Tastes like chicken. You know the hidebound old adage well, and maybe even have humorously offered it in response to sampling extremely vile or creepy food. Now check this out. The brainiacs at Stanford University have used that saying to essentially describe the effects of sleepy driving. Confused yet? Well, you know how you'll eat a mystery meat at a cafeteria and say it "Tastes like chicken?" A Stanford study shows that driving while sleep-deprived "tastes" like drunk driving, when the levels of impairment are compared. In a way, drunk driving is getting a bad rap because now everything is being compared to it. DUI has been yoked to talking on a cellphone, using a hands-free device while talking and now being...sleepy.
Stanford pitted sleep-deprived drivers against drivers with a blood alcohol concentration of .089, which is over the legal limit, and found that there were no significant differences between the two groups in 11 different test metrics. Sleep-deprived driving isn't necessarily illegal, but use some common sense. There's nothing wrong with taking a nap in a parking lot or ducking into a cheap and sleazy motel for some, er, shut-eye before hitting the road again. You might even enjoy carrying your own sheets to the room. [Stanford via Core77]