Matthew Walker, Ph.D., on sleep – Part I of III: Dangers of poor sleep, Alzheimer's risk, mental health, memory consolidation, and more.

**Peter Attia** (0:04)
Hey everyone, welcome to The Peter Attia Drive. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
The drive is a result of my hunger for optimizing performance, health, longevity, critical thinking, along with a few other obsessions along the way. I've spent the last several years working with some of the most successful top performing individuals in the world. And this podcast is my attempt to synthesize what I've learned along the way to help you live a higher quality, more fulfilling life. If you enjoy this podcast, you can find more information on today's episode and other topics at peterattiamd.com.
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Again, the podcast will remain free to all, but my hope is that many of you will find enough value in, one, the podcast itself, and two, the additional content exclusive for members to support us at a level that makes sense for you. I want to thank you for taking a moment to listen to this. If you learn from and find value in the content I produce, please consider supporting us directly by signing up for a monthly subscription. Welcome to the kickoff of this Matthew Walker three-part series on sleep. This is one of the topics we are asked about the most, and I think this will be a fan favorite. This series of podcasts will be released over three weeks, with this one being the first. Now at the end of the series, we're going to take questions for a follow-up AMA with Matthew. Asking questions on the AMA forum and listening to the AMA podcast with Matthew, along with all AMAs, will only be available to subscribers. So if you haven't signed up yet, you can do so now at peterattiamd.com forward slash subscribe. My guest this week is Matthew Walker, professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. Matthew earned his undergraduate degree and PhD in neurophysiology in London, and subsequently became a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School before moving to Berkeley. His research examines the impact of sleep on human brain function in healthy and diseased populations. To date, he has published over 100 scientific studies. He has received numerous funding awards from the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and he's a fellow with the National Academy of Sciences. He's the author of the international bestseller, Why We Sleep, which also happens to be the favorite book of my not yet two-year-old son. He holds many patents covering various consumer-based sleep recordings, sleep tracking, and sleep simulation. He's a sleep scientist at Google, where he helps the scientific exploration of sleep and health and disease. He is also an enormous fan of Formula One and My Hero, Ayrton Senna. And in the third part of this installment, we actually spend quite a bit of time discussing this. Here in the first part of this series, we discuss the relationship between sleep, dementia, and Alzheimer's disease. The four pillars of sleep, sleep stages, measurements, and the overall importance of sleep. The lack of sleep and dangers of drowsy driving. And how the conversation of sleep has changed over the past several years. So without further delay, here is the first installment of my three part series with Professor Matthew Walker.