatically, you have probably noticed a desire to eat more when you’re tired. This is because too little sleep increases a hormone that makes you feel hungry and suppresses a hormone that signals food satisfaction. The need to sleep is a foolish biological phenomenon that evolution should have cleaned out of the system. When you sleep you cannot fulfil the basic drives of life: to eat and drink, reproduce and protect yourself. And yet, across the animal kingdom sleeping is a common factor. The World Health Organization has declared sleep loss an epidemic throughout industrialized nations. Two-thirds of adults do not have the recommended eight hours of nightly sleep. “Society’s apathy toward sleep has, in part, been caused by the historic failure of science to explain why we need it,” Walker explains. The fact that sleeping persists throughout evolution means there must be tremendous benefits that far outweigh all the obvious hazards and detriments. In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists used recordings from electrodes placed on the scalp to provide a general sense of the type of brainwave activity underpinning ‘REM’ (rapid eye movement) sleep. ‘Deep sleep’ describes the bodily state of inactivity, while ‘REM sleep’ describes high levels of brain activity with the eyes moving rapidly in different directions. The older technology limited our ability to understand what was happening during REM sleep that makes it so important. In the early 2000s, with the advent of brain-imaging machines, we could reconstruct three-dimensional visualizations of brain activity during REM sleep. This has enriched science’s understanding. Sleeping aids the body by restoring our immune system to fight malignancy, prevent infection, and ward off all manner of sickness. Adequate sleep maintains a flourishing microbiome in your gut which ensures nutritional health. The physical and mental impairments caused by one night of bad sleep dwarfs those caused by an equivalent absence of food or exercise. Dreaming provides humans with many gifts, among these are nightly neurochemical baths that mollify painful memories, and allow the brain to combine past and present knowledge, and inspire creativity. It is believed that “time heals all wounds.” However, Walker suggests that it might be that time spent in dream sleep offers a form of overnight therapy. REM sleep dreaming takes the painful sting out of difficult, even traumatic, emotional episodes you may have experienced during the day, offering emotional resolution when you awake the next morning. This happens because REM sleep is the only time during the twenty-four-hour period when your brain is completely devoid of the anxiety-triggering molecule. Sleep is clearly needed for us to heal emotional wounds. Sleep is also a creative incubator. In the dreaming sleep state, your brain will cogitate on vast amounts of knowledge you have acquired, and then extract overarching rules and commonalities. When we wake we are often able to find solutions to previously impenetrable problems. This is the difference between knowledge (retention of individual facts), and wisdom (knowing what they all mean when you fit them together). Mendeleev formulated the periodic table in a dream, something his waking brain was incapable of. When he awoke he wrote it down, and in only one place was a correction necessary. The neuroscientist, Otto Loewi, formulated how nerve cells communicate with each other in a dream. For this he received a Nobel Prize. Paul McCartney’s origination of the songs “Yesterday” and “Let It Be” were derived from dreams and then written down. “I couldn’t believe I’d written it. I thought, no, I’ve never written anything like this before. But I had, which was the most magic thing!” Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones had a similar experience with his music. Mary Shelley’s dreams provided the vision and narrative for the spectacular gothic novel, Frankenstein. Laboratory tests have shown how problem-solving abilities increase by 15 to 35 % when participants are emerging from REM sleep compared with daytime performance! The REM-sleep dreaming brain was utterly uninterested in bland, common sense, linear type links. In REM-sleep the brain drops the logic guard and ignores the obvious in` favour of very distantly related concepts. So, how do you know whether you’re routinely getting enough sleep? The rule of thumb is whether you could go back to sleep at ten or eleven that morning, or whether can you function optimally without caffeine before noon. And of course, whether you would sleep past your waking time if you didn’t set an alarm clock. Like a loan in arrears, your sleep debt will continue to accumulate. It will roll over into the next payment cycle, and the next, and the next, producing a condition of prolonged, chronic sleep deprivation from one day to another. The implications for your professional performance or management style should be clear. Coming to work sleep-deprived is no better than coming in hungover. And when next you hear someone brag about how little sleep they get, give them Walker’s book to read, or even just this column. We need to revise our cultural appreciation of sleep and reverse our neglect of it. Readability Light --+-- Serious Insights High +---- Low Practical High -+--- Low *Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of the recently released ‘Executive Update. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 27, 2018 by Ian Mann
    • Informative overview of the necessity of sleep
Why We Sleep is an overview of the author's research into the purpose of sleep as well as the consequences of a lack of it. It discusses a lot of issues and the author gives his views on the evolutionary benefits and distinctiveness of humans, so it really is quite comprehensive. Most people today, myself included, just are somehow unable to get a healthy amount of uninterrupted sleep and the author does a good job of explaining the consequences of that to the individual through multiple cognitive lenses. He also considers the consequence to the country as a whole through its loss of productive capacity due to overworking. The book is split into four, largely independent sections. The author begins by discussing how sleep occurs, including some of the neuroscience and the chemical cycles associated with our sleep schedule. The reader learns about the marginal differences between certain physiological cycles and the 24 hour day. In addition the causes of jetlag are explored as well as the required adjustment for changing time