jayterwahl

Epistemic status: Subjective report describing youthful exuberance. The actual experimentation part of this was very badly executed. In light of the recent homemade peptide vaccine, this is a writeup of my experiences in insufflating internet chemicals. This happened during a period of my life when I was very bored, kinda rich, and getting really into darknet libertarian culture. This is cowboy science, and upon reflection, I was insufficiently concerned about either of legal troubles or brain damage. Background Orexin (aka hypocretin-α) is a neuropeptide which promotes wakefulness, weight loss, and happiness. Damage to the orexinergic system seems to cause Type 1 Narcolepsy—comorbid with sleepfulness, obesity, and depression. Deadwyler et al attempted to prove a causal relationship, by sleep-depriving rhesus monkeys and having them insufflate orexin. It appears that sleep-deprived monkeys snorting orexin perform as well on cognitive tests as the non-sleep-deprived monkeys. So there I was, a graduate student reading through this paper, and you can hear the gears in my head turning. 1. Orexin insufflation appears to promote wakefulness in sleep-deprived primates. 2. I am a sleep-deprived primate. 3. ... Transhuman Greed Will this cause some kind of...anti-narcolepsy? Have I found a cure for sleep itself?? I was properly embracing More Dakka. But this Kerbal Space Program-tier science thought wasn't as nuts as it seemed. This was 2012, the orexin research was fresh, and my neuroscience professors were still touting the party line of “perhaps the only purpose of sleep is to keep humans indoors and conserving calories during the night, because their comparative advantage is day. We don't even know why, or even if, we really need sleep!" (We didn't know about sleep-as-memory-post-processing, or that, during sleep, the brain lobes spread apart to let the CSF pressure-wash away all of the metabolite byproducts. We just thought sleep was one