Sleep Thieves: an Eye-Opening Exploration into the Science and Mysteries of Sleep

by Stanley Coren

An eye-opening and engrossing exploration into the science and mysteries of sleep and sleeplessness from the bestselling author of The Intelligence of Dogs .

Is there some way to determine if you are getting enough sleep?

Do dogs and cats dream?

What are the ways to help children sleep through the night?

What role did sleep deficit play in the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and the nuclear accidents at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island?

Why is the shift to Daylight Savings Time dangerous?

Why do many sleeping medications actually make insomnia worse?

What was Leonardo da Vinci’s technique for getting by with only an hour and a half of sleep each day?

The answers to these questions are in this fascinating and provocative book that will change the way you think about sleep.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Psychology, Health, Biology, Neuroscience

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[Etienne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A decent book about sleep. Even if it isn't that actual, already has 20 years, it was till interesting, had good information , made you thing about how strange our relation with sleep is weird in our modern world and it was easy to read. I'm growing an interest into this subject for over 2 years now so I didn't learn much (but still have), having a good background knowledge, but for the new comers, this is a good introduction. The anecdotes to prove the author points wasn't necessary in my opinion and it cost one star to the book. Not perfect, but better then a lot and a book worth reading!

[Alisa Kester · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing, important book. Seriously, if everyone read this world the world could change for the better in so many ways.

But since everyone won't read this book, at least *you* can. And maybe it will change your life.

There was no part of this book that wasn't fascinating.

[SheRa McGyver · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining and interesting, but possibly not the most solid science. 42% of the way in (the chapter about the Kitchen) and the author mistakes Cocoa leaves (Theobroma cacao) with coca leaves (family Erythroxylaceae) as the source of cocaine. Pretty jarring - I had to put the book down and come here to complain.

[Theo Carroll · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bought this book several years back and never read it...I found some of the information valuable but all in all it was a bit dated and repetitive.

[Niederhoffer · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book contains some entertaining anecdotes about sleep deprived people but the book itself is not very scientific nor very informative in 2011. Coren draws conclusions from anecdotal evidence and some sketchy statistics, and never differentiates between bad and good evidence, making the read of this book a kind of a filtering process. If you are truly looking for an eye-opening exploration into science and mysteries of sleep, this is isnt the right book.

[Nic · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to sleep right now. I'm never waking up. Byebye.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book could have been a lot less enjoyable given the author's approach as a committed believer in evolution, given my own thoughts about that, but the author's general objectivity was certainly refreshing and the author's point about our need for sleep and the way that our contemporary society shortchanges this is definitely on point.  My own struggles with sleep are fairly well-documented [1], and have lasted a long time.  As a result, I tend to read a fair amount about sleep, pondering it as a problem not just for myself but also for my particular time and place.  The author does the same thing, putting sleep in a context where the daily cycles of life and a look at other beings and their sleep needs and looks at sleep in history and determines that our current society sleeps far less than it should and that the consequences are immense.  This may not be new insight to those who have struggled with sleep, but the way the author puts a great deal of myths about sleep to bed is worthwhile and enjoyable even for this rather chronically sleep-deprived person.

The nearly 300 pages of this book are divided into 24 short chapters which look at sleep from a very far-ranging perspective.  The author looks at the curse of Edison on contemporary sleep through his cultural influence (1), and looks at sleep and consciousness (2) and the definition of sleep (3).  The author then looks at the vulnerability of sleep and how it would appear to contradict certain ideas about the survival of the fittest (4) along with the consequences of not sleeping at all (5), cutting down on sleep (6) and only getting a little bit of sleep (7).  The author then looks at circadian rhythms (8) and the times when we are most and least sleepy throughout the day (9), and how sleepiness is something passed down from busy parents to children who need even more sleep than they do (10), as well as blaming a great deal of problems on sleep-deprived teenagers (11).  A look at the way that foods conspire against good sleep (12) and a look at the myth of Ondine's curse and its role in understanding sleep apnea (13) leads to a look at sleepless nights (14) and the connection between sleep and health (15).  After this comes four chapters that looks at the harrowing consequences of being asleep at the wheel (16), at the operating table (17), on the night shift (18), and in the sky (19).  At this point the author looks at the cost of sleep debt (20), whether we as a culture are chronically sleep-deprived (21), our personal sleep debts (22), the way that our sleepiness can be understood through daylight savings time (23), and closes with a wake-up call to action on the part of readers (24).

