I’m a cognitive neuroscientist in the department of Cognitive Sciences at UC Irvine. I would like to tell you a personal story that illustrates both the central theme of my research, which is to understand the importance of sleep, and one of the critical health problems that we face in our culture today, namely that medical science is in “sleep denial”. When my son was one year old he had emergency brain surgery to fix an arachnoid cyst at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles (CHLA). I am very gra...