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The Dangers of Being Really, Really Tired
Sleepy Dog Millionare writes "Brian Palmer, writing for Slate, asks 'Can you die from lack of sleep?' and shockingly, the answer may very well be Yes, you can. Palmer points to 'ground breaking experiments' in the area of sleep research. It turns out that sleep deprivation can actually be deadly in rats. The obvious conclusion is that it is probably deadly in all mammals. So the next time you think you need to pull multiple all-night hack-a-thons, ask yourself if it's worth risking your life for."
I wouldn't be able to get a first post.
But did they feed the rats Jolt?
It keeps me alive!
Now if I can just do something about those damned bats...
It's not the voluntary all-night hack-a-thons that society needs to worry about. It's the insistence by employers that their staff work all night, because of deadline screwups by management, or by the requirement that staff have to do on-call, rather than employing people specifically for night shifts.
I wouldn't lose any sleep at all, if it wasn't for idiotic decisions by my employer.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
According to a reliable source, a lack of REM sleep in a group of people will cause them to go crazy and start murdering each other...
I don't know... so far, research indicates that any test will at some point cause death in rats. I've never read conclusions like "tests indicate that the rats live on just fine throughout the experiments".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Who thinks this is shocking.
We need water. Would you be shocked to find a lack of water can be deadly?
Why would anyone be shocked to find lack of sleep can kill?
Is this official? Does this mean I can sue my University for torture!
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
The current world record for time without sleep is 11 days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder)
Wasn't this already proven by several cases of Chinese "volunteers" who stayed up for days playing Counterstrike in lan centers?
Also, there's usually a reason why your body makes you do things. Sleep is a method of biological maintenance, as is pooping. This is so obvious that I'm offended that rats had to die for this "experiment".
a bunch of meth-heads I used to know could have told you that
I remember reading some time ago (in the 1970's) of some research that was already old then (1950's?), about sleep deprivation literally killing cats. (Who would do such research is not clear, but looking back on things I suspect a military connection.)
This must be available in some public archive, if anyone cares to hunt for it.
We are born awake. Our natural state is awake. It is a very dangerous state to be in, when considering all the predators one must deal with, before the advent of houses, that is... If we did not need to sleep in order to continue living, we would not have evolved that state of consciousness.
Years ago I was working on a project to export data from a fancy survey instrument. After working at my office all day, I started work on the survey project in my basement around 5pm on a Friday night and worked on it for a while and had a wonderful time and everything was coming together nicely. After a while I suddenly felt sick; thought I might have to lie down or something. I then noticed that it was about 7pm on Sunday night. I hadn't noticed until then. That's why I was suddenly sick.
It's one of the strangest things that ever happened to me. I subsequently felt much better after having a meal and a nap.
I guess that if something is sufficiently interesting and so on, you won't notice that you haven't had any sleep for quite some period of time.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
After a good night of no sleep, get in a car to test your reflexes. Probably better have the Mythbusters test things like this.
Privacy is terrorism.
That article about "ground breaking experiments" is from 1997. I'm trying to remember when I read the story about Rechtschaffen's experiments the first time, and it is entirely possible that it was a /. story then too, which would make this a dup. This story is hardly news.
There was a programme on TV the other week about some guy in Canada who's been awake for about 3 years, using some experimental drug (that they named, but I forget about it other than I discovered it was illegal in this country).
He didn't seem to be dead. Could have been a zombie, I guess.
It's coming to something when even the submitters can't be bothered RTFA. All night hackathons are not going to kill you:
So unless you work 32 days straight, you're not going to die.
http://harridanic.com
If you die from 1 all-nighter then you probably died from something else (very poor health). I think most of science and engineering have been built on all-nighters so sorry, not going to stop.
I remember hearing about an exactly identical study when taking psychology in the late eighties. This news article even mentions a similar thing.
Have you ever considered piracy? You'd make a wonderful Dread Pirate Roberts.
Is there anyone here who seriously thought that it would be even remotely related to ok, to not sleep for several days?
Not only does it make you stupid as hell, and depressed. Your brain also starts to fail more and more. Even if you do not die, you will not be far away from a zombie.
Hope you do not run up to me in that state, because I am going to shoot you. I don't take risks zombies. Zombies and raptors. Especially zombie raptors. ^^
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
So the giant, talking can of cola has been lying to me all these years? I think I'll take his word over these "researchers".
Well, as somebody above pointed out, some employers would be shocked to learn that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
is less harmful then sleep deprivation now? Looks like the U.S. is already one step ahead and has been using this for a long time as a means of torture.
