Sean Goh's Reviews > Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

Berkeley shoutout!
A very important book on the centrality sleep has to our lives.
Read it, then go fix your sleep schedule/environment.

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Vehicular accidents caused by drowsy driving exceed those caused by alcohol and drugs combined.

The variance in preferred sleep schedules can possibly be explained by a tribal group collectively having less hours where everyone was asleep, reducing periods of vulnerability.

Caffeine has an average half life of 5-7 hours. That means it occupies your adenosine (sleep pressure signallers) receptors for a very long time.

Caffeine messed with spider webs more than marijuana, LSD, and even speed.

Sleep spindles (bursts of brain wave activity) occur during the deep and lighter stages of NREM sleep, and the more there are, the harder it is to awaken the sleeper.

You can never sleep back that which you have previously lost.

When in an unfamiliar the sleep environment, one side of the brain sleeps more lightly than the other.
However REM sleep always involves both halves of the brain, no matter which species.

Fasting triggers the body to sleep less, as it sees a need to forage longer for more calories.

Autistic individuals show a 30-50% deficit in REM sleep they obtain, relative to children without autism. The direction of causality, if it isn't co-occurrence, is unknown.

Deep sleep may be a driving force of brain maturation, not the other way around.

Early-evening snoozing jettisons precious sleep pressure, leading to difficulty falling asleep at night.

Muscles themselves have no memory, it's your brain remembering the routine. And sleep aids this remembering.

Sleep for memory consolidation is an all-or-nothing affair. You cannot catch up with sleep and hope to remember. Our RAM clears fast.

With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will acclimatise to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. The sub-optimal state becomes the new baseline. Sixty years of scientific research preclude the author from accepting anyone who says they can survive on 4-5 hours of sleep.

The under-slept brain is more prone to mood swings in either direction.

Both dementia and cancer are related to inadequate sleep.
Without sufficient sleep, amyloid plagues build up in the brain, attacking and degrading the deep-sleep-generating regions of the brain. The loss of deep NREM sleep lessens the ability of the brain to remove amyloid, leading to a vicious cycle.

Daylight savings time causes a plummet in heart attack rates when the clocks move back (longer sleep), and a spike when they move forward (less sleep). The same trend is seen in traffic accidents.

Sleep is an intensely metabolically active state for brain and body alike.

Emotions are a strong predictive daytime signal for dreams. A significant portion of emotional themes and concerns that participants were having while they were awake during the day powerfully and unambiguously resurfaced in the dreams they were having at night.

To resolve our emotional past, we require REM sleep with dreaming about the emotional themes and sentiments of the waking trauma. This revisiting helped patients to find emotional closure.

Lucid dreamers can control when and what they dream while they are dreaming (eye movements were used as signals to communicate while in REM sleep).

iPad use at night suppresses melatonin levels even for a few nights after, like a digital hangover effect.

Alcohol messes with REM sleep, due to its metabolic byproducts.

Those who take sleeping pills are 3-5 times more likely to die, depending on usage levels. A possible cause is higher than usual rates of infection.

REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity. REM sleep deprivation causes symptoms of clinical psychosis.

After 22 hours without sleep, human performance is impaired to the same level as being legally drunk.