Image
Mapping The Darkness

Mapping The Darkness

Community Room 302

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

The definitive story of the scientists who set out to answer two questions: “Why do we sleep?” and "How can we sleep better?”

A century ago, sleep was considered a state of nothingness—even a primitive habit that we could learn to overcome. Then, an immigrant scientist and his assistant spent a month in the depths of a Kentucky cave, making nationwide headlines and thrusting sleep science to the forefront of our consciousness.

In the 1920s, Nathaniel Kleitman founded the world’s first dedicated sleep lab at the University of Chicago, where he subjected research participants (including himself) to a dizzying array of tests and tortures. But the tipping point came in 1938, when his cave experiment awakened the general public to the unknown—and vital—world of sleep. Kleitman went on to mentor the talented but troubled Eugene Aserinsky, whose discovery of REM sleep revealed the astonishing activity of the dreaming brain, and William Dement, a jazz-bass playing revolutionary who became known as the father of sleep medicine. Dement, in turn, mentored the brilliant maverick Mary Carskadon, who uncovered an epidemic of sleep deprivation among teenagers, and launched a global movement to fight it.

Award-winning journalist Kenneth Miller weaves together science and history to tell the story of four outsider scientists who took sleep science from fringe discipline to mainstream obsession through spectacular experiments, technological innovation, and single-minded commitment. Readers will walk away with a comprehensive understanding of sleep and why it affects so much of our lives.

Copies of Mapping The Darkness will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of a gift from the Cheryl Rosen Weston Estate.

Kenneth Miller

Kenneth Miller

Kenneth Miller is an award-winning writer and editor based in Los Angeles. His work has appeared in Time, Life, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Discover, Mother Jones, Salon, Reader’s Digest, Elle, More, Ladies’ Home Journal, Parade, Prevention, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and many other publications. His new book, Mapping the Darkness: The Visionary Scientists Who Unlocked the Mysteries of Sleep, will be published in October 2023.

Recent Book
Mapping the Darkness