Randy Gardner (sleep deprived)

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Randy Gardner holds the Guinness world record for the longest period of time a human being has intentionally gone without sleep not using stimulants of any kind. In 1964, as a 17-year-old high school student, Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours (11 days) with the help of friends, TV reporters, and shooting hoops. On his final day without sleep, Gardner presided over a press conference where he spoke without slurring or stumbling his words and in general appeared to be in excellent health. "I wanted to prove that bad things didn't happen if you went without sleep," said Gardner. "I thought, 'I can break that (Peter Tripp's 1959) record and I don't think it would be a negative experience.'" Sleep experts now believe that such sleep deprivation stunts are dangerous (Veasey et al., 2002).

It is often claimed that Gardner's experiment demonstrated that extreme sleep deprivation has little effect.^{[citation needed]} This is primarily due to a report by researcher William Dement, who stated that on the tenth day of the experiment, Gardner had been, among other things, able to beat Dement at pinball. However, Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross of the US Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit, who monitored Gardner's condition at the request of his parents, reported serious cognitive and behavioral changes. These included moodiness, problems with concentration and short term memory, paranoia, and hallucinations. On the fourth day he had a delusion that he was Paul Lowe winning the Rose Bowl, and that a street sign was a person. On the eleventh day, when he was asked to subtract seven repeatedly, starting with 100, he stopped at 65. When asked why he had stopped, he replied that he had forgotten what he was doing.

[edit] See also

Sleep deprivation

[edit] External links

Article from bbc.co.uk
Sleep Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency - article from Psychiatric Times noting Gardner and Tripp cases
Ask Yahoo! article
Vietnamese Man Handles 33 years without sleep

[edit] References

Sigrid Veasey, Raymond Rosen, Barbara Barzansky, Ilene Rosen, and Judith Owens (2002). "Sleep Loss and Fatigue in Residency Training". JAMA 288 (9): 1116–1124.