It could have been hypothermia brought on by decreased body temperatures, illnesses that arose from damaged immune systems, or severe brain damage.) In July 2012, Chinese soccer fan Jiang Xiaoshan died after staying awake for 11 days to watch all of the European Football Championship.

(According to a 2009 Slate article, specialists who have looked at the 1989 study dispute which effects of sleep deprivation ultimately killed the rats. In 1989, at the University of Chicago, researchers observed rats which died after being kept awake non-stop for several weeks. Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity Ed Yong Also in 2003, Japanese researchers found that total sleep deprivation can cause high blood pressure and has “profound” effects on the immune system. In 2003, neurologists at the University of Pennsylvania found that sleep deprivation over three consecutive nights (in the study, staying awake for 88 hours) as well as chronic sleep loss (in the study, four to six hours of sleep each night for 14 nights) seriously impaired cognitive functions in healthy adults. Some studies have linked sleep deprivation to chronic conditions like hypertension, diabetes, and bipolar disorder. Losing sleep can cause hallucinations, psychosis, and long-term memory impairment. Sleep deprivation is nearly as misunderstood as sleep itself, but it can physically and mentally harm people in myriad ways. “Whether you can train that to change, I don’t know.” “Now clearly like all biological things there are probably people who feel great on five hours, and they’re really lucky, and some people who need nine hours, and they’re not so lucky,” Feinsilver said. Steven Feinsilver is a pulmonologist and sleep specialist who said that humans need, on average, seven and one quarter hours of sleep to stay healthy. “While we sleep, we do not procreate, protect or nurture the young, gather food, earn money, write papers, etc.,'' he wrote.ĭr. Allan Rechtschaffen, a sleep expert and a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, told the New York Times in 2003. “It may be the biggest open question in biology,'' Dr. Joyce Walseben, a psychiatrist and the former director of Bellevue Hospital’s Sleep Disorders Center, point to sleep’s importance in regulating the body’s hormones.

There are theories-some think sleep may be the process by which the brain shuts down so it can store the day’s memories. Unlike other basic bodily functions, such as eating and breathing, we still do not fully understand why people need to sleep.

But what happened to me could happen to anyone who stays awake that long, voluntarily or otherwise. Sleep specialists call these involuntary collapses “microsleeps.” It’s not hard to see why anybody-a high school chaperone, a parent, a doctor-might view a twitching, crumpling, babbling kid like me as some sort of nutcase. This happened more than once on my final day awake. While imposing a monologue on my biology teacher-who, I later learned, thought I was tripping on LSD-I blacked out and slumped mid-sentence. Kennedy Airport, my body was giving out, too. Toward the end of the ordeal, in New York’s John F. As the sleepless days passed, I experienced the increasingly severe psychological effects common with extended sleep deprivation: I hallucinated, rambled, and lost focus. So did furiously paced, illogical scribbling in a fat blue pocket notebook. To this day, I am not sure how many consecutive nights I spent awake, but it was at least four. Why? There are a few layers of “why,” and I will mine them later. I stayed up writing all night, and the next morning, on little more than impulse, I decided to go for it. I was 18, in Italy, on a school-sponsored trip with that pompously misnamed group for American teens who earn As and Bs, the National Honor Society. In those first moments, I remembered the basics about what had landed me in the hospital: Some pseudo-philosophical ranting and flailing brought on by a poorly executed experiment to see how long I could last without sleep. My tousled hair shot out around my puffy face my head throbbed. I made it to the toilet, then threw water on my face at the sink, staring into the mirror in the little lavatory. I forced myself up and stumbled, grabbing the chair and the bathroom doorknob for balance. I remembered the hallway I had been wheeled down, and the doctor’s office where I told the psychiatrist he was the devil, but not this room. I wore two pieces of clothing: an assless gown and a plastic bracelet. My joints ached and my eyelids, which had been open for so long, now lay heavy as old hinges above my cheekbones. I awoke in a bed for the first time in days.

The body and the archive