Nick Eff (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
roadrunnertwice) wrote2007-12-27 07:41 pm
roadrunnertwice) wrote2007-12-27 07:41 pm
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This looks incredibly awesome. If orexin turns out to actually make narcolepsy go away, well, my god. (The article's got precious little detail about that, preferring to focus on the smart-drug aspect -- I was curious about whether it makes the hallucinations or cataplexy go away, too, but no love.)
The article may be right to focus on the smart-drug aspect, though. Say you had access to that spray -- no physical addiction, no twitchy side effects... would you abuse it? 'Cause if it really is that perfect of a drug, you wouldn't be getting the feedback telling you when you're using your body up; you'd just keep on going, with no safety net of jitters or exhaustion to tell you when to let up.
It's kind of a new dilemma -- how many of us have the discipline to handle a drug that doesn't suck?
The article may be right to focus on the smart-drug aspect, though. Say you had access to that spray -- no physical addiction, no twitchy side effects... would you abuse it? 'Cause if it really is that perfect of a drug, you wouldn't be getting the feedback telling you when you're using your body up; you'd just keep on going, with no safety net of jitters or exhaustion to tell you when to let up.
It's kind of a new dilemma -- how many of us have the discipline to handle a drug that doesn't suck?
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My big question is, what psychological effects does it have for humans, in that whole star trekkie "we need time for our subconscious to process things" stuff. Will everyone go insane?
Same goes for the bodies muscles. Even when one doesn't sleep, the body rests.
Most likely, everyone would just work more and become really boring.
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I researched (and experimented [unsuccessfully] a bit with) alternative sleep management schedules a few years ago, and if you get that REM, there're ways to squirm out of the repair phases of sleep. None of them seem to work very well unless you're over 30, and they force some pretty drastic diet changes; I think you have to take in more calories, but simultaneously jack up the nutrient density to about what people on those crazy calorie-restricted diets eat. (Plus some weird stuff; apparently you crave large amounts of grape juice.) I think the best-case scenario with this new stuff -- at least in its role as a smart drug -- is for a healthy person over 30 who wants to reduce their sleep to 2-3 hours a night and is willing to pay the price of a permanent major diet overhaul. And the price of an increased cancer risk (as per that other recent science article, about shift workers getting it more often than daylighters).
There'd also be a lot of people hitting it moderately during finals and sleeping normally the rest of the year, and I don't think they'd be in any big danger. But I can foresee a whole lot of Korean Warcraft players keeling over in internet cafés. That's your worst-case scenario. (That, and those damn sitting corpses down in the hold. Ugh.)
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It was a pretty ingenious little experimental design where each test rat was paired with a control rat. Whenever the test rat stopped moving for too long, they were both automatically splashed with water until the test rat started moving again. So, the test rat couldn't sleep, but the control rat could sleep as long as the test rat was moving. And they both got splashed with exactly the same amount of water at exactly the same time, so that couldn't create a difference.
The result? After about a month, the test rats started dropping like flies, and no one knows why.
So, yeah, that drug scares me. I would, most likely, abuse it horribly and then suddenly and die in a month, cause unknown.