Provigil Extends Your Day? 660
John Mearns writes "It looks like before long all caffeine junkies will be able to ditch the bottle of Mountain Dew or cup of coffee in favor of pill. Its not a true stimulant so you don't get the "caffeine crash," just countless hours of alert attentiveness. " It's also
still in testing so it'll probably make you grow horns or something, and is
supposed to only be used for people who are sleepy during the day, but it raises
several interesting ethical questions.
It won't replace coffee. (Score:4, Insightful)
WARNING! No one knows how it works!!! (Score:4, Insightful)
Provigil was developed in France in the 1970s. Although no one is sure how it works, animal studies show that the medication--unlike other drugs that induce wakefulness--doesn't seem to dramatically increase levels of dopamine, a neurotransmitter associated with arousal and alertness.
If you want to take a drug that no one knows how it works, go for it. However, I will not be taking a drug that scientists are clueless about.
The best treatment for sleepiness is SLEEPING!!! If you are engaging in an activity that is depriving you of sleep, STOP!!! There is a reason you get sleepy. Your body and mind needs to rest and recharge and sleepiness is the signal to do so. Medical test after medical test has shown that people that deprive themselves of sleep go insane and lose their ability to perform even the easiest of tasks. That is why sleep deprivation is used so often as a torture device to break down subjects, so they will spill the proverbial beans.
It's sad... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sleep is fundamental, period. There are no substitutions.
Is this wise? (Score:3, Insightful)
If you're sleepy, you need to sleep. If you're sleepy during the day, well, maybe you need to go to bed earlier.
Plus, sleeping is one of the seven capital pleasures of being human. Going to bed when you're sleepy is actually pretty nice. Why give it up?
What "interesting ethical questions"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Da Vinci (Score:2, Insightful)
The human body has many continuous overlapping cycles. The most prominent is the circadian rythymn, our daily clock. But there are longer cycles (women's monthly cycles) and a shorter one of approximatly 4 hours. Adopting this sleeping pattern would maximize restorative sleep (Stage 4 and REM) while minimizing the less productive sleep stages (Stages 1-3). When you adopt this sleep schedule, you immediately go into deep sleep and then dream within 5 or 10 minutes. The normal delay for dreaming is usually 3-5 hours.
One last thing that I found in my research. While most people can deal with moderate sleep loss for an extended time 2-3 hours a night, there is a core sleep time of 4-5 hours that the average person must get otherwise they become non-functional.
I would love to read up more on this drug and to see how the research has changed in the three years that I have left school.
Normal Sleep (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sleep and dreams... (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think that this is true. I read a New Yorker article a few months ago about the same drug. It said that not getting enough sleep will impair your performance at the time, but it doesn't cause any long-term effects. It talked about Randy Gardner who stayed awake for 11 days straight. He didn't experience any real problems during the experiment, and was completely back to normal after sleeping for something like 14 hours after the experiment.
And the really interesting thing about this new drug is that you can stay awake for long periods of time without any performance impairment, or even any sleepiness. Cool and scary at the same time...
Re:WARNING! No one knows how it works!!! (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's the good part: side effects are almost completely unknown. They're found by administering the drug and seeing what happens. Sometimes there are no side effects, sometimes you get a dry mouth, sometimes your fingernails fall off, sometimes all your mitochondria die, etc. There's a reason drug trials are carefully planned and monitored.
Completely wrong. There are some people who *never* sleep, yet do not suffer from bad effects. If the need for sleep where a fundamental characteristic of higher neural activity, they would die in childhood, but they do not.It is entirely possible (and I would say likely) that sleep is caused by a clock mechanism that tries to modulate consciousness. It is plausible that the "turn off" signal from the clock becomes hyperactive if it isn't satisfied and wreaks havoc on the rest of the brain, which is perfectly capable of staying online. If you could block or reset this hypothetical clock with a drug, you could stay awake forever.
Re:I've used it. (Score:4, Insightful)
I never grokked why this stay-up-for-hours mentality became such a powerful meme with college students. I *always* did better by getting a reasonable amount of sleep than by staying up to cram. Give yourself a few extra days lead time for in-depth studying. Get proper sleep sleep for the period just before and during exams. Watch your performance soar.
Re:As with all good things... (Score:3, Insightful)
And even beyond your points, natural and good for you don't always mean in your best interest. One of the effects of receiving sufficient or excessive nutrition is that cells (and animals) tend to focus on procreating at the expense of their own lifespans. There is a fundamental biological process that kills cells faster when there is an abundance of nutrience. That means, even though malnurishment is "bad" for you, you may live longer on a carefully malnourished diet.
This makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint because in lean times you are best served by just surviving until better times when you can procreate or help your tribe/etc in other ways. Similarly, if you are stressed and not getting enough sleep, it may mean that you are going through some other kind of negative period in which the body's best bet is simply to extend life until better times roll around. In fact, recent studies suggest that those who sleep about 6-7 hours a night live longer than those who sleep 8-10.
Go figure.
Sleep and Dreams... (Score:4, Insightful)
Some evidence for this: there is a specific type of autism (I can't remember the name) that baffled researchers until they started monitoring the EEG's at night. The researchers found out that the people with this type of autism were literally going in to seizures at night, at least they were experiencing the "electrical storm" in their brains that characterize a seizure. The researchers put the patients on anti-epilepsy medication, and it cleared up the symptoms right away. As the theory goes, the brain was using all of it's connections every night, preventing unused/unneeded connections from atrophying. So the patient was literally unable to forget anything, but also didn't have any more room for more connections.
The moral of the story (considering that only a fool wouldn't realize that these pills won't be more abused than Viagra)? Don't use/abuse these pills if you want to be able to remember/learn anything long-term.
BlackGriffen
Re:It won't replace coffee. (Score:3, Insightful)
Exercise is making a huge difference for me (Score:5, Insightful)
What about the LGMs? (Score:3, Insightful)
kids... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Seriously (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow... and I thought taking LEGAL advice from Slashdot was bad!