Recently, I’ve been blogging mostly about my cognitive productivity R&D and Discontinuities: Love, Art, Mind. However, I’m also actively doing R&D on sleep onset, insomnolence and perturbance (“emotion”). My colleagues and I will present three posters at the World Sleep Congress which will be held in Vancouver in September.

These items present:

1. My revised somnolent information processing theory (on which the current and an upcoming new version of the cognitive shuffle are based).
2. A systematic review of pre-sleep mentation. (The cognitive shuffle is based on my theory in this space).
3. A reflective examination of a recent empirical research project of ours on insomnolence.

For more information, see this blog post on mySleepButton.com or my publication page at Simon Fraser University.

The abstracts will be published in a Sleep Medicine journal supplement. I will also publish the abstracts and related materials at SFU Summit (open access).

Unity in diversity

While all these research projects may seem quite different from the outside, in fact they all stem from the same integrative design-oriented research approach to, and theory of, the human mind. The current approach is an update to what I presented in my first Cognitive Productivity book and to my Ph.D. thesis (PDF) in the Cognition Affect project. The latter project was led by Aaron Sloman at Sussex and the University of Birmingham (1991-2008). The approach is summarized in the first poster mentioned above. I expound upon it in two research papers in progress.

One of the major postulates of my theory of sleep onset and insomnolence is that insomnolence is due to perturbance. For more on perturbance see this early paper of ours,
Towards a Design-Based Analysis of Emotional Episodes and my update at AISB-2017.