| Why would I write a book on sleep? After all, everyone sleeps, it looks easy, and nothing much seems to happen while you’re doing it. That’s what I used to think before I started studying sleep. I first came across the intricacies and mysteries of sleep as an undergraduate studying psychobiology at UCLA in the 1970s. I was amazed at how much was actually happening during what most people think of as downtime or wasted hours. Still more fascinating was the emerging idea that time spent asleep was essential to proper functioning. As we gained more knowledge, it became clearer that proper sleep plays a large role in maintaining health, promoting learning, performing at top proficiency, and sustaining emotional well-being.
In some ways, this shouldn’t be a mystery. Anything we devote a third of our lives to must be important. Just about every animal we have looked at shows periods of sleep. The sleep of all mammals is very similar to our own, differing only in the amount of time spent asleep. Even birds show a rapid eye movement (REM)/non-REM cycle similar to ours.
Sleep is a complex undertaking, requiring numerous pathways through multiple parts of the brain. Several of these areas seem to function just to direct other regions. Every multistep process in the body is vulnerable to potential problems at any point in that process. It is these problems that cause disease, and the same is true with sleep. Given its complexity, the true mystery is that most of the time everything works correctly. |