I had a vision of Ballmer and his slaves on a giant Longship. He's threatening his employees with The Chair, while they pull another 72 hour all-nighter finishing Windows VII.
You'd normally think the vision would be funny, but Ballmer was wearing nothing but a Toga. My medical insurance doesn't cover that.
The slaves even had a chant... "developers, developers, developers..."
So...all of us who work on IT have our days counted? ? ? ?
What about Sporadic Fatal Insomnia and Fatal Familial Insomnia.
Nonsense of course. All my research proves the contrary.
Everyone who's wise knows sleep is really an addictive illness that needs to be overcome.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
I've know several people over the years what would do 3-7 night binges on speed and none of them died from lack of sleep but can't say much for their bodies and mind from too much of the drug.
BUT
I gave away my pet rat to a friend. What happened was the rat got his teeth stuck on the cage and couldn't get out. After not being able to get out for several hours and being stuck in an uncomfortable position the rat died from stress.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
What's the LD50?
..I'll sleep when I die...
When you concentrate on problem for a while, brain enters into "programming flow", you just don't realize how the time passes by when there's no distractions. It's really easy to spend a whole night coding, but next day I have to skip school in the morning.
This really bothers me. To do some serious programming, it's just impossible for me to do it without staying whole night. OTOH, it is really hard to be professional/responsible person without normal sleeping schedule. I mean, I unwillingly have to skip a lot of classes, meetings because of sleeping problems.
What other /. do to keep the balance? What's your advice?
I've got insomnia because of work. My boss pushes me more, the better I do, but never lets up on being suspicious. I dread Mondays and by the end of the week, I'm so fed up of feeling nervous that my attitude changes to "to hell with it", which isn't exactly good for me or my work, and Thursday night I usually sleep well. Friday night I feel manic so I can't sleep and I mess up my sleeping schedule. I'd change jobs but it's difficult right now and can't afford accepting a lower wage, not that I get paid too much as it is.
The Soviets cetainly knew sleep deprivation was bad. As described by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, it was the most effective torture method used in the Gulag.
Parent post modded Insightful. Only on slashdot!
I once went 9 days without sleep. After 22 hours of sleep I woke up in severe pain, as an injury I had suffered halfway through, which seemed very mild in my sensory-depressed state, was in fact something that required medical attention. If it had been only a tiny bit worse, I could have developed life-threatening complications after several days of ignoring and aggravating it. Impaired motor control, pain sensitivity, awareness, and judgment, all at the same time, is a dangerous combination.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
In my early thirties I started snoring a lot, and very heavily. Two years later I started experiencing symptoms such as forgetting where I was going as I driving down the road, getting into my vehicle and not remembering how to start it, forgetting my own phone number, the inability to perform my job at any level of competency, etc.... I thought I had suffered a major stroke.
I went to the doctor and he said I was a ringer for sleep apnea and referred me to a sleep clinic.
Long story short I was waking 50 times an hour because that's how often my breathing was being interrupted and my body would rouse me due to low oxygen levels in my blood. To me it seemed as if I was awake all night long and never went to sleep.
After being fitted with a cpap mask and sleep machine to pump air into my mouth and nose while I slept it took me three weeks of normal sleep to recover my mental faculties.
Sleep deprivation will kill you, and it will also seriously degrade your mental capabilities. It's nothing to mess around with. In addition to the mental problems the probability of a stroke or heart attack is greatly amplified.
http://www.amazon.com/Lights-Out-Sleep-Sugar-Survival/dp/0671038680 - T.S. Wiley's been saying this for years.
I don't this is something that happens often under circumstances people normally experience.
First if it was we would already know and not need to be doing the research now, to find out if can be lethal.
Second nature probably has its methods of preventing you from killing yourself in this fashion no matter how dumb you are about trying to stay up.
You usually cannot hold your breath until you die. You might be able to do it with some contrivance like a plastic bag tied around your neck or noose, but if you just sit there in your chair and attempt to hold your breath you will pass out before you die and start breathing automatically when that happens.
I suspect you can't keep yourself awake long enough to die either without getting pretty darn creative.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Sorta. After 32 days the damage got to be deadly. It doesn't mean you can't get smaller doses of damage long before that. Keep doing it often enough, and it might just add up.
And the darndest thing is that your cells have Telomeres, i.e., maximum division counters. So even damage that can be repaired, only goes so far. E.g., old age and death by old age, are simply a matter of more and more of your cells reaching the limit, and thus more and more damage can't be repaired. So, anyway, that which doesn't kill you, usually shortens your life instead of making you stronger.
