A pill that kickstarts the brain when sleep deprived seems to be coming soon. Why am I nervous?

Cool Beans! Now I can work 24 hours a day through the semester, with Sunday as my sleep day, to let my brain catch up! With all that time up my sleeves, I'm bound to catch up on all my assignments!

Speaking of which, I'd better get back to it...

Maybe I'll be able to stay awake in computational chem. That room is stuffy.

Funny. It might help those of us who feel sleep deprived after only 12 hours.
But, it enhances brain activity without the sleep deprivation... if they market this stuff, how long before they start testing for it at chess championships?

man, I can foresee this being pumped thorough IVs to us here at work... Though, can you just imagine the next Halo Ironman tournament? Bawls will introduce this as a new additive. :)

This is a horrifically bad idea...

I can see the situation in 20 years where it's a matter of "take the drugs or get the hell out!" in every major corporation...

...and sleep is required for a purpose... The body processes all manner of trash and toxins while comatose...

In the late 1980s and early nineties the US military (who else?) monitored the effects of sleep deprevation by monitoring "volunteers" for up to 11 days at a time... It was discovered to be impossible to keep anyone up longer than this as they had an annoying propensity to drop into comas with a temperature of 105'F...

What's going to hapen if these drugs become suggested, or even mandatory for certain jobs?

Not simply that, but REM sleep is shown to assist in memory storage - people who don't get that REM sleep simply don't have the memory retention as everyone else.

This may be useful as a short-term solution to a lack of sleep, but I have severe doubts as to it's efficacy as a long-term strategy. My suspicion is that after long periods on the drug, your memory will be rather patchy...

...mental effects. Not physical effects. No-one has said anything about physical effects. Presumably your body still shuts down after a while...

Is it addictive?

I think that "Take the pills or get out!" may just end up killing off a few less popular businesses and starting a lot of startups. I also think it's unlikely - coffee has long been claimed to produce similar (if less dramatic) effects, and I have yet to hear of "Drink coffee or get out!".

No, what is far more worrying is the idea of direct genetic modification. And before anyone tells me that's fiction, read through this article - although I doubt the Sleepless will turn out exactly as in the book, it looks like they are possible.

What... the kind that can locate and fly out of teh open half of a half-open window? We better advertise that point in case we get invaded...

I digress...

Genetic circadian patterns?

I'm in the process of "growing a newbie" who's two months old now and just starting to sleep through - when it's dark she sleeps...although apparently initialy newborn babies start off nocturnal and have to be "conditioned" to sleep at night...

It'd be interesting to find out if these genes were present in humans, but not to diddle wkith them, as it looks to me like the natural human pattern is in the inverse to Drosophila melanogaster.

Yes, and there is no possible way that just wasn't a typo. Because look how different they are. One is THE and the other is TEH. Really people.

OT:

I've got a sneaky feeling that you won't have to worry about companies kkj, I think that it's probably going to be a military thing for a while yet.

It would be enormously helpful on the battlefield I think.