Dr Sutapa Mukherjee

So, you know, they do have napping areas for staff.

And, you know, I think it's the kind of thing, if you're at your desk and you're feeling really sleepy, maybe, you know, maybe you didn't have a good night's sleep or you just need a nap, a 20-minute nap is very restorative and you can set your alarm and wake up and then you're exactly right, you can power on during the day.

So we don't really know, but there are some hints that it could be an environmental cause.

And when I say an environmental cause, I mean it could be a virus or something from an external environment that has affected that person's neurons in the hypothalamus and told them to stop making orexin.

And there are some hints that this is probably the case.

So I don't know if you remember, there was a SARS epidemic that affected not so much Australia, but other parts of the world, including China, Canada, a lot of other parts of the world were affected.

And

they came up with a vaccine for SARS and they administered it particularly in China.

And there was a wave of narcolepsy that happened after they vaccinated these people against SARS.

And so that led to a lot of work, particularly in China, which really mapped out very clearly that it was related to the

vaccination.

And so it does lend itself to supporting that hypothesis that some sort of an environmental trigger, perhaps a virus or an immune type response was responsible for those neurons in the brain not producing orexin anymore.

Yeah.

So it's kind of that state change that we were talking about with sleep.

So sleep is completely different to wakefulness.

And we talked about how your muscles are paralyzed.

So what's happening is she's experiencing emotion, which is like the trigger in the brain to make her fall asleep.

And then the muscles become paralyzed.

So it's

wakefulness one second and then it's sleep the body is asleep the next second and that's when she's her muscles are paralyzed because the body is saying you're asleep but yes it's it's a sudden state change from wake to sleep and of course the laughter is the trigger that's causing it and i mean obviously in the hypothalamus where the orexin making neurons are