Sorta if you will, like saying that you need a whole 0.45% alcohol in your blood to have a 50-50 chance of death. Yeah, but much smaller doses, if done often enough, can kill you just the same.
And to answer to your objection from a different message too, yes, 1 or 2 nights you can recover from. (Though if done for work reason, it may still be interesting to remember the study where the students who were allowed to have a good 8 hour sleep solved a problem actually faster than those who pulled all nighters. You're a lot less smart when very tired.) After about 3 you start getting permanent brain damage.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I guess this is something to think about when you are being wheeled into the emergency room and meet your doctor who has been up for 30 hours. See http://www.ergoweb.com/news/detail.cfm?id=1190.
There is a reason why people tend to sign and say anything you want them too if you keep them awake long enough. That's why modern countries don't use this any..., ah never mind.
I read somewhere that most humans will drop dead after not sleeping for 9 days.
Let me be the first to call shenanigans on this.
Any studies on the harmfulness of sleep deprivation are so horribly confounded as to be practically useless.
The problem lies in the fact that in order to deprive rats of sleep you have to apply some kind of aversive stimulus to disrupt their sleep. Not only that, but the more tired an animal gets, the stronger the aversive stimuli needed to keep them awake. These aversive stimuli cause stress, and we already know that chronic, unavoidable stressors can kill.
So how can they make the attribution to lack of sleep rather than to stress? There's no simple way to separate them.
One of the articles even states that one of the physiological results of lack of sleep is an increase of cortisol and TSH - *BOTH* of which are known effects of stress. I would rather say that the physiological results they are seeing have been caused by the stressors they are applying to keep the animals awake than the lack of sleep.
Shenanigans I say, shenanigans.
What about the ground breaking experiments involving insane World of Warcraft players who stay up for several days at a time?
After about 24 hours up, my stomach starts turning. I think the longest I've been up is 36 hours and I got loopy as hell, chain smoke and have diarrhea.
gross I know...
I also slept over 24 hours once because I kept misreading the AM/PM dot on my clock.
I read about lack of REM sleep being well known to cause death when researching polyphasic sleep years ago...
People have went over a week without sleep and still survive, so there no reason to get all worked up about it, nor use it as an excuse to miss work.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Every 108 minutes I had to push the damn button. Until Locke made me activate the fail-safe however.
Did anyone else notice that the NYT article is from 1997?
A few years ago I went through a spell where I couldn't sleep for 6 or 7 days. I would fall asleep, but for whatever reason it never lasted long, I never got REM sleep so it wasn't restful.
I think we've all experienced not sleeping for a night, maybe two. You're tired, but you can generally function and do work. Things take a little extra concentration, and if you're like me your eyes get sore without the rest. It's annoying, but it's not horrid.
But as time goes on, things get worse. There is nothing on TV. After the first night or two everything is cleared off your TiVo. That means you are looking at ~8 hours of killing time. But it's night so you're exhausted. You can try to sleep, listening to the TV or whatever, but it doesn't work. At this point you may not have started watching TV to kill time, you may still think laying in your bed will work.
Pretty soon you are too excused to function. Keeping your eyes open hurts and it's hard to focus, because you've been using them for a few days constantly. Your working memory goes down to about 1 thing, making doing anything impossible. Trying to read or watch TV is bad enough because of your eyes, but it doesn't matter because you can't follow what's going on because it takes so much mental effort that you often unable to do it. This means you can't entertain yourself or try to speed the passage of time, at all. As things progress, you can barely even finish your own thoughts, even simple ones. Losing your ability to think is amazing, but terrifying.
In fact, everything is terrifying. Between the effects of the sleep depravation and the pressure you put on yourself, combined with all the energy you've used up already trying to function during the days when others are around... you have no buffer. Anything sets you off. You don't have a temper. You get very sad easily. Everything, every noise/touch/surprise is raw. You feel completely exposed and helpless. You're definitely in your animal brain, or at least you can't control it's impulses any more. It's purse "survival mode".
By the end, you're a blob. You can function about as well as a rock. You'd do anything just to go to sleep. It's agony.
From what I've heard, you may be able to go like this for quite a while. Some people can, some people can't. One poor guy was able to survive like this for months, which would be horrible. You're supposed to start hallucinating.
It's horrible. You lose your ability to do even the simplest thing. If you think you can stay up for three days straight to get more work done, it doesn't work like that.
Sleep. You may have no idea just how bad things get, but trust me, you don't want to find out. Ever.
