Not right now, of course. On Sunday morning, from midnight to 8:30 am, I’m going to be at RPI’s Lighting Research Center. No caffiene after 10 am Saturday, and then during the study they’re going to be monitoring my heart and brain activity, and periodically having me fill out a questionnaire about lighting levels and how sleepy I feel. I can bring whatever I want to keep myself busy, and they provide snacks and drinks.
They’re essentially paying me (at better than $10/hour) to do what college students do best: stay up all night and consume munchies. Okay, so maybe that statement would be more accurate if they were providing alcohol, but I take what I can get and don’t ask questions.
I’ll be bringing my laptop, so if I have an internet connection there (very doubtful) I’ll be on the SDMB, reporting live from the LRC. If not, I’ll just tell you all how it went afterwards.
The current plan is to put enough Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes on my laptop for a 12-hour marathon (I have the whole series on my 250 GB external). Once I start watching a TNG ep, I’m with it all the way, which is why I’m not worried in the least about actually falling asleep during this study.
I tell ya, life sucks. I stay up all night every night, because I work nights. It’s not worth it to reset my body to daylight hours for two or three days off.
On my off nights, I’d sign up for as many studies like that as I could - not doing anything, awake anyway, 180 days per year off, hell, that’s a lot of extra income
Send some night / sleep - deprivation studies on up to Canada, would ya?
Did you verify with the LRC folks that bringing a laptop to watch movies is okay? I’d potentially be concerned that constantly looking at an additional light source might be a confounding factor. (Granted, it’s not a real bright light source, but still…)
Now if you could only find a sleep study on Monday that would pay you another 100 smackers to zonk out for 12 hours, follow that up with a quick visit to the local sperm bank for another hundred, and then volunteer for a taste testing at Sarah Lee…well, life would be good.
I once did a college study where I had to trick people to cheat on a test. They paid me $20 and after 10 tries, I only got one person to actually cheat on the test.
Well. Now I’m back from my little excursion into sleep deprivation. It wasn’t quite as easy as staying up all night and munching. I’d be in a regularly lit room relaxing for a while, then they’d actually connect the electrodes on my head and start recording while I alternately stared at an X on the wall or kept my eyes closed. Then, for 40 minutes I’d have to keep my head in a chinrest in a blue-lit box while I did an error-catching test with seven character long sequence of letters and numbers. That was the most uncomfortable part: sitting in that chinrest for 40 minutes. Then they’d do the eyes open and closed thing with a tiny little X below the screen in the box. Then I’d go back to relaxing some more. And the electrodes were obviously on all night despite being used sparingly, so they’d fall off a lot, and I still have the gunk in my hair that they used to stick them on.
Okay, so maybe that statement would be more accurate if they were providing alcohol, but I take what I can get and don’t ask questions.
