JD.RTD🎖️

A 17-year-old once stayed awake for 264 hours straight to prove that going without sleep doesn't hurt you. On day 10, he beat a Stanford sleep scientist at pinball. On day 11, he couldn't count backwards. His name is Randy Gardner. In late 1963, he and his friend Bruce McAllister needed a project for their high school science fair in San Diego. They decided to break the world record for staying awake. The record was 260 hours. Back then, nobody really knew what that would do to a human brain. His parents were scared it might do real damage. Then a young researcher named William Dement read about the attempt in a San Diego newspaper and showed up. Sleep science was a brand-new field. Dement later said he was probably the only person on the planet at the time who had actually done sleep research. A doctor, Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross, checked on Randy's health. Two classmates kept a log. The pinball game became the famous part of the story. The kid who stayed awake for 11 days and was fine. He wasn't fine. Ross's notes describe mood swings, trouble concentrating, short-term memory problems, paranoia and hallucinations. On day 11, they asked him to start at 100 and keep subtracting 7. He stopped at 65. When they asked why, he said he'd forgotten what he was doing. On January 8, 1964, he passed the record: 264.4 hours, 11 days and 25 minutes. He held a press conference looking healthy. Then he slept for 14 hours and 46 minutes. For years, his case was quoted as proof the body can take extreme sleep loss. Guinness later stopped accepting attempts at the record, because it was too dangerous to encourage. Then, in 2017, Randy said something nobody expected. Around 2007, more than 40 years after the experiment, he had started getting serious insomnia. He believed those 11 days were to blame. He stayed awake to prove sleep didn't matter. Decades later, sleep stopped coming. How long is the longest you've ever stayed awake and why?