• Question: How can people survive with no sleep?

    Asked by anon-189199 to Rachel, Jason, Emma on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Rachel Sharman

      Rachel Sharman answered on 5 Nov 2018: last edited 5 Nov 2018 6:47 pm

      Great question! The thing is, they can’t!!!

      When we are really tired (think about your first class Monday morning), our heads nod, and our eyes lose focus. That’s your brain drifting into the first stage of sleep ( sleep has 4 stages NREM (1-3) sleep and REM). These microsleeps can just tick us over to allow the body to continue for a while.
      I used to run studies where we would keep people awake for 50 hours or more,. We would measure their brain waves to make sure they didn’t have those little microsleeps.

      For the world record, they didn’t monitor the persons brain so they were likely having microsleeps, sorry to ruin it!! We know from animal studies run years ago that animals can’t live with no sleep, in rats it was around 10 days.

      It’s of course no surprise we have never studied this in humans!! It defintely wouldn’t be ethical to do that!

    • Photo: Jason Ellis

      Jason Ellis answered on 6 Nov 2018:

      Unfortunately, they can’t. Believe it or not you can go without food and water for longer than you can without sleep! What I find amazing and cool is that your body will try to find a way to get sleep when you are sleep deprived. As Rachel mentioned – microsleeps happen and we don’t always notice that they are going on. As I always tell my patients, your body is designed to sleep and it will eventually whether you want it to or not. The trick is to work with it to find the best times and places to sleep.

Comments