Seminarcolepsy

Later today I’ll be meeting up with my friend and we’re going to a genomics seminar. Academic science seminars are famous for being a place for naps because they happen late in the afternoon, after your coffee crash, after lunch, after a full day of bench work or staring at a computer screen. The coffee and cookies outside the seminar room do their best to perk you up, but usually they just set you up for a bigger crash. You enter the seminar room, the air is stifling, the room is hot, the lights are low, and the monotone voice and delivery of data are boring…. boring…. boring…. Actually, that last part doesn’t even need to be true. It can be hard to stay alert and awake in the most dynamic presentations on topics of great interest.

For example, I once fell asleep in a seminar given by one of my academic heros. I’d had breakfast with him earlier that morning, and we had a great conversation about each other’s research. He’s pretty well-known in the ecology and evolution field and his work is multidisciplinary, so his talk attracted a large audience that packed the seminar room. I ended up sitting in the back row, against the wall. The seminar started, and it was engaging, but not enough to combat the somniferous facets of the environment. At some point in the lecture, I fell asleep, my head fell backwards and CRACKED against the wall! It instantly woke me up, along with other people that had apparently fallen asleep, and it was loud enough that several people in the room turned around to look in my direction. Embarassing.

But you really can’t be too embarrassed. The phenomenon is pretty general. So general, in fact, that my friend Wendy wrote a song about it called “Seminarcolepsy”. She is quite deft in the art of science pop songcraft, and the lyrics of her song describe the phenomenon much better than I have here. Enjoy!