Mark’s World Record Bio-Data
In 2021 Mark will attempt to break the Guinness World Record for the longest lecture by speaking for nearly six days and in doing so is raising money for the children’s charity, Barnardo’s. On 26th October 2019 he undertook a warm up lecture at the Norwich Science Festival having been awake for 58 hours! The lecture went superbly well and he now has his sites set on the world record attempt next year.
During his warm up lecture and for the duration of the World Record attempt he will be wearing the MyndPlay EEG device. The device allows for detection of a number of different brain waves but Mark will be tracking the alpha, theta and delta waves in particular. Alpha waves are the 8 to 12Hz oscillations, are the wakeful background rhythm of the brain and will be prominent when Mark is lecturing.Theta waves are the 3 to 8Hz oscillations and occur during the moments between being awake and light sleep.Delta waves are the 0.5 to 3Hz oscillations and occur during deep sleep.
During Mark’s lecture he will present a dominant background rhythm of alpha waves but he will experience micro sleeps during this time even though he seems to be awake. We all experience these during our awake state when we fail to respond to external stimulation without even realising it. You may have been driving and realise you cannot remember the last junction or perhaps when undertaking a tedious task you may find you did it but cannot recall doing the task…you have had a microsleep! According to Linda Ng Boyle, John Tippin and Matthew Rizzo in their paper ‘Driver Performance in the Moments Surrounding a Microsleep’ a microsleep can be identified from an EEG trace when episodes lasting between 3 to 14 second are observed when the theta activity replaces the waking background alpha rhythm. Mark will need to stay awake but by comparing theta and alpha wave values it is possible to spot when he has had a microsleep.