Unfortunately, when a person is sleep deprived, events are more likely to seem boring. A person with no sleep deprivation "will probably not fall asleep even in the most boring of lectures" according to sleep researchers (Adler, 1993). However, a person deprived of sleep is likely to find the same lecture boring, and that person may get almost uncontrollably sleepy during a lecture.
An average human spends 200,000 hours sleeping, it’s reasonable, to assume that sleep must serve one or more key functions, but it is hard to discover these functions. One way of trying to work out why we sleep is to deprive people of it.
Only a handful of people have remained awake over 200 hours (8 days). A famous case is that of Peter Tripp, a New York disk jockey, who vowed to stay awake for 200 hours to raise money for the March of Dimes. He was closely monitored by sleep researchers and tested in various ways. By 100 hours he was already hallucinating. Tripp managed to finish his 200-hour ordeal, slept for 13 hours, and awoke feeling normal, although he reported a slight depression that lasted for three months afterward. Tripp's hallucinations may have been due to amphetamine drugs he was taking (under the supervision of doctors) to keep himself awake.
Five years later, a young man named Randy Gardner tried to break the world record for sleeplessness. While sleep researchers observed him and monitored his body functions, he went over 260 hours without any drugs or any ill effects except occasional mental lapses. Unlike Peter Tripp, he experienced no hallucinations. He slept fourteen and a half hours after his sleepless period and seemed normal after that. In view of the fact that Randy Gardner missed out on about 80-90 hours of sleep, he remarkably had few problems. He was clearly less affected that Tripp by sleep deprivation, even though he did remain awake for an extra 3 days.
There were two other cases that involved animals; rats and cats. Rechtschaffen looked into sleep deprivation with rats. He used two rats at a time, he put rats on two disks above water and their EEG activity was monitored. One rat was not allowed to sleep letting it fall into the water if it did. All sleep deprived rats died within 33 days whereas the rats not deprived seemed in good health.
Jouvet used cats and the ‘flower-pot technique.’ Cars sat on a upturned flower pot, when the cats would fall asleep the pot would upturn and the cats would fall into the water. In REM sleep muscles became relaxed and they would fall into the water, this led to the cats dying and Jouvet discovering that lack of REM sleep was fatal.
Peter Tripp was a small scare study, it also lacked a lot of control because he, himself recorded everything. There were also ethical issues such as harm to participants mentally and physically. This case was also andocentric because it was only a man that was used during the study so no results could compare it with a woman and also ethnocentric because Peter Tripp was a New Yorker.
Randy Gardner was the exact same, except there was control because a researcher, Horne, recorded everything and it was an actual study. You could also say randy Gardner was used to staying up for ‘all nighters’ because he was a student and used to such pressures. He was also much younger that Peter Tripp so he could have been more resilient.
Rechtschaffen and Jouvet used animals in their studies which cannot be generalised to humans. These two cases were small and had ethical issues. You could also say that the rats and cats did not die because of sleep deprivation but because of the stress. It’s ethical issues were the real problem because cats and rats died pointlessly as the findings were not valid.
