Evidently, you may often be in worse shape during the first few minutes after waking up than you might have been when you retired the previous evening.
An amusing item from CNN this morning: "For a short period, at least, the effects of sleep inertia may be as bad as or worse than being legally drunk," said researcher Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Evidently, parts of the cortex do not rouse as quickly as other parts of the brain, hence a potentially (quite literally) groggy degree of impairment. This explains, in part, why I've managed over the years to make every conceivable mistake one can think of getting the coffee maker started... ...from forgetting the coffee, the water, the filter, the grinder, right through to the "on" switch ...before those higher cortical functions had woken up and kicked in...
What's next, holding the sandman accountable to dram shop laws?