I may have narcolepsy or something, but at some point, and it varies depending on the day and previous days, my body says it cant do it anymore. Sometimes its a little over 24 hours, sometimes its 18. My body will physically put me to sleep- i'll pass out in a chair, or feel very sick while standing. I never understood how people could push much past a day. I think once I made 36, and that was brutal. I can't imagine 4 days.
how did they conclude that sleep deprivation was the cause of death? perhaps it was the repeated shocks being administered, or the strobe lights, or the coffee they gave them
There's a reason the disease is called fatal familial insomnia, and not mildly inconvenient familial insomnia.
Seriously, this is not new knowledge.
And Guiness' "world records" are much shorter than the months-long completely sleepless descent into complete insanity
Try sleeping more than 5 hours a day when you're trying to graduate to see what happens. It is impossible to keep up schedule.
It's ironic that sleeping less makes you dumber. The less you sleep, the less productive you get, and the less time you have to sleep.
What I do is go trough the week with caffeine and energetics, party saturday and sleep the whole sunday. Yeah, I know more than anyone that this isn't healthy, but I plan to graduate some day and get fitter, happier. At least, most people survives.
entropy happens
The result of prolonged sleep deprivation are studied in Fatal Familia Insomnia cases. It is rare and not much studying has been done though.
http://blogs.qc.cuny.edu/blogs/0906N_1432/007/2006/10/rare_disease_fatal_familia_insomnia_--_terminal_insomnia.html
According to scientists, new tests show that life is deadly. Professor Doe says to Slashdot "We found that in a a 200 year study involving talking to people, and registering accounts of subjects in our research that passed away that all people die sometime.".
Later, we asked the professor if he knew why this happened, and if anything could be done about it, and he answered "No, it's definitely a mystery, and we will have to look closer in the following years."
...understand the joys of lack of sleep for extended periods. You have periods - sometimes weeks on end - where you get interrupted every couple of hours, which means you're not getting much, if any, REM sleep. I know of other parents who say that with multiple young children they have periods of YEARS where everything is just a bit hazy.
There has been some research (can't remember where I saw it) that sleep is vital for moving the day's memories from short term memory into long term memory where it can be accessed. Extended lack of sleep means that new information isn't properly transferred into the cortex and so gets "overwritten" with fresh information, resulting in some memory loss.
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
"The obvious conclusion is that it is probably deadly in all mammals." Why is it obvious?
Yes, we've known you can die from lack of sleep for decades. The point of TFA, which is not mentioned in the summary here, is that they have figured out humans actual natural sleep cycle, and it's nothing like what we do. In nature, it says, humans have 3 states: awake, asleep and "wakeful resting" which is a 3rd state that we're supposed to do for *6 hours a day*, and westerns never do at all anymore, and aren't even aware that they have such a possible state.
That's where the article gets interesting.
http://digg.com/general_sciences/Man_in_Vietnam_hasnâ(TM)t_slept_in_33_years._2
It won't pull up the story right now but I recall reading it. Apparently he got some illness and it led to some very specific brain damage, (by fever?) and prevented him from ever being able to sleep again. The article said he used the nighttime over the course of several years to dig a pond to raise fish to supplement the family's income. You'd think this guy would be the subject of intense research by a variety of groups, civilian and military alike?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Clown will eat me.
Have gnu, will travel.
none of this research is new. tfa says that the research was done in the 80s. the nyt article was published in 1999 (before the fucking millenium). the u of c doesnt even have a sleep research lab anymore.
http://www.nytimes.com/1997/01/05/magazine/awakening-to-sleep.html?sec=health&pagewanted=all
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I stayed up three days - Friday to Sunday night - and worked three jobs over that weekend. I had three jobs, and usually things worked out pretty well, but that particular weekend everything fell together in a bad way and left me working from about 7AM Friday until 6-7 PM Sunday.
Oh yeah one of those jobs was a delivery driver for a national pizza chain. And the kicker was, when I got home (from another job) Sunday they called and demanded that I come in to work, because someone else has not shown up. I quit, on the phone call from them, went to bed, and slept 24 hours.
One just has to look at anyone with untreated sleep apnea to see just how dangerous it is. You can easily identify such people just by looking for the signs... darkened eye sockets, labored breathing, swelling of the legs and body, disorientation, lethargy and bruising.
And it's not just difficulty sleeping either, the body ends up literally consuming more energy trying to sleep than it does while conscious. The lack of oxygen in the circulatory system fools the body into overproduction of red blood cells to compensate. This, in turn, leads to a dangerous shift in blood pressure to the point that the heart may cease to function under the load (chronic-conjestive lung and heart failure).
In many cases, those suffering from it are often discovered with blood oxygen levels lower than that of a cadaver.
