Below, some news and notes for Thursday...The guru of the college sleep crusade is James Maas, who over 48 years taught more than 65,000 students in Cornell University's most popular class -- a sleep-focused version of introductory psychology. Maas evangelized to his students and experimented on them as well, asking them to wear sleep-monitoring headbands and showing them magnetic resonance images of the brains of sleep-deprived college students.
"You can see that nothing is going on in their brains," Maas said. "Literally nothing."
Confronting students with such photos, along with hard data on how sleep undermines academic performance, is the most effective way to change behavior, Maas says. Still, he'd like to see colleges do more: ending early classes, sound-proofing and air-conditioning dorms, putting sleep education into the curriculum.
The people most receptive to his message on campus are usually coaches. A few years back, he made his pitch to the Cornell's basketball coach, who stopped morning practices. The next year the Big Red became the first Ivy League team since 1979 to advance to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA men's basketball tournament.
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