Another Canter Across the Bleeding Obvious

Obviously, there is a need to understand why we make poorer choices when we don't get enough sleep; not only "because there exist today unprecedented opportunities to incur damaging losses by means such as online gambling", in the words of one researcher, but because healthy stress and sleep deprivation are natural and well-documented results of market forces, labour flexibility, globalisation, the War on the Abstract Noun and all those other wonderful features of life as it is today. Hence, a team of researchers at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina has discovered that "sleep deprivation causes areas of the brain to malfunction, making people blunder". Being mere academics, they evidently couldn't afford a trip to Guantánamo Bay; so they scanned the brains of volunteers who were playing a computer card game, presumably far into the night, and "discovered that the sleep-deprived show increased signs of rash risk-taking". Apparently sleep deprivation causes changes in those parts of the brain which are "responsible for appreciating reward and understanding the significance of heavy debt" and which shut down automatically when we vote, use a credit card or otherwise make economic fools of ourselves. Whether the same brain parts, appropriately altered, might result in asymmetrical tendencies is apparently not a matter of consuming academic interest in Durham, North Carolina.