Study: Waking Up Like Being Drunk

Ant writes "CNN reports that "sleep inertia" leaves some people so groggy, after they wake up, they might as well be drunk, researchers said on Tuesday. "For a short period, at least, the effects of sleep inertia may be as bad as or worse than being legally drunk," said researcher Kenneth Wright of the University of Colorado at Boulder."

Comments

Its just like...

[Saggi]

Its just like sitting and waiting for a new post on slashdot, and then quickly trying to write something usefull, witch actually ends up rather stupid.

According to this research we should not allow post for at least 3 min after a new entry on slashdot.

I think this entry proves my point.

theolein reports on Common Sense

[theolein]

It may come as a great shock to these scientists to realise that most people on the planet take awhile to get fully awake after waking up. Those same people would refer to that knowledge as common sense.

Re:theolein reports on Common Sense

[kfg]

. . .do you have scientific evidence that common sense exists?

Anecdotal evidence suggests that it does not. I shall apply for a grant to conduct a rigorous test of the hypothesis. If I get it. . .

Q.E.D.

KFG

MIT natural alarm clock

[moonbender]

There was a story about some sleep researchers from MIT having developed an alarm clock that monitors your sleep and wakes you up at a time when you're most likely to be well rested (outside a REM phase or whatever). Of course that meant you couldn't enter the exact time to wake up, just an approximate. I still thought this sounded awesome, and they were going to commercialise it, but even if they did I guess it's really expensive and also, sleeping with sensors attached is bound to be annoying.

Re:MIT natural alarm clock

[Red Alastor]

There was a story about some sleep researchers from MIT having developed an alarm clock that monitors your sleep and wakes you up at a time when you're most likely to be well rested (outside a REM phase or whatever).

No need for sensors or anything complicated. Use two alarm clocks, set one at the earliest time you want to make. Set it on radio and set the sound fairly low. Set the second at the maximum time you want to wake but put it on alarm at maximum volume.

When you'll be ready to wake up, the low sound will wake you up. If it doesn't happen, the second will wake you. It might take a few shots to figure out how low/loud you must set the first alarm.

Re:Legally drunk?

[Flendon]

Well it varies greatly depending on the situation and what state you live in. If you are drunk and creating a big scene in a public place you can be arrested for 'Drunk in Public', which is a sort of catch all which can also be used to get bums off the street and such. Then if your driving it is based off of a specific blood alcohol level, which varies by state. Also if a minor is caught drunk it has to be proven with a blood alcohol test, but the levels are very low. So really "legally drunk" is just a catch all phrase without a set scientific answer.

Re:Legally drunk?

[Fruny]

It's not "legally" vs. "illegally", but, say, "legally" vs. "medically".

Re:I'm sure I read this yesterday on the BBC site

[silasthehobbit]

Ah! Then in that case, I'm fine with it.

--
silas
hobbit
london

Easy to scoff

[SimianOverlord]

If you had gone to a hospital bureaucrat and argued against shift patterns for junior doctors requiring them to nap during the night when no patients were around, and they asked you for evidence, what then do you do? Say that they would be sleepy? That it was common sense that they couldn't do their job safely?

I suspect you'd be dismissed because people don't make important decisions like that based on what Joe Schmoe reckons is 'obvious'. That's why things that, on the face of them seem obvious, must be checked out scientifically. There has to be evidence to base decisions on, as gut feelings and common sense are, in many cases, completely and flagrantly wrong.

You demand those new conditions for junior doctors, and you're suddenly paying them millions of pounds more countrywide. I wouldn't stake millions of pounds on someones common sense without something more to back it up.

Re:Easy to scoff

[belmolis]

I think that there are a couple of factors. One is the financial one. The other is that doctors regard going without sleep as a rite of passage. They did it when they were residents so those who come after them should too. It's a stupid macho thing, like surgeons wearing clothes encrusted with blood and gore until the late nineteenth century.

Simple Solution...

[CrazyTalk]

I'm like that as well. That's why God invented coffee.

Waking drunk

[Feanturi]

I get some pretty weird ideas when I'm first waking up. I always use the snooze alarm, setting the clock to start half an hour before I actually have to get up, because I like to sort of 'ease into' waking up. But sometimes, when I'm particularly fatigued, I get strange ideas about what is going on with the alarm clock. On a few occasions, I've hit the snooze and thought to myself, "I'm tired, but at least I have this button that gives me 10 more minutes of sleep," and I would translate this as, "Good thing I can travel back in time by 10 minutes, I can keep this up indefinitely until I am bored with sleeping!" Then there'll be a harsh moment of panic when I actually look at the clock and realize that the time travel isn't working right for some reason.

Other times, back when I was learning the guitar, I had the weirdest notion that the pulsing tone of the alarm clock was actually a musical scale of a particular key, and I've have to guess what key it was as I hit the button. Then I'd lie back down to wait for the next "test". The clock was a monotone, but I'd declare, "C minor!" and would feel that I had gotten it right, and I would get it right each time with different answers. :)

Techie equivalent: Night-time On-call

[CrazedWalrus]

I'm also amused by my stint in big companies that they seem to be alright with waking people up in the middle of the night in order to have them fix something on multi-million-dollar systems doing huge financial transactions.

For a while, I was the guy staying up all night for a large bank, calling the day-shifters when something broke. The people were very good about it, and generally were able to cope with this, but I always thought it was a recipie for disaster.

I find it difficult to make good decisions during my normal waking hours if I'm very tired, let alone being awakened a few hours after having gone to sleep and asked complex questions during my normal sleep time.