Thread by @DrMatthewSweet

Fascinated to read in @Londoners_Diary that someone has put my criticisms of Stolen Focus to @johannhari101 and that he replied by saying that the "attention crisis" is real because "we sleep less than we did in the past". standard.co.uk/news/londoners…

Sorry to sound like a stuck record, but this is another issue on which Stolen Focus cherry-picks and exaggerates. Sleep deprivation is bad for you, that's obvious. But is there really a historic decline in the number of hours we spend asleep?

In this melange of stats (some plucked from Gallup polls), Johann acknowledges that there is "a scientific debate about the extent our sleep loss" - but he doesn't tell you about evidence that points in the opposite direction - that we're actually sleeping more than we once did.

Here's a paper on the subject. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

And another. There's a reason why those ads on the tube that ask - "do you feel tired all the time" - are so seductive. But just because something feels true doesn't mean it's right. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…

I think historians can help here. How can sleep be in sharp decline when working hours, historically, have also declined? Think of those unsleeping miners described by Orwell. Or think of the mysterious patterns of the medieval night.

I don't know how much more I really have to say about this, but here's my thought for now. If books are published that attempt to pathologist the experience of modernity - to tell you that everyday life is reducing your brainpower - they need better evidence than this.

Anyway, more things we might have discussed had he turned up to the studio.

Pathologise, sorry!