A former night shift worker in Massachusetts interviews a sleep researcher about the health and social consequences of working when most people are asleep.
To get a better understanding of the effects of sleep deprivation, I took a trip over to the UMass Amherst Life Science laboratories to talk with sleep expert, Dr. Rebecca Spencer, associate professor of life and brain sciences. She gave me a tour of her sleep labs where she studies sleeping test subjects overnight. We then sat down and discussed the effects of sleep and lack of sleep on humans.
“The deficits from sleep deprivation we’re all very aware of because we’ve all had some level of sleep deprivation. We become less attentive. If that grogginess sets in, it’s really hard to focus, it’s hard to attend to things, it’s hard to remember things because you’re just not encoding new information,” she said.
