The complaint has become all too familiar: the phones by our bed are Trojan horses, brimming with enemy soldiers (demands, anxieties, distractions) laying siege to our sleep. The risk of a culture with no off switch is that sleep becomes an inconvenience, an obstacle to the ideal of 24/7 productivity. This is the context for the widely proclaimed insomnia epidemic that, according to sleep scientists such as Matthew Walker, threatens a public health emergency of catastrophic proportions, with dire consequences for our health, safety and productivity.
Few would argue with the basic premise that the digital age is menacing our sleep. But as psychoanalyst Darian Leader's bracing and important intervention in the debate makes clear, this is a narrow point of agreement amid many points of contention. The most basic concerns the nature of insomnia itself: is it a psychosocial malaise, or a neurobiological one?
The hasty assurance that it is both may be superficially correct, but it's also disingenuous; most of the contemporary sleep science that determines the parameters of research and leads public discussion of the problem screens out the environmental conditions that shape our sleep, reducing the sleeper to the sum of their neural signals.
Take those research labs that monitor the nocturnal activity of their subjects. Rigidly recumbent on single beds, hooked up to EEGs and other devices, substituting a sterile, anonymous lab for the familiar habitat of their own homes and beds and night-time rituals, the subjects are contrived artefacts of science, resembling ordinary sleepers in much the same way as a Love Island coupling resembles an ordinary relationship. And yet it's these subjects, Leader notes, whom “we expect to give the real facts about sleep”.
Psychoanalysis has long been accused of lacking scientific precision, ducking the ultimate test of falsifiability and taking refuge instead in untestable speculations. Leader's example of the sleep lab neatly turns the criticism back on itself – what kind of precision can we expect from measurements that screen out most of the relevant factors?
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