The Twenty-Four Hour Society: Understanding Human Limits in a World That Never Stops (A William Patrick Book) - Hardcover

Moore-Ede, Martin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0201577119 ISBN 13: 9780201577112

Publisher: Addison-Wesley, 1993

Synopsis

A medical researcher shows readers how they can protect the needs of people in an economy paced to the round-the-clock performance of machines, describing the risks involved when technological society outpaces human biology.

About this title

About the Author

Dr. Martin Moore-Ede is a former professor of Physiology at Harvard Medical School, and President and CEO of Circadian Technologies, Inc. He is also executive editor of the Working Nights newsletter. He received his medical degrees from Guy's Hospital Medical School in England; his clinical training in Toronto, Canada; and his Ph.D. in Physiology from Harvard University.

He has published over 100 scientific articles and several books, including The Clocks That Time Us, Harvard University Press 1982, and Mathematical Models of the Circadian Sleep-Wake Cycle, Raven Press 1984, on the subject of the biological clocks that time the daily sleep-wake cycles and the rhythms of alertness and performance. He has served as Editor of the "Biological Timekeeping" section of the American Journal of Physiology and has served as Chairman of the International Union of Physiological Science's Commission on Sleep and Circadian Physiology. In 1985, he was awarded the Bowditch Lectureship of the American Physiological Society in recognition of his scientific research.

The Twenty-Four-Hour Society: Understanding Human Limits in a World That Never Stops, has been published in the United States (Addison-Wesley), United Kingdom (Piatkus), Germany (Heyne), Australia (Random House), Japan (Kodansha) and China (China-Times). Reviews from around the world have been overwhelmingly positive. Publishers Weekly reported "this vitally important book offers insights and advice to most anyone who works for a living... could well save many lives and billions of dollars."

Most recently, Dr. Moore-Ede co-AUTHOR: ed The Complete Idiot's Guide to Getting a Good Night's Sleep (Alpha Books/Mcmillan, 1998) which included tools for assessing individual sleep personality profiles.

Dr. Moore-Ede pioneered the scientific development of biocompatible work schedules for round-the-clock operations and has developed techniques for enabling employees to be awake, alert, vigilant, and competent twenty-four hours a day. In 1983, he founded Circadian Technologies, Inc., which consults to organizations worldwide on the application of human-centered management and technology to improve industrial safety and productivity. Among the organizations Dr. Moore-Ede has provided consulting services are British Rail, Canadian Pacific, Federal Express, General Electric, General Motors, IBM, Libbey Owens Ford, Procter & Gamble, Shell, Sony, Southern California Edison, and Texaco.

In 1988, Dr. Moore-Ede established the Institute for Circadian Physiology, an independent non-profit research center spun off from a fifteen-year research program at Harvard Medical School. The Institute is dedicated to basic and applied research on how to optimize human safety, performance, and health in our twenty-four-hour world. The Institute has built a broad base of support from Federal research grants and contracts (NASA, NRC, NIH, USAF, and Army), and from corporate sponsors including Alcan, Amoco, Boeing, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Exxon, Foxboro, Liberty Mutual, Matsushita, Mobil, Monsanto, Raytheon, and 3M. Dr. Moore-Ede stepped down from the Institute directorship in 1996 to join Circadian Technologies on a full time basis. He continues to serve on the Institute Board of Trustees.

Widely recognized for his expertise in the role of fatigue in human error accidents and lost productivity, Dr. Moore-Ede has been frequently quoted in various publications and newspapers such as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, National Geographic, Time, and Business Week. His work has also been featured on the ABC and CBS Evening News, Good Morning America, Today, CNN Business News, 20/20, Oprah Winfrey, and BBC-TV Horizons.

