Profile

Hi! I’m John (he/him) and I’m a cognitive psychologist/lecturer interested in the question why do we sleep? 😴

Right now I’m living in Leicester with my Fiancée Natalie, and at the moment we are dog-sitting Penny and Max for her parents while they are travelling.

Penny (left) and Max (right)

When I’m not working I enjoy going to the gym, competing in outdoor obstacle courses (like below), Videogames (Mainly PES, Fifa, and Football Manager right now, but I always make time for Classic Pokémon), or just thinking of random questions I want an answer to.

Competing in Total Warrior in 2017

Over UK lockdown I decided it was an opportunity to expand my knowledge, so I’m proud to say over the last 12 months I have watched every single episode of The Simpsons ever made. 705 episodes. Was it good? No. Could I have predicted that Season 31 was bad? Yes. But a key part of being a scientist is testing your predictions. 

Interesting facts about me

• I was diagnosed with ADHD, Dyslexia, and Dyspraxia at the age of 23
• I’m the first in my family to go to University (and have never left)
• I have 100h+ of tattoo work on my body. I can only say 100h+ as I lost count

My day can vary massively depending on whether I’m running some research or not as sleep research isn’t something you can just throughout the day

Non-research days

On a non-research day, I wake up around 5-6am, head to the gym and spend roughly 1h there to help me wake up. After that around 7:30-8 I head into the office.

When not actively researching I spend most of my time teaching undergraduate classes focused around Psychology. Roughly I give one hour talks on topics like Sleep/Dreams, problem solving, and perception, but alongside side these I run smaller seminars where 10-12 students and myself have a discussion about research areas. Beyond this I’m mainly reading articles on the latest research in my area or starting to write up my own backlog of studies. Once I finish I head home and just try to relax, primarily through video games right now just to distract me. Maybe take Max and Penny for a walk if Natalie hasn’t already.

Research days

The days where I’m actively researching are my favourite. This is when I am doing what I feel I am best at. When we run our sleep studies we naturally need to do them at night (it’s when we all sleep!), so my day is completely swapped.

At 6pm I leave the house and head into the office.

6:30pm-8:30pm is spent getting participants comfortable in their ‘bedroom’. We have a small room with a single bed, wardrobe, nice rug, just a nice space.

Example of our bedroom

While preparing participants for the experiment it’s a great opportunity to get to know them a bit more. Often it goes into discussing the weirdest/craziest dream they have, what it all means, etc.

8:30pm: Depending on what experiment we are running, I leave them to just be on their own or run a quick experiment on them, usually just showing them some words that they need to remember or if we are running a problem solving game, giving them something like Angry Birds/Humans Fall Flat. At around 9pm I leave them to start to sleep and be there to wake them up at 7am.

9pm-7am: During this time I have to be awake and making sure they are ok, but it’s quite a boring period, so I do a bit of work, or if I’m particularly bored watch Netflix (I watched all of Game of Thrones during testing), play on my Switch (mainly Football Manager- FC United of Manchester Hall of Famer), just really anything to keep me awake.

At 7am, I wake up the participant and we just have a bit of a chat to wake them up a little. Talk about if they had any dreams, what they remember, etc. Once they are feeling a bit more award I get them to complete part 2 of the experiment. Once that is done I send them on their way and begin to clean up. After that I head home and finally get to sleep!