Me too. I saw the book recommended in a comment on HN about a month or so ago, got a copy, and I am now trying to get more sleep inspired by it. Just yesterday I told the main EH&S officer at the company I work for about it -- given the book shows how sleep impacts health and safety. I feel like it is one of the single most important books I've read in the past decade.
* Sleep is when we move memories from shorter-term storage in the hippocampus to longer-term storage in the frontal cortex. If you don't sleep well at night, you lose many memories of the day.
* Without adequate sleep (about 8 hour a night) your cognitive performance during the day nosedives into the ground -- and the cumulative effects get worse over time. At the same time, you may be less able to recognize this effect.
* After 20 hours of being awake you are as cognitively impaired as if you were legally drunk.
* More and worse car accidents happen from drowsy driving then drunk driving. While drunk driving may slow reaction times, drowsy drivers have "microsleeps" where for seconds at a time they stop responding to external stimuli and can unknowingly drift over into oncoming traffic or not stop for a red light or a pedestrian.
* Sleep is needed to make new immune cells like for preventing cancer.
* Sleep is needed to process emotional events from the day so we can reflect on what happened without becoming too anxious about it. He gives an example for treating PTSD of veterans via better sleep and a medication that affects dreaming.
* Sleep-deprived people are more likely to slack off and even make unethical choices. Underslept people also are less charismatic leaders. So less sleep does not equate to more productivity.
* Sleep (and dreams) are a time when the brain connects random ideas that may lead to useful ideas when awake the next day.
* Good sleep is absolutely essential to the developing brain in children even from before birth.
* While ADHD may be a real health condition, many symptoms of sleep deprivation overlap with those of ADHD and so there may be some misdiagnosis going on from that.
* Some people are naturally early-riser larks and others are naturally late-rising night owls (and many are in the middle). Forcing one to keep the schedule of the other leads to worse performance and more accidents and so on.
* Teenagers naturally go to sleep later and wake up later than younger children or adults (possibly to give them experience acting independently of their elders in a tribal setting). Delaying the start time for high school students by about an hour in one case lead to a 200+ point increase in SAT scores of top performers -- and in another case to a 60% decrease in car accidents among the teenagers who drove.
All this is backed by references to recent scientific studies.
Essentially, as my own analogy, our brains are overclocked during the day and need eight hours of good sleep to fix up all the deferred maintenance.
He includes advice on getting more and better sleep. One surprising recommendation from the book -- set an alarm to remind you when to go to sleep!
I also submitted the book to HN as a story a week ago: "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams" by Matthew Walker https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17528154
Some example ideas from the book:
* Sleep is when we move memories from shorter-term storage in the hippocampus to longer-term storage in the frontal cortex. If you don't sleep well at night, you lose many memories of the day.
* Without adequate sleep (about 8 hour a night) your cognitive performance during the day nosedives into the ground -- and the cumulative effects get worse over time. At the same time, you may be less able to recognize this effect.
* After 20 hours of being awake you are as cognitively impaired as if you were legally drunk.
* More and worse car accidents happen from drowsy driving then drunk driving. While drunk driving may slow reaction times, drowsy drivers have "microsleeps" where for seconds at a time they stop responding to external stimuli and can unknowingly drift over into oncoming traffic or not stop for a red light or a pedestrian.
* Sleep is needed to make new immune cells like for preventing cancer.
* Sleep is needed to process emotional events from the day so we can reflect on what happened without becoming too anxious about it. He gives an example for treating PTSD of veterans via better sleep and a medication that affects dreaming.
* Sleep-deprived people are more likely to slack off and even make unethical choices. Underslept people also are less charismatic leaders. So less sleep does not equate to more productivity.
* Sleep (and dreams) are a time when the brain connects random ideas that may lead to useful ideas when awake the next day.
* Good sleep is absolutely essential to the developing brain in children even from before birth.
* While ADHD may be a real health condition, many symptoms of sleep deprivation overlap with those of ADHD and so there may be some misdiagnosis going on from that.
* Some people are naturally early-riser larks and others are naturally late-rising night owls (and many are in the middle). Forcing one to keep the schedule of the other leads to worse performance and more accidents and so on.
* Teenagers naturally go to sleep later and wake up later than younger children or adults (possibly to give them experience acting independently of their elders in a tribal setting). Delaying the start time for high school students by about an hour in one case lead to a 200+ point increase in SAT scores of top performers -- and in another case to a 60% decrease in car accidents among the teenagers who drove.
All this is backed by references to recent scientific studies.
Essentially, as my own analogy, our brains are overclocked during the day and need eight hours of good sleep to fix up all the deferred maintenance.
He includes advice on getting more and better sleep. One surprising recommendation from the book -- set an alarm to remind you when to go to sleep!