It’s said that we need to sleep because a waste product called adenosine builds up in our brains while we’re awake. When we sleep the brain does this thing where adenosine gets flushed out by csf. Adenosine also makes us feel sleepy and can cause hallucinations if we’ve been awake for days. I looked up adenosine and it’s a cns depressant, like a sleeping pill is. I remember reading an old news article where a man from China stayed awake for 11 days to watch football and he died. If the adenosine levels in his brain were so high to kill him why didn’t he just pass out and sleep before he died if it’s a cns depressant?
I stayed up for a little over 3 days due to a funky schedule and baseball playoffs. Finally crashed and slept for 28 hours. Room mate said I slept forever, and I thought it was just for 4 hours when I looked at my alarm clock.
Yeah that’s what I don’t get. After 3 days you can barely think straight. I don’t know how the guy in China deliberately went 11 days without any sleep at all to watch a football game. It sounds similar to holding your breath until you die. He didn’t have fatal insomnia so I don’t get why he didn’t just automatically pass out before he died and slept.
Huh. Even if he set a cooking timer (or something) to go off every 15 minutes, I still can’t see him keeping it up for eleven days straight.
I did three days once and was still lucid. Wasn’t even really tired, so I even went clubbing until 5am on the last night. I could have stayed up longer, but I had no reason to be up anymore, so I got four or five hours of sleep and was back on schedule. Some people just can’t do that kind of thing, and it seems to be easier for others. Dude from China sounds like a machine though. I’d guess be was the right combination of the kind of person who doesn’t require a lot of sleep and stubborn as hell.
You’d be surprised what stimulants and human will power cna accomplish. You should look into fatal familial insomnia though.
Maybe not the same root cause, but I bet the symptoms are similar:
I’ve been awake so long I gave myself a heart condition.
