A blogger named Jane Galt has apparantly been discussing the insane hours that medical residents work and notes:
No matter how high your IQ, how young your heart, how charged your system with adrenaline, when you've been awake for 24 hours . . .
You. Are. Stupid.
Your reactions slow down. Your memory gets fuzzy. You become prone to make (bad) snap decisions. You are dangerously willing to cut corners if it will get you home to bed. You have difficulty keeping the thread of what you are doing, forcing you to go back and do it again. It takes longer--a lot longer--for you to diagnose even familiar problems given a set of symptoms.
Having supervised others on little sleep, I can readily state that anyone who thinks he was fine after 24 hours without sleep is either lying, or has had his memory permanently impaired by sleep deprivation. You may be the smartest guy in the whole world, but around hour 16 you began dropping 10 IQ points an hour.
As my regular readers know I work in the election office. I was averaging close to 80 hours a week the last month before the election.
And all I'll say is: this principle could explain more problems than hanging chads, black box voting and deliberate malice put together...
Politics
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