zones. The author discusses a bunch of experiments done where we were able to learn about our cicadian cycles and some of the differences in sleep requirements any cycle times by age. The author also highlights his novel view on how REM sleep was associated with human ability to light a fire which allowed them to sleep on the ground rather than be in an unstable position in a tree and this evolutionary advancement was essential for modern development. Perhaps, probably not, but the author truly is impassioned about the subject with strong views. The author then gets into why we need sleep and discusses with abundant experimental evidence, the benefits of sleep to cognitive abilities and the necessity of it for healthy living. Some remarkable pathologies are discussed, for example there was an individual who lost the ability to go to sleep and their body slowly lost its ability to function and the disease proved quickly fatal. The author highlights that the Guinness Book of World Records struck the longest period without sleep as a category due to its terrible health consequences and the author spends time on the consequences of lack of sleep to driving abilities highlighting the large number of fatalities that follow. The author also discusses the benefits of sleep to overall body health and gives substantial experimental evidence to the regenerative benefits of sleep to natural ailments. The author does highlight that sleep will not just cure cancer but simultaneously implicitly argues that it might. So the author, with evidence, strongly argues that sleep has the ability to help one regenerate far more than the general scientific community currently advocates. The author gets into dreaming and how sleep breaks up. He discusses how each form of sleep is required and they have different functional benefits. Furthermore the body needs for NREM and REM sleep differ in immediate priority but not in absolute priority and these results are discussed with experimental evidence for how the body catches up on sleep after being deprived. The author discusses multiple memory experiments that depend on prior sleep conditions and highlights the substantially better performance statistics of students who have had enough sleep prior to trying to learn facts. The author then discusses the consequences of sleeping pills, which are considered significant and detrimental. The author also clarifies the difference between sedation and sleep and makes it very clear that sedation is not sleep and does not serve as a remedy and can be counterproductive. Alcohol's detrimental effects are considered by their impact on sleep for example. The author goes through several common sleeping tablets and makes it clear he does not believe any are substitutes and argues they can become dependencies that create major long term problems. The author then discusses how much better the world could be if we all paid more attention to sleep and how overall productivity of the society could be enhanced. This sort of analysis is interesting but also in need of being the most skeptical of in terms of being a realistic analysis. Why We Sleep is informative and entertaining. It is exaggerated at times and so aspects of the credibility of the book can be highlighted. The author argues multiple times how even one night of sub optimal sleep has distinct impacts on ability and how an all nighter can be catastrophic, only to bring up an example in which an individual goes without sleep for multiple days to then sleep and make a major scientific discovery. The point of the example was to display the benefits of sleep but it erodes the earlier argument that any lack of sleep puts the individual at a massive handicap. Thus the author argues too forcefully for the unrealistic, that we need 8 hours a day without exception, while highlighting that he himself often cant sleep properly once a week. Despite the at times marginally inconsistent tone, the book is a good reminder of the importance of sleep, a good reference for the scientific benefits of sleep and important tutorial on the health requirements for sleep. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 19, 2019 by A. Menon
    • Gem of a book !
A rare book which should have been written long long ago ! This research based book provides proof that we humans have lost touch with our evolutionary past and now are eminently facing a “Sleep Epidemic” ! A practical orientation with suggestions are very useful to the public at large. Opened my eyes to some devastating truths like the strong links between lack of sleep and mortality, life ending diseases, weakening of the all-important immune system…. etc. A must read for all indeed !! ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 27, 2022 by Rajiv
    • Outstanding book. Best book on sleep
Outstanding book. Everyone must read this book. I bought many copies to give as gifts to my colleagues. Very educational. Majid Mani MD, FACS, FAAO.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 14, 2022 by Majid Mani
    • highly recommended for everyone
A reading that will help you change the way you sleep for life. Totally worth it. I highly recommend it to everyone, especially parents.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 8, 2022 by Ethel
    • Interesting
It is an interesting book to read. For people who suffer from insomnia, it may cause anxiety as the author talks about the terrible effects of sleep deprivation. I have been struggling with insomnia for years so I was hesitant about reading those parts but eventually I told myself that none of these things are new, I already knew how bad it is to not sleep prior to reading this book, so what is there to worry about? On the contrary, learning about sleep from a scientific point of view actually helped me feel less anxious by reminding me that it is just a simple natural process - sleep when the sleep hormones kick in and just don’t if you are not tired enough, if that makes sense. ... show more
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 23, 2022 by Olivia Song
    • Excellent read.
If you want to get a good nights sleep, keep reading this book. Well written, informative, and well researched.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 9, 2022 by Bobbie
    • Easy read. but informing
Comples but unpretentious dialogue about sleep-- why when where who how. very interesting with lots of research support. kind of a "reference manual"
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 23, 2022 by tvoyager

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