Antonio Sortino
When he was in need of inspiration, the inventor Thomas Edison used to take a nap in a chair while holding a metal ball in each hand. The moment he dropped off, the balls would drop too and crash to the floor, jolting him awake. Edison claimed that this allowed him to capture creative ideas that had fleetingly bubbled up into his semi-consciousness as he fell asleep.
The state Edison was chasing is known as the sleep-onset period (SOP), a little-studied phase of the sleep-wake cycle. Once seen as merely a brief interlude between wakefulness and slumber, it is now…
