At 8:30 a.m., a bleary-eyed young woman wearing a bright orange bandanna and fuzzy, gray slippers is staring at a computer screen. When a number appears in a small box, she hits the space bar. She does it again and again, sometimes quickly and other times much more slowly.
“She’s very sleepy. She has a lot of lapses,” whispers Namni Goel, a sleep researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.