One thing to remember though, is that the act of sleeping isn't just merely closing the eyes for a few winks, the body *needs* to rest lying down to recover from the negative effects of being upright all day. Blood that is left to pool in the legs for too long can eventually lead to dangerous blood clots.
At the very least, if you can't afford to sleep regularly, try taking a brief nap lying down once every few hours to help maintain normal circulation.
8==8 Bones 8==8
Does anyone else remember that news story about the Chinese kid who died because he was addicted to some videogame (Counterstrike if I recall) and hadn't slept in many days?
I've had some similar experience. One semester in college, I had a terrible schedule - almost all my classes were before lunch. The previous semester, I had gotten used to staying up very late since my I didn't have a single class before 2 PM. When I decided to try and stay up late, and then just take a nap in the afternoon, my grades in calculus, history, and physics suffered. But my creative writing class I did very well in. My computer science class was an even split - I came up with some very well-optimized code, but my documentation was horrible, and sometimes by the time I met up with the rest of the group to get all the modules working together, I couldn't even remember how it did what it did.
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
I made it almost seven days with increasingly large dose of caffeine. By the last day, I drank 3 pots of coffee in under twelve hours, and then I started having extremely vivid visual hallucinations. That's when I decided I was at my personal limit. (And then I slept for over 24 hours.)
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
It's refreshing to read some intelligent commentary about unions on this page rather than the typical knee-jerk anti-union comments that generally get attention.
I disagree with your assertion that you need 8 hours to get the required REM sleep.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyphasic_sleep
Some people have been shown to get 3 hours sleep per day, in 30 minute regulated naps and not go insane (or die) even after 6 months.
The issue comes when your body does not know when it should be getting the sleep. If you have irregular patterns, then you will suffer. If you have a sleep pattern that is as regular as clockwork, I would suggest that to survive you body would adapt and quite happily live on 6 hours, just run the REM cycles closer together.
This is old news if you've ever heard of the Korean Gamer who died after a 50 hour game session.
but sleep dep is not likely to kill unless you are kept awake artificially. I've gone as long as 80 hours awake just for fun (teenager), and by about 72 I was having some serious visual hallucinations, and at 80 I just couldn't stay awake any longer. Slept for about 24 hours.
Ah, to be young again!
The study cited in the main article was done in the '80s, and said the rats "might have died" from lack of sleep. The other link is a newspaper article published in 1997. This is hardly "groundbreaking."
As a grad student I talked with an assistant in a sleep research lab studying the effects of sleep deprivation in rats. The rats had electrodes implanted in their skulls which were used to monitor wakefulness as they were rocked back and forth in a cylindrical cage. Whenever they fell asleep the cage would rock back and forth, waking them up. I was told that experiments of this sort could only be done over 72 hours (after which time the rats had their heads chopped off and flash frozen for later brain slicing) or, based on previous research, they would be likely to die (from lack of sleep rather than the guillotine). I assume that this was not a new discovery. Perhaps the new part is actually trying to kill rats through lack of sleep and keeping track of how long it takes to do so.
I had a night job at a factory one time. 11pm to 7am. This meant that I slept about every two days.
I had a beekeeping hobby during the off factory hours. Can't put those little critters off. Once I was so sleepy I gathered a swarm into a box on the top of a 10' ladder. Then took a good nap up there with the idea or waiting for the bees to move to my box. Woke up a couple of hours later to an unpleasant dream which turned out to be reality. I had slept through a few bee stings. The swarm had moved, not into the box, but over and into my bee netting, clothes, hair, face, etc.
It was just annoying because swarms are fairly placid. So I carefully pulled my bee covered bee netting off and put that in the box. Went and took a proper nap in a bed.
You folks do anything interesting while sleep deprived? Leave out anything that could get you into trouble.
I think it's safe to say that you're going to fall asleep long before lack of sleep is in itself life threatening.
1. This is /.
2. Dreaming doesn't count.
I have epileptic episodes when sleep deprived - nothing else causes it - that's the trigger mechanism alone for mine.
I understand what its like to stay up for > 30 hours (did so well before it happened). Its near impossible to do anything. But, given my situation, I'm a bit tired of hearing people say "I only got 5 hours of sleep last night. I'm tired. This sucks." What some people think suck or is/are dangerous is, dare I be blunt, a fuck lot more dangerous for me.
Fortunately, with medication, you'll never know I'm epileptic. I hope it stays that way. I can get a license but since the big city I live in is so convenient to get in/out and around, I prefer for mysake and those of others to refrain from driving.
Just as an aside, I didn't know until I had a gran mal (my one and hopefully only) how much they hurt after. I was young and very much in shape and I was sore for a good month after - legs, arms, back and all over. What really sucks is that some people have them them several times a day. I'd say, people should only be so lucky to never have a seizure.
