UWC Library Talk with Annabel Abbs - The Female Night Brain & Why it Matters (Member's Event)

Name: UWC Library Talk with Annabel Abbs - The Female Night Brain & Why it Matters (Member's Event)
Start: 2024-10-09T18:30:00+01:00
Location: The University Women's Club, 2 Audley Square, W1K 1DB London, United Kingdom

Schedule

Wed Oct 09 2024 at 06:30 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

The University Women's Club, 2 Audley Square, W1K 1DB London, United Kingdom | London, EN

New research suggests that the brain works differently at night, and history bears this out - for women wakeful nights were often a time for themselves - to write, learn, create - rather than a time of insomniac anxiety.
Now scientists have found that the female brain at night might be less inhibited and more creative. In this talk, award-winning author Annabel Abbs discusses the women who embraced their sleepless nights to make art, write, track wildlife, walk and study the stars, starting with Enheduanna 26 centuries BC and running through to Virginia Woolf, Vera Rubin and Louise Bourgeois. Four years of research into the female nocturnal brain (for her new Times Book of the Week, Sleepless: Discovering the Power of the Night Self) revealed a way of thinking fostered by darkness that we may be losing. But can we retrieve it? New research from Newnham College also suggests that women are resilient to poor sleep – and that we have less to fear from wakeful nights than headlines suggest. So what can history’s night spinners teach us? Annabel shares the little-known nocturnal secrets of dozens of women who found their greatest inspiration as the world slept around them.