Need to Stay Alert? Starve Yourself  Thumbnail image for
JackBauer01.jpg image via Yeah, Chuck Norris has to sleep. ​Have
you ever noticed that Jack Bauer never stopped to eat or sleep
on the TV show 24? You may have spent the past few years feeling
terribly inferior to this paragon who never needed to succumb to
basic human needs. But now scientists in Paul Shaw's sleep lab
at Washington University have proven that you, too, can become
as superhuman as Bauer.  It turns out that if you starve
yourself, your body will become so absorbed in hunting down
nutrients, it will forget about its need to sleep.  OK, so maybe
that's kind of a drastic solution, admits Matt Thimgan, a
postdoctoral research assistant who worked on the study.
"Obviously starvation has drastic consequences, but it could
work in the short term," he says. "But I don't recommend it as a
strategy."  But what is this mysterious link between starvation
and superhuman sleeplessness?  Like many scientific experiments,
it all comes back to a, shall w