[sillysaurus2]

The point of science is to never fall back on claims like "you'll probably get permanent brain damage" unless it's known what brain damage you may get, along with bounds on a confidence interval. Otherwise we're just philosophizing.

[mattdmrs]

Science is slowly getting to those conclusions:

> Taken together, these changes in brain and body are further evidence that sleep deprivation is a chronic stressor and that the resulting allostatic load can contribute to cognitive problems, which can, in turn, further exacerbate pathways that lead to disease.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0026049506...

[foobarbazqux]

Well, it's a testable hypothesis. We will probably never test it in humans or higher mammals due to ethical concerns.

[VladRussian2]

may be we willn't as we already did. Google "sleep deprivation experiment".