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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."
The current world record for time without sleep is 11 days. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder)
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
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.
Death from too much work/too little sleep is so popular in Japan, that they have a nice name for it here - karoshi.
Which, surprisingly, translates literally to "death from too much work".
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.
Parent asks:
"Gotta say that was a very long post that repeated a lot of conventional wisdom but said almost nothing to answer OP's question..."
"What is it specifically that requires us to lose consciousness to get what we need from sleep?"
The grandparent post answered that question with:
"I think the biggest thing you need sooner or later is REM sleep, not just a lie down. Lack of REM sleep (which, as we'll see is possible while technically still getting some sleep) can result in actual brain damage, or in the very long run even death."
Sure he didn't say "The thing that specifically requires us to lose concious to get what we need from sleep is REM sleep", but he did answer the question.
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
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
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
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.
I don't [think] this is something that happens often under circumstances people normally experience.
I agree. In the first article, it doesn't tell us how the rats were kept awake, but it gives a hint that they were not kept up by excitement over their latest project:
It's also possible that extreme levels of stress contributed to the rats' demise.
However, the article opens talking about Guantanemo; it is relevant to consider that such treatment of fellow human beings might be more dangerous than supposed.
Volunteer Fire & Rescue I'm on-call 24/7. Our radios have this horrible tone that wakes you from your sleep so well your not even tired. But I'm self employed so in theory I can sleep in but that rarely ever happens.
The next question is, what does REM sleep bring? It's commonly believed to be the required / most beneficial part of a person's sleep, but what specifically occurs during that period to, for example, update the type of memory you mention?
No, the most essential type of sleep is slow-wave sleep, which is even mentioned in TFA.
I've done some computational modelling of the cerebral cortex, and my hypothesis (page 7/139) is that slow-wave sleep is used to re-strengthen competitive connections between cortical columns, restoring the ability to think clearly.
Seems unlikely a UDT/SEAL would be posting here, but they go a whole week without sleep as a kind of finale to their training. (It's called Hell Week for a reason.)
They are explicitly being trained to keep running, keep fighting, keep moving as a team even while totally out of their minds. Sort of like training the ol' hind-brain to keep going no matter what happens.
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.
boring tasks -- decorating for example.
In my experience, it is possible to find someone else who will quite happily actually insist on taking care of all one's home decorating, with even some fringe benefits thrown in. Of course some might find surprising disadvantages to my solution, like sudden difficulties completing 24h WoW sessions, but as TFA says even the average slashdotter needs his beauty sleep.