He Stayed Awake for 11 Days. Then He Slept for 14 Hours.

In January 1964, a 17-year-old boy in San Diego finally went to bed after 264 hours awake: 11 days without a single night of sleep. Everyone expected the worst. Instead, Randy Gardner slept for just over 14 hours and woke up feeling almost normal. So what was his brain doing all that time, and what is your own brain doing with the sleep you skipped this week? In this video we follow Randy Gardner's science fair experiment day by day, with sleep researcher William Dement and Navy doctor John Ross; the counting test he failed on day 11; the Pennsylvania study where six hours of sleep a night did as much damage as two nights awake; the Australian study that compared a sleepless night to alcohol; the brain cells that fall asleep while you are awake; the brain's night-time cleaning system; and the 2020 Harvard discovery that sleep loss can kill through the gut. Every claim is backed by the original studies listed below. Don't try this at home: Guinness World Records no longer accepts attempts at this record because of the risks. CHAPTERS 0:00 11 days awake 0:41 "You don't need sleep" 1:16 The science fair 2:35 The doctor's game 3:26 Eleven days 5:32 Just one kid? 6:42 Not just one lab 7:56 The part nobody tells you 8:52 The twist 9:58 Back to Randy SOURCES (all sources always cited) G. Gulevich, W. C. Dement, L. Johnson, "Psychiatric and EEG Observations on a Case of Prolonged (264 Hours) Wakefulness", Archives of General Psychiatry 15(1): 29-35, 1966: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper... L. C. Johnson, E. S. Slye, W. Dement, "Electroencephalographic and Autonomic Activity During and After Prolonged Sleep Deprivation", Psychosomatic Medicine 27(5): 415-423, 1965: https://www.ovid.com/jnls/bsam/abstra... J. J. Ross, "Neurological Findings After Prolonged Sleep Deprivation", Archives of Neurology 12: 399-403, 1965 J. M. Siegel (UCLA), "Human sleep deprivation: the Science Fair project of Randy Gardner", 2021: https://www.semel.ucla.edu/wp-content... NPR Hidden Brain, "Eleven Days Without Sleep: The Haunting Effects Of A Record-Breaking Stunt", 6 November 2017: https://text.npr.org/562305141 NPR, "Lessons from sleeplessness: The 60th anniversary of Randy Gardner's world record", 28 January 2024: https://text.npr.org/1227217274 Randy Gardner sleep deprivation experiment (recovery details): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_G... Peter Tripp, the 1959 Times Square wakeathon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_T... "William Charles Dement", scientific obituary: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... H. P. A. Van Dongen, G. Maislin, J. M. Mullington, D. F. Dinges, "The Cumulative Cost of Additional Wakefulness", Sleep 26(2): 117-126, 2003: https://academic.oup.com/sleep/articl... A. M. Williamson, A.-M. Feyer, "Moderate sleep deprivation produces impairments in cognitive and motor performance equivalent to legally prescribed levels of alcohol intoxication", Occupational and Environmental Medicine 57(10): 649-655, 2000: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... Y. Nir, T. Andrillon, ..., I. Fried, "Selective neuronal lapses precede human cognitive lapses following sleep deprivation", Nature Medicine 23: 1474-1480, 2017: https://www.nature.com/articles/nm.4433 L. Xie, ..., M. Nedergaard, "Sleep Drives Metabolite Clearance from the Adult Brain", Science 342(6156): 373-377, 2013: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles... A. Vaccaro, Y. Kaplan Dor, ..., D. Rogulja, "Sleep Loss Can Cause Death through Accumulation of Reactive Oxygen Species in the Gut", Cell 181(6), 2020: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0... and Harvard Medical School on ScienceDaily, 4 June 2020: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases... #science #sleep #randygardner #psychology #curiosity