Doomed to Fail - Ep 146 - Fatal Insomnia: New Fear Unlocked

Episode Date: October 24, 2024

We LOVE sleeping, but isn't it weird that we have to? 1/3 of your life you spend in a vulnerable state where your brain tells you stories that science hasn't found an answer for! Today, let's talk a little about the theories on WHY we need sleep, and the horrible things that can happen to you if you don't get it! Tuck in and sleep tight!  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. And we are back on a lovely, lovely Thursday most likely. How are you doing, Taylor? Good. How are you? I'm good. I'm good. I'm good. I am excited for the race to the end. of the year and the chaos of it all and all those things so hopefully all these people will be relaxing if it really is Thursday um and I assume it will be um Thursday is the day that I take my postcards to the post office I wrote 200 postcards to voters in Texas to remind them to vote and Florence wrote about

50 of them and they're very huge um did you send any to me um no you weren't on my list I had a you know No, we had a list of voters to send to you, but it's quite cute, and it was, took a long time and my hand hurt a lot, but we did it. Who did you do that through? Postcards to win. Postcards to swing states is the thing. And I think in total, this volunteers, like you, I paid for the stamps and they sent me the postcards. And in total, they sent about 40 million postcards. They consider Texas a swing state.

yeah that is this is the same delusion tailor that we experienced when we first started in politics like almost over two decades ago this no way a decade ago a little over a decade ago like back then i remember being sent to texas when i was living in california because they're like all these organizations like we're going to flip tech we're going to flip texas like you're nowhere even not only nowhere close you also completely lost the ability to even try to flip florida at this point. So Florida's not even really in play anymore as a swing state. God, that's nuts. What a waste of resources. But I'm thankful you did it. It's a good civic action. I mean, there are plenty of other things to vote for two besides like, you know, vote at all. Vote now ballot, you know. I know. The partisan aspect of it is like that's, I'm addressing that, not so much like whether people will do vote or don't vote. But yeah, anyhow, that's fun. That's a fun little project. That's a really good way to get, um, get the engage with um with civics yeah yeah um cool well i'll introduce us oh yeah yeah yeah so bad this welcome to doomed to fail we are the podcast that brings you history's most notorious disasters and epic

failures twice a week my name is taylor joined by farz and this week is far as his turn or today as far as his turn to tell us story yes and this one is it might be a little longish or long er but it's going to be multifaceted because I kept finding it more and more interesting stuff about it. And it's a topic that we all know and love dearly. And it's, I added like the ending, actually listen to that. Listen through to the end because the end is a really fun story that like puts all into perspective, which I think people all like. But my topic is going to cover one of our favorite things, which is sleep.

Oh, I do it. So, you do it. We all love, love to sleep. And it was a fascinating bit of research trying to figure out exactly why we, sleep what happens when you don't sleep what are some things that go on with your body when you go through that that uh your circadian rhythm um and also going to be covering a very very scary concept that is known as fatal insomnia which is exactly what it sounds like and luckily it's incredibly rare but we're going to go ahead and cover that towards the end so taylor i wrote

down asked taylor this question so here's a question taylor can you guess how long the average human will spend sleeping in their lifetime. Like, in what percentage of their day time? You do percentage or you can do time. Wait, what's the average

lifetime? I have a lot of questions. I'm going off 79 years. Okay, 30 years. So it's 23 years. All right. So you spend 23 years asleep and 56 years awake if you live to be 79 years old. And that's going off about a seven hour amount of sleep per night, which a lot of people

get more than that or some might get less than that, but that's about a rough approximation. So that's, that means one third of your life is spent sleeping. And it's where it gets kind of interesting. So our bodies tell us when to sleep and when to wake based on our circadian clock. which is actually like a physical condition that is created within your body and it runs on 24-hour cycles. So I'm going to go into how it manifests itself, but the control center for all this or some nerves within the hypothalamus that are called supra chasmatic nucleus or CSSCN for short. And this is kind of like the main cluster of nerves that kick things off within your body to keep it

on this 24 hour o'clock. What's super interesting is it's actually not 24 hours for most people. For most people, it's about 24 hours in 10 minutes. So we're a little slower than the rotation of the earth. Does that have to do with like how we've kind of changed it anyway? Like why we have leap ears? I don't know. I should research that.

