In The News
More news on the importance of sleep
Dr. David Dinges of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, along with several other colleagues, has published an article in the Journal of Neuroscience entitled “Lapsing during Sleep Deprivation Is Associated with Distributed Changes in Brain Activation.â€
That’s a fancy title for saying that being deprived of sleep even for one night makes the brain unstable and prone to sudden shut-downs akin to a power failure, brief lapses that hover between sleep and wakefulness, according to researchers.
"It's as though it is both asleep and awake and they are switching between each other very rapidly,†Dinges said. "Imagine you are sitting in a room watching a movie with the lights on. In a stable brain, the lights stay on all the time. In a sleepy brain, the lights suddenly go off."
In other words, turn out the lights and the party’s over.
Or in a very, very serious vain, turn off the lights and a wreck is about to happen.
The findings suggest that people who are sleep-deprived alternate between periods of near-normal brain function and dramatic lapses in attention and visual processing, Dinges said in his article.
"This involves more structures changing than we've ever seen before, but changing just during these lapses," Dinges said.
He and colleagues did brain imaging studies on 24 adults who performed simple tasks involv-ing visual attention when they were well rested and when they had missed a night's sleep.
The researchers used a type of brain imaging known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, or FMRI, which measures blood flow in the brain.
They found significant, momentary lapses in several areas of the brain, which seemed to frequently falter when the people were deprived of sleep, but not when these same people were well rested.
"These people are not lying in bed. They are sitting up doing a task they learned and they are working very hard at doing their best," Dinges said.
He said the lapses seem to suggest that loss of sleep renders the brain incapable of fully fending off the involuntary need to sleep.
He said the study makes it clear how dangerous sleep deprivation can be while driving on the highway, when even a four-second lapse could lead to a major accident.
"These are not just academic interests," he said.
Did you notice that Dinges report said that being deprived of sleep for even one night makes the brain unstable?
One night.
Our guess is that there is not a trucker out there who hasn’t been deprived of sleep for one night, yet climbs in the cab and heads down the road.
Maybe it’s been a rough day on the road with construction and accident delays.
Maybe it’s been a call from home about an ill child or parent.
Maybe there’s trouble on the job front.
Maybe it’s an independent contractor wondering how they’re going to pay for the next tank of diesel until the next check comes through.
There are a lot reasons that it might be tough to go right to sleep at the beginning of that eight-hour sleeper berth period.
Dinges report appears to reinforce the claims by many that the industry needs more flexibility in its Hours of Service rules, a flexibility that would allow truckers to drive while rested and sleep when they’re sleepy.
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Speaking of diesel prices, a few weeks ago Mary Novak, the managing director of North American Energy Services, reminded us of the impact of refining margins on the cost of diesel at the pump, regardless of the price of oil.
Mary’s reminder is right on target.
Back around the first of June, the price of oil at WTI/Cushing, Okla., was $124.33 a barrel and the average price at the pump was $4.70 with a refining margin of $32.67 a barrel.
Since that time, the price of oil has continued to climb.
But on July 1, the price for oil at Cushing was $141.06 and the average on-highway price had dropped to $4.654.
The refining margin?
$25.16 a barrel.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the refining margin is generally related directly to demand, and the demand for distillate fuel will escalate once cold weather sets in and heating oil production begins in earnest.