In 1959, Peter Tripp, a New York DJ, staged a charity ‘wakeathon’ in which he did not sleep for eight days. Towards the end of his feat, Tripp showed some disturbing symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions. The delusions were so intense that it was impossible to give him any tests to assess his psychological functioning.
In 1965, William Dement studied Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old student stayed awake for 264 hours and 12 minutes (more than 11 days), aiming to get himself into the Guinness Book of Records. Gardner had difficulty in performing some tasks but his lack of sleep did not produce anything like the disturbances experienced by Peter Tripp. Afterwards, Gardner spent 14 hours and 40 minutes asleep and when he awoke he appeared to have recovered completely. On subsequent nights, Gardner returned to his usual pattern of sleeping for eight hours per day, and Dement stated that he did not seem to suffer any permanent physiological or psychological effects from his long period without sleep.
However, there is a flaw with saying that he definitely didn’t experience any effects. Such effects are not always possible to detect, and they may not appear until several years later.
Going without sleep for over 200 hours has been subsequently achieved by a number of people, none of whom seem to have experienced any long-term detrimental effects. Unfortunately because the cases of Tripp, Gardner and others were not carried out carefully in controlled conditions, it is difficult to draw a conclusion about sleep deprivation from these studies alone.
However, Hüber-Weidman produced a psychological list of the effects of sleep deprivation day by day. He found that on the second night of sleep deprivation, a person’s urge to sleep becomes much greater. On night three, tasks requiring sustained attention are seriously impaired whilst on night four, participants usually go through periods of micro-sleep. This is where they stop what they are doing and stare into space for a few seconds. On night five, delusions may be experienced and on night sense a clear sense of identity is lost. This is called sleep deprivation psychosis.
However, the effects of sleep deprivation do not accumulate over time. For example, if we normally sleep for eight hours a day and are deprived of sleep for three days, we do not sleep for 24 hours afterwards. Thus, we do not need to make up for all the sleep that has been missed although we do make up for some by sleeping for a slightly extended period of time.
There are many studies on sleep deprivation in animals. Rechtschaffen et al placed a rat on a disc protruding from a small bucket of water with an EEG monitoring its brain activity. Each time brain activity indicated sleep, the disc rotated. This forced the rat to walk if it wanted to avoid falling in the water. Another rat was used as a control and was allowed to sleep when it wanted to. After 33 days all the sleep deprived rats had died whilst those that slept normally appeared not to have suffered.
However, there are ethical issues that must be taken into account. To subject an animal to no sleep is ethically wrong. It is also impossible to generalise the results to humans to say that after 33 days of no sleep a human would die. As there have been no recorded attempts of a human going for so long without sleep, it cannot be assumed.
The experiment also lacked ecological validity because it isn’t something that would happen in real life.
