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by mchahn
3741 days ago
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> forcibly keep an animal awake for long enough and you will kill it. The same almost certainly applies to humans. There was a PBS Nova episode on sleep many years ago. It showed people who never sleep. They are rare but they exist and have been studied extensively. They do have down-time where they rest for hours, but they never fall asleep. If this was any other show than Nova I'd call bullshit. |
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Animals in studies seem to die after around 30 days (which I think is longer than any scientifically verified claim made by a human?), and also may even have microsleeps prevented, depending on the experiment.
Humans may also have some rudimentary system of "local sleep". Some other animals have much more sophisticated systems. Basically, parts of your brain might "sleep" and become inactive temporarily, while others are still functioning. I don't think there's any hard evidence of this in humans yet, though.
Also, the longer you stay up, the less aware and cognizant you are, so you might even doze off for an hour or so and not actually realize or remember it. I imagine the people Nova reported on were studied and confirmed not to have actually napped, but it probably does apply to many people who give personal anecdotes of staying up for more than a week.
The only cases of a human truly "never sleeping" are from fatal familial insomnia, I think, and it is as fatal as it sounds like.
So, I suspect if an experiment really kept a human up for a month and prevented microsleep, they'd also die. Even if they didn't die as a direct result, their immune system would be so compromised that they'd probably die from a pathogen pretty quickly.