We can fight off the sandman for a while,
but after a certain point, sleeplessness
leads to temporary madness and – just
maybe – death, discovers Adam
Hadhazy.
It’s surprising how we spend our lives. Reach your 78th birthday
and according to some back-of-the-
envelope calculations , you will have spent nine of
those years watching television, four years driving a car, 92 days
on the toilet, and 48 days having sex.
But when it comes to time-consuming activities, there’s one that
sits head and shoulders above them all. Live to 78, and you may
have spent around 25 years asleep. In an effort to claw back
some of that time it’s reasonable to ask: how long can we stay
awake – and what are the consequences of going without sleep?
Any healthy individual planning to find out through personal
experimentation will find it tough going. "The drive to sleep is so
strong it will supersede the drive to eat," says Erin Hanlon, an
assistant professor at the University of Chicago's Sleep,
Metabolism and Health Centre. "Your brain will just go to sleep,
despite all of your conscious efforts to keep it at bay."
Why sleep at all?
Exactly why the urge to sleep is so strong remains a
mystery. "The exact function of sleep is still to be elucidated,"
says Hanlon. She adds, however, that there is something about
sleep that seems to “reset” systems in our bodies. What’s more,
studies have shown that routine, adequate sleep promotes healing,
immune function, proper metabolism, and much more – which is
maybe why it feels good to arise refreshed after a serious
snooze.
On the flip side, insufficient slumber has been linked
to greater risks of diabetes, heart issues, obesity, depression and
other maladies. To avoid those latter outcomes, we are wracked
with uncomfortable sensations when we burn the midnight oil: we
lack energy, feel groggy, and find that our heavy eyelids press on
aching eyes. As we continue to fight off sleep, our ability to
concentrate and form short-term memories slackens.
If we ignore all these side effects and stay up for days on end,
our minds become unhinged. We get moody, paranoid, and see
things that aren’t really there. "People start to hallucinate and
go a bit crazy," says Atul Malhotra, the Director of Sleep
Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. (Long-haul
truckers have an evocative term for this hallucinatory phenomenon:
"seeing the black dog". When a shadowy apparition appears on the
roadway, so the advice goes, it's time to pull the lorry over.)
Many studies have documented the body's parallel decline during
sleep deprivation. Stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol
increase in the blood, in turn elevating blood pressure. Meanwhile,
heart rhythms get out of whack and the immune system falters,
says Malhotra. Sleep-deprived people accordingly feel anxious and
are likelier to come down with an illness.
Still, all the havoc wreaked by a bout of insomnia or a few all-
nighters does not seem permanent, disappearing after solid shuteye.
"If there's any damage, it's reversible," says Jerome Siegel, a
professor at the Centre for Sleep Research at the University of
California, Los Angeles.
When the curtain never falls
But what if sleep never can come? A rare genetic disease called
Fatal Familial Insomnia provides one of the starkest pictures of
the consequences of extreme sleeplessness.
Only about 40 families worldwide have FFI in their gene pools.
A single defective gene causes proteins in the nervous system to
misfold into "prions" that lose their normal functionality. "Prions
are funny-shaped proteins that screw these people up," says
Malhotra. The prions clump in neural tissue, killing it and forming
Swiss cheese-like holes in the brain (which is exactly what happens
in the best-known human prion disorder, Creutzfeldt-
Jakob disease ). One area that is particularly badly
affected in people with FFI is the thalamus, a deep brain region
that controls sleep. Hence the debilitating insomnia.
An afflicted individual suddenly goes days on end without rest and
develops weird symptoms such as pinpoint pupils and drenching
sweats. After a few weeks, the FFI victim slips into a sort of
pre-sleep twilight. He or she appears to be sleepwalking and
exhibits those jerky, involuntary muscle movements we sometimes
have when falling asleep. Weight loss and dementia follow, and
eventually, death.
Still, sleeplessness per se is not thought to be the lethal
agent, because FFI leads to widespread brain damage. "I don't
think it is sleep loss that kills these individuals," says Siegel.
Similarly, the oft-used torture tactic of depriving human prisoners
of sleep is not known to have summarily caused anyone to die
(although they will still suffer horribly).
Along these lines, animal sleep deprivation experiments provide
more evidence that a lack of sleep in its own right might not be
deadly, but what prompts it may well be.
Studies by Allan Rechtschaffen at the University of Chicago in the
1980s involved placing rats on discs above a tray of water.
Whenever the rat tried dozing off, as revealed by changes in
measured brain waves, the disc would rotate and a wall would
shove the rat towards the water, startling it back awake.
All rats died after about a month of this treatment, though for
unclear reasons. Most likely, it was the stress of being awoken
– on average a "thousand times a day" says Siegel – that did
the rats in, wearing down their bodily systems. Among other
symptoms, the rats exhibited body temperature dysregulation and
lost weight despite an increased appetite.
"That’s the problem in interpreting sleep studies in humans and
animals: You can't thoroughly deprive a person or an animal of
sleep without their cooperation and not impose a fair amount of
stress," says Siegel. If death occurs, "the question is, 'is it the
stress or the sleep loss?' It's not an easy distinction."
Wake up! Wake up!
All of this may well put most people off exploring the limits of
our capacity to go without sleep, but the question remains: how
long can we stay awake? The most widely cited record for
voluntarily staving off sleep belongs to Randy Gardner, at the
time a 17-year-old high school student in San Diego, California.
For a science fair project in 1964, Gardner did not hit the hay
for 264 hours straight, or just over 11 days, according to
scientists who monitored him towards the end of his vigil.
Numerous other, less credible accounts abound, including one of a
British woman in 1977 who won a competition to continuously
rock in a rocking chair (presumably by a landslide) by doing so
for 18 days.
Overall, the jury is out on just how long a human could ever
stay awake, but perhaps that's a good thing. Acknowledging the
injury people might cause to themselves through intentional sleep
deprivation, the Guinness Book of Records stopped keeping track
of this particular superlative last decade.
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150220-how-long-can-we-stay-awake

Let me get some sleep,I read somewhere sleeplessness can lead to madness. I have been reading all day. When I get up at dawn(God's grace) will read full story. Good night OP.

I think say na qst u dey ask.

I bin wan ans: till u sleep na.