Brian Palmer's article states that "no human being is known to have died from staying awake...", but that's not true. People who have a very rare genetic prion disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia always die from staying awake. Those who have it are struck in middle age, are never able to sleep again, and die between six and 18 months later. One family in Venice, Italy, has records of insomnia deaths that go back more than 200 years.

It's really rare, documented in only about 40 families worldwide, but always fatal.

That's a great point, and thanks for bringing it up.

At this time, researchers simply aren't sure what kills patients with Fatal Familial Insomnia.

Two factors suggest that the cause of death may not be as simple as staying awake too long. First, FFI patients exhibit certain muscular symptoms that aren't typical in most sleep deprivation sufferers. Second, other prion diseases (such as Kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob) tend to kill in approximately the same amount of time as FFI after appearance of symptoms.

Further complicating the issue is that researchers don't agree on the exact cause of death in animals who have died in sleep deprivation studies. Until we can precisely define the "signature" of death by sleep deprivation, it is impossible to say that an FFI patient has died from that cause, especially when there are other possibilities. FFI patients have a genetic disorder that affects every cell in their bodies, and suffer significant damage to parts of their brains. It may be that these factors are more directly responsible for their death than sleep deprivation.

Scientists may ultimately decide that lack of sleep is the proximate cause of death in FFI patients, but we don't know right now.

Thanks again for the perceptive comment.

I know this is anecdotal, but I participated in a "hand-a-thon" years ago in which the goal was to keep one's hand on a car for longer than other participants in order to win the car. Contestants had to stand, without leaning on the car. One hand only.

Of the 88 contestants, I finished 12th, after having been completely sleepless for almost exactly 72 hours. The winner, amazingly (to me, anyway) lasted another 40 or so hours. She was an ER nurse.

Why did I lose? Well, it's a long, convoluted story, but the short of it is that a few hours earlier the tent that the contest was being held in had turned into a McDonalds restaurant. The car that I was keeping my hand on had turned into a pillar inside this McDonalds and my holding up the pillar was the most important job in the entire world. But even though I had no clue why, I knew it to be true. Further, the emcee who'd been asking the contestants Trivial Pursuit questions to keep us awake had turned into a murderer who killed people who got his questions wrong. I knew this because people were walking away from the pillar and never coming back! At some point in the night, this murderer placed two hamburgers in front of each pillar-holding employee and implored us to eat them, saying they were donated to the "contestants." I was quite leery of this. I knew the burgers were poisoned. I told the guy next to me that they were poisoned! He ate mine for me. And sure enough, after awhile, he was gone. About an hour after my burger-eating colleague left, the murderer morphed into my boss (I was a grocery store clerk at the time) and I became convinced that I'd failed to run a price check for him--one that I knew he’d asked for hours before--and I knew he'd be mad as hell that I hadn't gotten back to him. I was convinced this price check was even more important than holding up the pillar and so I took my hand away to go tell him that I'd not found the green beans he'd wanted me to check...

I'm not kidding. This was my reality. After only 72 hours of no sleep. Had I not been in a safe place, I'm quite sure that I would have ended up dead without sleep. Who knows what I would have been seeing out in the real world?! Please know that I was not on drugs (the contest required drug tests before and during). I was a healthy, 20 year old kid and I'd completely lost all sense of reality. 10 hours of sleep, some food, and then another few hours of sleep and I was fine. Angry with myself for losing my marbles, but fine.

So yeah, it can really mess with you, and in a relatively short time...

Regarding the post above, when I said that "I'm quite sure that I would have ended up dead", I didn't mean that the sleep deprivation itself would have killed me, only that I would have likely wandered into traffic, or shot myself thinking I was answering a phone, or some other such hallucination-induced craziness...

Smagboy, that's quite an experience! thanks for sharing it with us and further enlightening us on the effect of sleep deprivation. Your experience also proves that sleep deprivation is not a means to get any sort of credible information....

There is an article about a Vietnam man who hasn't slept since 1973. You can read the article here: <link> If one can die from lack of sleep, how is he still alive?

Where was that contest your were in?

I was in one in Florida a while back.

Pretty fun.