the brain needs rest, similair to how your computer needs to be shut down sometime sto be given a rest. Let's that say, you've left your computer was left on for a week or two. You notice that some programs will run slow, others wont open at all nad generally it's to slow.
You may experience hallucinations due to lack of sleep, because you're brain is working over-time still processing information. These may become permanent and you go insane mabye after a week or two of not sleeping.
I don't think a french guy has stayed awake for 30 years, but then again what do I know?
You show me, I'll believe it.
After edit:Ok, I looked around because I'm intrested in this and here's some stuff I found.
The official verified sleeplessness record is 11 days, set by high school senior Randy Gardner in 1964. He was monitered by sleep specialists throughout, and apparently suffered little or no negative consequences.
When totally denied of sleep rats die after 3 weeks. First their fur drops out, then they lose weight, then they lose their ablity to regulate their body temperature, and then they die.
that was off a forum.
A guy said he stayed awake for 4 weeks and just stared up at the ceiling, but I doubt that as he porbably feel asleep then woke up without realising it. I do that some times. The guy said all he had was one bottle of pills (no coffee) and no mental/physical stimulation.
Heres what a doctor said.
J. Christian Gillin, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, conducts research on sleep, chronobiology and mood disorders. He supplies the following answer.
The easy experimental answer to this question is 264 hours (about 11 days). In 1965, Randy Gardner, a 17-year-old high school student, set this apparent world-record for a science fair. Several other normal research subjects have remained awake for eight to 10 days in carefully monitored experiments. None of these individuals experienced serious medical, neurological, physiological or psychiatric problems. On the other hand, all of them showed progressive and significant deficits in concentration, motivation, perception and other higher mental processes as the duration of sleep deprivation increased. Nevertheless, all experimental subjects recovered to relative normality within one or two nights of recovery sleep. Other anecdotal reports describe soldiers staying awake for four days in battle, or unmedicated patients with mania going without sleep for three to four days.
The more difficult answer to this question revolves around the definition of "awake." As mentioned above, prolonged sleep deprivation in normal subjects induces altered states of consciousness (often described as "microsleep"), numerous brief episodes of overwhelming sleep, and loss of cognitive and motor functions. We all know about the dangerous, drowsy driver, and we have heard about sleep-deprived British pilots who crashed their planes (having fallen asleep) while flying home from the war zone during World War II. Randy Gardner was "awake" but basically cognitively dysfunctional at the end of his ordeal.
In the case of rats, however, continuous sleep deprivation for about two weeks or more inevitably caused death in experiments conducted in Allan Rechtschaffen’s sleep laboratory at the University of Chicago. Two animals lived on a rotating disc over a pool of water, separated by a fixed wall. Brainwaves were recorded continuously into a computer program that almost instantaneously recognized the onset of sleep. When the experimental rat fell asleep, the disc was rotated to keep it awake by bumping it against the wall and threatening to push the animal into the water. Control rats could sleep when the experimental rat was awake but were moved equally whenever the experimental rat started to sleep. The cause of death was not proven but was associated with whole body hypermetabolism.
In certain rare human medical disorders, the question of how long people can remain awake raises other surprising answers, and more questions. Morvan’s fibrillary chorea or Morvan’s syndrome is characterized by muscle twitching, pain, excessive sweating, weight loss, periodic hallucinations, and severe loss of sleep (agrypnia). Michel Jouvet and his colleagues in Lyon, France, studied a 27-year-old man with this disorder and found he had virtually no sleep over a period of several months. During that time he did not feel sleepy or tired and did not show any disorders of mood, memory, or anxiety. Nevertheless, nearly every night between 9:00 and 11:00 p.m., he experienced a 20 to 60-minute period of auditory, visual, olfactory, and somesthetic (sense of touch) hallucinations, as well as pain and vasoconstriction in his fingers and toes.
rest of the stuffs
here
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