Saturday, February 18, 2006
Sleepless in Quang Nam
The Machinist featured a character who hadn't slept for a year. I wondered if this is possible, considering how you'll occasionally hear of some dedicated worker dropping dead after not sleeping for a week. Apparently, yes. The Vietnamese farmer Thai Ngoc has not slept since 1973! He's still healthy, aside from some liver problems. No word as to if he's been growing cocoa.
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There is a semi-regular character in the Fox network series "Prison break" who suffers that abnormality,and I think it is a real one, a brain disorder caused, I think, by a lesion on a certain part of the brain. I would think that, in those extremely rare real life cases such as your Vietnamese farmer, medication to prevent psychotic episodes would be required.
J.G. Ballard had a short story in which psychologists turn off the sleep capacities of a group of test subjects, who eventually go insane. It was quite good, as I recall.
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