Скачать или смотреть Most Terrifying Phenomenon In Medicine: Narcolepsy

Today, I'm going to talk about an interesting, yet absolutely terrifying phenomenon in medicine.
As we all know, our sleep has 4 stages. The first 3 of these stages come under NREM sleep, while the 4th stage falls under the REM sleep which is the Rapid eye movement sleep.
I won't go in details about the exact occurences in all the stages, but just remember that in NREM sleep, the muscle tone is maintained but in REM sleep the muscle tone is lost. Thus the body does not move in REM sleep.
So, with this information to set the backdrop, let us now look at a very interesting phenomenon.
You all must have heard of a disorder called Narcolepsy.
In Narcolepsy, there is wide spectrum of features, which include daytime sleepiness and insomnia.
Along with these, it also can lead to hallucinations.
These hallucinations maybe hypnogogic which occur at the beginning of sleep, or they may be hyponopompic, which occur at the end of the sleep.
So, what happens in Narcolepsy is that, due to the disruption of the circadian rhythm, there is an overlap between the hallucinations and the REM sleep.
And as we have already seen, REM sleep leads to loss of muscle tone, as in it causes paralysis.
So if a person was to have a hallucination in such a stat of paralysis in sleep, he will not be able to move in response to the perceived threat within the hallucination and this will lead to a very distressing experience to the patient.
In my opinion, this has to be the most terrifying phenomenons that we've come to understand in medicine.
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