There are at least a few aspects of this book that are particularly notable.  For one, our focus on the quantity of "productive" time rather than the harm done to our productivity and creativity and value of life as a result of not sleeping well enough to full recover from how we live is something I have noted at least anecdotally for myself.  Additionally, I was deeply struck by the way that certain aspects of our culture seem perversely designed to cause a great deal of suffering to others--whether that includes the demands we place on the wakefulness of young people, the savage disregard for the well-being of resident interns in hospitals, and the backwards way we look at shiftwork.  Over and over again the author reminds us that many of those who were regarded as paragons of industry and creativity grossly underestimated their own sleeping and napping habits and therefore bequeathed a false idea of how much sleep was necessary for people to live and work at their best.  As a result this book is definitely a helpful one to look at sleep and its importance in our own drowsy and insomniatic world.

[1] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2016...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2015...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2014...

[Logan Spader · Rating 5 out of 5]

PERFECT!!! "Sleep Thieves" was actually written by a sleep doctor unlike all of the popular and well advertised sleep literature currently on the market. Here are my reasons why this book was so awesome:

-The author is a doctor and runs a sleep research team
-The book discusses the evolution of human sleep
-It talks about how all sentient creatures require sleep no matter how detrimental it is to their survival
-Death via sleep deprivation is horrifying
-Human circadian cycle is 25 hours for an important reason.
-Anything less than approx. 10 hrs of sleep in humans has measurable negative consequences
-The author has DECADES of fascinating sleep related stories
-He went to great lengths to procure data proving the dangers of our modern sleep habits

I would never have imagined that a book about sleep could be so enthralling. Stanley is an amazing author who deserves high praises for the work that he put into this book. READ IT!

[Kathleen Garber · Rating 3 out of 5]

This will be a short review since the book is outdated and hard to find. However if you find it at a library it might be worth the read. It would be nice if a new version was made.

The book has lots of good information on sleep and specifically “sleep thieves” meaning those things that make us lose sleep. This includes the usual like shift work and caffeine but also includes lesser thought of things. It had some good knowledge in it, it just is outdated like I said. Most of it is still applicable, but it’s missing the affect of smartphones on our culture. That is a BIG sleep thief.

Only recommended at a library

[Kalle Wescott · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read /Sleep Thieves: an Eye-Opening Exploration into the Science and Mysteries of Sleep/, by Stanley Coren:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.blog/2018...

Most of the sleep books are pretty interesting... this one less so, other than the sections on how animals sleep (at least from my reader perspective).

[Henrik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book! Changed my way of thinking of sleep.

[Kayla Kurin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Made me like this book even better to see all the author’s other books are about dogs.

[N.D. Wisard · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm going to sleep right now. I'm never waking up. Byebye.

[Yune · Rating 4 out of 5]

No relation to The Dream Thieves, which I'm reviewing the same day. This one's nonfiction, examining the importance of sleep to life (both human and animal) and how people have managed to screw it up, essentially. This isn't a new concept to me, but I enjoyed the read all the same.

The book begins on a rather accusatory note toward Edison, who invented the light bulb which so effectively promotes voluntary sleep deprivation. And apparently Edison himself was a bit of a snob about sleep, claiming not to need more than 4-5 hours a night. Coren lays out a case for humans actually preferring something around 9 hours a night (based on people placed in environments where they were unable to tell what time it was and could set their own schedules), and discusses the dangers of significantly shorting this amoutn regularly. Given how vulnerable sleep makes us, or any creature that has had to survive in the wild, he figures there must be a powerful need for it. Rats, for example, who were preventing from sleeping during a rather cruel experiment simply up and died. Humans also tend to become paranoid, hallucinate, and in extreme cases of torture, end up losing their core body heat and also die.