From the Back Cover

"This book should be read by everyone who flies a plane, drives a car or truck or finds themselves sleepy while doing important work." Francis D. Moore, M.D. Harvard Medical School

"Dr. Moore-Ede helped us resolve major health, safety and industrial relations problems. Now his book, The Twenty-Four-Hour Socieyt, shows how his unique insights and expertise can help others confront the problems of human fatigue in twenty-four-hour operations." David Morton Chairman and CEO Alcan Aluminum Limited

"For those of us who are concerned with workplace safety and how to improve it in the face of technology and modern work processes, Dr. Moore-Ede's book is a must read." Gary L. Countryman Chairman and CEO Liberty Mutual Insurance Company

"The future of business cannot rest on the shoulders of overloaded people stretched by technology to push beyond human limits. This engaging book offers a people-centered approach to maintaining alertness, health and stamina in the global economy." Rosabeth Moss Kanter Harvard Business School

"For yeras Dr. Moore-Ede has been in the forefront of sleep and alertness research. This book is a significant contribution to this important work." Frederick W. Smith Chairman and CEO FedEx

"Professor Moore-Ede has done a superb job of portraying the problems engendered by the twenty-four-hour society. The institutions and nations that listen to his advice will lead in the struggle for competitive advantage - and in improved public health in the decades to come." A. Clifford Barger, Ph.D. Harvard Medical School

From the Inside Flap

Why is it that our most notorious industrial accidents - Exxon Valez, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Bhopal, the Rhine chemical spill, the fatal navigational error of Korean Air Lines 007 - all took place in the middle of the night?

Common sense, and millions of years of evolutionary history, tell us that people are more prone to error when their natural cycles of sleeping and waking are disrupted. Yet our society, driven by the pace of high-tech communications and the economic pressures of international competition, increasingly is tempting fate as we become ever more committed to round-the-clock performance.

Airline pilots fight drowsiness at the controls while haggard executives race through too many time zones. Traders get up in the middle of the night to juggle huge sums on foreign markets, medical residents face critical decisions in the blur of twenty-four-hour shifts, and fax and modems keep many of us plugged into our work night and day, everywhere we go. The results are employee burnout, accidents and litigation, and even loss of life.

The Twenty-Four-Hour Society is both a warning against these increasing dangers and a prescription for dramatic change.

Dr. Martin Moore-Ede, an international expert on the human biological clock, has for the past I ten years consulted with businesses and govern- j mental agencies around the globe, helping them j manage the demands and minimize the risks of non-stop operations. Here he brings together the latest scientific findings about sleep-wake cycles, jet lag, alertness, and fatigue, showing us the many negative effects that can be avoided once we understand our bodies' specific mechanisms, then put that knowledge to work to our advantage. He presents a wide array of proven management tools and new technologies that allow us to monitor alertness and assess impairment, even new light-therapy devices that allow us to minimize the effects of jet lag by resetting our own biological clocks.

Dr. Moore-Ede shows us how to rethink the work schedules, to manage information flow and travel demands, and to create our own personal time cocoons to achieve maximum efficiency. He shows us how to stop designing work environments, ranging from conference rooms to air traffic control centers that actually encourage drowsiness, and how to factor in the same maintenance concern for the operators of machines that we show for the machines themselves.

As a hands-on guide to overcoming the conflict between biological and environmental time, The Twenty-Four-Hour Society is vital reading for anyone with a stake in our technological future.

