A short article on the BBC website reports that male drivers are alarmingly prone to "micro-sleeps" -- that is, to "Light sleep that lasts from five to ten seconds during which the brain goes to sleep involuntarily." Micro-sleeps are, by their nature, dangerous interludes of unplanned oblivion, ones that we only perceive retroactively, usually by means of the sudden jolt or head jerk with which the micro-sleeper abruptly resurfaces into consciousness from a slumber that has taken him or her by surprise. Without this physical shuddering into wakefulness, the mind would not know that it had slept, because, as the sleep scientist Jim Horne puts it, "Sleep has to last beyond a minute or two for your brain to remember it."
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