@nathan: I don't believe in those sound machines at all. I use a white noise machine at night, and that works great. It cuts out the noise happening around me, and it doesn't distract. The problem with the other sounds is that they're inconsistent and your mind gets used to them and knows what to expect. Like, you'll find yourself anticipating a certain bird chirp because you remember what it sounds like from the night before. That isn't relaxing your mind -- that's keeping it active.
Anyway, today at the IBM Impact conference I heard about a company called BodyMedia that has a product for monitoring sleep that seems much more sophisticated than this. I'm curious to learn more about it. I don't think it involves an iPhone or the bizarre notion that it can impact your dreams.
KMT, thanks! I'm glad you enjoyed it. And, yes, I would thinking shutting one's phone would be ideal before bed. The phone's presence on my mattress made me very aware and made it harder for me to sleep. I'm sure the hype around this app will die down pretty quickly.
I feel your pain. I've never used this app but I've used those audio programs that play water, and birds tweeting, and the churps of crickets. I too got very little sleep.
Great v-blog Nicole. Very funny! I don't see how such an app could actually be popular, but I guess this is this app's 5 minutes of fame. And when it comes to sleep, don't researchers recommend shutting down your phone and disconnecting to get optimal rest??
Yes, Nicole, you always have to read the small print. And if you succeed in having the most beautiful dreams of your life I will be waiting for a Vblog update. :)
Are you sure you didn't have to take some sort of hallucinatory magic pill before going to sleep to let the app work as promised? Look at this tweet from a DreamOn app happy user:
"@DreamONapp Weird. Weird. Weird! Didnt "hear" the app, but was in a field. Until it turned into a volcano! So brightly coloured. Awesome!!"
Ha! Thanks for the backstory on Richard, Kim! I should add that the only dreams I remember having this week at all -- in whatever few minutes of sleep I got -- were unpleasant ones. So if that was also a function of the app, then I have another reason to be grateful.
What a very feeble piece of app design. By the way, the wake-up function sounds like something we used to call "an alarm clock." The brain is adept at misconstruing external influences on dreams, so playing a soundtrack of birds is as likely to put you in a torture chamber as a pleasant garden; anyone can experiment with this by falling alseep with the radio on. It gets surreal pretty fast.
As for Richard Wiseman being a psychologist:
Richard started his working life as a professional magician, is a Member of the Inner Magic Circle, and holds Britain's only Chair in the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire.
Yes, he's had academic papers published - on subjects like parapsychology, ESP, hauntings and spoon-bending. Let's just say, he's not in the mainstream of the subject.
Nicole and Kim have heard the news that Google's new mobile OS, "Jelly Bean," has a voice assistant that's poised to defeat their precious Siri. It's time for another test!
Apple's newest commercial features actress Zooey Deschanel having her requests for weather, soup, and music easily fulfilled by Siri. Nicole and Kim are putting those same questions to the test.
At the IBM Pulse conference, executives urged attendees to stop being guided by hype and start thinking about the cloud and other enterprise "toys" in terms of their own business outcomes.
Marissa Mayer at Yahoo has come out with her strategy on turning the company around: culture, company, calibration, and compensation. But Yahoo needs to have a technical approach to the mobile cloud opportunity, not a management theory lesson.
The proposal to make more IPv4 addresses available through a buy-and-sell exchange is dumb and won't work. We've fiddled on this issue long enough; it's time to just make the switch to IPv6 and be done with it!
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
