Charlottesville Words

Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body by Jennifer AckermanRead more about this book…

The three authors on the Science Writing panel at next week’s Virginia Festival of the Book have a theme in common: Life cycles. Susan Freinkel writes about the cycles of growth, maturity, and death in a single species, and the interlocking cycles of parasite, host, and humans, in American Chestnut (more on this book coming soon). Michael Sims writes about the daily cycle of our planet on its axis and its annual cycle around the Sun in Apollo’s Fire. Jennifer Ackerman, in Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream writes about the cycles of the human body and how they influence — and are in turn affected by — our health, our relationships, and our society.

Ackerman’s book is structured around a typical day — morning, afternoon, evening, night — and the activities that characterize each period. Within this structure, she presents the latest findings on circadian rhythms and how they relate to an amazing array of everyday (and everynight) activities. Our biorhythms influence how well we perform mental tasks, they determine whether we gain weight after eating and how much, they can influence whether or not we catch the virus that’s going around as well as determine our reaction to medical treatments.

After reading SSEDD, CvilleWords had a few questions for the author:
First, I’m curious– Have you adopted any good habits or abandoned any bad ones as a result of your research?

Absolutely. The first examples that come to mind involve sleep. I’ve become the champion of the mid-afternoon twenty-minute nap to combat the post-lunch “doldrums” and boost my alertness, mood and productivity later in the day. I’ve also given up the very bad habit of skimping on sleep at night. Like most people in this country, I used to get about 6 or 6.5 hours of sleep a night. That’s not enough. The National Sleep Foundation 2008 poll suggested that almost one in three people reported feeling sleepy at work and one in five have lost interest in sex because they’re too sleepy. A staggering 36 percent of drivers said that they’ve nodded off while driving in the past year. My research for this book also taught me the hazardous effects of too little sleep not just on alertness but on the physical well being of the body. So now I insist on a solid 7 or 7.5 hours for myself and my family.

To illustrate the difficulties with multi-tasking, you describe your experiences as a subject in a psychology experiment conducted at the University of Virginia’s Cognitive Aging Lab. Beyond providing a lively personal touch to your book, what benefits or insights do you gain as a science writer from participating in the experimental process?

Being part of an experiment provides a wonderful window on the incremental nature of the scientific process–each study building on the ones before, like an upside-down pyramid. It also offers a first-hand view of the ingenuity involved in crafting an experiment. (I think, for instance, of the Rube Goldbergian rigging I wore during an experiment at Harvard, which scientists there had devised to measure the bob of the human head during running.) Finally, it’s a great opportunity to interact with the scientists at the cutting-edge of their fields.

As your book demonstrates, there are so very many things we can now know about our bodies. With increased knowledge comes, for many of us, a sense of increased responsibility. You confide, for instance, that new findings about the effectiveness of matching chemotherapy delivery to body rhythms can cause “the sort of speculation that keeps me up at night.” How should we deal with the weight of responsibility that comes with knowledge? How can we make good medical decisions for ourselves and our families without lying awake at night worrying that somewhere out there might be the one bit of information that could make all the difference?

These are great questions with no easy answers. We have a responsibility to be well informed on medical issues in our society so that we can confront choices thoughtfully and make good decisions–for instance, on the potential benefits of embryonic stem cell research, or genetic manipulation or enhancement. When it comes to making personal medical decisions for ourselves and our loved ones, we have the responsibility to learn as much as we can and then move forward. It used to be that people often left decisions to their doctors–even the decision of whether or not to tell a patient the nature of his own illness. That’s less common today, in part because there’s so much good information easily accessible on the Internet.

I have a relative with chronic pain but no diagnosis. He spends hours with doctors, on the Internet, talking with friends and family. And, yes, he stays awake at night thinking about that one bit of information that might be the clue to diagnosis of his illness and cure. At some point, he may have to accept that there will be no diagnosis, that the only way forward is through pain management strategies. But it helps him to know that he has explored every avenue.

Your book captures a sense of the growing respect researchers and doctors have for the natural rhythms of the human body. And yet, there seems to be a trend, which you also describe, towards less and less respect for these rhythms in our culture. In the struggle between scientific knowledge and the round-the-clock pressures of global capitalism, which do you think will win?

Well, there’s no question that we live in a 24-hour society, and that’s unlikely to change. However, there are some hopeful signs that business and industry are picking up on the importance of respecting natural rhythms–by, for example, designing shifts so as to avoid the most punishing schedule (the swing shift), building naps into work schedules (along with a culture of acceptance of snoozing on the job), and recognizing the importance of minimizing long-term exposure to bright artificial light at night (which has been shown to increase the risk of breast and other kinds of cancer).

I noted in your acknowledgements that it took you four years to write SSEDD. Judging from the recent dates on the studies you cite, you must have been writing right up until the book went to press! The findings reported are fresh and up-to-date, just as we expect from today’s science writing. But the timeline for getting new scientific discoveries out to the public in a thoughtful, coherent form is surely only going to compress. How are science writers and publishers of books such as yours coping with these pressures? Will we see new forms of science writing emerge?

Yes, it’s a challenge to keep a book fresh and up-to-date. No doubt science writers will make greater use of online forums to keep readers abreast of the latest on a given topic. However, the published book will be with us for a long time. Science writing is not all about delivering information, but crafting an engaging narrative, a story, to draw in the reader. I still find the printed book the best vehicle for that purpose.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Filed under: authors, books, charlottesville, interviews, reading, science, VABook08, virginia, writing Tagged: | circadian rhythms, Jennifer Ackerman, science writing, Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream, VABook08, Virginia Festival of the Book