Educational Media Reviews Online

Night shifts, 24-hour grocery stores and restaurants, cities whose nightlife keep us up until the wee hours of the morning. What do these three phenomena have in common? They are all the product of a non-stop, 24-hour society that has slowly evolved since Thomas Edison’s invention of the light bulb. With the obvious advantages and conveniences of such a society comes the inevitable disadvantage of sleep deprivation, a serious condition that is currently affecting approximately 17 million North Americans.

The Sleep Famine: The Effects of Sleep Deprivation and Chronic Fatigue begins strongly with scenes from the Chernobyl incident, which has been attributed in part to human error – fatigued people making poor decisions. Many other fatigue-related disasters have occurred – Three-Mile Island, Exxon Valdez, the Challenger explosion – urgently prompting scientific study and experimentation on sleep patterns in the 21st century. The Sleep Famine provides a nice balance and smooth transition of interviews from leading experts – doctors, psychologists, professors, and scientists from NASA - and regular, everyday workers – shift working technicians, truck drivers, doctors and nurses, television broadcasters, teachers, fire fighters, and policemen. Shocking stories and scenes of truck drivers and airline pilots falling asleep at the wheel only remind the viewers of this video how easy, yet disastrous, it can be to close their own eyes and rest for “just a second.”

The sound quality and editing of The Sleep Famine is truly excellent, and the language is neither too technical nor too rudimentary. Director/producer Vishnu Mathur takes his audience into experimentation stations, as well as life on crowded city streets, so that they can understand and appreciate the problem of sleep deprivation in its entirety, and possibly adjust their own habits to improve on day-to-day productivity and increase overall life expectancy. At a price of $129.95, this video would seem to be most beneficial to owners and managers of any kind of facility – factories, hospitals, transportation dispatch centers – that hire employees to work around the clock. Not only will accidents be avoided and workers stay healthy, but productivity will increase, which is what these managers are presumably hoping for in the first place by keeping their businesses running 24/7.