Cognitive shuffling: a mental trick to help you quiet racing thoughts and fall asleep [Video]

When Dr. Luc Beaudoin was an undergraduate student nearly 40 years ago, he often had trouble falling asleep on Sunday nights and was eager to find a solution.He found inspiration in a cognitive psychology class he was taking and a professor’s theory regarding visual motion detection, Beaudoin, now a cognitive scientist, said. Visual motion detection refers to the visual system’s ability to perceive and process motion based on changing patterns of light on the retina.”I thought to myself: If I can understand the human brain’s ‘sleep onset control system,’ I could perhaps devise a technique to trick the brain into falling asleep,” Beaudoin, who is also an adjunct professor of education at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, said via email. That technique was cemented as “cognitive shuffling” by 2009, when he was 41 and experiencing another bout of difficulty initially falling asleep or falling back asleep after waking up …