In 1963 Randy Gardner Flipped A Coin And Became The Most Sleep-Deprived Person In History

While we would like to point you to a definitive answer, the Guinness Book of Records has stopped awarding records in this category, as to not encourage an activity that could cause harm to participants. And with good reason. Experiments on humans has shown that sleep deprivation causes paranoia, suspicion, hallucination, and various other problems in volunteers. Chronic lack of sleep can increase the risk of stroke and conditions like diabetes, not to mention accidents in your sleep-deprived state.

But there are known instances of people who, against all medical and parental advice, have attempted to stay up as long as possible. Before the Guinness Book of Records ceased listing the record, it had been awarded to two teenage boys who, in 1963, decided to stay awake as long as they possibly could for a science project.

Randy Gardner and Bruce McAllister decided they wanted to study the effects of sleep deprivation on "paranormal ability", before abandoning this idea due to fairly apparent practical problems, instead exploring the effects of sleep deprivation on cognitive and physical performance. The only thing left to do was to flip a coin to see who would take notes and who would endure a state of sleeplessness never previously endured by any known human in history. Pretty much your standard group project dynamic.

Randy lost the toss and prepared for what would turn out to be a fairly horrific ordeal. The experiment could have ended up in complete obscurity, were it not for a local paper that covered it, drawing the attention of Stanford sleep researcher Dr William C. Dement.

“I was probably the only person on the planet at the time who had actually done sleep research,” Dement told The BBC. “[Gardner’s parents] were very worried that this might be something that would really be harmful to him. Because the question was still unresolved on whether or not if you go without sleep long enough you will die.”

Death was not totally out of the question, it seemed at the time. At the request of his parents, the experiment on Randy was supervised by Dement, as well as Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross of the U.S. Navy Medical Neuropsychiatric Research Unit in San Diego.

In order to keep Randy awake, the team made him play pinball and basketball, made him talk through the toilet door whenever he went to the bathroom, and, more simply, prevented him from lying down. Without even an opportunity for a sneaky toilet nap, Randy was successfully kept awake throughout the experiment.

The early stages of sleep deprivation went well for the boy, just 16 at the time of the study. But day two saw him having difficulty identifying objects by touch. On day three he became moody and was struggling to perform tongue-twisters, (though, to be fair to the boy, they are sort of designed that way).

Memory lapses and his first hallucinations and delusional episodes set in on day four, with quite some force.

"I hallucinated that I was this famous black football player, Paul Lowe, from the San Diego Chargers," he wrote in Esquire years later. "My friends thought that was hilarious, 'cause I weighed like 130 pounds."

Hallucinations continued the following day, with the boy seeing a forest pathway in front of him, in place of what would normally be the rest of his house.

"After that point, everything basically went in the toilet," he wrote. "There were no more highs, just lows and lower lows. It was like someone was taking sandpaper to my brain. My body was dragging along okay, but my mind was shot."

Like others who have endured sleeplessness, he experienced paranoia. But his hallucinations were at least not as bad as DJ Peter Tripp, who stayed awake 201 hours prior to Randy's record. Tripp, whose name was apt, hallucinated scurrying mice and cats inside his studio during his stunt, and eventually fled the studio when he mistook a man in an overcoat for an undertaker. 

Over the next few days, Randy's speech slowed and began to slur, while his memory became worse. He would start sentences, then stop halfway, either forgetting where he was going or being interrupted by a new thought entirely. He was, however, still able to play a reasonable game of ping pong.

On the final day of his experiment, Randy was expressionless and needed constant prompting in order to respond to any questions, which he would do in a slurred monotone. Tests on his mental abilities ceased very quickly, as he would eventually forget what he was doing.

Nevertheless, he appeared not to suffer from many ill effects, setting a new world record after he made it through the sleepless days and nights. Following Gardner's time awake, he was monitored for several nights – which involved a lot of REM sleep, gradually going back to normal.

The experiment concluded that during the sleep deprivation, areas of his brain had been "catnapping" the whole time. The same effect was later seen in rat experiments, where subsets of cortex neurons switched off as the sleep-deprived rats continued about their business, awake. It was also seen in Tripp, whose hallucinations occurred on 90-minute cycles similar to REM sleep. However in this case it is unclear whether the DJ's hallucinations were due to the lack of sleep, or use of Ritalin to prevent sleep.

“He wasn’t the first human being – or pre-human being – to have to stay awake for more than one night and that the human brain might evolve so that it could catnap," McAllister told the BBC. "Parts of it could catnap and restore – while parts of it were awake – made total sense. And that would explain why worse things didn’t happen."

Other humans have since claimed to have topped Gardner's time spent awake. The last record set in the Guinness Book of Records was awarded to Maureen Weston of Peterborough in the UK, who stayed awake for  for 449 hours (a whopping 18 days and 17 hours) during a rocking chair contest, suffering a few hallucinations towards the end. 

In 2007, unaware that Gardner's record had already been significantly broken, Tony Wright, a 42-year-old from Penzance in the UK, claimed to have beaten Gardner's 11 day record, recording the attempt on a webcam.