What I Just Read

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...

Extraordinarily useful on several levels. Highly, highly recommended for anyone curious about their own psychology, curious about psychotherapy, and curious about how to interact with people more effectively. And there's much more. Over the course of various case histories and therapeutic anecdotes (some surprisingly gripping) the reader learns the elements of persuasion, influence and suggestion, even techniques that, today, we would call NLP.  Uncommon Therapy pays an attentive reader a wide range of dividends. At the same time, there are also certain difficult truths in this book--be ready for them.  For example if someone asks you for help, you'd think you could just say, "here, do this [good thing]. It will really help you." Nope. We give reactance and pushback, we have "not invented here" [1] , we view new thoughts or ideas from others to be an egoic threat, etc. We humans have all kinds of difficulties accepting "help," even when we direct...