Every now and then I stop at a bulletin board and read the multitude of posters on it. Because it is summer, this is much easier to do than during the school year because there are very few posters during the summer. So today, looking at a bulletin board, I was surprised to find 4 posters soliciting volunteers for a sleep study, and not the same sleep study, but 4 different sleep studies.
The headlines on the posters are along the lines of “Do you avoid sleep like the plague?” and “Do you get less than 6 hours of sleep a night?” followed inevitably by something along the lines of “We want you for our sleep study.”
It really hit me that these posters were designed for people who do not sleep much, ie people at MIT, be they students or faculty. It is a tad unnerving that these posters were put on bulletin boards at MIT for a reason, because they thought they could appeal to more people who lack sleep at a place like this. And the headline “do you avoid sleep like the plague” … I don’t even have any words for that except “wow.”