HOW TO STAY AWAKE AND STIMULATE YOUR BRAIN
Now it is safe and FDA approved !As a species, we've hit the bedtime barrier. You can eat at your desk, socialize in the break room, and answer text messages on a date, but sooner or later, you're going to have to sleep.
After 18, 19 hours awake, your brain function starts to fail," says Dallas, Texas, sleep-medicine specialist Andrew O. Jamieson. Coffee might keep you up, "but you're not going to be focused."
Coffee? You might as well be commuting by buggy. Old-school stimulants like caffeine, amphetamines and the drug Ritalin are about to be marginalized by eugeroics.
This emerging breed of "wakefulness" pills promises to keep the workers of tomorrow not just awake, but alert, on-task and feeling fine through the night and well into the next day.
Remember these names, because they're your future: Modafinil, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy and marketed in the U.S. as Provigil, is already giving a competitive edge to everyone from Air Force pilots on 40-hour missions to (less legally) college students cramming for exams.
Current research suggests modafinil, like its older and better-tested analogue adrafinil, is a safe, effective and well-tolerated agent. It is long-acting and doesn't tend to cause peripheral sympathetic stimulation. Yet its CNS action isn't fully understood. Modafinil induces wakefulness in part by its action in the anterior hypothalamus. Its dopamine-releasing action in the nucleus accumbens is weak and dose-dependent; the likelihood of a euphoric response ('abuse potential'), dose-escalation and tolerance is thus apparently small. Modafinil-induced alertness is partially antagonised by the endogenous cannabinoid neurotransmitter anandamide. Modafinil has central alpha 1-adrenergic agonist effects i.e. it directly stimulates the receptors. Modafinil inhibits the reuptake of noradrenaline by the noradrenergic terminals on sleep-promoting neurons of ventrolateral preoptic nucleus (VLPO). More significant, perhaps, is its ability to increase excitatory glutamatergic transmission. This reduces local GABAergic transmission, thereby diminishing GABA(A) receptor signalling on the mesolimbic dopamine terminals.
What it does is shut off your urge to sleep.
"It's a standing joke among sleep doctors that nobody sleeps in New York or Washington," says Helene Emsellem, director of the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase. "Except in New York they do it for pleasure, while in Washington they do it to work."
In trials on healthy people like Army helicopter pilots, modafinil has allowed humans to stay up safely for almost two days while remaining practically as focused, alert, and capable of dealing with complex problems as the well-rested. Then, after a good eight hours' sleep, they can get up and do it again -- for another 40 hours, before finally catching up on their sleep.
Originally aimed at narcoleptics, who fall asleep frequently and uncontrollably, modafinil works without the jitter, buzz, euphoria, crash, addictive characteristics or potential for paranoid delusion of stimulants like amphetamines or cocaine or even caffeine, researchers say. As with an increasing number of the so-called superhuman, posthuman or trans-human drugs or genetic manipulations rapidly entering our lives, modafinil thus calls into question some fundamental underpinnings of hundreds of thousands of years of thought regarding what are normal human capabilities.
The implications for Washington are profound.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is searching for ways to create the "metabolically dominant soldier." Among the projects it is pursuing is the creation of a warrior who can fight 24 hours a day, seven days straight. "Eliminating the need for sleep while maintaining the high level of both cognitive and physical performance of the individual will create a fundamental change in war-fighting," says the Defense Sciences Office on its Web site. As usual, DARPA did not comment directly for this report.
William C. Dement, director of the Stanford University Sleep Center, who is known as "the father of sleep medicine" for his pioneering work in the '50s, embraces the idea of modafinil use for official Washington. "If the Secretary of Defence had to stay awake for a long period of time, I would want him fully alert," he says.
Francis Fukuyama of Johns Hopkins University recently published "Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution," a book that is scathingly critical of what he sees as runaway biotech that could rob us of our very human nature. When asked about modafinil and its effects on Washington, he responded with a 2:50 a.m. e-mail from Europe, where he was finishing a grueling three-week trip. "I haven't heard of this but I'm not surprised," he wrote.
"I better get some," he half-joked.
Modafinil and its follow-on technologies hold the potential for changing society. "This could replace caffeine," says Joyce Walsleben, director of the NYU Sleep Disorders Center.
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