Early last year, I had a conversation with a friend about a spell of intractable insomnia I was going through at the time – a condition that has afflicted me, on and off, since early adulthood. My friend said that his own sleep had over the last while been much improved, in both quality and quantity, by a few habits he had lately developed. The most notable of these was the practice of going outside as soon as possible after waking and absorbing 15 or 20 minutes of early-morning sunlight. It had to do, I believe, with a spike in cortisol caused by UV rays, and with the resetting of the brain’s inner “sleep clock”. He had, he said, picked up this practice – along with an array of other highly specific-sounding lifestyle and health tweaks – from a podcast called Huberman Lab, hosted by the Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman.

I was intrigued (and sleep-deprived) enough to start listening. At first I was sceptical. There was a lot of talk of supplements, for one thing; Huberman begins his podcasts with a lengthy paean to his sponsor, the startlingly expensive dietary elixir AG1, along with a rotating cast of theoretically health-improving products and services – meditation apps; cold-water plunge baths; mattresses that track your sleep; some kind of high-protein venison delivery concern. But it didn’t take long for me to be drawn in.

My friend had described Huberman as “reassuringly boring”, and although this doesn’t quite do justice to his skill as a science communicator, it does go some way toward accounting for his appeal. His affect is wonkish without being impenetrable, and he has a gift for simultaneously condensing and simplifying complex bodies of........

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