Skip to main content

Sleepfaring – Jim Horne ****

Sleep is something we’re all familiar with (even if we don’t get as much as we should), but few of us really understand it. Sleeping can seem a waste of time, or a dangerous risk while driving a car, but Jim Horne’s Sleepfaring takes the reader on a journey through the science of sleep that will explain many of sleep’s mysteries and give a better understanding of why it’s so important.
Horne begins with the magnificently titled first chapter “petunias, one-eyed ducks and roly poly mice”, and goes on to explore the nature of sleep and how stimulants effect our sleeping, sleep’s effect on the body, the dangers of sleep deprivation, the different phases of sleep and how the brain operates during them, and the whole range of sleep peculiarities from long and short sleepers to sleepwalkers, insomnia and snoring. There’s a special chapter on children’s sleep for worried parents, and even a little “lark or owl” test to see when your best functional times are.
Horne doesn’t spend too much time on dreams, which is a good thing in the context of the book – it also makes it an ideal companion to J. Allan Hobson’s Dreaming, which though also sporting a “science of sleep” subtitle, turns the emphasis round the other way and concentrates on dreaming, without giving us too much of the detail on sleep itself.
For the first few chapters I was convinced that Sleepfaring was a five star book – it read like a dream (ha), and has an excellent balance of lively, chatty presentation (there’s a real feeling that Horne is talking to you) and remarkable facts. It’s quite a surprise, for instance, to discover that dolphins sleep one side of the brain at a time, while the other side (and its opposing eye) is still active to keep the animal alive. This is wonderful. Unfortunately the book lost that final star by getting a little mired in the middle, particularly when Horne is discussing drivers falling asleep, a chapter that seems to say the same thing over and over again (perhaps because there really isn’t enough to say to make it a chapter, but this is Horne’s speciality). Horne also wildly overuses references to other chapters – “which we’ll find out more about in chapter 18″ and many, many variants of this, becomes a little irritating after a while.
Bear in mind, though, that this still leaves Sleepfaring as a “near best” four star read. It is largely very readable and excellently informative – it’s just a pity when much of it shows signs of being one of the best popular science books of the year that it has moments of inconsistency in interest level. However, if you want to get a better understanding of sleep, and to have an enjoyable read along the way, this is far and away the best book around.

Hardback:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Jo Reed
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

In Seach of Sea Dragons - Matthew Myerscough ****

It's common advice to would-be authors of narrative non-fiction to open with something dramatic - Matthew Myerscough certainly does this with the story of his being trapped under an avalanche on Snowdon (while his girlfriend, also carried away remains on top of the snow unhurt). It certainly is dramatic, but seemed entirely disconnected from the reason I got the book, which was to read about fossil collecting.  Luckily, though, in the second chapter we get into a more conventional 'how I got interested in fossils as a boy'. Having recently reviewed Patrick Moore's autobiography and noting that astronomy was one of the few sciences where amateurs can still make a contribution, it came to mind that palaeontology is another - Myerscough is a civil engineer by trade, but just as amateur astronomers can find new details in the skies, so amateur fossil hunters have been searching for these relics for centuries. When I give talks in junior schools, the two topics that guarant...
Post a Comment
Read more

Robot-Proof - Vivienne Ming ****

As Vivienne Ming makes apparent, there seem largely to be two views of AI's pros and cons, both of which are almost certainly wrong. It's either doom-saying 'It'll destroy life as we know it' or Pollyanna-ish 'It'll do all the boring work and we can all be wonderfully creative and live lives of leisure.' Instead, Ming gives us a clear analysis of the likely trajectory for the workplace, particularly for the IT industry. She describes three 'equally flawed, intellectually lazy strategies' to deal with the impact of AI. The first is substitution and deprofessionalisation, using AI to allow cheaper 'AI-augmented technicians' to replace more expensive professionals, producing more low wage jobs and fewer mid-range. This does save money but leaves a company at risk of being easily outcompeted. The second is what Ming describes as the '"A-Player" Hunger Games', the approach favoured by Silicon Valley. This sees the growing rif...
Post a Comment
Read more