From the inbox:
Expand your mind. Gain exposure to new ideas. Meet potential collaborators. Participate in stimulating exchanges with other faculty sharing your research interests. You can do all this and more at the Researcher Rendezvous: The Human Body from 3:30-5 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 26, 2007. This informal gathering provides a venue for faculty members conducting human body-related research to convey information about their research to other faculty. Complimentary beverages and snacks will be provided.
A partial list of featured areas of research and researchers includes:
- ...
- Ever wonder how sleep deprivation affects your decision-making skills? Discuss the impact of sleep loss on risky choices and other decision-making components with Dr. David Dickinson (Economics).
As part of my constant effort to improve myself and help humankind, I wore one of the mad scientist's (I call him, simply, David) sleep watches last week. To the right you can see the results (click on the thumbnail for a larger image). The blue areas are sleep periods and the black spikes are active periods.
First of all, you can see that I didn't sleep at all on night 4, yet the sleep watch didn't register any activity. As it turns out, night 4 was bath night. I took off the watch and forgot to put it on in the excitement of the UK vs USC football game and a "couple" double IPAs (I didn't realize these were 8.6% alcohol until 6:15 the next morning).
Ignoring night 4, my average sleep time is 398.50 minutes. According to my calculations that is about 6.64 hours each night. Not too bad since I normally wake up after 7 hours sleep without an alarm. More disturbingly, I average 41 "wake bouts" each night and the average wake time during those bouts is 1.73 minutes. Night 7 was the worst night. It involved 3 major events (2 bad dreams and 1 diarrhea) amongst 3 people (aged 3, 5 and 44). My percentage wake time increased by 63% to 22%!
Some of David's research can be found here. Apply David et al's conclusions to myself, as only the totally self-absorbed are wont to do, relative to days after nights 1, 2, 3, 5 and 6, on the day after night 7 "... [John was] willing to take more risk than [he] ordinarily would when [he was] considering a gain, but less risk than [he] ordinarily would when [he was] considering a loss."
And, I'm sure you are wondering, that spike of activity on day 7 involved some sawing off of some monkey grass. Monkey grass: you can't pull it up, you can't dig it up, god doesn't answer prayers for it to go away. So, I used the hand saw and then sprayed it with weed killer. I win!
