An Italian family that has struggled with deadly insomnia for two hundred years. A cyclist who has not slept for more than a week to finish first, and almost lost his mind. An American woman with an enviable gift: she only needs four hours to get a good sleep. "Lenta.ru" studied the stories of people who have a special relationship with sleep.
Five thousand kilometers without sleep
When half of the way was left behind, the Slovenian cyclist Jure Robic saw the riders. A band of bearded men pursued him with guns in their hands. “They were mujahideen. They shot me,”he says. Robich put on the pedals, but the pursuers did not lag behind. Miran Stanislav from the car of the support group shouted that the Mujahideen were getting closer. It is impossible to stop - overtaken.
The Stanislav knew that the chase only existed in the racer's fevered imagination, but he played along to help him get to the finish line. Race Across America, which connects the west and east coasts of the United States, was in full swing. Robich had already covered several thousand kilometers, there were still the same. All this time he rested no more than an hour and a half a day. After several days without sleep, the cyclist did not fully understand what was happening and was poorly controlled.
At the start of the race, Robic struggled with sleep, singing alternately military marches and Lenny Kravitz. By the end of the second day, the lack of sleep made itself felt: the cyclist's speech became abrupt and incomprehensible. After another day, his short-term memory was disabled and hallucinations began. It seemed to him that wolves and aliens from outer space were watching him from the side of the road, and cracks in the asphalt under the wheels of a bicycle formed into encrypted messages.
According to Stanovnik, on the third day, the support group turns into cyclist software. Its participants decide for him what, how and when to do, because he himself can no longer cope with it.
“Yure did scary things. Sometimes during a race he would throw his bike and walk towards our car with an extremely vicious look,”one of Robic's assistants told the New York Times. "And what you?" - he asked. “We locked the doors,” came the answer.
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“During the race, everything inside comes out,” explained Robic. - Good, bad, everything. My brain, it starts to work by itself. I don’t like it, but it’s necessary to win.” When his wife first saw what state her husband falls into by the middle of the race due to many days of lack of sleep, they almost parted.
The ability to pedal day after day, without sleep or rest, helped the racer to become a five-time winner of Race Across America. In addition, he set a world record, having driven almost 835 kilometers in 24 hours without stopping.
Yure Robich. In 2010, the driver died in an accident. Photo: imago sportfotodienst / Globallookpress.com
Deadly insomnia
The family curse overtook an imposing 53-year-old Italian named Silvano when he took a sea cruise with his mother. Silvano noticed that he was sweating for no reason, and his pupils were tiny dots. He observed the same symptoms in his father and sisters, and he had not the slightest doubt about what would follow.
His niece persuaded him to appear to specialists from the University of Bologna. Silvano told them his prediction: "I will stop sleeping, eight or nine months will pass, and I'm finished." "Where such confidence?" one of the doctors asked. In response, the Italian drew his family tree from memory.
It all started in the middle of the 18th century. One of Silvano's ancestors puzzled the Venetian doctors: he suffered from insomnia for almost a year, after which he fell into a daze and died. The same fate awaited his nephew Giuseppe. History repeated itself with their sons and then grandchildren. The family grew and prospered, but no one was immune from the mysterious disease.
As a rule, at the age of fifty, Silvano's relatives began to suffer from insomnia. I could not sleep either day or night. Then their pupils narrow, blood pressure rises, sweating increases. Men develop impotence at this stage. After a few months, hallucinations appear, and then the person completely loses the ability to sleep. In the end, he becomes speechless, ceases to respond to external stimuli and dies.
Silvano was right. Before the eyes of powerless doctors, the disease developed exactly as he described. The doctors not only could not help him with anything, they did not even understand what exactly was destroying him. The unfortunate man died two years later, then two more family members died.
After Silvano's death, scientists discovered damage to the part of his brain that is responsible for sleep. Further research showed that the culprit of the disease is a rare mutation that causes the formation of prions that infect the thalamus. No more than 40 families are known to have fatal familial insomnia.
Frame: film Across the Pond Productions: Fatal Insomnia
Almost thirty years after the death of Silvano, researchers have published the results of clinical trials of a drug that can slow the progression of the disease. Patients who took it survived 13 months after the onset of the disease - almost twice as long as the control group. True, people at risk of becoming a victim of fatal familial insomnia are still in no hurry to accept it. Many of them do not want to know in advance if they have a deadly gene. They are afraid that the diagnosis will ruin their lives much earlier than the illness begins.
Wonderful gift
As a child, American Abby Ross noticed that she could go almost without sleep. “I will sleep for two, three or four hours, and then I feel cheerful and energetic,” she says. - I got up at three in the morning and no matter how much I tried to fall asleep, nothing came of it.
Ross discovered that her father did not like to sleep either. Every day, at dawn, only two were in charge of the house: father and daughter. According to her, they considered this watch as their own time.
Ross is now 64 and her father is 92, but they still get by with four hours of sleep. Ross usually wakes up around five in the morning. She never feels sleepy and is always full of energy. “These morning hours are fabulous,” says Ross. - They are so peaceful and quiet, you can do so much! It's a shame that shops are rarely open at such times. However, now you can buy everything on the Internet."
An unusual ability allowed her to graduate from university in just two and a half years. While the rest of the students were resting, she continued to study. In the early morning, no one could stop her. “It's amazing that there are so many hours in my day,” says Ross. "It feels like I can live two lives."
Three weeks after the baby was born, she decided to spend her morning jogging around the block. The next day I ran on. “I can get up early and exercise while others are still in bed,” she explains. Ross continued to increase the distance, and it paid off. At one time, she ran a marathon at least once a month.
Geneticist Ying-Hui Fu of the University of California at San Francisco believes that every hundredth inhabitant of the planet has the same ability as Abby Ross. She studied people who get by with three to four hours of sleep a day with no apparent ill effects, and found a gene that is unique to them. How it works, researchers have not yet figured out.
Oleg Paramonov
