Thursday, November 07, 2002

I think the world is divided into two sorts of people: those whose ideal medical breakthrough is Botox, and those whose ideal medical breakthrough is Provigil. Guess which category I fall into. I have written about this before. New Scientist has more this week, however.

I would love to be able to do entirely without sleep. I could get an amazing amount of additional reading done. However, I wonder what the long term effects of this would be. We simply do not know what sleep is actually for, so we just do not know whether removing the urge to go to sleep will do horrible damage over the long term or not. From an evolutionary standpoint, the requirement that we sleep regularly is a substatial disadvantage though, so there must be some reason. The temptation to try it on myself to find out is surprisingly strong, however.

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