Sunday, January 11, 2009

Sleepmailing?


We have all heard of sleepwalking. But, sleep-e-mailing? You've got to love the way the doctors have described this behavior: “complex nonviolent cognitive behavior.”

Here's a sequence of things the patient managed to do while sleepwalking:

... while staying at a relative’s house, she started the computer, used a password to log on to the operating system, loaded software to reach the e-mail service and then used her username and password to access the e-mail system.

And sent (at least) three e-mails! Here's an interesting legal implication:

... it poses a challenge to the accepted notion that sleepwalking is confined to activities involving gross motor movements, with minimal cognitive activity. Until now, we have been able to take comfort in our understanding of our own sleepwalking as an impersonal phenomenon. [...] Legal doctrine is based on this same notion. Sleepwalkers have been acquitted of criminal felony charges by basing their defense on the concept of “noninsane automatism.”

2 Comments:

  1. Pratik Ray said...

    that's cool. The closest thing to this that I have seen is sleep messaging, when a classmate of mine while sleeping kept pressing send to the same number (which was of another student in our class). We counted a total 209 messages before we gave up counting.

  2. Anonymous said...

    So, "sleep hackers" and "sleep spammers" can get away with their acts!