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Shift Work Dulls Brain Performance
davidshenba writes: Scientists warn that working in unusual shifts can prematurely age the brain and dull intellectual ability. Three thousand people in France were given tests of memory, speed of thought and wider cognitive ability. People with more than 10 years of shift work history had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The brain naturally dulls as we age, but the researchers said working antisocial shifts accelerated the process.
I know this study is flawed because it involves work and France. They pretty much don't do that over there.
When did they test these candidates? If you're testing everyone at 8 AM that's going to show a bias for the people just woke up and had their coffee compared to the night shift workers who are getting ready for bed.
I wonder how long until we realize that shift work is a public health issue, like clean water and vaccination and smoking.
Anyone who has ever done factory work could tell you that. It's brain-numbing. I used to have co-workers who used to talk to themselves and act like schizophrenics after 20 years of it. Fortunately, it was only a temporary college job for me.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Maybe people who weren't as mentally sharp had fewer employment options and ended up in jobs with shift work.
France has been "innovating" on work rules based on their pet notions of what is right for a long time.
The "traditional" French baguette is not traditional at all, it was invented less than a century ago because laws about working conditions forbid bakers from baking bread in the wee hours of the morning (swing shift), so they needed to invent a loaf that took less total processing time.
Now, I'm not saying that it wouldn't be nice to live in the French dream world, but (speaking as a scientific atheist) we do need to bear in mind that there is no stress free disease free immortal existence for humans, and that the human condition entails suffering and risk, and I value free will and individualism more highly than the French, because I value a small percentage of the population achieving great things and propelling our species forward more than I value a more pleasant dreary existence for multitudes of undistinguished people. And before you push back on that, remember that I'm not conceding at all that a pleasant dreary existence is the best way to go for the multitude, we need to keep sacrificing ourselves to propel society forward so the picture of the pleasant dreary existence painted in Federation Space can come about.
Many things that cavemen evolved to do probably led to not only dull minds, but caved in skulls, death in childbirth, and child mortality rates of greater than 50% before adulthood, etc. If only they had lived long enough to get all the cancers they were flirting with eating smoked, salted, rotted, etc. foods.
Al that to say, I don't even agree with the metrics they are using for this type of study, and coming out of France we can be certain that it simply reinforces preexisting notions along the lines of "c'est ironique, non?" "c'est l'amour", "c'est la guerre", "c'est la vie" et cetera. LOL French.
I think Lavoisier might have been the last Frenchman who contributed anything of interest.
who read the headline as "Shit Work Dulls Brain Performance"?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
As someone who used to work a graveyard shift, I know my brain felt dulled not because of the shift, but because I got 5 hours of sleep a night. The world does not recognize the need for people who work graveyard to sleep. I swear the garbage trucks came five days a week back then.
Three-and-half years of shift work (interesting, well-paid work for a good employer and decent working conditions) did me physical harm that did not wear off for many years after the experience. I felt listless, short on energy and intitative and thinking power, slightly better while on days, but very bad while on nights. That listlessness was still with me for years afterwards.
During those years, I experienced three different shift patterns. Rotating once a week (day, evening, night) was worst - pretty hellish. Rotating once a month was bearable. I once did 4 months straight on nights - to my surprise, that worked OK (physically). At the end, I was back on weekly rotation and couldn't wait to get out.
Shift work wrecks your social life. Your friends never know where you're at, so they don't include you in their plans, and you don't have the energy yourself to organize anything.
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
Most people that work 3rd shift in the united states get a shift premium as it is. Depending on the company there's usually an hourly bonus of a few dollars after a certain time of day. Most places I used to work at when I did factory work, it was around 6pm to 8pm to around 6am and you got up to an extra $3 an hour which was no small chunk of change in the 90s. If they didn't offer that, no one wanted the job because it really was awful. It has nothing to do with the time of day or the light... or anything like that. It made your life miserable due to everyone else not doing it. You'd have to modify your bedroom so you could sleep during the day. Who's taking your kids to school? Got a dr appointment? Gotta go when you're normally sleeping. Same with the bank, shopping, everything. Hell, even trying to get gas turned into a problem. There are certainly plenty of 24hr gas stations, but its not all of them and you could be certain the ones that were convenient for you were the ones closed at 4am.
Then there were the problems it caused at work... I was a welder. Run out of gas in the middle of your shift? You're going home. Get injured? You got 1 bleery eyed nurse and a Dr that couldn't do better than the 3rd shift position at a rural clinic. Want to order parts for tomorrows job? You have to leave a note for first shift to call it in because everywheres closed and by the time the orders in, even if it's next day aired, it won't be delivered for 2 days as far as you're concerned because you have to wait 12hrs for the order to get put in and UPS doesn't deliver at midnight.
