Matt Walker: How Sleep Affects Your Emotions Speech Analysis Essay Example

Did you know that the world record for not sleeping is 11 days? In Matt Walker's video “How sleep affects your emotions” he talks about how the lack of sleep affects your emotions. Matt is a professor at the University of California Berkeley he is in the science department there. The author has very little bias in his TED Talk. Matt has published many other works; he has many other TED Talks and he has written some books in his time. Sleep is a topic that he is comfortable with because he is very neutral on his stance on the topic. Matt has some bias leaning toward getting enough sleep because that is the base of his rhetoric.  His purpose is to persuade you to get enough sleep by helping you understand why you need the sleep. Matt uses logos and some pathos  in his video because that is the best way for him to get people to understand it better. 

 Matt Walker is from East Liverpool, United Kingdom he has a degree in neuroscience from the University of Nottingham and a PhD in from Newcastle University in neurochemical pathology. He founded and directed the Center for Human Sleep Science at the UNiversity of California Berkeley. He is a New York Times best selling author for his book “Why we Sleep”. He has served as chief scientist and part of the scientific council for brands like Fitbit or Hello. 

When you get enough sleep your brain functions within the proper range but when you do not get enough sleep the connection between two parts in your brain suffers. Matt talks about two different parts of the brain called the prefrontal cortex which is the CEO of your brain and the amygdala is the center for emotions. Sleep controls your brain to a point because without it your brain does not function within normal ranges. Sleep has effects on your body in many different ways such as your emotions, eating habits, and your reactions to outside forces. Sleep can help prevent or decrease chances of many different diseases, creates better chances of success, longevity of our life, and increases the lifespan of any children that you have. 

Matt Walker presents his argument straight forward and does not leave any room for discussion. He states the facts he found and why they are relevant to what he is talking about. “And as a consequence, the amygdala was responding far more reactively due to a lack of sleep” (Walker 2:25). When he is stating his argument he does not have any room for people to question his logic and process. This makes for a very successful argument because if he would phrase it in a slightly different way saying he thinks or believes something that leads to people thinking that he is  not credible or knows what he is talking about. He uses facts to prove his point because when someone hears facts they are more inclined to believe someone than if he was using more emotional examples. This makes his TED Talk more understandable because he puts everything into terms that anyone watching the video can understand. 

Audience plays a very important role in his video because he intends it for people of all ages and understandings. He not only uses his words in the video he asko uses pictures and moving images that will help people understand what he is talking about. When you are looking at something so in depth in terms of scientific reasoning images help clarify what they are talking about. There are quite a few examples of this in his video. When he is talking about the amygdala, the prefrontal cortex, and how sleep affects them he uses images to help him depict what he is saying. When he is using the images it helps the audience better understand what he means by the terminology he uses. In other scientific studies they make their audience people who have a strong understanding of what they are talking about and they expect them to already have a background understanding of the topic. Matt goes into the TED Talk thinking that his audience has no understanding of what he is talking about and that he needs to explain things or give them a visual aid to help them understand his topic. This helped him become more credible because people are going to be more inclined to watch or read something that they understand. When people are watching or reading something one of the first things they realize is what stance the author took on the subject.

When looking at the video Matt made and reading the transcript of it you could tell right away the stance he took. His beliefs and his study affected his stance which made him take the stance that people need to be getting the proper amount of sleep. The stance he takes is because of the research, degrees, and profession he has. His purpose also affected his stance because he wanted people to understand why he felt the way he did about getting enough sleep. When he took his stance he did not only give his side of the information he also gave the other side. He could have easily just stated why getting enough sleep is better than not getting enough sleep. But Matt gave the other side as well, showing what happens when someone does not get enough sleep. This stance helped him stay credible to the people that were watching the TED Talk. Matt used quite a bit of design work in his video. The design work he used was to help his audience understand what he was talking about and why he was talking about it. 

He formatted his video where he started off explaining everything and what he did in the study he conducted. Once he explained everything he went into connecting the dots so to speak which then made everything make sense. Oftentimes you see videos like this and they do not have the same in depth explanation or detail that Matt put into the video. When someone analyzes the design or media of an article of the video they need to keep in mind why the text was written and how it affects the audience. Matt's video affected the audience because of his use of the video explanation and the design he did to help portray his message. 

When he wrote and recorded the video he used logos and pathos to help him persuade people to get enough sleep. The use of logos came with him giving the statistics that he found while doing the study he conducted. Using logos in this setting made it so that people had fact based information about the topic and not having to just trust that what he was saying was true. He also uses pathos in his video when he is talking about how time might not heal wounds it is sleep. This is the use of pathos because when you hear or read that it emotionally affects how you think about the situation. He uses this rhetoric because it made his video the most effective and it gave him more credibility. If he would have just relied on pathos his video would not have had the credibility it did because there would have been no proof of what he did. 

Overall, Matt used a lot of rhetoric in his video that helped it become more credible and help people have a deeper understanding of his topic. Matt is a very credible author and publisher. He understands the topics that he is doing because he is using the degree that received in college. The way he set up his video led to his audience having a deeper understanding of his topic and being able to trust him more. His use of logos made his argument more credible and sound because he was giving you the facts and not just giving you something to believe. This topic is really shedding light on why people need to take better care of themselves and why they should be getting the proper amount of sleep to help them thrive. This article was very interesting and helped me better understand how my brain works and why my body reacts how it does under more stressful situations.