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http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2757-limits-human-survival.html
How long can we stay awake?
Air Force pilots have been known to become so delirious after three or four days of sleep deprivation that they crash their planes (having fallen asleep). Even a single all-nighter impairs driving abilities as much as being drunk. The absolute longest anyone has voluntarily stayed awake before nodding off is 264 hours (about 11 days) — a record set by 17-year-old Randy Gardner for a high-school science fair project in 1965. Before falling asleep on day 11, he was essentially a vegetable with its eyes open. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]
But at what point would he have died?
In June, a 26-year-old Chinese man reportedly died 11 days into a sleepless attempt to watch every game of the European Cup. But he was also drinking alcohol and smoking throughout, making it difficult to ascertain his cause of death. No human has ever definitively died from lack of sleep alone, and for obvious ethical reasons, scientists can't find the breaking point in the lab.
Rat sleep deprivation experiment.
CREDIT: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic | Jean-Etienne Poirrier
View full size image
They've done it with rats, however. In 1999, sleep researchers at the University of Chicago put rats on a rotating disc positioned over a pool of water, and continuously recorded the rats' brainwaves with a computer program that could recognize the onset of sleep. When the rats nodded off, the disc was suddenly rotated to keep them awake by bumping them against the wall and threatening to knock them into the water. The rats consistently died after two weeks of this misery. Before perishing, the rodents showed symptoms of hypermetabolism, a condition in which the body's resting metabolic rate speeds up so much that it burns excessive calories even while completely still. Hypermetabolism has been tied to lack of sleep. [The 6 Craziest Animal Experiments]
http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/2757-limits-human-survival.html
How long can we stay awake?
Air Force pilots have been known to become so delirious after three or four days of sleep deprivation that they crash their planes (having fallen asleep). Even a single all-nighter impairs driving abilities as much as being drunk. The absolute longest anyone has voluntarily stayed awake before nodding off is 264 hours (about 11 days) — a record set by 17-year-old Randy Gardner for a high-school science fair project in 1965. Before falling asleep on day 11, he was essentially a vegetable with its eyes open. [Top 10 Spooky Sleep Disorders]
But at what point would he have died?
In June, a 26-year-old Chinese man reportedly died 11 days into a sleepless attempt to watch every game of the European Cup. But he was also drinking alcohol and smoking throughout, making it difficult to ascertain his cause of death. No human has ever definitively died from lack of sleep alone, and for obvious ethical reasons, scientists can't find the breaking point in the lab.
Rat sleep deprivation experiment.
CREDIT: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic | Jean-Etienne Poirrier
View full size image
They've done it with rats, however. In 1999, sleep researchers at the University of Chicago put rats on a rotating disc positioned over a pool of water, and continuously recorded the rats' brainwaves with a computer program that could recognize the onset of sleep. When the rats nodded off, the disc was suddenly rotated to keep them awake by bumping them against the wall and threatening to knock them into the water. The rats consistently died after two weeks of this misery. Before perishing, the rodents showed symptoms of hypermetabolism, a condition in which the body's resting metabolic rate speeds up so much that it burns excessive calories even while completely still. Hypermetabolism has been tied to lack of sleep. [The 6 Craziest Animal Experiments]
![0]](/styles/default/xenforo/NTemojis/alien.gif "Alien 0]")
