Weekly Book Club 018 (Exclusive) - Why We Sleep

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(The English version follows)

本周的 Weekly Book Club 推荐的是 Why We Sleep，这本书曾经被 Bill Gates 放入 2019年的推荐书单中。

这本书介绍了睡眠的方方面面，比如什么是 REM （快速动眼睡眠） 和 NREM （非快速动眼睡眠），以及两者在记忆形成方面的功效，比如咖啡因/酒精对于睡眠的危害，比如缺少睡眠带来的问题等等。同时，针对每一个情况，这本书都给出了相应的睡眠改进方式。






Why We Sleep




This week's Weekly Book Club features Why We Sleep, a book that was selected in Bill Gates' list of recommended books for 2019.

The book covers all aspects of sleep, such as what REM (rapid eye movement sleep) and NREM (non-rapid eye movement sleep) are, and the effects of both on memory formation, the harmful effects of caffeine/alcohol on sleep, the problems associated with lack of sleep, and more. For each of these conditions, the book also offers ways to improve sleep.

If you want to understand sleep better and if you are also suffering from insomnia, this book can be of great help.

If you were to pick just one piece of advice from this book, it would be to go to bed and get up on time every day.

Please share this with your friends if you find it helpful:)



Why We Sleep

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Top Quotes

The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life span.


As we’ll discover later in this book, humans likely evolved to co-sleep as families or even whole tribes, not alone or as couples.





Most important in this regard: do not seek sleeping pills as your first option.

While it is true that we flip-flop back and forth between NREM and REM sleep throughout the night every ninety minutes, the ratio of NREM sleep to REM sleep within each ninety-minute cycle changes dramatically across the night.

Since your brain desires most of its REM sleep in the last part of the night, which is to say the late-morning hours, you will lose 60 to 90 percent of all your REM sleep, even though you are losing 25 percent of your total sleep time.

After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Second, NREM sleep rebounds harder. The brain will consume a far larger portion of deep NREM sleep than of REM sleep on the first night after total sleep deprivation, expressing a lopsided hunger.

Throughout developed nations, most adults currently sleep in a monophasic pattern—that is, we try to take a long, single bout of slumber at night, the average duration of which is now less than seven hours.

However, those that abandoned regular siestas went on to suffer a 37 percent increased risk of death from heart disease across the six-year period, relative to those who maintained regular daytime naps.

From these clues, I offer a theorem: the tree-to-ground reengineering of sleep was a key trigger that rocketed Homo sapiens to the top of evolution’s lofty pyramid.

NREM sleep helps transfer and make safe newly learned information into long-term storage sites of the brain.

Sleep, especially REM sleep and the act of dreaming, is a tenable, yet underappreciated, factor underlying many elements that form our unique human ingenuity and accomplishments, just as much as language or tool use (indeed, there is even evidence that sleep causally shapes both these latter traits as well).

In the last two weeks of pregnancy, the fetus will ramp up its consumption of REM sleep to almost nine hours a day.

But we do know that REM sleep is vital for promoting brain maturation.


In other words, the proportion of REM sleep decreases in early childhood while the proportion of NREM sleep actually increases, even though total sleep time decreases.

That balance will finally stabilize to an 80/20 NREM/REM sleep split by the late teen years, and remain so throughout early and midadulthood.

Adolescents face two other harmful challenges in their struggle to obtain sufficient sleep as their brains continue to develop. The first is a change in their circadian rhythm. The second is early school start times.

Instead, I recommend you first explore the effective and scientifically proven non-pharmacological interventions that a doctor who is board certified in sleep medicine can provide.

Poor memory and poor sleep in old age are therefore not coincidental, but rather significantly interrelated.

Each stage of sleep—light NREM sleep, deep NREM sleep, and REM sleep—offer different brain benefits at different times of night. Thus, no one type of sleep is more essential than another.

Sleep protects newly acquired information, affording immunity against forgetting: an operation called consolidation.

It was early-night sleep, rich in deep NREM, that won out in terms of providing superior memory retention savings relative to late-night, REM-rich sleep.

By transferring memories of yesterday from the short-term repository of the hippocampus to the long-term home within the cortex, you awake with both yesterday’s experiences safely filed away and having regained your short-term storage capacity for new learning throughout that following day.

However, the capacity to forget can, in certain contexts, be as important as the need for remembering.

Daytime naps that contain sufficient numbers of sleep spindles also offer significant motor skill memory improvement, together with a restoring benefit on perceived energy and reduced muscle fatigue.

After being awake for nineteen hours, people who were sleep-deprived were as cognitively impaired as those who were legally drunk.

Memories formed without sleep are weaker memories, evaporating rapidly.

The two most feared diseases throughout developed nations are dementia and cancer. Both are related to inadequate sleep.

When short sleeping, the very same individuals ate 300 calories more each day—or well over 1,000 calories before the end of the experiment—compared to when they were routinely getting a full night of sleep.

More importantly, the extra calories that you eat when sleep-deprived far outweigh any nominal extra energy you burn while remaining awake.

Chronic sleep loss will erode the very essence of biological life itself: your genetic code and the structures that encapsulate it.

During the dreaming sleep state, your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge,I and then extract overarching rules and commonalities—“the gist.”

Our human memories are, on the other hand, richly interconnected in webs of associations that lead to flexible, predictive powers.

While the reasons remain unclear, insomnia is almost twice as common in women than in men, and it is unlikely that a simple unwillingness of men to admit sleep problems explains this very sizable difference between the two sexes.

  • This frontal lobe region of the human brain helps control our impulses and restrains our behavior. Alcohol immobilizes that part of our brain first.

To successfully initiate sleep, as described in chapter 2, your core temperature needs to decrease by 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit, or about 1 degree Celsius.

If alarming your heart, quite literally, were not bad enough, using the snooze feature means that you will repeatedly inflict that cardiovascular assault again and again within a short span of time.

Sleeping pills, old and new, target the same system in the brain that alcohol does—the receptors that stop your brain cells from firing—and are thus part of the same general class of drugs: sedatives.

Natural sleep is one of the most powerful boosters of the immune system, helping ward off infection.

All twelve suggestions are superb advice, but if you can only adhere to one of these each and every day, make it: going to bed and waking up at the same time of day no matter what.

In younger, healthy adults, exercise frequently increases total sleep time, especially deep NREM sleep. It also deepens the quality of sleep, resulting in more powerful electrical brainwave activity.

In other words, sleep may have more of an influence on exercise than exercise has on sleep. The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of.


Weekly Book Club 017 - Your Brain at Work
Weekly Book Club 016 - How to Decide
Weekly Book Club 015 - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Weekly Book Club 014 - Finite and Infinite Games
Weekly Book Club 013 - Born a Crime
Weekly Book Club 012 - Measure What Matters
Weekly Book Club 011 - How Will Your Measure Your Life
Weekly Book Club 010 - Range
Weekly Book Club 009 - The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Weekly Book Club 008 - Talking to Crazy
Weekly Book Club 007 - Indistractable
Weekly Book Club 006 - Thinking in System
Weekly Book Club 005 - The Lean Startup
Weekly Book Club 004 - Let My People Go Surfing
Weekly Book Club 003 - It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work
Weekly Book Club 002 - Writing My Wrongs
Weekly Book Club 001 - Poor Economics
Weekly Book Club 001 - Good Economics for Hard Times
Weekly Book Club 000 - The Motivation Myth