If there's no tiredness, then presumably the caffeine is irrelevant. Nothing you're saying here is convincing me that you're a good judge of, well, pretty much anything.
Just stay away from my daughters on the road.
The discussion was the claim that caffeine masks tiredness, I respond that on me caffeine doesn't mask tiredness, and that it in fact makes me the opposite of tired.
And you say that if I am not tired from having used caffeine, then caffeine is irrelevant.
Presumably you are writing this very late at night and you are tired - since what you have written plainly does not follow.
Regards,
Renato
I think you will find if you research further that this has later been disproven.
Microsleeps don't wave flags they just happen. The time line you are discussing puts you in the fatigue area where they occur.
My parallel is valid as it is talking about healthy, fit individuals (military pilots) in controlled situations in a decompression chamber. They know exactly what is occurring and how and the best proof of this is to do it to only a percentage of the group at a time whilst the others watch. For what it's worth I can say been there done that to these specific and quite a few other similar type tests.
Hi Bill,
In your parallel you have healthy individuals being deprived of oxygen to the point of being unconcious - and they don't know it.
And while being deprived of oxygen they write stuff they think makes sense, but it turns out to be gibberish.
In both cases, while they may have known what was going to happen to them, they didn't know when it did actually happen to them. They didn't know at the actual time that they were going from bad to worse.
Are you saying that in my caffeinated state i may have thought I was doing a good job of driving, but that I was deluding myself like your oxygen deprivation crew was doing to themselves?
You forget - I had an independent objective observer sitting next to me, who's life was dependent on my safe driving. She won't ever drive in Italy, and on those long drives in Italy and USA she far preferred me driving with No-Doz, than me driving without it.
Regards,
Renato
I spent five years as a night cabbie, driving twelve hour and occasionally longer shifts on a daily basis. Fatigue management was part of my life. Caffeine is all very well, but I needed to stay alert and focussed, not just for the driving but needing to keep an eye on the passengers when I had them and the despatch system when I didn't.
I found that when I began to get tired, I'd start to make small errors in navigation or giving change, and that if I kept going, the errors would get bigger. I didn't dare make any major mistakes with so many kangaroos and idiot/drunk drivers around, so whenever I began to feel weary, I'd find a little patch of darkness - a park, or a corner of a carpark or a lane or something, Canberra's full of 'em - crank back the seat and zonk off. No alarm, I'd just sleep as long as I could. Even five minutes of sleep would make a difference. Real sleep, that is, brain turned off.
Bugger the drugs, I say. Emergency use only. They don't make up for being fully awake.
Sure, they may give the feeling of being awake, but perceptions are altered too.
As others have said, it only takes one mistake.
There's a joke I used to tell before I became a cabbie. When I go, I'd say, I want to pass away peacefully and quietly in my sleep. Like my grandfather. Not screaming in terror like his passengers.
You assert that caffeine gives one the feeling of being awake, and that perceptions are altered too.
Any evidence for this?
While your tips for taking naps is great for when driving around where you live, how is that practical for someone like me who has never been able to take such naps?
For someone like yourself who can take naps, when in my circumstances of driving in the Arizona, Nevada and California deserts in 40C+ heat, where exactly could you find somewhere to take a nap or several naps? it seems impractical to me.
If I only had the feeling of being awake when I thought I was driving fine at 130kph in Italy while caffeinated, but was in fact nowhere near as awake as I felt I was, and I was being totally misled by my perceptions of how well I was driving, what do you think? Am I actually drugged out with painkillers in intensive care right now, imagining that I am typing this to you at this very minute? Or was my feeling of being awake entirely accurate and were my perceptions unaffected?
To my mind, we have perceptions and we have reality. If one's perceptions don't match reality at high speed, then one will most likely wind up dead.
Regards,
Renato
