New Yorker Asks Whether Regular Sleep is Unnecessary
The cartoons in the magazine are black and white. They are unique in the way that bubbles are not coming out of character’s faces but rather a quote or a line describing the cartoon is printed below the cartoon itself. These cartoons deal with both contemporary issues as well as philosophical issues. There are no photographs at all in the New Yorker except the ones that are part of an advertisement. The pictures in the magazine are all drawings or sketches. The drawings of some of the newest art pieces in the museum do use color, however. Some of the pictures in the magazine are big, elaborate, and full of detail while others are small such as a tree.
“Goings on about Town” highlights the many happenings in New York City. Theatrical production reviews are included as well as information on dance, auctions and antiques, and photography. A section in each magazine is dedicated to nightlife. Movies, both new and classics are featured with reviews and theater locations. Other sections include museums, libraries, musical performances, and book recitals.
“The Talk of the Town” highlights articles of both regional and national importance. “Comment Differences” is about the war on terrorism and its differences and similarities with other wars. “New Haven Notebook: The Game, Once More” is about football games between Yale and Harvard. “At the Museums: A Face-lift on Fifth” is about the new museum called Neue Galerie which is on the corner of Eighty-sixth Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. We find a biography of Billy Joel and his newest CD “Fantasies and Delusions” in the article “Lessons: Piano Man, Part Two”. The longest “Talk of the Town” piece discusses the economies of the Middle East and North Africa in “The Financial Page: The Real Price of Oil”.
“Medical Dispatch: Eyes Wide Open: Can science make regular sleep unnecessary?” was the most interesting article in the magazine. The article dealt with tests done by the United States Army Aero Medical Research Laboratory in Fort Rucker, Alabama regarding sleep deprivation. Sleep researchers have studied sleep deprivation using a laboratory that contains an elaborate flight simulator. This flight simulator is a replica of a helicopter cockpit supported on a hydraulic base that produces the complex movements of flight. In a recent study, pilots had to stay awake for two forty-eight hour periods and had to perform routine precision maneuvers. Sleep-deprived pilots responded more slowly and made more errors. John Caldwell, the study’s leading researcher says that, “Drugs are a tactical necessity for sleep deprivation.” For this reason, compound 2-(diphenylmethnyl) sulfinylacetamide, also known as modifinil, was first tested and proved to be effective in allowing pilots to stay awake for long periods of time without making errors.
The Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) will provide more than a hundred million dollars in research grants to study deprivation. The purpose simply is to have military personnel go without sleep for as long as possible and using drugs such as modafinil to prevent them from making mistakes.” The capability to resist the mental and physiological effects of sleep deprivation will fundamentally change current military concepts of “operational tempo” and contemporary orders of battle for the military services. In short, the capability to operate effectively, without sleep, is no less than a 21st Century revolution in military affairsâÂ?¦As combat systems become more and more sophisticated and reliable, the major limiting factor for operational dominance in a conflict is the warfighter. 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 warfighting and force employment.”
Sleep deprivation is also studied because nearly thirty percent of the population has significant insomnia on occasion and between ten and fifteen percent have it as a regular condition. Employers say that lost productivity due to sleep disorders costs an annual $18 billion every year. “Modafinil is a key to understanding biologically what it means for us to be awake,” said Matthew Miller, a pharmacologist at Cephalon, a Pennsylvania-based company that licensed the drug. The drug promotes the more selective firing of neuronal circuits in the cerebrum particularly in the prefrontal cortex, where many of the higher functions of cognition and emotion seem to lie. Doctors are prescribing modafinil to patients who have sleep disorders, drowsiness and fatigue associated with multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, and depression. The drug is not addictive and users do not develop a tolerance to the drug.
United States Air Force crews used to use the drug Dexedrine. However, it causes jitteriness, hypertension, rapid and irregular heartbeat, a high potential for addiction, and a negative “rebound” effect – non-restorative sleep when the drug wears off. Caffeine is a drug commonly used by Americans to keep awake but it can only keep a person awake for up to twenty hours. Scientists are exploring the prospect that people may be able to be in a state of alertness for days. They even say that further advances could make it possible that regular sleep would be unnecessary. “Modafinil looks much better than caffeine. Wakefulness becomes effortless”, says David Dinges, researcher on sleep deprivation at the University of Pennsylvania. He says he finds this both exciting and disturbing.
Employers expect their employees to go on a rotation schedule that has changes of shifts from day to day or week to week. “Shift-worker syndrome” describes people who, because of moving between day and night schedules, have continual drowsiness when they are supposed to be active and insomnia when they are trying to sleep.
A study was conducted in which 16 healthy subjects were placed in shift-work conditions in a laboratory. Some were given modafinil while others were given a placebo. They endured one twenty-eight-hour period of sleep deprivation to imitate the habits of real-life shift workers. Then they began a four-day period of being awake at night and sleeping from 11am to 7pm. Despite these radical changes in their sleep cycles, the volunteers found that modafinil sustained their alertness and the capacity to perform well in a variety of cognitive tests. In one of the tests, volunteers were asked to memorize symbols that represented different numbers. When a particular symbol was shown to the volunteer, he had to type the designated number for that symbol on a computer. The error rate was greater in those who took the placebo compared to those who took modafinil.
An interesting thing to note is that dolphins never fully go to sleep. “If these dolphins fell asleep, they could die in the water. As mammals, they have to surface regularly for oxygen, so they’ve had to adapt,” says John Carney, a neuropharmacologist who oversees the DARPA program. In dolphins, only one cerebral hemisphere sleeps at a time. The right hemisphere is awake while the left hemisphere is asleep and vice versa. Carney says that studies involving dolphins who are able to maintain a basic level of alertness while the hemispheres sleep may result in providing sustained cognitive performance in human beings.