Because isn't that like, don't we have leap years? I was just like, it's not perfectly 24 hours. It's like a little bit off. That is true. So maybe we are more in sync with the. planet than not we could be although although i did also do research on this on time in how we measure time is also totally not 100% accurate i've also wanted to talk to do a whole episode in like time being like what the hell there's some crazy stuff like the way people measured time in the old days

and like how anyways it's all kind of interconnected taylor i started going down the time thing and then somehow i ended up on i sent einstein's theory relativity and was like i can't explain this Why am I doing this? No, I remember one time learning that, like, the reason you say, oh, clock is when they started to use clocks, they had to, like, specify, like, I'm going by the time on the clock. I'm just in, like, random ass time I made up because I looked at the sun. Right, right. Yeah, well, so there was, there was that. There was the, there was a water clock, which was incredible.

You would basically drill a hole in this, like, one container and then put it into a larger container full of water. And when that thing sank was, like, you would know it was like a minute or 30 minutes or an hour or whatever. like a like a what's it called the sand an hourglass yeah yeah basically that except like imagine like having to sit there and stare at this thing like sinking like how distracting um so you haven't had anything else to do as much yeah just trying not to die just stoning which is the death while you're watching this thing um so the the again like there's actually physical manifestations of how your circadian rhythm operate so for example there's things around your blood pressure increasing and decreasing, there's controls around your body temperature

increasing and decreasing, melatonin, testosterone secretion, which goes up and down based on this one nucleus that controls how your body's reacting to the time of day that it actually is. It even goes so far as to controlling the desire for bowel movements. Like, it is literally like your entire, it's a big chunk of like the things that make you move around and do things, essentially. So it is your body essentially working together to tell you when you need to sleep and when you need to be awake. And obviously light plays a huge component of this because your body is kind of like looking at when or identifying when the sun's coming up to kind of kick things off or slow things down. So this is why researchers say not to use a device before bedtime because the light you get exposed to could and has proof.

to disrupt the circadian rhythm. So when your blood pressure should be lowering because your body's telling you, you should be going to sleep now, it could jack it up because it's like, oh, no, it's light now. Look, like, we're seeing lights. And so that's what that has to do with. Yeah. So we don't have a 100%, well, we have pretty good ideas of why we sleep, but it's not

100% for sure that we know all the reasons why we sleep. So part of it is assumed to have to do with energy. conservation. So it's been research that we use about 10% less energy while we're asleep than when we're awake, which helps slow down the metabolic rate, which means you need to consume less calories. There's theories around restoration, tissue repair, muscle growth, protein synthesis, stuff like that. There is concepts around your own cognitive function, which makes a ton of sense in your brain function, where it is the time when you're asleep is when your brain is able to kind of store memories or consolidate them or, you know, kind of like give its own moment

of rest and relaxation. So it's not just like dealing with your external stimulus as it has to process that. Emotional regulation plays a part of this. And mostly we know that because of what happens when you don't sleep. So it's assumed that that has something to do with this. It's also assumed that when you fall asleep, your body, body is clearing any toxins that might have entered it to your brain during this time. And then the last big thing that they assume is why you sleep has to do with hormone regulation

or hormone balancing. It is weird that you have to sleep. It's very weird. Like you're dead for like a quarter of your life. It's crazy. It's crazy. Yeah. So let's get into what happens if you don't get enough sleep.

So we actually have a really great study. to look at for this that happened in the 1940s. It was in Russia. And this is when researchers locked five political prisoners in a chamber and kept them awake for 15 days by pumping an experimental gas into the chamber. And then when the researchers stopped pumping the gas and the prisoners didn't want to remove themselves

from the chamber, when the researchers went in, they saw that the prisoners had disfigured and cannibalized themselves and our fellow prisoners. whoa wait the gas cap them awake somehow yes this is also total bullshit I made that up that's the Russian prison experiment that's creepy pasta

because it's Halloween so I thought I'd throw that in there oh my god I was like that can't be true I was like you know what's funny I was writing this Taylor was like I know there's no way Taylor hasn't read the Russian sleep experiment internet thing and I was like how far am I going to get into this and I was like by the time I say Russia

she's going to be like far as I know you're lying we didn't so there we go I didn't I don't think I've read that one. That's hilarious. It's fun. It's very fun. They actually made a movie about it, too. Nice, nice. But, okay, this part's true. So the longest any human has been verified to have stayed awake was a 17-year-old named

Randy Gardner, who in, I think it was 1963, stayed awake for 11 days as part of a science project. This was cataloged and researchers were a part of this project, so they knew what was going on. The Guinness World Record Company actually stopped accepting world record attempts for sleep deprivation just because of the... It's dangerous. Yeah, because of the danger involved. Yeah. How did he stay up? Was he okay, Randy?

