Australia has no shortage of serious research problems. We have an ageing population, chronic disease, declining productivity, an energy system undergoing an extraordinarily expensive transformation, agricultural challenges, housing shortages, cybersecurity threats and a host of scientific and technological problems where genuinely new knowledge might deliver enormous benefits. Against that background, the Australian Research Council has awarded researchers at CQUniversity $877,410 for a three-year project investigating a rather more restful question: how long should workers nap during a night shift?
To be fair to the researchers, the project is not as ridiculous as the headline initially makes it sound. CQUniversity researchers at the Appleton Institute in Adelaide want to determine how different nap lengths affect alertness, productivity and safety across an entire night shift. More than two million Australians undertake shift work, and fatigue contributes to workplace errors and accidents, particularly in industries where mistakes can have serious consequences. The researchers therefore argue that identifying the optimum nap duration could produce useful workplace guidance.
Fair enough. Sleep matters, fatigue matters and nobody should pretend that occupational safety is a trivial subject. The more interesting question is whether discovering the supposedly optimum length of a workplace nap is important enough, uncertain enough and socially valuable enough to justify almost $900,000 of scarce public research funding.
The difficulty begins with the fact that we already know quite a lot about short naps. Twenty years ago, Flinders University researchers Amber Brooks and Leon Lack conducted a controlled experiment comparing no nap with naps of 5, 10, 20 and 30 minutes after participants had undergone restricted nighttime sleep. The study involved 24 healthy young adults and measured sleepiness, fatigue, vigour and cognitive performance during the hours following their naps.
The results were hardly mysterious. Five minutes did relatively little. Ten minutes produced immediate improvements across the measured outcomes, with some benefits continuing for more than two hours. Twenty minutes also produced benefits, although these emerged later, while the 30-minute nap initially impaired alertness and performance through sleep inertia before producing subsequent improvements. Of the durations tested, the researchers concluded that the 10-minute nap was overall the most effective.
The new ARC project is not simply repeating that experiment. Its researchers make the reasonable point that previous work has not adequately determined the relationship between nap duration and performance and productivity across an entire night shift. That is a more specific occupational question, and it is entirely possible that the research will produce useful information.
But this is where research funding requires something more than demonstrating that a question can be scientifically investigated. Almost anything can be investigated scientifically if enough money is available. The relevant question for public funding is opportunity cost: what are we not researching because $877,410 has been allocated to this?
Every dollar awarded by the ARC is a dollar that cannot be awarded to another project. Australia has finite research resources, and universities contain vastly more researchers seeking grants than governments can possibly fund. Consequently, the standard should not merely be whether a proposed project is legitimate research. It should also be whether the problem is sufficiently important and the expected knowledge sufficiently valuable to justify taking resources away from competing projects.
The nap question looks particularly vulnerable when considered from the perspective of ordinary human experience. People differ enormously in their responses to sleep. One worker may wake from a 20-minute nap feeling refreshed, another may feel dreadful. Some people can fall asleep almost immediately, while others may spend their entire allocated nap period staring at the ceiling. Age, accumulated sleep debt, circadian rhythms, caffeine consumption, health, habitual sleep patterns and individual differences in sleep architecture can all affect what happens during a short rest.
That makes the search for a single "perfect" nap length somewhat questionable from the beginning. Even if researchers eventually conclude that, averaged across their subjects, 12, 17 or 23 minutes produces the best combination of alertness and productivity, the practical advice to an individual worker may still amount to something remarkably simple: experiment with short naps and discover what works for you.
That experiment costs approximately nothing. Try ten minutes. If you wake refreshed and work better afterwards, excellent. If you remain tired, try fifteen or twenty. If a longer nap leaves you wandering around for half an hour feeling as though someone has filled your skull with wet cement, shorten it next time. Human beings have been conducting precisely this sort of informal self-experimentation for as long as they have been falling asleep during the day.
There is an important distinction here between questions requiring collective scientific investigation and questions that individuals can answer reasonably well through ordinary experience. I cannot personally determine whether a new cancer treatment works, whether a bridge design will withstand a once-in-500-year flood or whether a new battery chemistry can economically store renewable electricity. Those questions require expertise, equipment, controlled experimentation and substantial resources. Determining whether I function better after ten minutes' sleep than after thirty is something I can discover myself.
Workplaces involving pilots, surgeons, emergency workers, miners, truck drivers or operators of dangerous machinery may reasonably want evidence-based fatigue-management policies rather than leaving everything to individual preference. There is therefore a defensible scientific core to the project. But even here the most useful conclusion may ultimately be a range rather than a magic number, precisely because workers are individuals rather than interchangeable experimental units.
The earlier Flinders research already points us in that direction. Short naps can improve alertness, while longer naps can bring the penalty of sleep inertia. The 10-minute nap performed particularly well in that experiment, although nobody should imagine that this establishes ten minutes as a biological constant applicable to every human being under every working condition.
The broader issue is the culture of research funding. Universities naturally generate research questions because generating research is what universities do. Researchers are professionally rewarded for obtaining grants, conducting studies and publishing papers. The bureaucratic machinery evaluates whether proposals are methodologically sophisticated, novel within their particular literature and capable of producing measurable outputs. What can get lost is the commonsense question a taxpayer might reasonably ask: do we really need to spend nearly $900,000 finding this out?
Perhaps the CQUniversity researchers will surprise the sceptics and discover something of substantial importance for shift-work safety. If their findings prevent serious industrial accidents, the investment could easily repay itself. It would therefore be unfair to dismiss the research as worthless before it has even been completed.
But accepting that possibility does not remove the question of priorities. Public research money is scarce precisely because there are so many worthwhile things scientists could investigate. Funding one project necessarily means not funding another, and the case for spending $877,410 refining our knowledge of workplace nap duration should therefore be weighed against all the medical, technological, agricultural and scientific problems competing for the same pool of money.
We already know that fatigue reduces performance. We already know that short naps can restore alertness. We already have experimental evidence comparing different nap durations, including Australian research finding particularly strong immediate benefits from a 10-minute nap. Most importantly, individual workers can determine surprisingly well whether ten, fifteen or twenty minutes leaves them feeling refreshed or resembling a recently exhumed corpse.
Science should investigate questions that matter, but public science funding must do something more difficult: decide which questions matter most. The workplace nap project may produce perfectly respectable science. The real question is whether Australia needed to spend $877,410 to obtain an answer that millions of tired workers are capable of investigating for themselves during their next lunch break.