How long can you go without sleep? My personal best is a mere 40 hours, and there’s a four-hour
chunk that I absolutely do not remember, except for the taste of gin-and-tonics. Health
care workers often work full 24-hour shifts, firefighters sometimes go three days without
getting shuteye, and film production workers lead the world in cumulative lack of sleep.
Still, most of us try not to go more than a day without at least getting in a nap.
Well, this is Randy Gardner - the teen who broke a world record when he stayed awake,
without any sleep, for eleven days.
December 1963. San Diego high schoolers Randy Gardner and Bruce McCallister need a project
for the upcoming science fair. While other kids may be content with baking-soda-volcanoes or
solar system dioramas, Randy has his sights set on something bigger. He comes from a military family,
constantly moving, and is used to distinguishing himself by taking first prize at the science fair,
no matter where he lives. San Diego’s the biggest city they’ve landed in,
though. If he’s going to make his mark, he’s going to have to go bigger than ever before.
So he and Bruce decide to make history. By breaking the world record for sleep deprivation.
At this time, the record is held by Tom Rounds, a disc jockey for KPOI radio in Honolulu.
Fresh from New York, Rounds had wanted to drum up publicity for the station - and for himself,
as the new guy. Setting himself up in a department store window, he stayed up for a record 260
hours - just four hours shy of a full eleven days. The publicity worked - Rounds made news
around the world. It caught the attention of Bruce and Randy, who love a challenge.
But it is for a science fair, so they have to come up with a scientific pretext.
Their first idea: the effect of sleeplessness on…paranormal ability. Which paranormal ability?
How will they measure that data? With no real idea how to approach that, they decide to take on
a more straightforward experiment: the effect of sleeplessness on cognitive ability. To be measured
in various ways: memory tests, math problems, and on the basketball court. They decide one
of them will be the test subject, and the other the observer. They flip a coin - and Randy gets
to be the guinea pig. He’s not worried, though - he’s confident that he can stay up the full eleven
days, besting Tom Rounds by four hours, then catch up on sleep after, suffering no ill side effects.
The experiment begins early in the morning on December 29th, 1963. They keep a chart
on the wall, on which Bruce can make notations. Randy stays active, playing basketball. Regular
meal-taking is maintained, and otherwise, there is nothing added to the diet - no stimulants,
not even coffee…maybe the occasional Coke. Randy relies on stamina and will alone. There’s one
problem: it’s just the two of them, so Bruce has to stay up with Randy. The first sign of trouble
comes on day three. Bruce falls asleep while taking notes. When he wakes up, he’s still in the
middle of writing - on the wall. They need help. He recruits another classmate, Joe Marciano, Jr.
Randy’s parents are also getting concerned. They call in an expert,
Lt. Commander John J. Ross of the US Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit.
At first, things are progressing as expected. Randy appears to be mostly unaffected, though
he gets increasingly irritable. He also starts to get a little spacey in conversation. Still,
his basketball abilities remain unaffected, and he can still go out for walks with little incident.
The New Year comes, and the boys’ experiment gets a write-up in the newspaper. That article
gets the attention of William C. Dement, a sleep researcher based out of Stanford University.
Dement is a pioneer in sleep medicine. Along with classmates Eugene Aserinsky and Michel Jouvet,
and under the mentorship of Nathaniel Kleitman, Dement helped to identify and define REM sleep
in the 1950s. Like Randy, Dement is skeptical of the recommended eight hours of sleep. His
own observations tell him that it differs person to person. In 1963, just before the boys begin
their science fair project, Dement completes his own study on the sleeping habits of Bayard Quincy
Morgan, an 80-year-old professor of German at Stanford. Morgan claims he has gone to
bed at 10PM and woken up at 2AM, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, every day since he was 23 years old.
Weeks of observation with the Stanford sleep researchers proved that, yes,
Morgan was able to function completely normally - including teaching, writing,
and socializing - at age eighty, on slightly less than four hours of sleep. If that man can
go that long and be that productive on so little sleep, is it possible for others to do the same?
The age group is particularly fascinating to Dement: according to the studies of the
Stanford sleep lab, most teens around Randy’s age sleep between 10 and 11 hours a day (5).
He volunteers his services, arriving with an electroencephalogram,
or EEG, to record Randy’s brain activity and eye movement. The boys’ parents are more than
happy to have more professionals on the scene. While Dement says Randy seems mostly unaffected,
Lt. Commander Ross records that he’s beginning to experience hallucinations.
Day Four: Randy mistakes a street sign for another person on the street.
He later becomes convinced, although briefly, that he’s a famous football star.
Day Five: despite being indoors, a path suddenly appears in front of him, winding
its way through a quiet forest. Randy knows it’s a hallucination, but still - he sees it.
The hallucinations are not unexpected. Even before Tom Rounds in Honolulu,
another DJ pulled a no-sleep stunt. Back in 1959, Peter Tripp of WMGM in New York City
attempted a “wakeathon” to benefit the March of Dimes. He broadcast from a glass booth in
Times Square, with occasional breaks to use the bathroom or change his clothes.
As the days wore on, he began to hallucinate. After 120 hours, or five days,
he saw flames shooting out of a drawer in his hotel room. A scientist became an undertaker,
taking him away to die. The face of a clock became the face of a friend, the longer he stared at it.
Then he began to believe he was the friend, that he wasn’t really Peter Tripp, that the sleep
scientists around him were plotting against him. In all, he lasted 8 days, 8 hours - 200 hours in
all. Some still maintain that the experiment did permanent harm to him psychologically.
