Why We Sleep Quotes

“There was to be a six-year residency, quite literally. The term “residency” came from Halsted’s belief that doctors must live in the hospital for much of their training, allowing them to be truly committed in their learning of surgical skills and medical knowledge.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“I am in no way contesting the disorder of ADHD, and not every child with ADHD has poor sleep. But we know that there are children who are sleep-deprived or suffering from an undiagnosed sleep disorder that masquerades as ADHD.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“sleep deficiency and the epidemic of ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). Children with this diagnosis are irritable, moodier, more distractible and unfocused in learning during the day, and have a significantly increased prevalence of depression and suicidal ideation.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“REM sleep is what stands between rationality and insanity.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Under-slept employees are not only less productive, less motivated, less creative, less happy, and less effective, but they may be more unethical.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“those individuals who obtained less sleep in the preceding days are the same people who consistently select less challenging problems. They opt for the easy way out, generating fewer creative solutions in the process.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“As we have learned time and again throughout the course of this book, sleep is not like a credit system or the bank. The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Our own studies support his wisdom: 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.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“I’m sure you can imagine innumerable uses for such a method. That said, you may also feel ethically uncomfortable about the prospect, considering that you would have the power to write and rewrite your own remembered life narrative or, more concerning, that of someone else. This moral dilemma is somewhat far in the future, but should such methods continue to be refined, it is one we may face.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“following a night of sleep you regain access to memories that you could not retrieve before sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sleep is constantly modifying the information architecture of the brain at night. Even daytime naps as short as twenty minutes can offer a memory consolidation advantage, so long as they contain enough NREM sleep.V”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Before having slept, participants were fetching memories from the short-term storage site of the hippocampus—that temporary warehouse, which is a vulnerable place to live for any long duration of time if you are a new memory. But things looked very different by the next morning. The memories had moved. After the full night of sleep, participants were now retrieving that same information from the neocortex, which sits at the top of the brain—a region that serves as the long-term storage site for fact-based memories, where they can now live safely, perhaps in perpetuity.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“In doing so, sleep had delightfully cleared out the hippocampus, replenishing this short-term information repository with plentiful free space.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Those who were awake throughout the day became progressively worse at learning, even though their ability to concentrate remained stable (determined by separate attention and response time tests). In contrast, those who napped did markedly better, and actually improved in their capacity to memorize facts. The difference between the two groups at six p.m. was not small: a 20 percent learning advantage for those who slept.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Sleep before learning refreshes our ability to initially make new memories.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Passing into your mid- and late forties, age will have stripped you of 60 to 70 percent of the deep sleep you were enjoying as a young teenager.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“young individuals who are at high risk of developing schizophrenia, and in teenagers and young adults with schizophrenia, there is a two- to threefold reduction in deep NREM sleep.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“the suprachiasmatic nucleus begins to latch on to repeating signals, such as daylight, temperature change, and feedings (so long as those feedings are highly structured), establishing a stronger twenty-four-hour rhythm.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“these unborn infants suffered a depression in breathing during REM sleep, with breath rates dropping from a rate of 381 per hour during natural sleep to just 4 per hour when the fetus was exposed to alcohol.VII”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Autistic individuals show a 30 to 50 percent deficit in the amount of REM sleep they obtain, relative to children without autism.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Infants and young children who show signs of autism, or who are diagnosed with autism, do not have normal sleep patterns or amounts. The circadian rhythms of autistic children are also weaker than their non-autistic counterparts, showing a flatter profile of melatonin across the twenty-four-hour period rather than a powerful rise in concentration at night”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“REM sleep can even take a step back, so to speak, and divine overarching insights and gist: something akin to general knowledge—that is, what a collection of information means as a whole, not just an inert back catalogue of facts. We can awake the next morning with new solutions to previously intractable problems or even be infused with radically new and original ideas.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“the coolheaded ability to regulate our emotions each day—a key to what we call emotional IQ—depends on getting sufficient REM sleep night after night.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“that REM sleep increases our ability to recognize and therefore successfully navigate the kaleidoscope of socioemotional signals that are abundant in human culture, such as overt and covert facial expressions, major and minor bodily gestures, and even mass group behavior.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“where the ensuing mortality risk of not napping increased by well over 60 percent.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Instead, the true pattern of biphasic sleep—for which there is anthropological, biological, and genetic evidence, and which remains measurable in all human beings to date—is one consisting of a longer bout of continuous sleep at night, followed by a shorter midafternoon nap.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“Both you and the meeting attendees are falling prey to an evolutionarily imprinted lull in wakefulness that favors an afternoon nap, called the post-prandial alertness dip (from the Latin prandium, “meal”). This brief descent from high-degree wakefulness to low-level alertness reflects an innate drive to be asleep and napping in the afternoon, and not working. It appears to be a normal part of the daily rhythm of life.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“It is deeply biological. All humans, irrespective of culture or geographical location, have a genetically hardwired dip in alertness that occurs in the midafternoon hours. Observe any post-lunch meeting around a boardroom table and this fact will become evidently clear. Like puppets whose control strings were let loose, then rapidly pulled taut, heads will start dipping then quickly snap back upright. I’m sure you’ve experienced this blanket of drowsiness that seems to take hold of you, midafternoon, as though your brain is”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“more similar the sleep is in each half of the brain. It is perhaps one reason why so many of us sleep so poorly the first night in a hotel room.”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams

“The more nights an individual sleeps in the new location, the”
― Matthew Walker, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams