Whatever happened to orexin and the sleep peptide research, anyway? This feels like the first time I've heard about it since 2014, but I didn't hear about any crippling side-effects or big failure to replicates (of the sort that have seriously hampered interest in oxytocin). Did DARPA just stop funding it and no one else stepped in?

We still felt sleepy, though.

How did the feeling compare to modafinil, if you've tried all-nighters with that? With modafinil, I always characterized it as not so much that you felt sleepy as that you felt irritated, like "butter scraped over too much bread", in Bilbo Baggins's phrase.

I'm confused why your lab didn't know about sleep as memory post-processing. My high school psych class in 2005 taught that.

Made me laugh out loud twice, I enjoyed this post 😊

I'm not sure it's actually useful, but I feel like I should introduce myself as an individual with Type 1 Narcolepsy. I might dispute the claim that depression and obesity are "symptoms" of narcolepsy (understanding, of course, that this was not the focus of your post) because I think it would be more accurate to call them comorbid conditions.

The use of the term "symptom" is not necessarily incorrect, it could be justified by some definitions, but it tends to refer to sensations subjectively experienced by an individual. For example, if you get the flu, your symptoms may include a headache, chills, and a runny nose. On the other hand, it's rather unlikely that you may tell your doctor that you are experiencing the symptom of obesity, you'd say you're experiencing weight gain. Comorbid conditions, on the other hand, refer to conditions (with symptoms of their own) that often occur alongside the primary condition. The term "comorbid" is the one I find most often in the scientific literature about narcolepsy and other disorders and conditions. 

Why am I writing an entire comment about this semantic dispute? Well, firstly, given the goals of this website, it seems that correcting an error (no matter how small) seems unlikely to have an unwanted result. Secondly, I think that the way we talk about an illness, especially a chronic illness, can significantly affect the mindsets of people who have that illness. The message of "narcolepsy can cause obesity" seems less encouraging to an obese narcoleptic than "Narcolepsy increases the chance of becoming obese". That might just be me, though, so it's inconclusive. 

I hope this comment hasn't been too pointless to read. What do you think about the proposed change? Do you think that there's a difference between calling something a symptom and calling it a comorbid condition? Oh, and if anyone wants to know anything about my experiences with type 1 narcolepsy, ask away.

Kerbal Space Program-tier science

This article is amazing, I appreciate a good laugh.