Yeah. Yeah, so it's interesting because he was okay. He ended up sleeping 14 hours the first night and then stayed awake for about eight hours and slept 10 hours the next night. And then he fell into a normal rhythm, a sleep wake rhythm. And at the time, he reported there was nothing wrong with him. Around 2017, he was still alive. And he came out publicly saying,

that as early as 2007, he started having severe cognitive decline that he attributed to this study, but also by then he would have been like in his 50s, which is also a time when your brain starts slowing down and you could eventually start feeling the effects of Alzheimer's or dementia or something else. And so who knows what's real and what's not? But at a time, he said that he had no ill effects. Wow. Yeah. So ultimately, your body will find. you to get to sleep. You can suffer a bounce of insomnia or you can force yourself awake like this

guy did, but eventually your body ultimately wins. So lack of sleep can cause a ton of issues. So here's some basic ones that we know of. So if you go 24 hours without sleeping, your concentration, memory, and decision-making abilities are dramatically reduced. Your reaction time is reduced and your ability to kind of problem-solve is a lot more difficult. Emotionally, you're more irritable, prone to mood swings and things like that. If you have 72 hours without sleeping, then you suffer hallucinations that become incredibly vivid and frequent. You might suffer from delugial thoughts and paranoia.

Your stress level at this point physically is at an all-time peak. So this can lead to your heart rate being increased, your behavior being erratic. Again, the hormonal balance that we talked about earlier that you should be undergoing. um isn't happening and so this is really bad like i mean we've all pulled all nighters it's never good for you like literally never good for you yeah and if you go beyond 24 beyond 72 hours then death becomes real possibility um such a short time such a short time like in three days

you can die from that so it'll take a bit longer than that and we'll explain why that is here in a moment. And we have a really good case of why that is. So this is actually a nice dovetail into the topic, which is fatal insomnia. So fatal insomnia is caused by prions. Prions are just proteins that are contained within your cell that are misfolded, upon which when replication happens, that cell defect promulgates and ends up causing cell death. The most common and well-known case of a prion disease it has to be mad cow I think we all heard

that term that is actually kind of a rare way to get a prion disease since in that case people had to ingest contaminated meat which was infected

it's so messed up the way it happened to because what happens is that because of factory farming which again is horrible they would feed the animals back to the animals themselves

and so the defects within that cell would get consumed by the next animal, consumed by the next animal, and then consumed by humans over and over and over again. That's how it ends up happening. Ugh, awful. Another kind of wild prion disease I learned about was this thing called Kuro, which only occurred to a cultural and ethnic group of people known as four F-O-R-E people in Papua New Guinea.

These folks had a custom of eating their dead, which was believed to release their spirit. But unfortunately, this resulted in widespread infection of this prion disease known as Kuro, which caused loss of mobility or control of their muscles. Shortly after their ability to move would be gone, the most prominent and creepiest part of the disease would manifest, which was bursting into uncontrollable fits of laughter for no reason. I know about that. So do you remember the show? Do you watch the show Scream Queens with Jamie Lee Curtis?

No. So it was like, it was silly. But her character, she was a dean and she thought that she had that disease. What was it, Kurdu? You said? Kuru. Kuru. She thought that she had Kourou because she went to Papua New Guinea and they had eaten food with like a tribe there. So she thought that she had it. And she called the person that she had like met there. And he was like, no bitch. You're just being super racist. You know, like we don't do that. And then they found out that she was getting sick because she never ever drank water. She only drank. drink whiskey. So she would drink like whiskey with no ice and she had brush her teeth with it and she had zero water in her body. And that was what was happening. It was just a dumb and funny. But it was she like thought that she, uh, that she had that and they were like, no, stop being racist. She was like, oh. I mean, it's not racist. They literally did this. Yeah. Like, this is actual fact. Um, do they don't do it. So they don't do it anymore. But the problem is that this type of prion disease can take 10 to 50 years to manifest. And so I think it was. somewhere in the 60s that they actually stopped practicing cannibalism. And so in theory, somebody could pop up or, I mean, people have popped up since they stopped doing it because the onset manifests itself way after the infection rate or infection date. And so it's feasible that people could still pop up that have this disease. So anyways, on to fatal insomnia. Again, this is this is the prion defect.

