Carl Zimmer Sleep Summary

Carl Zimmer’s “The Purpose of Sleep? To Forget, Scientists Say” is a persuasive scientific piece in which Zimmer uses different lab experiment results to support scientists’ claim that the purpose of sleep is to forget, hence the article’s title. Zimmer’s target audience is science enthusiast and Zimmer is effective in addressing this group of audience by utilizing scientific terms as well as triggering the audience’s thought process. Although Zimmer uses credible lab experiments to support his persuasive argument, his article is still lackluster because he fails to elaborate his supporting points and connect them back to the main argument. It is quite clear that Zimmer is effective in addressing his target audience which are science enthusiasts.

However, he fails to elaborate on how these experiments connect to his main point. Under the representation of material criteria, Zimmer’s supporting details are not consistent. In the first lab experiment example where Dr. Tonomi and Dr. Cirelli observed synapses to test their theory that sleep helps the brain cut back connections to reduce brain’s “noise”. In the second experiment, researchers found that mice who slept had smaller synapses than mice who stayed awake. In another experiment where two groups of mice are given a memory test. One group of mice slept normal while the other group gets chemical injected into them to prevent their synapses from getting smaller during sleep. The result was that ordinary mice performed better than the mice who got injected. Zimmer did not further explain why these experiments are important or how it connects back to his main point. For example, Zimmer includes another researcher’s claim that contradicts with these experiments’ objective. The researcher claims that it could be difficult to tell whether the changes in the brain at night are caused by sleep or by the biological clock. Therefore, by including this excerpt, Zimmer’s whole supportive evident are no longer consistent with one another. Thus, Zimmer fails to persuade the audience under the representation of material