Coren relies heavily on anecdotes, but they're fairly powerful. He himself attempts an experiment to whittle away potentially extraneous sleep, making it down to 5.5 hours a night before he blanks out on the road while driving and realizes how dangerous it is. He recovers from his sleep debt to discover how much of an utter mess he'd been oblivious to; he'd become totally disorganized and inefficient and a dreary presence at work, and had even sent out papers with embarrassing mistakes and leaps in logic that he normally never would have missed. Then he takes a look at other groups of people frequently sleep deprived: truckers, medical residents, teenagers, night shift employees, and, of course, parents of newborns.

He does offer some research, including observations of brain waves in an actual sleep lab, and his assertions about biology are interesting stuff. Food coma? Probably is a natural cyclical tendency toward sleepiness during the period right after a typical lunch hour, with a correspondingly higher number of accidents. Somewhat amusingly, a soldier who kept notes during a long shift would sometimes attribute his drowsiness to having eaten, and other times claimed that a snack had perked him up. Basics like the different stages of sleep are also covered.

And famous people who scoffed at sleeping a normal amount of sleep at night? They were often frequent nappers. (Various animal species also snatch their sleep in tiny intervals on the go.) More broadly, Coren points out how potentially harmful the societal attitude of "if you have sufficient willpower, you can power through sleepiness" can be, and the sometimes-fatal mistakes that occur due to the lack of focus that results.

Both entertaining and educational, with some tips included for people dealing with sleep problems. My main wish is for an updated edition -- I can only imagine that there's new information to share since the publication date. Also, be warned that the author occasionally sees the need to retell tenuously related Greek myths, but hang in there; they're brief and worth making your way past.

[Ed Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fascinating book, and full of fascinating anecdotes, and important information about the costs of sleep deprivation.
He also derides our current societal view that sleep is a waste of time, rather than fulfilling critical functions.
Tom Edison, who hoped that his light bulb would eliminate some of this waste, may have exaggerated his short sleep hours, and may actually have made up for it, by taking many mid day naps.

He discusses some of the common causes of either lack of sleep, or, more insidious, fragmented sleep.

Some tidbits:
Unlike dolphins, who are so adapted to the water, they can hold their breath for long periods of time, the Russian fur seal is much more like a human swimmer. How does a Russian fur seal sleep without drowning?

How much sleep do we really need?

Record holders in going without sleep: what were their experiences?...

Are the regulations on work and rest hours on the trucking industry and airlines keeping us safe?

So the Russian fur seal sleeps in one brain hemisphere at a time! One side is sleep paralyzed, on the other the seal swims with the flippers on one side. Every two minutes, the sleep switches to the opposite side, the seal makes slow alternating circles.

Humans may need about 10 hours of sleep to have full cognitive function. The idea that 7 hours is all we need and 6 is not bad is probably destructive for most people. All of the higher apes sleep about 10 hours. Why would we be different.

Common symptoms of deliberate long term sleep loss involve cognitive decline, inappropriate anger, and progressively more and more vivid hallucinations followed by paranoid delusions. The author himself experimented with attempting to wean himself from sleep, by gradually reducing his sleep hours. He finally could not tolerate the experiment; he later found rejection letters for peer reviewed articles he had submitted during the period, expressing surprise at the low quality of his work--and was surprised to find that the papers were unfocussed, disorganized and filled with grammatical and spelling errors, none of which he had noticed before.

The collision of technical rules that do not really fit the realities of the industry or of human sleep with the pressure of economic factors are producing fatigued drivers and pilots, and costly adn sometimes fatal errors.

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

I do realize there's a lot of irony in my staying up late to read a book about how bad sleep deprivation is for me, but I want to read as much of this as I can before I learn enough feel compelled to fix my sleep habits.

Now that I have finished, I have to say that while this book has a lot of useful information (and so many things I never knew before (I do apologize for sharing an endless sequence of information tidbits to those stuck in a car with me recently)), it did seem alarmist to me a number of places in the book. My own experience (sleeping from 10 pm - 3:30 am most weekdays) is that the software I write doesn't have plummeting quality despite my lack of sleep. I also tend to remain creative and upbeat. I'm trying to decide if it's because I arrived at this sleep schedule by small incremental steps, if it's because I do catch up some on the weekends, or if what I think of as my full creativity and happiness is really just a shadow of what could be.

