Mapping the Darkness
The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
‘Fascinating, magisterially researched, and brilliantly written.’ Steve Silberman, author of Neurotribes
Thirty-two days underground. No heat. No sunlight.
4 June 1938. Nathaniel Kleitman and his research student make their way down the seventy-one steps leading to the mouth of Mammoth Cave. They are about to embark on one of the most intrepid and bizarre experiments in medical history, one which will change our understanding of sleep forever. Undisturbed by natural light, they will investigate what happens when you overturn one of the fundamental rhythms of the human body. Together, they enter the darkness.
When Kleitman first arrived in New York, a penniless twenty-year-old refugee, few would have guessed that in just a few decades he would revolutionise the field of sleep science. In Mapping the Darkness, Kenneth Miller weaves science and history to tell the story of the outsider scientists who took sleep science from the fringes to a mainstream obsession. Reliving the spectacular experiments, technological innovation, imaginative leaps and single-minded commitment of these early pioneers, Miller provides a tantalising glimpse into the most mysterious third of our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Miller's eye-opening debut explores the lives and work of four researchers who pioneered the scientific understanding of sleep. He begins with Nathaniel Kleitman, the "patriarch" of sleep science, who fled Russian pogroms and landed in the U.S. in 1916 at age 20. He received a physiology PhD from the University of Chicago and afterward taught and conducted landmark studies there, including one in which he and five other people stayed awake for as long as 115 hours while their memory and concentration were tested, finding that "the sleep drive" fluctuated depending on what activities they were doing. The development of new technology for measuring brain activity helped Kleitman's mentee Eugene Aserinsky discover that the "slumbering brain is as active as its waking counterpart." William Dement, another Kleitman protégé, built on Aserinsky's studies, discovering that the length of dreams match the duration of REM sleep and that sleep follows "distinct cycles of neural activity." The biographical background humanizes the scientific history, and Miller excels at drawing out the real-world implications of the research, as when he discusses how Mary Carskadon's discovery in the 1980s that teenagers need more sleep than younger kids led high schools across the U.S. to delay their start times. Readers will have no problem staying alert through this fascinating scientific history. Photos.
