Nap Time at Walter Reed

What could explain the incredible, total failure of senior officials to fix up the Walter Reed Army Medical Center (prior to being exposed by the Washington Post)? I mean, how could those in charge live with the fact that injured soldiers were living in decrepit conditions?

Maybe the officials weren't getting enough sleep.

This study by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research won't come as a surprise to anyone who's ever pulled an all-nighter: researchers at the institute have found sleep deprivation might make people more evil. Or specifically, that a lack of sleep effects our moral decision making:

Research has shown that bad sleep can adversely affect a person's physical health and emotional well-being. However, the amount of sleep one gets can also influence his or her decision-making. A study published in the March 1st issue of the journal SLEEP finds that sleep deprivation impairs the ability to integrate emotion and cognition to guide moral judgments.

The study, conducted by William D.S. Killgore, PhD, and colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, was focused on 26 healthy adults, who made judgments about the "appropriateness" of various courses of action in response to three types of moral dilemmas on two separate occasions: at rested baseline and again following 53 hours of continuous wakefulness.

Compared to baseline, sleep deprivation resulted in significantly longer response latencies (suggesting greater difficulty deciding upon a course of action) for moral personal dilemmas.

The findings suggest that continuous wakefulness has a particularly debilitating effect on judgment and decision making processes that depend heavily upon the integration of emotion with cognition, said Killgore, adding that the results provide further support to the hypothesis that sleep loss is particularly disruptive to the ventromedial prefrontal regions of the brain, which are important for the integration of affect and cognition in the service of judgment and decision making.

The study's results raise some interesting questions for military: The Air Force is looking for new ways to keep people awake, even though the service's use of "go pills" was blamed for a friendly fire incident that killed four Canadian soldiers. In the meantime, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has expressed interest in ways to alleviate post-traumatic stress in soldiers. Maybe they can give it to guys like the Army surgeon general Kevin Kiley, when they come to grips with how many soldiers they've mistreated.

-- Sharon Weinberger