Enough about me, though. I'm supposed to be reviewing this book. Besides the anecdotes that were occasionally dramatically morbid, I rally enjoyed this book. I learned a lot about how our society could be better organized to take into account the need to sleep, and that it's a definite need... that no animal has been able to overcome the need to sleep despite all the pressures that would make not sleeping an attractive goal.

One thing I really liked about this book: ammunition in the form of information for kids who think they can get along without sleep. This book is full of fun facts to share about sleep needs.

Warning: there is a test at the end of the book. A way to measure your own sleep debt in a simple qualitative way. Be prepared to learn that you are not getting enough sleep if you are intrepid enough to take this test.

[Sophie · Rating 4 out of 5]

As my friends will tell you, I'm still repeating anecdotes from this book several years after I read it. It's one of the most useful and interesting books--on any subject--I've ever read. The author makes a compelling case that sleep deprivation has serious consequences, ranging from poor work performance to fatal car accidents to large-scale catastrophes such as the Chernobyl disaster.

Coren outlines how certain employment practices, such as "swing shifts" (switching between first, second, and third shift) and paying truck drivers by the mile (encouraging them to work longer without sleep), can cause consequences far worse than tiredness. He puts himself through sleep experiments, shortening his nightly allotment of sleep, and observes the effects on his work (not good). He thoroughly debunks the myth that we can "get by" on less sleep than we need and suffer no ill effects.

There are a lot of fascinating bits of information in this book, but the one that's stuck with me the most is the study on daylight saving time. The author wondered if the hour of sleep lost in the spring had any ill effects, and he found that there are more fatal car accidents the Monday after DST begins than at other times of year, and conversely, there are fewer accidents the Monday after the autumn switch to standard time. It's such a simple study, and the results are striking: sleep deprivation is deadly.

[Glen Engel-Cox · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little lighter in tone, and much more accessible to the most techno- or medio-phobic of lay readers is Sleep Thieves by Stanley Cohen. While Cohen’s book does not have the same claim to impartial accuracy of the researcher, it gains ground by its engrossing style and an ability to merge folklore with medical studies. The whole, as it appears, is then dissected, and Cohen ends up destroying as many myths as Prof. Lavie (in many cases, the same ones). Cohen does have a purpose with his book, and that is to say that as a culture, we are running up a “sleep debt”; that is, by denying ourselves the amount of sleep that our bodies need, we endanger ourselves and others. Before he gets to this conclusion, his common ground with Prof. Lavie is visited, including studies on sleep deprivation and its results, people’s perceptions of sleep, and the amount of sleep that our bodies fall into without the self-regulating clock of the sun. His conclusion is tied together neatly, with a fine work of statistical research using the time lost and gained during the change from and to Daylight Savings Time. Lack of sleep, due to cultural demands, is a major cause of accidents that are often fatal.

[Todd Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sleep Thieves examines the science of sleep. Although scientists have developed hypotheses regarding the origins of sleep and why we need it, much remains a mystery. What is clear is that sleep is both necessary for survival, and for optimal brain function.

Coren claims that humans need between 8-10 hours of sleep per day and that many people today are sleep deprived. The price society pays for this sleep deficit comes in the form of errors at work, lost productivity, and accidents.

Overall, the book interesting, but Coren spends far too much time repetitively going over the same ground again and again (like a bad recurring dream).
Children are sleep deprived … bad things can happen when children are sleep deprived.
Doctors are sleep deprived … bad things can happen when doctors are sleep deprived.
Truck drivers sleep deprived … bad things can happen when truck drivers are sleep deprived.
...

Eeesh, I would also have been sleep deprived, except that the monotony of these chapters kept putting me to sleep.

[Isaac Lord · Rating 3 out of 5]

Entertaining. Chock full of tidbits to share at the dinner table. I appreciated especially the chapter debunking the myth of the "short-sleeper"-- the eccentric genius who needs only three hours a night, the dedicated businessman who forces himself to cut down on sleep to work more-- as I myself need at least 8 hours to avoid bursting into tears at odd moments, and it turns out that so does everyone else, pretty much, though sometimes they spread it out into naps.

The chapter 'Tired Kids, Tired Parents', however, was filled with the kind of unresearched, "common sense" advice common to many mainstream parenting books: babies need to sleep alone, if they cry in the night don't touch them, it's normal for babies to cry so hard in their cribs that they vomit... I had expected something more, maybe some cross-cultural studies, something, but no.