Reviews

This vitally important book offers insights and advice relevant to most anyone who works for a living. Moore-Ede, a physiology professor at Harvard Medical School and CEO of Circadian Technologies, makes the point early on that contemporary technological society collides with the physiology humans have developed over eons, ill-adapting us physically to deal with the demands of jobs that can require us to be alert at 4 a.m. He shows how the employees in the airline business, the medical profession and the nuclear power, trucking and railroad industries, for example, suffer disastrous accidents because their circadian cycles have been disrupted. In amelioration, however, Moore-Ede notes that if fatigue cannot be measured, alertness can. If put into effect, his strictures could well save many lives and billions of dollars.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Today's work schedules, environments, and policies not only ignore what is known about the body's circadian rhythms, states the author (himself an expert on day-night rhythms of human alertness and fatigue), they actively counter biological cycles and propensities. But chronobiology, a hot research topic now starting to move out of the lab to address real life, may help modern societies address these problems. Moore-Ede (physiology, Harvard Medical Sch.) does not offer simple solutions. He argues that major shifts in thinking about scheduling, environmental stimulation, and strategic napping, plus greater commercialization of devices for light therapy, could greatly improve the health and productivity of U.S. workers. This book is likely to interest the many people who work odd or late hours; suffer from jet lag, insomnia, or other sleep disorders; or find themselves tired and stressed by a relentless schedule. Highly recommended.
- M.E. Chitty, Biotrends Research, Natick, Ma.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: Outpaced by Our Technology EARLY ONE MORNING at three o'clock, as a DC-S of a major airline was on final approach to Chicago's O'Hare Airport, the second officer (flight engineer) noticed that the plane was headed not for the runway but straight at the American Airlines terminal. He immediately alerted the first officer, who was flying the plane, but the first officer responded in a dazed, zombielike voice, "Everything is okay, I am on a vector to intercept the runway." Realizing that both the first officer and the captain were in a sleepy stupor, the second officer yelled out in desperation, "Where are you going?!" Fortunately, the captain then responded and landed the plane safely while the first officer sat beside him like a passive lump. The first officer had sunk into an automatic behavior state in the netherland between sleep and wake. Like an automaton disconnected from reality or relevant data input, he could still follow through on the well-rehearsed automatic process of landing a jetliner. But incoherent and unresponsive, he was obviously a danger to all on board-a nightmare of human error propensity just barely averted. On the other side of the world, the 290 passengers on another airplane were less fortunate. For below them, in the Persian Gulf, steamed the technological pride of the United States Navy, the USS Vincennes, a $1 billion Aegis cruiser-and no ordinary ship. The skipper did not scan the horizon from the bridge with heavy binoculars, but instead exercised command from the high-tech Combat Information Center (CIC), a windowless room linked to the outside world through glowing computer and radar screens. Never before had a warship's captain had access to so much instant and accurate information or had so much technological power at his fingertips. But all this technological prowess was only as good as the weakest link in the chain-the sailors who operated the technology. Unfortunately, the crew had been fatigued and stressed by frequent calls to general quarters battle stations. Each time the exhausted crew members went below decks to sleep, another small Iranian patrol boat was spotted carrying potential attackers, and, following combat procedures, again the crew members were called out of their bunks. The path of the Iranian A300 airbus, as it climbed for its scheduled short trip over the Persian Gulf, was detected by the Vincennes's Aegis system. Although the radar showed the commercial airliner climbing on a normal flight path, at least one fatigue-stressed CIC operator anxiously and repeatedly told the captain that the "target" was descending, as if to attack. Another key officer struggling against fatigue distorted the data to fit his preconceived perceptions of an attack scenario. Despite accurate contraindications from sophisticated computers, the fateful decision was made to launch a missile, which intercepted the plane and sent 290 innocent people to their deaths. This disaster in turn spawned the retaliatory bombing of Pan Am flight 103 six months later, in which 270 people lost their lives, and which led in time to the bankruptcy of that pioneering airline.