The general population doesn't even know how to fight. The general population thinks "our troops" are "over there" doing some kind of "stuff" to "protect our freedoms!"
Well... guns anyway. Balls? I'm less convinced.
The history of US warfare is filled with one-sided confilicts, late entries and early pullouts. The modern American talks big but lacks the will to see things through (see the current situation in Iraq... ISIS taunts the US as a recruitment strategy because they know you're not willing to take the kind of casualties necessary to go back in and squash them).
This is one in a series of "studies" I've seen saying this. What I don't understand is what the mechanism for causing this effect is supposed to be. It can't be absolute time, because then you'd find people with "normal" hours in certain time zones get this brain damage as well. If its lack of sunlight, then you'd see the same brain damage with people who live very far north, or in areas that don't get much sunlight like the Pacific Northwest and England (we can have fun joking, but its indisputable that lots of the world's smartest people live in these places). If it's changing your sleep patterns that causes the damage, then you'd see the same problem with frequent fliers. The simple solution there is to pick one shift and stick to it, which is decidedly not what I'm seeing suggested.
If it's not sunlight or switching, then there's simply no biological mechanism I can think of that would cause problems simply due to the values of numbers on a piece of machinery that humans invented a few hundred years ago.
I can however think of reasons why lots of people would love to grasp any possible pretense to argue against shift work. One should show much extra scrutiny for any heavily promoted "study" that tells people exactly what they want to hear.
For all we know, this might've been a factor in the nuclear cheating scandal
That was a promotion system design problem. They were all getting excellent scores but the promotion system was basically linked to perfection. No one is perfect, but when you're strongly motivated you'll find some way to cope. The outcome was inevitable.
Maybe people who couldn't get anything better than "shift work" had duller brains to start with.
While this is certainly a possibility, even if you took a quick glance at TFA (I know, I know...), you might find out there seems to be more than that:
Those with more than 10 years of shift work under their belts had the same results as someone six and a half years older. The good news is that when people in the study quit shift work, their brains did recover. Even if it took five years.
Why would dumb people "recover" lost brain function if they never had it in the first place?
And once you read that in TFA, it might actually make you want to click on the link to the study itself, where you can discover the methodology in the abstract without even reading the article:
Methods: We conducted a prospective cohort study of 3232 employed and retired workers (participation rate: 76%) who were 32, 42, 52 and 62â...years old at the time of the first measurement (t1, 1996), and who were seen again 5 (t2) and 10 (t3) years later. 1484 of them had shift work experience at baseline (current or past) and 1635 had not.
"Prospective cohort" -- i.e., they had a control group, which they measured periodically. The shift workers did significantly worse....
(Why is it that everyone at Slashdot seems to automatically assume every study is done by idiots who could not possibly foresee their first possible objection? And why do such posts get modded up? There are lots of crap studies out there, but not every obvious objection was unforeseen by most research teams. Sorry for the exaperation, but if you're not even going to bother to RTFA, stop modding idiots up who also haven't.)
I remember in the 90s I was on "swing shift" (3-11pm-ish) and we got an extra 17 cents. Lots of people preferred it because they had mornings free during business hours. "Graveyard" shift (11pm-7am) got an extra 91 cents, and "nobody" wanted to do it. Oh, they had people willing; people who were told they were being moved to that shift, and who wanted to keep the job hoping that after a couple years they could switch back. But they had too many new people, production was so much lower they shut it back down.
I'll bet for many manufacturing jobs they could do fine now without more than a few cents extra, because that sector hasn't recovered and isn't projected to.
As far as ordering parts, these days you should be able to do that online and you can have them there by the start of the next shift if your supplier has rush service and starts early. Most parts suppliers start their first shift an hour or two before the companies they service, so that isn't unusual. Day shift can't get parts until the middle of the next day, unless you're at the start of the special delivery route, because they're not going to deliver in between shifts.
As far as appointments and things, you've got it backwards. Day shift has the hardest time, because they have to take time off work to get anything done, and that has a cost for the worker. Workers who constantly ask for time off to run errands are not valued team players. Night shift, if you keep a normal sleep pattern, but just at a different time, then you can set your appointments for after work (evening for you, morning for everybody else) and then sleep afterwards. No problem. Even if you use a lopsided pattern (sleeping immediately after getting off work, which makes for a sucky worker the last few hours of their shift) you still wake up during business hours. Most of the people with this sort of "problem" that I saw were going to the bar at opening (7am) drinking until 9, then sleeping until 6pm, and complaining there was no time they "could get anything done." On a 3 shift schedule it is normally an 8 hr shift, so you have 16 off hours, and 8 of those are business hours. Compare to day shift, who has 16 off hours, none of which are business hours. And if you have a schedule like 10hrs 4 days on, 3 off, then you have at least one whole business day off every week to schedule stuff.