I have twin ten-month-old boys. Apparently, I should have died dozens of times over by now.
Better living through money.
Check out what the US, UK, Israel do as standard practice - make their prisoners go crazy and suicidal via sleep deprivation. It's considered "non-lethal", but research like the above is proving otherwise. The truth is that in significant doses it causes severe damage to the body. You've heard of gamers dying after playing for days on end (e.g. Korea, Japan, China). When you read about a torture detainee in one of Cheney's dungeons or Israel's "secret" Torture Prison 1391 dying "of natural causes", this is yet another one of those causes that is not actually very natural at all.
Of course, for me just listening to AM radio makes me feel like I'm going to die ...
rats-> ? -> humans
Torture? And even more importantly rather dangerous to the victim's life. I can tell you guys if I go 20 hours without sleep I start feeling the effects. Any more than that I'm liable to just fall asleep, even while walking.
This is very old news. Yes, eventually you will die, but do you really think you'll stay awake for more than 2 weeks? Anyone can manage a week without any severe problems (though they shouldn't drive etc), but you'd probably have to stay awake for more than 3 weeks to even have any risk of death. When it comes down to it, it's like holding your breath...You can't kill yourself by holding your breath, you'll simply pass out. It's the same regarding sleep where you'll simply pass out before you die.
No one should be concerned that they'll die from staying up for 48 hours or something.
As an undergrad psychology student I recently had a few lectures delivered by a very up-to-date sleep researcher. First of all, circadian rhythms (our internal wake-sleep schedule, sort of) control (a) blood pressure, (b) heart rate, and (c) core body temperature. Despite unverified self-reports that conveniently occur in relatively deindividuated internet forums, I can't possibly think of how severely disturbing our circadian rhythms would result in normal functioning. Secondly, as some readers have speculated while actually reading the linked article, it would most likely take a lot of sleep deprivation to kill an otherwise healthy individual. Last, but not least, studies have shown that sleep deprivation for 11 days led to considerably increased slow wave and REM sleep for several nights thereafter, so obviously the mind is prepared to deal with sleep deprivation. I'd better get some sleep now.
Yeah, I know more than anyone that this isn't healthy, but I plan to graduate some day and get fitter, happier.
Alcoholics often "plan" to stop drinking later too.
In reality you're setting yourself up for a lifelong bad habit. If you don't learn to manage your stress and work/life balance as a grad student, you will likely continue to create stress and health problems for yourself in your eventual career (assuming you are doing grad school in order to step into academic or research work). Your graduation is reaching the trail head to start the real climb. Retirement is reaching the summit, and even some who make it there die during the descent, because they didn't manage their health properly on the way up.
The hardest part of getting sleep with an infant only lasts 4-6 months. Switch off duties with your partner to ensure she gets some sleep too.
If (s)he's 3 already, your sleep troubles should've been over a long time ago. If they're not, put that kid on a schedule with a bedtime routine. Schedule mealtimes (roughly) too - set his/her circadian rhythm. (S)he'll sleep several hours longer than you, giving you and your mate much needed together time....
Does he/she have a pet? How does one explain space to a toddler?
Excuse, but this is *not* news. This fact has been in my medical textbooks years ago.
Yes, some people do slip into REM much quicker. As I was saying, narcoleptics can get into REM in 15-25 minutes, sometimes less.
Also, you do need less sleep with age. Margaret Thatcher was born in '25, and was PM between '79 and '90, i.e., between roughly 54 and 65 years old. Admittedly still a bit young for 4 hours a night, but less spectacular than if someone half that age pulled that stunt anyway.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Almost everybody will tell you that they're at their best artistically when under stress.
Most authors admit their best work was achieved during the worst times of their lives.
During periods when their life is comfortable, artists generally tend to lose the edge.
I agree with some of your statements, but a lot of your rant was (dis)coloured by the typical attitude of 'Foreigner in Japan' syndrome: which is that the Japanese way is not the same as my way, therefore it is inferior.
Many of my gaijin acquaintances in Japan do nothing but complain about the place, yet whenever I ask them if they've forgotten the correct route to the airport, they clam up and don't speak to me for a while.
Almost all of them came to Japan for at least one of the four main reasons foreigners (who are almost always male) come here.
1. They believe that in Japan they will at last be Big Men, physically, and not average-below average men, as they feel they are in their home country, because "all Japanese men are midgets".
2. They believe that in Japan they will be treated like movie/rock stars, women will throw themselves at them, and the president of Sony/Hitachi/Corp X will beg them to sign on and "show them how to do it".
