And one I have experienced myself, personally. In fact, it forced my early retirement because I couldn’t stay awake at meetings.
Trump has been observed to nod off during his Manhattan trial. Some have suggested that he may be deprived of drugs that he may need to stay awake. I have another explanation. Simply stated, Trump may be going deaf.
Hearing impairment is common in men of a certain age, especially if they have been exposed to loud noises or diseases that may have affected their hearing over their lifetimes. The cilia in the cochlea can be damaged by many causes over the years and the damage is cumulative — in humans and many other mammals, damaged cilia don’t grow back. High-frequency hearing loss is most common because the highest frequency cilia are located closest to the outside world and are most exposed to loud noises. Unfortunately, most of the information in human speech is in the high frequency portion of the sound spectrum.
Hearing loss can put you to sleep. In a one-on-one discussion, the hearing-impaired person can pick up visual cues, including lip movement or body gestures, that help interpret word meanings. The hearing impaired person can also ask someone to repeat themselves for better clarity. But in a group setting, voices are distant and background noise interferes with comprehension. The hearing impaired person can never ask each speaker to repeat their statements. Eventually, even the subject matter becomes obscured and all the listener hears is noise.
It doesn’t have to be complete deafness, in fact a certain degree of sound penetration actually creates a white noise background in a communal setting that is the basis of many sleep machines.
To understand the impact, imagine you are attending a meeting in a foreign country and the entire meeting is conducted in Swahili or Farsi or some other language that is foreign to you, and you have no other way of discovering what is being discussed. Also imagine that you have not had much sleep due to stress or some other malady. Now add a big meal to juice your endorphins. I challenge anyone to stay awake in that situation.
I have no evidence that Trump is going deaf. But his tendency to fall asleep in large group settings, combined with his sleeping and eating habits, his age and his gender, suggests, to me at least, that more is going on than drugs.