The Challenger explosion in 1986 was thought to be caused by human error and sleep deprivation.
Those “on the nod” are also now thought to be responsible for the Exxon Valdez disaster, the Chernobyl disaster, Three Mile Island meltdown, The Challenger explosion, and the Bhopal Chemical disaster in India. So what more proof do we need that a lack of sleep makes your brain grind more slowly?
The following is an excerpt from the interview between Dr Rubin Naiman and Dr Buczunski at the National Institute for the Clinical Application of Behavioural Medicine:
“…there’s a direct correlation between insufficient sleep and dysfunctional thinking.”
Dr. Naiman: It affects us both psychologically and medically, biomedically and I think that these two, many of us believe of course that they overlap. We know on a day- to-day basis just losing a little bit of sleep will impact your cognitive process…
…What I’ve noticed is there is a direct correlation between the amount of sleep a person gets or the insufficient sleep I should say and their tendency to engage in dysfunctional thinking. And I think most of us, you don’t have to be a therapist to know this, that sleep loss affects your judgment; it affects your perception, even just a little bit of sleep loss.
Sleep loss contributes very significantly to a decrease in performance. We see serious drops in the quality of work and the quantity of work. And we see a serious rise in accidents. There is some data suggesting that there may be more people having car accidents, motor vehicle accidents associated with driving drowsy than with driving drunk. But we don’t have complete data on this but we know that there are thousands and thousands of accidents caused every year.
From a larger sort of disaster perspective, there is strong data suggesting that the Exxon Valdez disaster, the Chernobyl disaster, Three Mile Island meltdown, The Challenger explosion, the Bhopal Chemical disaster in India, and many, many other large scale disasters like this were directly linked to sleepiness on the part of people involved. So that’s the tip of the iceberg.
Dr Naiman’s interview with Dr. Buczynski can be found at … http://www.pacificariptide.com