Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep

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. (Oct.)