Most of us have pulled an all-nighter and stayed awake for nearly 24 hours - and most of us have suffered the consequences and quickly regretted going without our eight hours.
But what happens when you try and stay awake for a whopping 200 hours? That's the equivalent to around eight days of being awake with no sleep!
Well, back in January 1959, New York City DJ Peter Tripp put this to the test in a sleep deprivation experiment that he called a ‘Wakeathon’, per Study.com.
He wanted to raise money for the March of Dimes charity and since this was the first time someone had tried to stay awake this long, psychologists agreed to observe him and make sure he was safe.
Tripp performed most of his stunt in a glass booth in the middle of Times Square and managed to stay on air broadcasting his regular show for some of the time he was awake.
At the start of the experiment, Tripp was reportedly functioning okay.
Although clinical sleep educator Terry Cralle tells Everyday Health that even after 24 hours of no sleep, the mind’s “judgment is affected, memory is impaired and there’s deterioration in decision-making ability.”
However, by around 120 hours in, Tripp was struggling with hallucinations, imagining spiders crawling in his shoes and then believing that the doctors were in a conspiracy against him.
This caused him to turn hostile and he experienced angry outbursts.
By day eight, Tripp could not grasp what was real and what wasn’t, telling the scientists that he wasn’t actually Peter Tripp.
The psychologists believed the reason for Tripp’s hallucinations was that he was actually dreaming with his eyes open, experiencing ‘waking dreams’... which sounds absolutely terrifying.
This is because his visual hallucinations seemed to be in sync with the rapid eye movement (REM) cycle that humans have which causes us to dream when we sleep.
Although Tripp did endure over 200 hours of sleep deprivation, he was reportedly drugged throughout the last 66 hours.
According to the Slow Sleep Blog, some critics of the study have suggested that the stimulants given to Tripp to keep him awake may have caused his hallucinations instead.
After, Tripp was then sent to sleep for around 24 hours and awoke from the Wakeathon appearing unscathed.
However, some say that the experiment did have long-term consequences on Tripp.
He continued to show psychotic symptoms, quit his job and his wife divorced him.
Since Tripp, another famous attempt was made to break the record. This time it was pursued by Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old student, in 1964.
He managed to stay awake for 11 days.
When speaking to Witness, a podcast from the BBC World Service, Gardner’s friend and fellow student, Bruce McAllister, who suggested the idea as a high school project said: “We were idiots, you know young idiots.”
Sleep deprivation can be fatal in some circumstances, so even though there have been more efforts to break the record since, The Guinness Book of World Records no longer accepts any attempts at sleep deprivation.
