Sleepyhead

How bad is it really, not to get eight hours of sleep? What happens to our brain when we're sleep deprived? How much sleep should we really be getting?

Sleep is something so fundamental that most of us take it for granted, undervalue it, and rarely look directly at it - in the last century, the amount we sleep has fallen by 20%.
Henry Nicholls doesn't have this problem - he suffers from narcolepsy, a disorder he developed at age twenty-one. For the healthy but overworked majority, this might sound like an enviable condition, but for Henry, the inability to stay awake is profoundly disabling.

Through personal reflections, interviews with fellow narcoleptics, insomniacs and neuroscientists, anecdotes from medical history, and insights from art and literature, Henry Nicholls travels through the half-lit world of sleep. He considers how sleep is seen in contemporary culture, and delves into the history of sleep theory: how it was irrevocably damaged by Freud, and how this has created a medical vacuum for the treatment of sleep disorders.

Sleepyhead is a scientific, cultural and autobiographical journey into the hinterlands of sleep, told with penetrating intelligence, humour and gentleness.