Читать книгу Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams - Paul Martin - Страница 22

Care is heavy, therefore sleep you.

Thomas Dekker, Patient Grissil (1603)

If society were to recognise the true importance of sleep, then attitudes towards tiredness on the roads and in the workplace might become more enlightened. In a more sleep-conscious world it would no longer be socially acceptable, let alone admirable, for people to drive or turn up for work suffering from severe fatigue, any more than it is now acceptable to be drunk in the workplace or behind the wheel of a car. Napping during working hours would be tolerated and even encouraged, rather than stigmatised as a sign of sloth, drunkenness or illness. Meanwhile, society continues to turn a blind eye to people driving cars, flying aeroplanes, practising medicine, operating safety-critical machinery and running nations when they are mentally and physically impaired by lack of sleep.

In the next chapter we shall see that sleep-deprived people are bad at making decisions and communicating those decisions to others. Their judgment is impaired, they are easily distracted, they respond poorly to unexpected information, they lack flexibility, they persist with inappropriate solutions to problems and they are prone to taking foolish risks. These are not the characteristics any of us would wish to see in the people who make life-and-death decisions in the corridors of power, hospitals, flight decks or nuclear power stations.