Fatal Familial Insomnia

[eselgeist]

Okay, I just learned about the rare, ghastly condition known as Fatal Familial Insomnia.

You basically just stop sleeping to death. Seriously. Your thalamus

Comments

[crashworks]

I remember hearing an NPR story about the unfortunate Italian family stricken with this disorder. I'm not quite sure, but I think it was this episode of Radio Lab (which is an excellent series in any case).

[jirris_midvale]

Oh man... yeah. I've known about this thing for a long time, due to my horrible curiosity when it comes to medical oddities.

Could make for some interesting storytelling in fiction, though.

[maxmeligfic]

That's what I thought when I heard about it. I used it in my first novel when a chronicler/bard witnessed a story so horrible he died from sleeplessness. /shudder!

[sardonicus]

I remember seeing a special on it some twenty-odd years ago, perhaps on 60 minutes.

As neurological conditions go, it made short-term memory loss ( of the sort as seen in Memento) look like a walk in the park.

They showed one sufferer at the start and then at the end.

Start, normal family man with hobbies he enjoyed.

End, a walking corpse with thousand-yard eyes.

It's one of the few diagnoses that I can think of that would make me reach for a gun and bullet.

[mikosquirrel]

I think my favourite - in an odd sense of favourite - is silent major ischemia, in which the first symptom is death.

[borkos_livejrnl]

that's really, really scary.... O.O