Nemuri: Cognitive Shuffle

It's 3am. You're tired. You're wide awake. And your mind won't stop. Nemuri is a sleep app you don't look at. Open it, press one button, turn the screen off. Ten seconds from opening it to lying in the dark — and then a calm voice starts reading you things to picture, one at a time. A wooden spoon. A harbour. A folded map. A red bulb. You picture each one for a moment, then let it go. There's nothing to follow, nothing to solve, and nowhere for your thoughts to run. A worry needs a thread. Unrelated pictures give it none. BASED ON THE COGNITIVE SHUFFLE The cognitive shuffle is a technique developed by cognitive scientist Dr Luc Beaudoin at Simon Fraser University. The idea is that picturing a series of unrelated items interrupts the connected, purposeful thinking that keeps you lying awake. Done unaided, it means thinking up the items yourself — which is its own kind of effort at 3am. Nemuri does that part for you. THE LIST IT READS FROM This is the part that took the longest. 2,345 things to picture, every one of them checked against published psycholinguistic ratings and selected for low emotional arousal. Concrete enough to picture, and neutral enough that nothing on the list can set you overthinking. Consecutive items are never related to each other, so there's no thread to link them into a story. Around ten nights of listening before one comes round again. TEN SECONDS IN The screen goes black and stays black. Lock the phone and the audio carries on. Set how long it runs, and whether to leave five or eight seconds between items. That's every setting there is. No library, no menus, and no sleep score in the morning. HOW TO USE IT Get into bed, start it, put the phone down. Close your eyes and picture whatever you hear. Don't try hard — a loose, half-formed image is the whole point. If your mind wanders off, come back at the next item. WHAT IT DOESN'T DO No account, ever. No ads, no notifications, no streaks. Nothing collected, nothing sent anywhere. Works with no signal. No subscription. It isn't a cure. It's somewhere to put your mind. Nemuri is not a medical device and is not a treatment for insomnia or any other condition. If sleep problems persist, please speak to your GP.