Dr. Richard Davidson

And sleepiness is often something reported when people are meditating, and particularly in the early stages of practice.

You know, I've dealt with sleepiness a lot and particularly before I changed my routine and when I gave up the alarm clock because I was getting too little sleep.

Yeah, exactly.

And I felt it and I struggled with it.

So I have this meditation teacher, Mingyur Rinpoche, who one of the things he's taught is sleepiness meditation.

And sleepiness meditation is simply to be aware of sleepiness.

Just be aware of sleepiness and don't try to fight it.

Just simply notice what is sleepiness?

How is it feeling?

And investigate it with curiosity.

And that completely changed things for me.

Exactly.

My conjecture is that our ability to look at our minds is way more developed than in any other species.

And there may be some rudimentary kinds of meta-awareness

in other species and some scientists have suggested that it may be correlated with successful performance on the self-test, recognizing yourself in the mirror.

There's a recent report of elephants passing the self-test.

Yeah.

And that's an interesting story.

They did this actually in the Bronx Zoo in New York and they had to construct a mirror that was the size of an elephant.

So they put rouge on the trunk and they expose the elephant to the mirror.