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Sleep is treacherous

Mauro Manconi, sleep neurologist at the EOC and scientific coordinator of the World Sleep Forum, holds the two ends of the problem together: the driver's responsibility, and a sleep that sometimes arrives without warning.

World Sleep Forum · Monte Verità · Ascona, Switzerland · November 2025

Whoever starts driving knowing they are sleepy, Manconi says, remains responsible: they are driving knowing they cannot guarantee a good performance. It is a delicate issue precisely because the border is not sharp - and precisely for this reason awareness matters.

Sleep is treacherous: sometimes it arrives without much warning. The sleep attack at the wheel is exactly that - a sudden sleep, almost without notice. But often, luckily, the warnings are there. When they are, they must be seized at once: no hesitating, no postponing - stop, because the body needs to sleep.

Sleep is treacherous: sometimes it arrives without much warning. When the warnings are there, we must seize them at once - and stop.

From the forum he coordinated, Manconi expects three things. A new discipline, putting sleep medicine in communication with the legislative sphere. A stable dialogue - which does not exist today - between sleep specialists, forensic physicians and the legal world. And concrete answers: guidelines for diagnosing sleepiness in those who have had an accident, for recognising the disorders that cause it, and for understanding, from the evidence at the scene, which elements to collect immediately to establish whether a crash was born of a sleep attack or of something else.

Mauro Manconi is a sleep neurologist at the Neurocenter of Southern Switzerland (EOC) and the scientific coordinator of the World Sleep Forum at Monte Verità. He is the scientific partner who has accompanied Drive Awake from the start: his voice joins the clinic, the research and the legal question that runs through the whole project - how to prove a danger that leaves no sign.