SLEEPLESS NIGHTS

"How long can you go without sleep?" asks an article in the New Scientist. Perhaps no longer than Randy Gardner, who set the record in 1963 by staying awake for 264 hours at the gentle age of 17.

He did it on a whim, under the observation of William Dement, a sleep scientist at Stanford University. This cursory description of Gardner's symptoms in the New Scientist is a little amusing:

Gardner experienced mood swings, memory and attention lapses, loss of coordination, slurred speech and hallucinations, but was otherwise fine.

Otherwise fine. Thomas Bartlett, a contributor to All-Nighters, an inspired blog about "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life" from the New York Times, further describes Gardner as someone who "temporarily lost touch with reality. At one point, he saw a path leading to a quiet forest, even though he was indoors at the time. The white teenager also believed himself to be the black running back for the San Diego Chargers."

The brief New Scientist article offers two interesting points, before throwing away the subject entirely:

1. Sleep-deprived people slip in and out of "microsleeps", which are "seconds of sleep that occur without you noticing them, often with your eyes open."

2. Sleep deprivation is eventually fatal. Rats that are kept awake die after two weeks, less time than it takes them to starve to death.

What makes sleep-deprivation fatal? The article doesn't say. Indeed, no one really knows for sure. Necropsies performed on the rats who died from exhaustion never yielded an unambiguous cause of death. The animals, it seems, were just really tuckered out.

After years of research, scientists have little idea why we spend a third of our lives asleep. D.T. Max considers this in "The Secrets of Sleep", a haunting article in the latest National Geographic. He reports that while inomnia is at "epidemic levels in the developed world" (56m prescriptions for sleeping pills were written in America 2008; the revenue for sleep centres is expected to approach $4.5 billion by 2011), and the Institute of Medicine places the direct medical cost of our collective sleeplessness at tens of billions of dollars, "remarkably little is being done to understand the root causes of insomnia".

Siri Hustvedt addresses this ignorance in her most recent post to All-Nighters, "What is Sleep?": "nobody knows why we must turn away from the productive waking world and enter another state or states. Insomniacs long for sleep and keep themselves awake with worry. But what exactly does the insomniac crave?"

She asks this like a true insomniac: the dread is palpable.

Max tracked down Dement, now the retired dean of Stanford's sleep studies and a co-discoverer of REM sleep. "I asked him to tell me what he knew, after 50 years of research, about the reason we sleep. 'As far as I know,' he answered, 'the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid is because we get sleepy.'"

~ EB

Picture credit: Alyssa L. Miller, ThrasherDave (both via Flickr)