{"id":1880062,"date":"2018-10-03T14:42:12","date_gmt":"2018-10-03T18:42:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/?p=1880062"},"modified":"2018-10-03T14:42:12","modified_gmt":"2018-10-03T18:42:12","slug":"sleep-deprivation-task-completion-1880062","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.futurity.org\/sleep-deprivation-task-completion-1880062\/","title":{"rendered":"For the sleep-deprived, small distractions can have dire results"},"content":{"rendered":"
Small distractions can have serious consequences for people deprived of sleep, according to the largest experimentally controlled study on sleep deprivation to date.<\/p>\n
The findings reveal just how detrimental operating without sleep can be in a range of situations, from bakers adding too much salt to cookies to surgeons botching surgeries.<\/p>\n
While sleep deprivation research isn’t new, the level at which distractions hinder sleep-deprived persons’ memories and challenge them from successfully completing tasks was not clear until researchers quantified the impact.<\/p>\n
“If you look at mistakes and accidents in surgery, public transportation, and even operating nuclear power plants, lack of sleep is one of the primary reasons for human error,” says study coauthor Kimberly Fenn, an associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “There are many people in critical professions who are sleep-deprived. Research has found that nearly one-quarter of the people with procedure-heavy jobs have fallen asleep on the job.”<\/p>\n