Mapping the Darkness
The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE 2024 ASJA BOOK AWARD, BIOGRAPHY/HISTORY
NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 BY THE NEW YORKER
NEW YORK TIMES EDITOR'S CHOICE SELECTION
From award-winning journalist Kenneth Miller comes the definitive story of the scientists who set out to answer two questions: “Why do we sleep?” and "How can we sleep better?”
A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness.
In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research participants (including himself) to a dizzying array of tests and tortures. But the tipping point came in 1938, when his cave experiment awakened the general public to the unknown—and vital—world of sleep. Kleitman went on to mentor the talented but troubled Eugene Aserinsky, whose discovery of REM sleep revealed the astonishing activity of the dreaming brain, and William Dement, a jazz-bass playing revolutionary who became known as the father of sleep medicine. Dement, in turn, mentored the brilliant maverick Mary Carskadon, who uncovered an epidemic of sleep deprivation among teenagers, and launched a global movement to fight it.
Award-winning journalist Kenneth Miller weaves together science and history to tell the story of four outsider scientists who took sleep science from fringe discipline to mainstream obsession through spectacular experiments, technological innovation, and single-minded commitment. Readers will walk away with a comprehensive understanding of sleep and why it affects so much of our lives.
"A propulsive, utterly engrossing history... None of it is simple and all of it is captivating."—The New York Times
"Mapping the Darkness offers two narratives at once: a sweeping journey of discovery about dreams, sleep and the terra incognita of unconsciousness; and a wake-up call about the dangers of chronic exhaustion. It’s time, Mr. Miller tells us, to take our sleep back."—The Wall Street Journal
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.
