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Losing Sleep Makes You Drunk

By Stuart Buck, Esq.

Well, not literally drunk, but you might as well be. A study in Nature* found that merely being awake for 17 hours -- which any of us might experience on a daily basis -- decreases hand-eye coordination the same as having a .05 blood alcohol concentration: Forty subjects participated in two counterbalanced experiments. In one they were kept awake for 28 hours (from 8:00 until 12:00 the following day), and in the other they were asked to consume 10-15g alcohol at 30-min intervals from 8:00 until their mean blood alcohol concentration reached 0.10%. We measured cognitive psychomotor performance at half-hourly intervals using a computer-administered test of hand-eye coordination (an unpredictable tracking task). Results are expressed as a percentage of performance at the start of the session...continue to full post

Full post as published by The Buck Stops Here on January 04, 2009 (boomark / email).