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

I had really high expectations on this book and it pretty much did not stand up to its hype.

I will split the book into 3 main parts and how i perceived them based on their span in %

1. 0-30% This is the most interesting part since the author sheds light onto the mechanisms of sleep , the brain parts that facilitate it , how it evolved (monophasic/biphasic) , and how it manifests within nature. It includes interesting info for example how birds manage to sleep when in transit , whales etc.
This part also decomposes sleep by its type : REM Sleep and Non REM Deep Sleep and explains why we need both , which is used and how , how are each of these wavelengths looks like on an oscilloscope etc. Really really fun and cool stuff !

2. 30-75% The hardest part to read.This huge chunk is basically an entire manifesto on the proven (and mostly unproven) dangers of not sleeping enough.
While i unnderstand the author tries to prove a point , he starts to just throw around hypotheses and as he himself admits unproven experiments , that sleep is the main culprit and heavily influences a whole range of diseases starting from cardiovadcular , cancers , digestive , brain etc.
It starts to look like every human problem is a nail and sleep is THE hammer !

3. 75-100% This is somewhat an average part focusing on how humans could change their habits regarding sleep , how employers could improve their companies by letting workers get their sleep , how entire inndustries andd technology could be devised as to work for our health promoting sleep and not against us like it is now.

All in all i can say the first part was really good , the second part after some point starts to become boring and really painful to read , ending with a mediocre one where you can find a couple of good tips regarding your sleep.

All in all a letdown mostly due to the second part and all the hype around it.