Just added to my daily reads: Mind Hacks, the companion blog to Tom Stafford and Matt Webb’s book Mind Hacks, recently released by O’Reilly.
Full of fascinating brain play (literally), like this post on how we perceive our sleeping habits:
Our own perception of how much we slept during a night can be startlingly inaccurate. Dr Allison Harvey (now of UC Berkley) took insomniacs and measured how much they actually slept during the night. Despite the insomniacs reporting that they had only slept for two or three hours, they had in fact been asleep for an average of 7 hours – only 35 minutes less than a control group who didn’t have any problems sleeping.
This shows that insomniacs (and probably the rest of us) are very bad at judging the time it takes us to get to sleep, and the time we actually are asleep. It also suggests that worrying about sleep, and our beliefs about how we’ve slept, have a big role in the negative affects of what (we believe) is a sleepless night.
I’m looking forward to seeing what else pops up on their weblog, and I will definitely need to pick up the book as soon as I get a chance.
(via Boing Boing)
“This Hollowed Ground” by Legendary Pink Dots, The from the album From Here You’ll Watch the World Go By (1995, 3:04).