It's nothing special- it runs in Ruby Shoes and I can email you the source code if it would be at all interesting. I wrote it after reading a number of papers describing sleep dep experiments that used it.
It shows a stimulus (increasing time in red in the center of a black background), then once you click in the upper left corner it waits 2-10 seconds (chosen at random) and then shows you another stimulus. This goes on for ten minutes. You get a host of reaction times (and so can watch that change) but the real value (and the reason it's boring) is that your ability to sustain concentration drops with sleep deprivation, and so lapses (where it takes you at least twice as long as your baseline, typically .5 to .8 seconds) start showing up. They become more frequent and longer the more sleep deprived you get (at my worst, it took me about fifteen seconds to respond to a stimulus; I didn't code it but the paper I took the parameters from had a buzzer sound if you went 30 seconds without a response). It outputs the times (absolute times of stimuli, responses, and false starts) to a text file, and I never wrote any analysis code because I considered the affiliated sleep experiment a failure.
It's also a very good proxy for driving- it involves a lot of staring at boring, barely changing views, and then when one gets into an accident, it's typically something that noticing it coming a half-second earlier could have helped a lot with. And so when you find that a half-second of inattention goes from a <1% of the time thing to a 5% of the time thing, you swear off the heavy machinery.
So, I know a number of friends on Paleo who recommend it. I recently read through a lot of bulletproofexec, who recommends his own variant of paleo. I care about my health, and so I need to resolve my diet and their advice somehow. Summarized data points:
I find the logic behind paleo questionable. Yes, hunter-gatherers are adapted to a different diet, but fire was first used to cook food 2 million years ago, and appears widespread by 100 kiloyears (ky) ago, with noticeable adaptations in humans (from smaller teeth to resistance to air pollution). Lactose tolerance demonstrates the ability of human biology to adapt to new diets. Civilization dramatically speeds up evolution- it probably took about 25ky for European hunter-gatherers (and later farmers) to go from a mean IQ of 85 to 100, and about 1ky for urban European Jews to go from a mean IQ of 100 to 115. Am I really supposed to believe that there aren't genes floating around that wheat (domesticated 10ky ago) is good for?
My interpretation of this data is that my current diet works well for me, and paleo is unlikely to work better. I am willing to experiment, though- if I will actually live better on a different diet, there is little holding me back besides a lack of information. My values, in descending order of importance, are: brain function, overall health, appearance, mood, and cost. (Note that those are weights- something can improve brain function but be so costly in dollars, prep time, and terrible taste that I'm not interested.)
So my question for you is: Should I try paleo (more likely, the bulletproof diet)? If I do, what data should I collect? Better yet, what data can I collect now to determine if I have any nutritional deficiencies?