Matthew Walker Audiobooks

Why We Sleep: a Berkeley neuroscientist on the one habit everybody gets wrong

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Who is Matthew Walker?

Matthew Walker is a British author, scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. His academic career has been devoted to one deceptively simple question: what sleep does to human health. He has contributed to a long list of scientific research studies, which matters, because it means the popular writing rests on a working scientist’s foundations rather than borrowed authority.

His first venture into popular science came in 2017 with Why We Sleep, the book that carried his research out of the laboratory and made his name with general readers.

Matthew Walker in audiobooks

That book, Why We Sleep, features in our catalogue, and there is a pleasing irony in absorbing a treatise on sleep during the waking dead time of a commute. As listening, it has the qualities that make science audiobooks work: a single big subject, a researcher who knows the material first-hand, and stakes that apply to literally everyone with a pillow. UK listeners should expect to become slightly evangelical about bedtimes afterwards; it is that kind of book. Few audiobooks genuinely change behaviour, but a subject this universal, argued by the man who studies it for a living, gives this one every chance.