These errors and accidents did not occur by chance. Myriad other, equally frightening mistakes happen every day. Each is the predictable outcome of failing to allow for human limitations in the nonstop world we have desigued and of investing much more in the technology of machines than in the performance of people (Figure 1.1). The engineers, desiguers, and managers of our society have not yet learned this lesson. Indeed, we continue to design equipment, systems, and procedures that can only increase the risk of catastrophic human error. The crisis in human performance is hardly limited to the world of aircraft and radar screens. All across the nation in our finest teaching hospitals, the wonders of high-tech medicine are rendered useless by mind-numbed interns and residents working day and night on thirty-six-hour shifts. On our highways, long-haul truckers working fifteen-hour days are lulled into non-responsive zombie states while driving huge vehicles at high speeds. And it is not a coincidence that the most notorious industrial accidents of our time-Three Mile Island, Bhopal, Chernobyl, and the Exxon Valdez-all occurred in the middle of the night, when those with hands-on responsibility were dangerously fatigued. The problem isn't limited to the control room, however. Management, too, fails to observe its own limitations, as, for example, in the Challenger disaster, when key NASA officials made the ill-fated go-ahead decision after working for twenty hours straight after only two to three hours of sleep the night before. Their judgment error cost the lives of seven astronauts and nearly killed the U.S. space program as well. At the heart of the problem is a fundamental conflict between the demands of our man-made civilization and the very design of the human brain and body. Fashioned over millions of years, we pride ourselves as the pinnacle of biological evolution. But the elegant organization of cells and chemistry, structure and systems, sinews and skeleton, that is the human being, was molded in response to long-outdated design specs that we seem to have forgotten. Our bodies were designed to hunt by day, sleep at night, and never travel more than a few dozen miles from sunrise to sunset. Now we work and play at all hours, whisk off by jet to the far side of the globe, make life-or-death decisions, or place orders on foreign stock exchanges in the wee hours of the morning. The pace of technological innovation is outstripping the ability of the human race to understand the consequences. Much like a toddler who is truly dangerous because his physical abilities have developed well ahead of his cognitive awareness, our society has reached a critical and hazardous stage of development. And the problem will get worse. Competitive pressures are forcing more and more businesses to provide their services twenty-four hours a day. Demands for increased returns on capital investment and lower costs are requiring most manufacturing plants to convert to around-the-clock, seven-day-a-week operations. International competition, made possible by the wizardry of modern telecommunication, is speeding up the pace of global trade and the demand for international travel. And the technology of fax machines and laptop computers seems designed to prevent us from ever escaping the fatigue of working at all hours of day and night-wherever in the world we may be. Meanwhile, the trend is for ever more power to be given to an individual. Oil refineries are centralizing their computerized control systems so that a single operator is responsible for more distillation towers and cracker units. Chemical plants are converting from batch processing to continuous processing so that more chemicals can be synthesized with fewer employees. Trucking companies are adding double and triple rigs to trucks so that a single driver can transport more goods. Aircraft manufacturers are designing the next generation of superjumbos to transport more passengers but reduce the cockpit crew from three to two. With more power comes more risk. Instead of only hundreds or a few thousand dollars being placed at risk from a single human operator error, now the costs are in the millions or even billions. A fatal heavy-truck accident typically incurs $1 million or more of liability; an error of inattention in a nuclear power plant, in a chemical plant, or on an oil tanker can create a $1 billion problem. The tab for Exxon from the Exxon Valdez oil spill, which the National Transportation Safety Board concluded was due to crew fatigue and inattention, has so far exceeded $3 billion, with more than $50 billion of claims in the legal pipeline. Such risk gives today's chief executive nightmares. An error by a junior person earning one-hundredth of a CEO's salary and whom the CEO has never met can bankrupt the company and deprive the CEO of a job. Few companies have the resources of Exxon to pay out billions of dollars and survive, and even Exxon cannot do that often. Indeed, Richard Stegemeier, the CEO of Unocal, has recently circulated a videotape to his employees urgmg extreme care in safety-sensitive operations such as shipping or trucking oil, because it would take only one such major accident to bankrupt his company.

PERILS OFA NONSTOP WORLD OUR TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR society has developed because of a set of technological and economic imperatives. The technology of telecommunications, satellites, and fax and computer networks means that we can pass a message or receive the answer to a question between Boston and Paris or London and Tokyo faster than it once took to walk down the street to consult a neighbor in a medieval village community. All that separates us now are the time zones-but therein lies the problem. Hustle and bustle, decisions, deals, and opportunities occur continuously, because it is always daytime somewhere in the global village. And those working in that daytime create a demand for instant attention from others who must work by night on the other side of the world. This constant hive of activity is reinforced by the fact that the technology of our society, the machines and equipment, are designed to run continuously without concern for night and day. Indeed, the economics of production and capital investment are so much in favor of using assembly lines and processing plants continuously that large sections of the population now work at night or on rotating shifts. They in turn need services at all hours, and so yet another group of people is inexorably drawn into this world where nature's temporal order no longer rules. All this might be fine if the human body were infinitely adaptable. But our patterns of sleep and wake, of digestion and metabolism, are governed by internal biological clocks, elegantly attuned to the patterns-of dawn and dusk, night and day-of a simpler era. They make us sleepy at night and alert during the day, and they regulate the activity of our digestive tract to be ready for the next predicted mealtime. The twenty-four-hour society forces us to operate the human body outside the design specs crafted by prehistoric experience. The solutions we must seek require a rethinking of society, and a sophistication in biotechnology to adapt the human body to the technology and the technology to the human body. Indeed, we are in the midst of the next major societal revolution-a time of crisis and of opportunity.

