POPULAR SCIENCE
WHY WE SLEEP
by Matthew Walker (Allen Lane £20) IMAGINE a revolutionary medical treatment that ensures a longer, healthier life. One that protects you from cancer and dementia, and reduces your risk of heart attacks, strokes and diabetes.
According to the neuroscientist Matthew Walker, such a treatment already exists. It’s called a good night’s sleep. But most of us aren’t getting that — we’re turning into a nation of insomniacs.
At its worst, sleep deprivation is a killer. Chinese football fan Jiang Xiaoshan stayed awake for 11 consecutive nights to watch the 2012 European Championship on TV. On the 12th morning, his mother found him dead in his apartment.
Few of us run the risks Jiang did, but two-thirds of adults in the developed nations are failing to get enough sleep.
The cumulative effects on our health and well-being are dire. Walker may sometimes overstate his case, but science is proving what Shakespeare appreciated four centuries ago — sleep is the ‘chief nourisher in life’s feast’.
INTO THE GREY ZONE
by Adrian Owen (Faber £16.99) ARE some people who appear to be in a vegetative state still conscious? Is there a ‘ grey zone’ between life and death to which some individuals are consigned by illness or accident?
Neuroscientist Adrian Owen vividly recounts the unorthodox techniques he has employed to reach the seemingly unreachable through brain scans.
Carol was a 23-year-old woman who had suffered traumatic injuries after being hit by two cars. She showed no reaction to any tests until Owen asked her to imagine playing a game of tennis and to visualise walking through her house room by room. Scans showed her brain responding in exactly the same way as those of healthy individuals.
(Charting the brain’s reactions to the twists and turns of a Hitchcock film is another of his methods.)
Owen’s results are astonishing. As one of his other patients, who later recovered her powers of speech, told him, ‘Keep up the brain scanning. It was like magic. It found me’. The stories are unsettling but moving and testify to the resilience of the human spirit.
THE BUTCHERING ART
by Lindsey Fitzharris (Allen Lane £16.99) HOSPITALS in early Victorian London were not good places to end up. Surgeons in grubby aprons presided over operating tables soiled with bodily fluids. They wielded scalpels and saws caked with the blood of their earlier victims.
In pre-anaesthetic days, they were prized for their speed. Robert Liston, renowned as the fastest knife in the city, could remove a bladder stone in less than 60 seconds and a limb in little more.
Surgeons were not always held in high esteem. In one hospital they were paid less than the ‘chief bug catcher’ — whose job it was to rid the mattresses of lice.
Lindsey Fitzharris evokes this world in as gruesomely compelling book, which also records how the story’s hero Joseph Lister, transformed Victorian medicine through his insistence on cleanliness and antiseptics in the operating theatre.
A fascinating account of how hospitals became places of healing rather than death.
THE INNER LIFE OF ANIMALS
by Peter Wohlleben (Bodley Head £16.99) A CROW reveals an unexpected sense of fun by jumping on the lid of a plastic container to slide down a snowcovered roof.
When it has reached the bottom, it hauls the lid up again and has another go. In a German institute for animal research, pigs learn to respond to their individual names at feeding time. (‘Brunhilde’ proves a particularly able student.)
Female deer demonstrate what looks remarkably like grief when they return time and again to the places where their fawns died.
Peter Wohlleben, forester, ecologist and author of bestselling The Hidden Life Of Trees, neatly combines anecdotes and scientific evidence in his search for the answers to some basic questions, such as do animals feel things the way that we do?
Wohlleben has no doubt that all animals have a rich inner life. By the end of this delightful, surprising book, most readers will be persuaded that he is right.