submission - Independent Pilots Association

I'm tv¡ticnlly so sleep deprit,ed that Icnn't wtderstand rest of statenient.]
Years ago, just to make a dramatic point, we were approached before we knew
about sleep debt, before we could measure sleepiness. lt was in the 60s we
were approached by a company that had a billion-dollar bed (ceramic bead bed -
billions of little beads. They use them now for burn patients. lt's supposed to be
the most comfortable surface ever. So we got a group of students. We had a
regular bed, the cold concrete floor condition and the beaded bed. To our utter
amazement, sleep was the same in all three conditions. The students who were
doing this were on spring break, they probably had a 10O-hour sleep debt, they
could probably sleep anyrvhere, and that to me is a symptom of grave concem.
lf you could sleep anywhere.. anytime you are very sleep deprived....that's not
good. That's another mythology. People get so macho. Saying that they can
sleep an¡rwhere is like saying they were drunk or they could drive when they're
drunk. People misunderstand that. That's a symptom of severe sleep
deprivation.
I ha¿e a couple questions. First of all, i-f u,e consider we are dealing with an indiaidual
u,ho lud no nccrued ;leep debt and tLnt indiuidual autoke in the nrcrning, u,hat does tlrc
science snv ahout the amount of tinte azt,ake tlnt indiuidual would lwae before, or is there
anv kini o.f .
Well. probably if he s getting up in the daytime. that person could not possibly
sleep rn the daytime.
I'tttnctti.zli::':i'?¿r0rr;-i/cr'l)urç. l/1r;¿'ion¡r:olr/,ilrcbcntt,nkebefor;ite.....
Oh. well. maybe 16 hours would be the usual time he's awake. One of the things
that we -- at least I and I think most of my colleagues -- agree on is that all
wakefulness is sleep deprivation. ln the model of sleep regulation, you need that
accumulated sleep debt of 16 hours to, in a sense, power the sleep of the night.
I.f uou ,ù,ln t ì:'¡t,e a sleep debt, hot ntattv ltours zt'ould vou hn¿e tt"'be n¡t'ake beþrt vott
coulrl b¿' tthb to tnl