ABOUT THIS EPISODE
- Why the podcast originally existed as the public research phase of The Snooze Button book
- Neil reading three chapters of the raw 2020 manuscript
- “Phillips Is an Ass” and the internal absurdity of a sleepless night
- Clock-watching, bargaining, caffeine, meditation and sleep performance anxiety
- “Sleepless in Everywhere” and three decades of morning radio
- What a 3 a.m. alarm does to conventional sleep advice
- Why becoming a father again changed the stakes of Neil’s sleep problem
- “The Wake-Up Call” and the hazards of diagnosing yourself through Dr. Google
- Sleep, tau and the difference between association and causation in Alzheimer’s research
- Dr. Adrian Owen’s study of sleep duration and cognition in more than 10,000 people
- Reasoning and verbal performance versus short-term memory
- The correction from a “ten-year” cognitive-aging comparison to the published estimate of roughly eight years
- Why the Owen study cannot prove that long or short sleep caused poorer cognition
- Michael Grandner on expertise, humility and uncertainty
- Why CBT-I can be first-line treatment and still be poorly represented in professional training
- Consumer sleep trackers and the problem with “best,” “most accurate” and “gold standard”
- Why PSG remains the reference standard for validating sleep measurement
- Sleep-versus-wake accuracy versus actual sleep-stage accuracy
- How consumer sleep technology guidance changed between 2020 and 2025
- EEG-fMRI research into why some people remember dreams more often
- Dream recall versus actually dreaming more
- Grandner, Fabian-Xosé Fernandez and Julie Flygare on narcolepsy and COVID-19
- Emmanuel Mignot’s response and the lessons scientists were drawing from H1N1
- Why the Pandemrix-narcolepsy association should not be generalized to all H1N1 vaccines
- What later research says about COVID, the blood-brain barrier and direct brain invasion
About Dr. Michael Grandner
Michael Grandner, PhD, is a clinical psychologist and behavioral sleep medicine specialist at the University of Arizona. In this recurring segment, he joins Neil to put new sleep research into context rather than simply repeating the headline.
MENTIONEDDissociable effects of self-reported daily sleep duration on high-level cognitive abilities
The 2018 Wild, Owen and colleagues study of more than 10,000 people discussed in Chapter Three.
Read the Adrian Owen cognition study
Reduced non-rapid eye movement sleep is associated with tau pathology in early Alzheimer’s disease
The 2019 Washington University study linking reduced slow-wave sleep with Alzheimer’s-related tau pathology.
Read the tau and slow-wave-sleep study
Wearable technologies for developing sleep and circadian biomarkers
The 2020 international workshop paper Michael references while discussing validation and the role of PSG as a reference standard.
Read the wearable-technology paper
World Sleep Society recommendations for wearable consumer health trackers
The 2025 guidance showing how the field’s view of consumer trackers has evolved while retaining important limits on interpretation.
Brain functional connectivity upon awakening from sleep predicts interindividual differences in dream recall frequency
The French EEG-fMRI dream-recall study Michael discusses.
Narcolepsy and COVID-19: sleeping on an opportunity?
The 2020 piece by Fabian-Xosé Fernandez, Julie Flygare and Michael Grandner asking what the pandemic might teach researchers about immune triggers and narcolepsy.
Read the Grandner/Fernandez/Flygare paper
Narcolepsy risk and COVID-19
Emmanuel Mignot and Steve Black’s response expanding on the H1N1, vaccination and narcolepsy questions.
Read the Mignot and Black response
Infection, vaccination and narcolepsy type 1: Evidence and potential molecular mechanisms
A 2024 review of the evidence for autoimmune narcolepsy and the specific roles proposed for infection and Pandemrix vaccination.
Read the 2024 narcolepsy review
The neurobiology of SARS-CoV-2 infection
A 2024 Nature Reviews Neuroscience review explaining why COVID’s neurological effects do not automatically prove widespread direct viral invasion of the brain.
