Eyespy: May 2005

A new alarm clock that always guarantees a gentle awakening from your slumber has been invented by students at Brown University, Rhode Island, United States. SleepSmart makes sure that you are only roused in the lightest part of your sleep cycle, ensuring you feel refreshed every morning. In sleep you pass through a sequence of states - light sleep, deep sleep, and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep - that repeat about every 90 minutes. The point in the cycle at which you wake can affect how you feel later and may be more important than how long or little you have slept. Being roused during a light phase means you are more likely to wake up perky. Eyespy is impressed but thinks that the perfect alarm clock is one that never rings (New Scientist 2005 Apr 14:24).

The 24 hours “always on” culture is worse for your brain than cannabis. An average worker's IQ, when distracted by telephone calls and emails, falls by twice as much as in cannabis smokers. Glenn Wilson, at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London, found that doziness, lethargy, and inability to focus reached startling levels in a trial of 1100 people for Hewlett Packard. People feel compelled to process each …