If Amanda Fucking Palmer has been “having a passionate affair” with a book—if “the information [in that book] is literally, physically, technically changing [her] life on a day-to-day basis”—well, I figured it might be worth a read.
And so far, it has been.
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You can get a pretty good idea of the thrust of Matt Walker’s book, Why We Sleep, from his TED talk (embedded above), which was just released. Like the book, his talk is clear, engaging, worrying, and hopeful.
Sound-byte version: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” is an unfortunate idea; “Adopt this mindset,” Walker writes, “and you will be dead sooner and the quality of that (shorter) life will be worse.”
I’m about a third of the way through the book, and so far I’ve been enjoying the ride. I’ve already had a number of assumptions challenged, which is always nice. I’ve learned that all organisms experience sleep, though the ways they experience sleep vary widely. Some animals, for example—dolphins and sharks and some birds—are “unihemispheric”—that is, they can sleep with one half of their brain at a time.
I’ve even come to understand that at least some of my teenage son’s crazy-ass sleep schedule—most of it, in fact—is pretty much natural to his age. It’s made me reassess whether all that bad sleep hygiene is symptom or cause.
I’ve read a number of PhD-types who have important insights, which they expand into relatively lame books. Deep concepts aren’t necessarily complex; sometimes an article or blog post is all that’s really needed. I guess books garner more attention, which is good (though the cynic in me knows that it also needs to be a book to sell…)
For example, Piers Steel’s Procrastination Equation offers the most fruitful way, at least that I have found, to think about procrastination and motivation. But his concepts could have easily (and more effectively) been presented in an article with a well-designed, illustrative graphic. (Indeed, there’s a “self-improvement” blogger who produced exactly this: a summary article and a fairly detailed flow chart.)
Similarly, Carol Dweck’s Mindset presents crucial insights about students and learning—important, ground-breaking stuff. These insights helped me better understand myself and the source of my own fears, which I had always found mystifying. Yet aside from the first two or three chapters, in which she focuses most closely on her actual research, I found the book tedious at best. It makes it hard to recommend the book, even though I find the work so valuable.
But this is not the case with Walker’s book. As I said, I’m only a third of the way through; I guess it’s possible that my opinion will change. I doubt it, though. He’s a great writer, grounding his work in research that is both fascinating and suggestive. And even though there is quite a bit that isn’t directly related to human sleep, as well as things that I can’t put into practice (e.g., we humans aren’t unihemispheric, so sleep takes over the whole brain, or none of it), it all fits together into a single, elegant argument.
I’m looking forward to the next two-thirds of the book—and to the literal, physical, technical changes it will suggest for my day-to-day life.
P.S. Amanda Palmer talks about Walker’s Why We Sleep during her interview on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. You’ll find it at around 8:20—though the whole thing is worth a listen (or watch–it exists in both audio and video formats).