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Originally posted by ZeroDeep
Untill he falls asleep.
After this, I don't know whether to think you are funny or you are a smartass.
Tuesday January 6, 2004
The brain, perhaps surprisingly, tends to be the only organ affected by sleep loss. "There's very little evidence that the body fails at all if you go without sleep," says Professor Jim Horne, director of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University. "Provided you get adequate nutrition and physical rest, all of the organs from the neck down can cope fine."
Sleep deprivation does more than turn you into a non-communicative vegetable, however. Sleep-deprived people have increased appetites, become shaky, get headaches and, mysteriously, get more horny. "If you consider that the average man thinks abou sex once evey 15 seconds, and you're awake for 24 hours a day, it's not surprising," says Stanley. As if to quell the urge, their bodies cool down a third of a degree.
After three days without sleep, hallucinations can kick in. The longest scientifically documented case of sleep deprivation was the provided by an American, Randy Gardner, in 1964, who, in an attempt to set a world record, stayed awake for 11 days. Four days in, he had a hallucination in which a street sign turned into a person, an episode quickly followed by a delusion where he though he was a famous black footballer. The hallucinations are due to what sleep scientists call dream intrusion. "If you deprive yourself of sleep, your body still needs to dream," says Stanley. "But because the dream is playing while you're still awake, you have two realities going on, so the hallucinations can seem very real."
Little is known about any long-term damage that sleep deprivation can cause. Studies in rats that were fed and watered, but kept awake until they died, showed that the animals eventually keeled over as their body temperature went haywire. They survived only 14 days, but as Horne points out, that's a long time for an animal that normally lives just two years.
Just how long a human can go without sleep is hard to judge, except to say that it is likely to be much longer than Gardner managed. After sleeping off his 11 day awake-athon, he showed no signs of long-term physical or mental damage. Horne says the idea that people kept awake for days will eventually go mad and start beating each other is nonsense. "What's far more likely is they'll just sit around and finally conk out."