Once again, as seen here the MacZOTters are trying explicit viral marketing: if enough people include the following text on blogs, they'll get a free $20 Pzizz sleep module and $15 off the Pzizz software you need to use it:

MacZOT.com Fans want Pzizz because 'According to the National Sleep Foundation, sleep deprivation and its effect on work performance may be costing U.S. employers some $18 billion each year in lost productivity. Another study pushes this cost to over $100 billion.' - link to full article

Pzizz is an interesting concept. We know from EEG readings that the human brain generally exhibits four different types of continuous sinusoidal waves, depending on the activity going on at the time. From that, some people assert that if you can present the brain with waves similar to the state that you want to be in, the brain will move towards that state.

You can't necessarily hear waves at all of the frequencies, though, so the practitioners use binaural beats - two waves that differ from each other by the appropriate frequency. Trained musicians recognize that concept as two identical instruments slightly out of tune with each other - when they play the same note, you hear the difference as a wave of beats. The closer in tune, the slower the beats; the more out of tune, the faster they come. Binaural beats work the same way: to hear a 4Hz wave, you might hear a 2000Hz wave played against a 2004Hz wave. The difference is a 4Hz wave that you hear as "beats."

Pzizz is a commercial program that uses these concepts to generate binaural beats designed to help you achieve certain mental states. The original Pzizz Machine was a $150 beat generator and software to control it, but the software-only version just generates MP3 files of the programs that you can put on your iPod or burn to CD and listen to wherever (not while driving, though, please).

The Pzizz sleep module generates programs to help you drop into a restful sleep and stay there; the "nap" module of which MacZOT often speaks helps people take naps - that is, helps them actually get to sleep in the middle of the day for much-needed rest.

I have no idea if I believe any of this. I've played with the open-source binaural beat generator SBaGen before, and when I used it to generate a "delta" (sleep-type) wave and put it on the speakers, it really made me feel sleepy almost instantly. On the other hand, almost all of the references in Google to this kind of stuff are to sites like "brainsync.com", "peyote.com", "brainwashed.com", "psychic101.com", "globalhypnosis.com", and so on - they're either a bit spacy-mind-altering, or they sell the equipment or software to make the beats.

Still, while SBaGen isn't easy to use, the few waves I tried seemed to do what the documentation said they were supposed to do. I've looked at Pzizz but never wanted to spend the money for it. If the BlogZOT succeeds, it'd give me a discount that might make it worth trying. Managing my sleep cycle is one of the biggest challenges I face, so if I can get it under my control, I'd be a Happy Panda.