3. As per reason 2. they believe that Japanese women accept it as their place in life to be shockingly mistreated by men, and that males in Japan are expected to have, oh, I don't know, let's say a wife and four girlriends.
4. They couldn't cut it in the west, so they come to Japan thinking they'll earn a fortune teaching English (with absolutely no formal ESL qualifications and experience), and that reasons 1-3 will also apply.
One of the reasons gaijin in Japan complain incessently about Japan is because they very quickly discover that 1-4 are all grossly incorrect, and they usually discover it the hard way.
Have you ever read a book called 'Notes from Toyota-land' by Darius Mehri? He came to Japan believing he would be a God amongst short people, mostly because he could speak Japanese, but also because he assumed westerners were heroes in this country.
When he discovered that his presumptions were incorrect, he wrote a book whining about how the Japanese do everything "the wrong way" and wept like the little bitch he is because nobody fawned all over him for being a westener who could speak some Japanese.
If you don't like the Japanese way, if it's "not as good as your way", you have two options: shuttup and live with the "fact", or fuck off back to your own country.
Note: I'm a 6'5" westerner with a Japanese wife (met and married her outside Japan, had two kids), and have lived and worked in Japan for a couple of years (as just another corporate drone), and understand that 99.999% of Japanese would be happy to see me and all other foreigners leave Japan forever, mostly because 99.9% of gaijin fall into motivational categories 1-4.
Death from sleep deprivation is the result of preventing your body from detoxication(which happens while you are sleeping) and leads to acidosis which can be deadly too (can cause heart attacks).
I couldnt read ALL comments, so please forgive me if it has been mentioned earlier.
God kills a kitten.
Experiments on sleep deprivation have been done since long and they have shown the same results. Nothing new here, I don't see why they keep stating new discoveries that were in fact discovered decades ago.
Really? News? :) Just google it for some funny videos.
A human can stay awake for max 11 days, after 11 days any human would probably die. And it has been known for quite a while now.
There are 2 bio imperatives that can override sleep: self preservation and hunger.
And lack of sleep can cause a ton of sleep related illnesses, most fun of witch are cataplexy and narcolepsy
I can confirm the carbohydrate cravings from first hand experience
Karaoroshi = death from too much bad singing over popular songs in bars.
I'm a bit surprised that nobody has mentioned this rare but 100% fatal, autosomal dominant disorder. IIRC the first symptom is the sudden onset of insomnia, followed by hallucinations, dementia, catatonia, then death, typically by middle age. The progression is rapid, irreversible, and totally untreatable by modern science. Insomnia appears to be a symptom of the disease and not the direct cause of death; but it is often the loss of the ability to sleep that is most disturbing to the afflicted individuals, as it is in this early stage when their cognitive function remains largely intact.
It stands to reason that a biological process that is common to nearly all animals such as sleep is so essential that the lack of it would be a serious health issue, if not a direct contributor to death.
There was an excellent (BBC?) Documentary Series on Sleep I watched many years ago (on VHS!) It had:
* A story of a Canadian man who found he couldn't sleep. Turned out he had a malfunction in his brain in a part that controlled sleep. No matter how hard or what he tried, he couldn't sleep. It took him six months to die and it was a horrible death.
* A story of a radio announcer who did a stay-awake-athon. He went for something approaching a week without sleep. Pscyhologists watched and said in hindsight they wished they'd stopped him. He got dellusions - spiders - and in the end he would dream while awake. THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART: After the 'thon was over he took a good long sleep, woke up refreshed and appeared to go back to his old self. But his personality changed, and his old amiable friendly self - as radio announcers tend to be - faded and he became irritable and just didn't get along with people. He lost his job. He was never the same again.
So sleep depravation is dangerous and may be damaging you in ways you don't understand. If you can find the series, highly recommended. BTW pretty clear our Justice Department knows as much about Medicine as it does about Law. I don't mean that as a compliment.
OT, but I wonder what the general mechanism is that produces situations in which employers have to ask their staff to work through the night to meet some deadline. I mean, at some point it must pass from the rational and industry-specific and into the irrational and the realms of psychological dysfunction. What makes an otherwise sane (and presumably reasonably intelligent) project manager or senior manager agree to push ahead with something that they know is going to be impossible?
"I have decided that we will deliver X, with Y resources, but I know that to deliver X you will need Y*10 resources. I shall ignore this and end up making 10 people work all night for a week to deliver something that I will eventually get fired for being barely production ready, it at all."
I have see exactly this on more occasions than I would think would be just bad luck.
