Sleepless Hours

For Science's sake one afternoon last fortnight four students at University of Southern California started to stay awake as long, as possible. Psychologist Brant Clark and his coworker, Dr. Neil Warren, wanted to clarify the physiological effects of a long period without sleep. After a day or two, attendants had such a hard time keeping one subject awake that they let him go. The other three started to play "Monopoly." They were so irascible that the psychologists deemed it best to terminate the game. After the young men had stayed awake 54 1/2 hours they gave up, plunged into bed.

In India two months ago, a merchant named Rai Bahadur Ramjidas Bajoria, believing that he had not slept for two years, offered $10,000 to anyone who would restore his ability to sleep normally (TIME, March 9). In Hungary there is a woman of 80 who says she has been continuously awake since 1911. Such people are either lying or they do not realize that they doze off while "resting." The chief physiological result of going without sleep is exhaustion, and utter exhaustion causes death. Dogs have been kept awake until they died. The best authentic record is that of a man who went 231 hours--about 9 1/2 days--with almost no sleep.* Loss of sleep can produce complete insensibility to noise and a high degree of anesthesia to pain.

Pending tabulation of the results of his test, Dr. Clark described some of the effects which 54 1/2 sleepless hours had on his students: "The faculty which suffers most ... is vision. The boys just couldn't see clearly, their notions of perspective were bad, their eye movements slow and their judgment of color erratic. Muscular coordination was low, tests of writing, aiming a gun, and hitting a nail on the head showing a great loss of accuracy. But there were periods when the boys seemed to make brief comebacks to alertness, something like 'second wind.' "

*Two years ago Dr. Siegfried Elias Katz and Psychologist Carney Landis of Manhattan reported to the American Medical Association on an unnamed young man who, believing sleep a waste of time and nothing but a habit, persuaded psychiatrists to give him a no-sleep endurance lest. He was not watched constantly but had to turn a watchman's clock every ten minutes. He dozed off seven times during the ten-day test and his naps totaled about five hours.

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