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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)
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.
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!
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.
What's the LD50?
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.
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.
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.
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
...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
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.
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'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?
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.
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 have twin ten-month-old boys. Apparently, I should have died dozens of times over by now.
Better living through money.
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.
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.
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.
This is exactly why good bands start to suck after a few albums. If they get successful they get comfortable. At least that is my theory.....
All points of time and space are connected.