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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)
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.
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.