Sleepyhead
Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night
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- 6,99 €
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- 6,99 €
Publisher Description
When Henry Nicholls was twenty-one, he was diagnosed with narcolepsy: a medical disorder causing him to fall asleep with no warning. For the healthy but overworked majority, this might sound like an enviable condition, but for Henry, the inability to stay awake is profoundly disabling, especially as it is accompanied by mysterious collapses called cataplexy, poor night-time sleep, hallucinations and sleep paralysis.
A writer and biologist, Nicholls explores the science of disordered sleep, discovering that around half of us will experience some kind of sleep dysfunction in our lives. From a CBT course to tackle insomnia to a colony of narcoleptic Dobermans, his journey takes him through the half-lit world of sleep to genuine revelations about his own life and health.
Told with humour and intelligence, Sleepyhead uses personal reflections, interviews with those with sleep disorders and the people who study them, anecdotes from medical history and insights from art and literature to change the way we understand our sleeping hours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Science writer Nicholls (The Gal pagos: A Natural History) uses his decades-long experiences with narcolepsy as a jumping-off point for this stimulating exploration of sleep. He relates his own condition, and the related one of cataplexy an abrupt loss of muscle tone in response to strong emotion to the more common experiences of insomnia and sleep apnea. Nichols is careful to ground readers in the history of research into REM and circadian rhythms, but takes more interest in new research, primarily concerning a certain kind of neurotransmitter, the hypocretin. As he reveals, a genetic study of narcoleptic dogs in the late 1990s suggested problems with the functioning of the hypocretins could be involved in multiple sleep disorders. Along the way, Nicholls shares a few dramatic cases including one of a man who strangled his wife while both were sleeping but avoids the traps of sensationalism and prurience by keeping his focus on himself and others whom he meets. Actual advice on better rest is modest and ranges from common sense, such as avoiding caffeine, to research-based but perhaps counterintuitive, such as sleep restriction as a treatment for insomnia. Everybody sleeps, and Nicholls's entry into the genre of pop science books that use the unusual to illuminate the everyday has equally universal appeal.
