Losing Sleep and Lives: Matthew Walker on the Global Sleep Epidemic

Last night, everyone listening as long as you slept became flagrantly psychotic. Welcome to the RTW podcast. I'm your host, Stephanie Sirota, partner and chief business officer leading the strategic partnerships team and RTW investments. Today, we welcome Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He's also the author of the New York Times bestseller, Why We Sleep, Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which will be the subject of our discussion today. Matthew, thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I really truly enjoyed reading your book. I have so many questions. I could start in a million different directions, but Dangerous, isn't it? Sure is. Early on in the book, you said, addressing the question of why we sleep from an evolutionary perspective only compounds the mystery. No matter what vantage point you take, sleep would appear to be the most foolish of biological phenomena. You cannot gather food. You cannot socialize. You cannot find a mate or reproduce, and you're vulnerable to predators. Sleep is surely the most puzzling of all human behaviors. Is that what sparked your interest in sleep? Most sleep researchers are accidental sleep researchers. I was studying people with dementia for my PhD, and I was looking at brainwave patterns, and seeing if I could differentially diagnose them very early on. And I was failing miserably. And then one weekend I was reading how the different sleep centers in the brain were affected at different levels in different types of dementia. So I thought, gosh, I'm measuring my patients at the wrong time, which was when they were awake. I should be studying them when they were asleep. Started doing that, got some amazing results. I then had to ask a question, are the sleep problems that I'm seeing in dementia a consequence of the dementia or an underlying contributing cause of the dementia? I thought, okay, I now need to go and find out why we sleep. That was twenty two years ago. And now what I've learned is that hard questions don't care who asks them. They will meter out their lessons of difficulty all the same. And I've been schooled in the difficulty of sleep. It is truly idiotic as a behavior. And you're paralyzed, you can't move. And worse, yeah. You're vulnerable to predation. Sleep should have been strongly selected against in the course of evolution. Even very ancient species like earthworms. In every species that we've carefully studied, species like earthworms. In every species that we've carefully studied, sleep appears to be present. What that means is that sleep probably evolved with life itself on this planet. And from that point forward, it has fought its way through heroically every step along the evolutionary path. We now have to ask, is there any major physiological system in your body or operation of your mind that …