Talk:Randy Gardner (record holder)

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1 33 years
2 Personal information
3 meth
4 It is often claimed that Gardner's experiment demonstrated that extreme sleep deprivation has little effect.
5 Photograph request

[edit] 33 years

some dude has been awake 33 years. He just doesn't sleep.

Been wondering what the source for that is for ages... well now I've found it [1] Mathmo 14:07, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Ridiculous. Wikipedia itself says that lab rats die after 28 days without sleep, and people with fatal familial insomnia live for several months without sleep. But 33 years? Come on. Wikipedia article on sleep deprivation

[edit] Personal information

The article lacks any detailed information about the person, including such essentials such as his Date of Birth and whether he's still alive or not.

[edit] meth

I know people who smoke meth that stay awake that long all the time and even longer.

[edit] It is often claimed that Gardner's experiment demonstrated that extreme sleep deprivation has little effect.

Pure urban legend. Here is a log by Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego, about Gardener during his period without sleep:

Day 2: Difficulty focusing eyes and signs of astereognosis (difficulty recognizing objects only by touch).
Day 3: Moodiness, some signs of ataxia (inability to repeat simple tongue twisters).
Day 4: Irritability and uncooperative attitude, memory lapses and difficulty concentrating. Gardner's first hallucination was that a street sign was a person, followed by a delusional episode in which he imagined that he was a famous black football player.
Day 5: More hallucinations (e.g., seeing a path extending from the room in front of him down through a quiet forest). These were sometimes described as "hypnagogic reveries" since Gardner recognized, at least after a short while, that the visions were illusionary in nature.
Day 6: Speech slowing and difficulty naming common objects.
Day 7 and 8: Irritability, speech slurring and increased memory lapses.
Day 9: Episodes of fragmented thinking; frequently beginning, but not finishing, his sentences.
Day 10: Paranoia focused on a radio show host who Gardner felt was trying to make him appear foolish because he ws having difficulty remembering some details about his vigil.
Day 11: Expressionless appearance, speech slurred and without intonation; had to be encouraged to talk to get him to respond at all. His attention span was very short and his mental abilities were diminished. In a serial sevens test, where the respondent starts with the number 100 and proceeds downward by subtracting seven each time, Gardner got back to 65 (only five subtractions) and then stopped. When asked why he had stopped he claimed that he couldn't remember what he was supposed to be doing.

Does this sound like "little effect"? http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/p980301b.html Madzyzome 08:45, 30 December 2006 (UTC)