So fatal insomnia has four stages. Stage one is an insomnia that just kind of progressively starts getting worse over time. It can manifest in terms of panic attacks and just paranoia. Typically, this stage can last up to four months. Stage two is hallucinations, which can continue for five months. Stage three is complete insomnia. This is where you don't even get what's called micro sleep, which is like moments when your eyes are awake, but your brain has shut off.

complete insomnia and it can set in and then stage four is when you become you experience dementia complete unresponsiveness and then death shortly thereafter so the disease is entirely inherited so it has to be in your DNA for you to have it and as such its full name is actually familial fatal insomnia I've just been calling a fatal insomnia but that's the full name of it as the name suggests it's 100% fatal. There's no cure for it. From the onset of symptoms to death can take as little as six months, as long as 36 months, but the outcome is always the same.

And the only treatment is palliative care. You can't take like a sleeping pill? No, they've tried this a million different ways. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. It can't work. You can't like force someone to go to sleep because that feels like something that you should be able to do.

Yeah, you would think so. So the reason we know about this disease is really interesting. So it is because of one family in Italy. So in the 1970s, there was this Italian family doctor named Ignacio Reuter who was married to a woman named Elizabetha. And I'm not going to use, I mean, there's no, there's no last names for these people because they don't want to be known because of the fact that this is all genetic in their DNA. So even if you research this, you're not going to get more detailed than Elizabetha being the name of the woman. She came from a prominent Venetian family who could trace their roots back nearly 400 years. Around 1977, Elizabeth's aunt went to Dr. Reuter and complained of insomnia.

To your earlier question, they tried sleeping pills and all kinds of different treatment. Nothing worked. And this aunt would ultimately die in 1978, about a year after the onset of symptoms. then in 79 a second one of Elizabeth's aunts was struck with the same condition and she died about a year later as well as this was happening Elizabeth's mom would tell Dr. Reuter that her father, Elizabeth's grandfather, died having exhibited the exact same symptoms in 1944 and so at this point this doctor being super his interest super piqued went to a local Venetian church which kept birth and death records for everyone in town going back centuries. He started researching Elizabetha's family tree and family history, and he found all these causes of death that were listed for her suspected relatives, referencing epilepsy, fever, mental illness, things like that.

He would meet with random family members and ask them if they have any memories, and they'd be like, yeah, I remember really, I remember like our great uncle. He died of like this so-and-so. And so he kind of sort of piecing all this together. Shortly after this is the pieces of this puzzle are kind of coming together. Elizabeth's uncle, a man named Silvano, came to visit. And Dr. Wojder would note that he seemed depressed. He seemed anxious.

He said that his behavior and his character had changed. And he recognized what was going on, essentially. And Dr. Wooder would contact a neuroscientist named, Dr. Elio Luguresi, who was a sleep expert, and he admitted Silvano to his clinic in 1984, months after being admitted, he died at the age of 52. His brain was removed and sent to the U.S. for study, and it was discovered that it was full of this, like, soft, spongy stuff and full of holes. And at this time, nobody knew what this was.

Prions had been discovered at this point. And so it was just a mystery, like nobody knew what was going on with it. It wasn't until 1997 when prions were discovered by this guy, he ended up winning a Nobel Prize of Medicine for this. And that's when they went back to Slobano's brain and diagnosis is this hereditary condition that is caused by this malformed protein in the brain that was causing this fatal case of insomnia within this family. As of right now, it is presumed that there's only about 50 families in the world that have

this defect, this cellular defect that can cause fatal insomnia. There's something else about that. I totally forgot what I was going to go with that. Well, you're not kidding. Like you said, the last episode about how we don't, we barely know anything about the human body and we're figuring stuff out all the time. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, this is a good example. Yeah. Can they get rid of it? Like, my cousin has something in her family that, like, is a genetic marker that can, like, make something happen, whatever. And they're able to, like, take her. her eggs and pick the ones that don't have it and, like, kind of get it out of her lines. So I think you're talking about CRISPR.

Maybe. Yeah. I don't know how far CRISPR is advanced, but nothing that I research indicated that they can do anything about this right now. These families are fully researching this because it's literally just them. Wow. And so they have a, they started a nonprofit and they're all funneling money into this, trying to figure out what it is.

It's noted that this actually doesn't impact everyone. I think the number is the last number I read was somewhere around 50% of people with this defect end up actually developing it. And of those, the unfortunate part is most of them are past, like, they're sexual reproductive ages. Right. So they've already passed it along. They've already passed it along.

