\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span> met a guy in pharmaceuticals who told me about a bunch of cool breakthroughs in sleep meds: mainly, we may be on the brink of a new Wegovy, but in this case it\u2019s a drug to cure narcolepsy. I suggested the two things are not quite the same, given that obesity is a global epidemic and narcolepsy is fairly rare. He countered that the way the drug works might also have applications for insomnia; similar to the Post-it note having been invented by someone trying to create the world\u2019s strongest glue.<\/p>\n Anyway, in the course of this, I discovered the test for type 1 narcolepsy, which is that you\u2019re put in a room with zero stimulation \u2013 nothing to read, no one to chat to, perfect silence, perfect temperature \u2013 and timed on how long it takes you to fall asleep. If it\u2019s under eight minutes, you\u2019re narcoleptic. But the average, for a person with no complaints in that area at all, is 22 minutes. I was completely incredulous. This is a grip on consciousness more or less the same as a house cat. Bored? Go to sleep. Even a dog will have a quick look for something to eat first.<\/p>\n Obviously I\u2019ve spread this troubling statistic all over town, and most people have follow-ups, such as: what kind of a room? What colour is the room? Is there a chair in it, and is it comfy? Never mind the chair, what kind of hoodlum can fall asleep without a bed?<\/p>\n I also discovered cataplexy, which can involve falling asleep after strong emotions, not necessarily bad ones (laughing too hard is a trigger), and strongly recognised it. Sometimes I go to sleep on the tube just because I\u2019m pleased the tube has arrived.<\/p>\n In short, science has delivered a fresh wonder. It\u2019s only because we find each other so interesting that any of us are awake at all.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I met a guy in pharmaceuticals who told me about a bunch of cool breakthroughs in sleep meds: mainly, we may be on the brink of a new Wegovy, but in this case it\u2019s a drug to cure narcolepsy. I suggested the two things are not quite the same, given that obesity is a global<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":36521,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[270,252,20377,195,550,8148],"class_list":{"0":"post-36520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-change","9":"tag-drug","10":"tag-narcolepsy","11":"tag-williams","12":"tag-world","13":"tag-zoe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=36520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/36520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/36521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=36520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=36520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=36520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}