Fortunately, Randy’s hallucinations are not that violent. And unlike Peter Tripp, no drugs are
being used to keep him going. He has other ways of staying awake. While it’s dangerous to sit down,
he enjoys driving around in the convertible Dement’s brought with him. Dement also observes
that the growing media coverage is becoming a circus, with newspaper, radio, and television
all camping out in Randy’s neighborhood (9). The attention and sudden celebrity is enough to
keep anyone awake, much less a 17-year-old at the height of his confidence. And, of course,
there’s always basketball. All else is beginning to suffer: his speech slows and slurs, he has
trouble remembering the names of common objects, he stops speaking in the middle of sentences and
forgets he was talking at all. The group conducts tests on his senses of taste, smell, and hearing,
and are surprised to see that not all of them become dulled - but, rather, more sensitive.
Randy begins to fight them on some of the smell tests, especially, saying he can’t stand it.
But his basketball game does not suffer - he even continues to win when playing against others.
Dement’s mentor, Nathaniel Kleitman, noticed similar behavior in his early experiments in 1922.
Kleitman observed that subjects had to be in constant activity to fight off drowsiness.
And not just any repetitive activity, but something truly dynamic - like
basketball or bowling, activities where you’re constantly changing speed and approach,
where there’s stimuli all around you. After all, he found that subjects would start to fall asleep
as soon as they closed their eyes even while in the middle of walking. As his student Dement
would later put it, “almost continuous muscular activity is necessary to forestall overwhelming
sleepiness (12).” Kleitman also found that it got worse for his subjects between 3AM and 6AM.
Dement finds a similar challenge. While during the day, Randy can be photographed, give interviews,
go bowling with his friends, generally act like a teenager without any issues - at night,
that all changes. For one thing, there’s nothing open - at least,
no establishment that will let a trio of high schoolers in. For another…well,
remember, Randy is going on nine days now. Over 200 hours without sleep. That broke Peter Tripp,
but Randy’s not even hitting Tom Rounds’ world record yet. As Dement later writes,
“at night we were driven to increasingly heroic measures to…resist sleepiness (9).”
By Day Ten, Randy is experiencing paranoid episodes. During a radio interview,
he suspects the host is mocking him. Purposely trying to make him appear foolish. But while
he might not be a fool, he is getting vaguer. When Dement speaks with Randy,
he records that while there are some minor lapses, Randy is altogether pretty together, pretty
unaffected. He still knows he’s Randy Gardner. But when Lt. Commander Ross records his observations,
he notes that Randy is having trouble remembering some of the details of the past ten days.
And in order to get any response, he often has to be prompted.
Day Eleven. The home stretch. Lt. Commander Ross records that Randy is expressionless. They conduct
a test - starting from the number 100, Randy is asked to proceed downward by seven. 100,
93, 86, 79, 72, 65…65….65…when asked to go past 65, Randy is unable to. In the middle of the test,
he’s forgotten what they’re doing. Later, though, Dement records a more optimistic interaction.
After 3AM, Dement and Randy find themselves in a penny arcade.
The two compete in about 100 games on a pinball machine - and Randy wins every time. To Dement,
this is proof of “his lack of physical or psychomotor impairment (9).” As the morning comes,
Randy gives a press conference. According to all observers, it’s the best he’s presented
himself - he’s articulate, informative, engaging. He’s also a world record holder.
January 8, 1964, Randy Gardner, 17 years old, has gone without sleep for eleven days.
He is whisked away to the San Diego Naval Hospital where, watched over by more sleep
researchers in a lab, he finally gets his first night’s sleep in 264 hours and 12 minutes.
He’s out for 14 hours and 40 minutes, before he finally gets up to use the bathroom. He stays up
for 24 hours before going back to bed for another eight hours…and continues his life as normal (12).
The data of his brain activity is processed in Arizona, and the results are pretty interesting.
While Randy technically stayed awake, his brain was taking catnaps.
Parts of his brain would actually fall asleep, while other parts remained active.
This may explain the hallucinations both he and Peter Tripp experienced - they
were actually dreaming while still awake. A curious preservation tactic,
but one that seems to prove that the brain does need to rest. Randy set out to prove the human
body doesn’t need sleep; instead, he learned that the body finds a way. Sometimes nightmarishly so.
The boys of Point Loma High School take first place in the Tenth Annual Greater
San Diego Science Fair. Randy even appears on television, on an episode of What’s My Line?.
Well into his 60s, he continues to be contacted by scientists and researchers from around the world,
but there’s also a not-so-fun side effect. Randy suffers from almost-debilitating insomnia, and he
fully blames his record-breaking stunt. He suffers for almost a decade before finally finding a
routine that works for him - and now, the boy who didn’t sleep is a man who needs his eight hours.
In the meantime, many others have worked to dethrone Randy. A month after the experiment,
Toimi Soini of Finland reported staying up for 276 hours. The Guinness Book of World Records, though,
recognizes Maureen Weston of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom, who in 1977
went without sleep while participating in a rocking chair marathon for 449 hours - that’s
18 days and 17 hours! But don’t even try to beat that. The Guinness Book of World Records no longer
recognizes the category of sleep deprivation, deeming it too dangerous. As Dement wrote in his
1972 book, Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, it is impossible to, quote, “locate a person who
never sleeps and yet is healthy and alert at all times. Although a number of claims have been made,
they have quickly faded under the cold glare of round-the-clock scientific observation (3).”
Now go watch everything you know about sleep and dreaming is wrong!
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