SOCIETY IN REVOLUTION SEVEN THOUSAND years ago, the agricultural revolution saw the hunter-gatherer in most civilizations become a planterharvester. An incessantly mobile human society was thereby converted into one invested in hearth and homestead. Two hundred years ago the industrial revolution converted that well-refined agricultural society into one dominated by the dictates of industrial production. Now we face another such major revolution - the conversion of our world into a single technologically integrated, around-the-clock community. Each such societal revolution was initiated by a set of unfulfilled needs and a set of innovations and inventions that responded to those needs. In the case of the agricultural revolution, population growth had strained the natural limits of food supply and made apparent the inefficiencies and uncertainties of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Responding to those needs was a stream of innovations such as planting, harvesting, breeding and raising livestock, home building, and defending territory. Similarly with the industrial revolution the inefficiencies and uncertain quality of widely distributed cottage industries could not meet the demand for goods. Innovations such as steampowered engines, industrial machinery, fuel supplies and energy production, steel, city construction, mass-produced row housing, water supply, and sanitation were designed to solve the problems and needs of industrialization. Our present revolution-the conversion of our world into a nonstop twenty-four-hour society-has developed in response to our need for ever more efficient production in a world with too scarce capital resources to meet the needs of an explosively growing population. It has been made possible, like other societal revolutions, by a stream of inventions and innovations: Instant worldwide telecommunications that allow us to pick up a phone and speak to a person at any point on the earth's surface, whether on a vehicle, roaming the desert, or out at sea. Computers and microprocessors-a computer on every desk, every lap, and even every palm, tapping into vast resources of information and computing power. Automation of machinery that will run continuously for weeks or even years without human intervention or servicing. Jet and supersonic travel, moving people and freight twenty-four hours a day rapidly point to point across the earth's surface. A global economy and trading system, and the tumbling of major political boundaries such as the Iron Curtain. Surely the Bamboo Curtain must fall in not too many years; already sixty million Chinese in the provinces near Hong Kong are developing a market economy under the principle "the mountains are high and the emperor is far away. Modems and fax machines bridge the gap to the outside world more readily than the old lines of communication keep contact with the aging power structure in Beijing. Societal revolutions have the habit of sneaking up on us. The agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution were each well under way before most people realized what was happening around them. To look back with the perspective of time and recognize how the world has changed is easy; to recognize the subtle seeds of change that will flower into a full-blown societal revolution is much harder. Only after many years, when the pundits and historians have put labels on a series of events and fundamental societal changes, is the societal transformation conceptualized as a revolution. People who understand early that a fundamental societal revolution is beginning can make the right decisions, choose the right investments, and modify their lives and businesses appropriately. They place themselves in a position to benefit most from the positive aspects of the change and suffer least from the negative. But the vast majority of people remain deeply embedded in the paradigms and assumptions of the past era. They do not wake up in time to comprehend how their world has changed and do not recognize early enough how they should change their lives accordingly. We are currently in the midst of a revolution as fundamental and as far-reaching as any previous societal revolution. This book chronicles this revolution and shows how to take advantage before the fact-where to invest, how to modify one's life and compete more effectively in one's business, and how to avoid the side effects that can rob one of health and financial security, and cause fatigue and stress. This is not a simple "how to" book, although where to find specific necessary information will become clear. Rather, it is a road map, a big-picture look at the transition we are passing through, a glimpse of how the world will look in the rapidly approaching twenty-first century. We must understand the big picture to make the right decisions for ourselves, our families, our businesses, and our lifestyles.

Edition details

• Publisher: Addison-Wesley
• Publication date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0201577119
• ISBN 13: 9780201577112
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 230