[Diana Sandberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bought this for my mother’s birthday, thought I’d peruse it before sending it off. It’s remarkably well written. Given that, I was a bit puzzled at first by the fact that I kept dozing off while reading it, but decided that the subject matter was just too suggestive. I found his thesis - that nearly everyone in the modern world is sleep-deprived - quite persuasive. I shared much of what I read with the rest of the family as I was going through the book, and now we are all trying very hard to get more and better-quality sleep. Putting together the information in his book with what we read in the book about melatonin, I was struck by the idea that perhaps the long list of benefits the previous author attributes to melatonin could be more reasonably laid at the door of sleep >induced< by melatonin.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fascinating book that explores the psychology behind our need for sleep. Thoroughly explores different threats to sleep, such as shift work and daylight savings time, as well as the resulting permutations of the effects of sleep deprivation upon our society.

Not hard to read at all. Palatable yet scientific, contains the results of studies as well as plenty of interesting anecdotes and ties to well-known historical events. The best $1 book I ever purchased.

Helped me try to figure out my own relationship to sleep by giving me a better understanding of the cues my body uses to set its own clock, and finally left me with the understanding that it's OK if I naturally gravitate towards sleeping 9-10 hours per night.

[Vicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

"To sleep or not to sleep?": that is the question. We sleep less, go to bed late, sit on Facebook late into the night and sacrifice our sleep for work, entertainment and housework. We believe that we don't need sleep the way our ancestors did, that we can survive on 6 hours every day and function as normal. Unfortunately, the truth is a very different story. We programmed by our genes to sleep longer hours, the lack of sleep affects our physiology, psychology, decision-making and at the end can destroy us. We are the generation that suffers from sleep deprivation, sleep disorders. People who work shift jobs, or follow the stock-market 24 hours a day, people who regularly travel for their work - all of them are in danger of multiple health problems.

[Ben · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was torn between 2&3 stars on this one. Book had a few nuggets of worthwhile tips and covered some interesting studies. I know I need more sleep; we all do as this book clearly(?) indicates. However, balancing work, responsibilities, family time, recreational pursuits, etc always seems to keep me, and most people I know, in the sleep debt that the author points out is killing us. Book was recommended during Prospective CO/XO school, and rightfully so. Those conning and navigating our ships need to be at pinnacle of readiness, with all other concerns, including how quickly to get back to bed secondary. Will be my goal to help them make it so.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some people would argue that we will have time enough to sleep when we die! But this book is my argument for being at peak performance--get enough rest. For me, that means 8.5 hours to 9 of sleep nightly. It is sad that I can't get by on less but if I cheat myself out of sleep my performance suffers. As a society, we foster sleep deprivation and that is just not good. I would daresay that this pattern has gotten worse since the book was written. :( Every day, I see a lot of exhausted people...

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who'd have thought I could pick up a book about studies on sleep and not doze off? But I could hardly put this down!

Sleep deficiency is responsible for stupid mistakes, accidents, brain fuzz, crankiness, and so many national and international disasters that it's amazing. And this book isn't only statistics and studies - there are stories and examples and SO many interesting things! So who's sleep deprived? We probably ALL are!

[Steve Rueffer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is a stellar layman's intro to the world of sleep research. Other have pointed out that the book is not heavy on research support, but that is precisely why it is so "readable". Yes, he does seem to jump to some conclusions and make some rather poorly supported arguments, but it is a fantastic start to developing some insight into the need for sleep and what happens when we don't get enough.

[Alexis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A fairly interesting look at the science of human sleep and the consequences of sleep debt. I'm fascinated by sleep and enjoyed reading this book, even though some parts of it are quite dry. The author makes the case that sleep debt, shift work and some other facets of the modern world are affecting our sleep and health. It would be interesting if he could write an update of this book now that humans are wired and accessible 24-7.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put: a very valuable book on our nocturnal routine and its importance. Probes questions like “why do we sleep?” and “why are we the way we are without sleep?” Investigates sleep states, sleep studies, ect with fascinating, useful information everyone should know. I now make sure to get a full night’s rest after reading this.

[Aras · Rating 4 out of 5]

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