Definitely true for this night owl. When I had to commute more than a short distance, I would struggle to stay awake while driving to work. Sometimes I would have to get off the road & take a brief nap. But I usually had no trouble staying awake when I drove home in the evening.http://canal.ugr.es/social-economic-and-legal-sciences/item/73494
Researchers from the University of Granada have shown that individual chronotype—that is, whether you are a "morning-type" or an "evening-type", depending on the time of day when your physiological functions are more active—markedly influences driving performance.
In fact, evening-types are much worse drivers—they pay less attention—at their "non-optimal" time of day (early in the morning) by comparison with their optimal time (during the evening). However, in this experiment morning-types were more stable drivers than evening-types and drove relatively well both in the morning and the evening.
-----
“A particular time of day can be a good or a bad time to perform these tasks as a function of the chronotype of the individual involved, although there are times that are bad for everyone, like siesta time or in the early hours between 3.00 and 5.00”, he warns.
The University of Granada researchers warn that driving after more than 18 hours wakefulness—say, at 2.00 in the early morning after waking at 8.00 the previous morning, which is quite common—“entails the same level of risk as driving with the legal maximum level of blood alcohol, because our level of vigilance declines considerably”.
No comments:
Post a Comment