“The thing about sleep that is maddening is we don’t know what it’s for,” Paul Shaw says with a hint of frustration. Rather than truly grasping the role sleep plays in our complicated biology, the neuroscientist has been stuck merely describing it. He’s not alone.
But Shaw doesn’t just want to understand sleep for sleep’s sake. He wants to uncover the mysteries of sleep because he thinks it not only has the potential to keep us healthy, but to fix what’s broken.