James B. Maas, a social psychologist who in books and lectures was an evangelist for the many health benefits of a good night’s sleep — or even a short power nap at work — died on June 23 in Charlevoix, Mich. He was 86.
His wife, Nancy Neaher Maas, said he died of heart failure in their summer home. Their primary residence was in Frisco, Texas.
Professor Maas taught an introductory psychology course at Cornell University each fall for nearly 50 years. It became so popular that it had to be moved from a lecture hall to an auditorium that could seat more than 1,000 students.
In 1969, five years after starting the course, he said that he began to add the findings of sleep research — mostly done by others — to his course. He had been inspired to explore the psychology and dynamics of sleep while making a film about the psychiatry professor Dr. William Dement, a pioneering sleep researcher at Stanford University; Professor Maas was riveted by one student’s recollection of a pre-dawn dream during REM (rapid eye movement) sleep.
“I was so fascinated by watching this one episode that I said to myself by the time morning came, ‘I’m going to spend the rest of my professional life studying sleep,’” he said on a 2017 GDA Speakers podcast. “I was just trying to make a short film for my class, because sleep is a soporific topic, and I’m talking to very tired kids. So I wanted to jazz it up a bit by showing a film, and that one night changed my life.”
Professor Maas surveyed his students about their sleep habits, and he devoted part of each semester to what happens during sleep, how sleep affects people and why so many don’t get enough of it. In his view, sleep was as critical as nutrition and exercise.
“It was known here as a course that had more sleep in it than any other psychology course, no surprise given that it was his special interest,” Thomas D. Gilovich, a longtime Cornell psychology professor, said in an interview.
Professor Maas became the sleep maven of Cornell; a regular on the speaker circuit; a corporate consultant; a producer of documentaries about sleep (and other topics, including drunken driving); and the author of books like “Power Sleep: The Revolutionary Program That Prepares Your Mind for Peak Performance,” written with his research assistants Megan L. Wherry, David J. Axelrod, Jennifer A. Blumin and Barbara R. Hogan (1998).
Professor Maas preached that chronic sleep deprivation could lead to Type II diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity; that people who get enough sleep think more sharply; and that working through bleariness and fatigue is foolish. He estimated that about one-third of Americans don’t get enough sleep, and that adolescents and young adults need at least nine hours of sleep but rarely get more than six.
And while he may not have coined the term “power nap,” for a 15- to 20-minute snooze at work, he helped popularize both the concept and the expression.
“The process of sleep, if given adequate time and the proper environment, provides tremendous power,” he wrote in “Power Sleep.” “It restores, rejuvenates, and energizes the body and brain.”
Sleep, he added, “is not a vast wasteland of inactivity.”
James Beryl Maas was born on Aug. 9, 1938, in Detroit. His father, Royal, owned two women’s apparel stores in Flint, and his mother, Mary (Weiner) Maas, was a classical pianist and piano teacher.
In 1960, he received a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. At Cornell, his studies in social psychology earned him a master’s degree in 1963 and a Ph.D. in 1966.
He began teaching the psychology course at Cornell in 1964 and developed a reputation as a dynamic speaker who illustrated psychological concepts with film clips, slides, animation and Power Point. He demonstrated elements of behavioral dynamics with clips from “Candid Camera,” the long-running television series on which Allen Funt, the creator and original host, used hidden cameras to capture unsuspecting people in unusual situations. In one clip that depicted the power of conformity, a man enters an elevator with three other passengers, all of whom are inexplicably facing the back of the car; soon, he follows their lead.
Professor Maas told The New York Times in 1999 that “when one removes the canned laughter” from the show, “even the funniest of scenes becomes a serious object of study for students who have been adequately prepared to note specific phenomena.”
In 1964, Professor Maas persuaded Mr. Funt, a 1934 Cornell graduate, to give the educational rights to “Candid Camera” to the school. Mr. Funt also donated the show’s archives.
Rebecca Robbins, a student of Professor Maas’s who collaborated with him on the book “Sleep for Success! Everything You Must Know About Sleep but Are Too Tired to Ask” (2010), said in an interview: “Until I met Jim and took the class, I hadn’t thought much about sleep. As a high school student, I struggled with sleep.”
Dr. Robbins, a sleep scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, recalled that Professor Maas’s lectures at Bailey Hall began with music and the dimming of lights.
“Every lecture,” she said, “seemed like a performance.”
An estimated 65,000 students took his psychology course.
He also taught an elective course on the psychology of visual arts, which sprang from his interest in photography.
In 1995, Professor Maas’s star dimmed somewhat when Cornell administrators upheld a faculty ethics committee finding that he had behaved unprofessionally in his relationship with four female students, and that his behavior constituted sexual harassment. Three of them said that he had repeatedly kissed and hugged them and made sexually suggestive comments. All four said that he had bought them gifts. He told The Ithaca Journal that they had mistaken “hugs and kisses of social greeting” for sexual harassment.
Professor Maas sued Cornell for $1.5 million, asserting that the procedures used by Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences to review the sexual harassment accusations against him were invalid and violated his employment contract and his relationship with the university. In 1999, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that the school hadn’t violated his contract, but he proclaimed victory because Cornell had changed the procedures for handling sexual harassment complaints in 1996.
“The kangaroo court procedures that found me ‘in effect’ guilty have been totally abandoned by the college faculty,” he told The Ithaca Journal.
The case did not derail his teaching career at Cornell, which ended with his retirement in 2011. He stayed busy after that as a speaker, consultant and endorser of like the Dr. Maas Comfort Gusset Pillow for United Feather & Down and a Sleep Enhancing Headband for Dreem Health, a sleep-care company.
Other ventures over the years included a video in 2001 about sleep deprivation among teenagers called “Who Needs Sleep?,” which received funding from the Simmons mattress company, and, that same year, a children’s book, “Remmy and the Brain Train: Traveling Through the Land of Good Sleep,” with illustrations by Guy Danella, about a boy who struggles to get enough sleep.
In addition to his wife, Professor Maas is survived by his sons, Justin and Daniel; a sister, Janet Robinson; and two grandchildren.
Professor Maas was himself a good sleeper.
“I try to get eight hours, midnight to 8,” he told The Phillipian, the student newspaper of Phillips Academy, in 2012. “I try to power nap at every opportunity. When I don’t get eight, I can tell it in my lecturing, I stumble upon things. I know the energy needed to be a teacher. And it makes a heck of a difference in my golf game, and in my tennis game.”
Richard Sandomir, an obituaries reporter, has been writing for The Times for more than three decades.
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