sleeping dogs lie

At the beginning of this week's episode of House, Cuddy told him "the longest anyone's survived without sleep is eleven days." And, putting aside the implications of the statement, this is more or less accurate. The longest time anyone has gone without sleep, on record, is Randy Gardner who has the dubious honour of holding a Guiness World Record for this reason.

Gardner, at the age of seventeen in 1964, stayed awake for 264 hours (that's eleven days) with the help of friends and stimulants. It's curious especially because of the controversy it caused. In general, accounts of what happened report that Gardner's health was fine, stating that he suffered no hallucinations or negative mood changes and that his mental and motor functions were fine throughout. In fact, it has been reported in phsychology textbooks as proof that sleep deprivation has little effect on a person. This is mostly due to a William Dement who interviewed Gardner on the tenth day: he said that he and Gardner ate at a restaurant, that Gardner's speech was not slurred, he seemed alert and he beat Dement at pinball several times.

However, Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego, monitored Gardner's condition through-out, having been called in by the boy's parents. He reports that Gardner suffered a number of negative effects from his lack of sleep, including the following (taken from the Psychiatric Times):

Day 2: Difficulty focusing eyes and signs of astereognosis (difficulty recognizing objects only by touch).


Day 3: Moodiness, some signs of ataxia (inability to repeat simple tongue twisters).


Day 4: Irritability and uncooperative attitude, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating. Gardner's first hallucination was that a street sign was a person, followed by a delusional episode in which he imagined that he was a famous black football player.


Day 5: More hallucinations (e.g., seeing a path extending from the room in front of him down through a quiet forest). These were sometimes described as "hypnagogic reveries" since Gardner recognized, at least after a short while, that the visions were illusionary in nature.


Day 6: Speech slowing and difficulty naming common objects.


Day 7 and 8: Irritability, speech slurring and increased memory lapses.


Day 9: Episodes of fragmented thinking; frequently beginning, but not finishing, his sentences.


Day 10: Paranoia focused on a radio show host who Gardner felt was trying to make him appear foolish because he ws having difficulty remembering some details about his vigil.


Day 11: Expressionless appearance, speech slurred and without intonation; had to be encouraged to talk to get him to respond at all. His attention span was very short and his mental abilities were diminished. In a serial sevens test, where the respondent starts with the number 100 and proceeds downward by subtracting seven each time, Gardner got back to 65 (only five subtractions) and then stopped. When asked why he had stopped he claimed that he couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing.

On a related note, an experiment conducted at the University of Chicago in 1983 showed that rats died when kept from sleeping for two and a half weeks. Turns out Talen and Naranater were right: avoiding sleep could hurt one. It could even kill one. How easy is that?!