"And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
The case of a woman in her 20s compelled to work several days and nights through until her fatal collapse in the Japanese financial services sector (not strictly karoshi as the cause of her demise seems to have been neither cardiac nor a stroke, but attributed to the sleep deprivation itself) is notorious in particular as her family was denounced for suing the employer, which public opinion reportly considered an immoral action there.
Well, in the case of my previous employer, it was due to the CTO fucking around with irrelevant aspects of the project and having hours and hours of meetings that achieved nothing but arguments - and then bang, the deadline was a week away and they'd achieved nothing. And thus the all-nighters began.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
i mean come on... thats been common knowledge for ages.
FTA: "While no human being is known to have died from staying awake, animal research strongly suggests..."
There was a documentary that I saw a long time ago detailing a man whose brain could not 'switch off', and he eventually died after 6 months without sleep. He would appear to sleep, but his brainwave patterns showed that he was indeed still awake, and by the end of his ordeal he was completely incapable of holding a conversation or reacting meaningfully to his environment.
http://sleep-disorders.suite101.com/article.cfm/the_man_who_never_slept
Just BUTCHER that little piece of sh*t.
Then toss the remains away in a plastic bag.
Poast pics, plz.
I wrote an article on how to fix your sleep pattern if you find it difficult to go to bed early after months of not sleeping early:
http://improfane.wordpress.com/2008/12/28/messed-sleep-pattern-the-fix-for-nocturnal-critters/
(Sarcasm)What a timely article(/Sarcasm)
Now that the CIA was/is to use sleep deprivation as a means to interrogate subjects.
Maybe the FBI and Janet Reno will be sued for using sleep deprivation on the Branch Davidians.
Oh yeah, Reno was on of the good guys....Bahhahaha....
Wait, this has been general knowledge for decades... What the hell? Am I really so old that I'm seeing the body of human knowledge being rediscovered again by an entirely new generation of n00bs? Sleep deprivation studies and experiments were carried out AGES ago, people.
The irony is that his generalization about expats is a common stereotype, and it is a trap that many expats fall into where they become hyper-aware of this stereotype and go around preaching how different they are.
I think the reality is more nuanced, as we (I've also been a white expat in Asia) start to see what it is like to be stereotyped and discriminated against in a way that impacts us. I say: welcome to life for the majority of people on earth; now get over it and decide what you think of different cultures and societies from a more objective vantage point, and create your own mix and enjoy...
You can either give stereotypes power over individuals, or you can give individuals the benefit of the doubt. Whether it's about race, ethnicity, height, language fluency, class, or general education, this decision is what makes you prejudiced or not.
back in 1984, shortly after ronnie fired all the strikers, i rented a room from a replacement atc who told me that not only do atcs swing shifts weekly, they swing back: taking an earlier shift, similar in effect to flying east: it's easier to adjust to flying west (later.)
since it takes ~2 weeks to adjust fully to a schedule change, our air transportation system is being run by sleep-deprived zombies;-{
Snowly.
I thought there were previous studies on this subject.
This information is nothing new, honestly. We've seen people literally stay up for several days, and then die. We've seen people sleep a few hours here and a few hours there and then die. Lack of sleep is extremely dangerous. Nothing new and then you have people that like to pop Adderall on a regular basis. These people are scary after they've been up for more than a couple of days on stuff like that. Do your self a favor and GO TO SLEEP!
I'm obviously not going to RTFA so I'll just blindly ask instead. How are these rats being kept awake? It seems to me that you're not going to be able to ask these rats to voluntarily attempt to stay awake as long as possible. I would wager that the stressful conditions used to prevent sleep are probably just as much to blame as the lack of sleep itself for the untimely death of the test subjects.
I think the thinking is that there's more going on than just loss of sleep in FFI. In other words, the lack of sleep and death are correlated, but not necessarily causally connected. It's tough to make a determination because the syndrome is so rare.
We're not talking about dying if you pull too many all-nighters. If you get tired enough, your body will force you to sleep. We're talking about dying if someone forceably wakes you every time you start to sleep. That's how the rats were killed.
This result that not being allowed to sleep eventually causes death is interesting, but not hugely surprising, and seems only a little bit useful medically. It's also a fairly horrible way to kill a bunch of rats. I honestly can't see that the result is important enough to justify the cruelty.
The study result wasn't even about the things which might actually kill you if you voluntarily stay awake - fatigue while driving, etc. Those things are more important to human decision-making and working conditions. The study was only about what will happen to you if someone decides to torture you to death by preventing sleep.
It seems very cruel and a bit trivial.
I have died a couple of times from lack of sleep.