It's like this is all having like these aunts that I mentioned that had passed and Solvano himself, they were in their 50s. so they'd already had kids and you don't know if you have it until you start to have kids until you start to have it exactly wow um so yeah it's terrifying it's terrifying situation that is all caused by this need to sleep and uh and what it does to your brain and what it does to your body if you don't get it which is uh yeah it's not good yeah so weird yeah like you said like we're so vulnerable when you're asleep you know

You have to find a place to sleep. You have to, like, find a safe place to sleep and sleep there, you know, and be vulnerable to whatever, you know. Also, it's interesting because, like, I feel like humans, like our relationship to sleep changes over time. Like, when I was younger, I hated going to sleep. I hated that. Like, I, you know, I remember friends and evening up to, like, college in that age group where we were, like, just, like, man, it would be so great to find a way. not to sleep and then you could like do so much more and be more productive and now at my age I'm like oh it's gonna be so nice to go bed yeah totally but I mean I feel I like I have very

I dream every night um like pretty vividly someone was like doing stuff while I'm sleeping in my brain yeah you know like that's that's interesting there was and I know you haven't watched the X-Files but there's an X-Files where um there's some Vietnam vets who we're in a study to keep people awake and they haven't slept in a long time and they're all real mad and very, very fucked up. So there is, there's several topics of this that I discovered as I was kind of researching. Some of them I kind of knew. One is lucid dreaming is real.

Like, lucid dreaming is a real thing. So essentially what ends up happening is that, I forgot what the term is they used for this, but there's a phase between sleep and awake that. If you are practiced in lucid dreaming, you can become self-aware that you are in that phase and then fall into the dream with complete control of your mental faculties. That's cool. It's really crazy. Like, I need to research more about how that's done.

But that phase is also a thing that can cause things like, what's it called? Sleep paralysis? Yeah. Yeah. It's because your brain comes out of. of the sleep phase before your body does. And then you literally are paralyzed because like the two parts haven't re-sinked up together, which is like crazy.

It's like it's like if an engine from like a Toyota was made, it's like the transmission of like a Ford. Like it's like two separate things that can't kind of come together. And that's also what caused it. Another thing that I found really interesting was I think it's called, so it's called Tetris something. I forgot exactly it's Tetris. or something along those lines.

But this is part of sleep research that is like the last thing that you were doing or that you did or that you heard or saw is the thing that imprints on you the most before you go to sleep. And so they brought this up in the context of Tetris because they found that like if people play a lot of Tetris right before they go to sleep, they literally just dream about the blocks falling. Yeah, I used to like work at, yeah, I used to like a long time ago. at like a place where the computer I looked at had like a black screen with white letters on it.

And I would close my eyes and see that all the time. Yeah. Yeah. So you can kind of control what you end up dreaming about. The things that you think about, the things that you see, all that kind of right before you go sleep is where you're going to end up going, unless you start actually researching and practicing yourself on how to lose a dream. In which case, like you kind of control whatever you can do in your sleep, which sounds awesome. I think my brother did that a little bit. but he was also just potentially just on drugs.

Yeah, that can do it too. But yeah, that's the story. I thought it was really interesting. Yeah, it's fun. And yeah, learned a lot. It's interesting. Every topic that we go into, I realize how little I know about it

because then you just discover all the things that you weren't aware of. I know. It's fun. Like, in the time thing, when I started researching that, Taylor, I was like, I can't cover this. Like, this would have to be like a 25-part series.

This is like Dan Carlin territory. I know. We should do, maybe we should do some, well, I want to do some 20-25 planning, but we should do some stuff for like you do the time of the clock and I do like the calendar, you know, and we figure out like what the hell. Or like we could do like a joint episode where it's like we do like one part we pick up on one part of it and then you pick up on the other part. I don't know exactly how to do it, but it's a huge topic.

Like, the fact that, like, humans invented the concept of... I know. It's so crazy because, like, you live in this world where, like, matches the earth. And it matches the earth and then the... Yeah, I started looking at, like, the theory of relativity and how, like, if you're traveling at the speed of light, it looks like you're frozen still, but if there's somebody outside the window, it looks like they're traveling. It's so wild.

I know. honestly taylor it led me down this this thing about like researching interstellar and like what's real about interstellar and what isn't because it's so interconnected space and time and gravity and like it's black holes and uh so fun so fun cool well thank you that was interesting and kind of want to take a nap yeah there you go there i'm all hopefully people please listen to us and then take a nap but um yes but yeah uh lucid dream hopefully you can get to sleep yeah yeah um so that's story again if you'll have any thoughts things you want to share please write to us at doom deflpod at gmail.com we always love to get that and follow us on all

the socials at doom defl pod um i think that's it taylor anything else that's it yeah no thank you we've had a couple folks send us some um some suggestions so we'll be speaking through those and i appreciate you sweet okay um with that said we'll go ahead and cut things off Thank you.