What I Just Read

Read this book and you'll never complain, ever, about anything. Imagine being trapped in a vegetative body but with full cognition and awareness. You can hear, see and understand everything, but you can't move or do anything. Everyone around you--your family, your caregivers, everyone--thinks you're a literal vegetable. And some of those around you will act like it, having insulting conversations about you while you're right there. Some caregivers--not all of them, mercifully--will handle you like a slab of meat. Occasionally you'll be rolled over to a performative "activity" in which a caregiver drags your fingerpainted hand across a paper, so your care facility can show your family you aren't spending all day staring at the wall. But yet you do spend most of your time staring at the wall, or worse, watching Barney . You will come to hate Barney with all your soul. Imagine living like this. For years . Until one caregiver really looks at you, really...

Tedious, weak, and worst of all  "riddled" with errors  and oversights. Do not read. I recommend instead  Dreaming: A Very Short Introduction  by J. Allan Hobson  for information about the REM/dreaming stage of sleep, as well as  Restful Sleep  by Deepak Chopra  for readers interested in practical help for improving sleep quality. Unlike Why We Sleep , both of these books are short, direct, readable and clear. Sadly, I also have to spend a brief few sentences  on Alexey Guzey's devastating criticisms of this book . Alexey's entire post is very much worth reading, but if you want to see just one glaring example of atrocious academic ethics, you can start with a chart Matthew Walker uses in Chapter 6 to prove a linear relationship between sleep loss and sports injury-- except that he cuts off the part of the chart that disproves his argument . This is childish middle school stuff, way beneath the line of a Berkeley and Harvard professor, a...