Talk:Randy Gardner

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Does this article offer anything of interest? This could easily be moved into the main article on the topic.

The referenced BBC article says:

The current world record for the longest period without sleep is 11 days, set by Randy Gardner in 1965. Four days into the research, he began hallucinating. This was followed by a delusion where he thought he was a famous footballer. Surprisingly, Randy was actually functioning quite well at the end of his research and he could still beat the scientist at pinball.

But this Wikipedia article says that there were no psychotic symptoms during the period of sleep deprivation. Aren't hallucinations and delusions considered to be somewhat psychotic? Nonenmac 18:41, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Now the article says "On his final day without sleep, Gardner ... spoke without slurring or stumbling over his words, ... and he showed no signs of the psychotic behavior.". So maybe both are true -- there were these symptoms during the experiment, just not on the last day.

Either way, there are several sentence fragments throughout this article. As I don't understand how to integrate them into the article, i'm just going to put up a cleanup tag. (for example: "In 1965, as a 17-year-old high school student, Gardner stayed awake for 264 hours with the help of two friends who took turns keeping him awake, pinball games and a growing number of television reporters.") Themindset 4 July 2005 19:51 (UTC)

sleep information[edit]

what's the most you've gone without sleep?[edit]

This seems to be a popular question on college campuses.

Death by Sleep Deprivation -- urban legend? The article at http://www.deeperwants.com/cul1/homeworlds/journal/archives/001284.html implies that going for 264 hrs without sleep is fatal. Is this just an urban legend? (After all, Randy Gardner went 264 hours, and he seemed to be just fine after sleeping for 14 hours and 40 minutes [1] ).

http://www.sciam.com/askexpert_question.cfm?articleID=0000F879-8E01-1CD1-B4A8809EC588EEDF mentions "Another rare disorder, Fatal Familial Insomnia (FFI), is an autosomal dominate disease that is invariably fatal after about six to 30 months without sleep." ... "Despite the rat studies in Chicago, I am unaware of any reports that sleep deprivation per se has killed any human (excluding accidents and so forth)."