Authors: Alex Boese
Meanwhile, Gardner valiantly pressed onward, struggling to stay awake. Nights were the hardest. If he lay down for a second, he was out like a light. So his high school friends and Dr. Dement kept him active by cruising in the car, taking trips down to the donut shop, blasting music, and playing marathon games of basketball and pinball. Whenever Gardner went to the bathroom, they made him talk through the door to confirm he wasn’t dozing off. The one thing they didn’t do was give him any drugs. Not even caffeine.
As more days passed, Gardner’s speech began to slur, he had trouble focusing his eyes, he frequently grew dizzy, he had trouble remembering what he said from one minute to the next, and he was plagued by more hallucinations. One time he saw a wall dissolve in front of him and become a vision of a forest path.
To make sure he wasn’t causing himself brain damage or otherwise injuring his health, his parents insisted he get regular checkups at the naval hospital in Balboa Park—the family’s health-care provider since his father served in the military. The doctors at the hospital found nothing physically wrong with him, though he did sporadically appear confused and disoriented.
Finally, at two a.m. on January 8, Gardner broke Rounds’s record. A small crowd of doctors, parents, and classmates gathered to celebrate the event. They cheered wildly, and Gardner, busy taking calls from newsmen, responded with a V-for-victory sign. Four hours later, he was whisked away to the naval hospital where, after receiving a brief neurological checkup, he fell into a deep sleep. He woke fourteen hours and forty minutes later, feeling alert and refreshed.
Gardner’s world record didn’t last long. A mere two weeks later, papers reported that Jim Thomas, a student at Fresno State College, managed to stay awake 266.5 hours. The
Guinness Book of Records
subsequently recorded that in April 1977 Maureen Weston, of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire, went 449 hours without sleep while participating in a rocking chair marathon. However, Gardner’s feat remains the most well-remembered sleep-deprivation trial. To this day,
29
no one knows the maximum amount of time a human can stay awake.
As of 2007, Gardner remains alive and well, having suffered no long-term ill effects from his experience. Despite sleep deprivation being the source of his fifteen minutes of fame, he insists he’s really not the type to pull all-nighters and says he’s maintained a sensible sleep schedule since his youthful stunt. He does admit to lying awake some nights, but attributes this to age, not a desire to beat his old record.
It’s three in the morning and you’re trying to get to sleep. But you’re not having much luck because you’re stuck in a cramped seat on an airplane cruising at thirty thousand feet. Turbulence keeps shaking you. Lights in the cabin flash on and off. People wander up and down the aisle. Somewhere a baby is screaming. How in the world, you wonder, are you supposed to get any rest?
If, in the future, you find yourself in this situation, you might want to reflect on an experiment conducted in 1960 by Ian Oswald, a professor at Edinburgh University. In his lab, he asked subjects to try to fall asleep while being exposed to far more intrusive stimuli than you would experience on a typical plane ride—even given the ever-worsening conditions of economy class. The title of his study hints at the bizarre setting he placed his volunteers in: “Falling asleep open-eyed during intense rhythmic stimulation.”
Three young men in their early twenties served as Oswald’s guinea pigs. Testing them one at a time, he asked each of the subjects to lie down on a couch. He carefully attached one end of a piece of tape to each eyelid and the other end to the subject’s forehead, keeping his eyes pried open. Steam from a boiling kettle in the room prevented the test subject’s eyes from drying out. Next, Oswald placed electrodes on the subject’s left leg. The electrodes produced a painful shock that caused the foot to bend sharply inward involuntarily. Oswald programmed the shocks to occur in a regular, rhythmic pattern. He also positioned a bank of bright flashing lights two feet in front of the man’s face. With his eyes taped open, he couldn’t avoid looking at these lights. Finally, Oswald turned on some blues music. The music, he noted laconically, “was always very loud.”
Having placed each of his three subjects in this unfortunate situation—music blaring, eyes pried open and staring at flashing lights, foot jerking rhythmically from electric shocks—Oswald sat in a corner of the room and waited for them to do something that would seem unlikely in such a circumstance: fall asleep.
One subject was sleep deprived going into the test, having only had one hour of sleep the night before. The other two subjects were fully refreshed and awake. However, it turned out not to make any difference. Within eight to twelve minutes, all three men were asleep. At least, they showed all the signs of being asleep. Their heartbeat slowed, their pupils constricted, and their brain waves, measured by an EEG, displayed a low-voltage slow-wave pattern characteristic of sleep. In addition, the subjects reported afterward feeling as though they had fallen asleep.
Acknowledging possible skepticism of the claim that his subjects fell asleep, Oswald phrased his words carefully:
It seems reasonable to believe that each of these volunteer subjects did go to sleep, but it will be remembered that there is no clear dividing line between wakefulness and sleep, and it is no part of my present concern to insist that subjects crossed any such dividing line, only to claim that there was a considerable fall of cerebral vigilance, and a large decline in the presumptive ascending facilitation from the brain-stem reticular formation to the cerebral cortex.
If your boss ever catches you napping at your desk, Oswald’s wording could offer a convenient excuse: “No, I wasn’t sleeping. I was merely experiencing a large decline in the presumptive ascending facilitation from the brain-stem reticular formation to the cerebral cortex.”
Oswald performed a second test, in which he seated two new subjects each in a chair. Again, he taped their eyes open, played loud blues music, and flashed lights in their eyes. But instead of shocking their legs, he asked them to bang their elbows up and down and tap both feet in time with the music. Required to keep moving, these subjects did not drift into an extended period of sleep as the men in the first study had. However, Oswald did observe them repeatedly drifting off into spells of sleep that lasted from three to twenty seconds. During these microsleeps, their brain waves slowed and they stopped moving their limbs. Then they would come to with a start and begin moving again.
In one of his subjects, Oswald observed fifty-two of these pauses within twenty-five minutes. However, the pauses
30
apparently happened without the subject’s awareness, because the young man later emphatically maintained he had only paused once.
Oswald’s results seem hard to believe. How could someone fall asleep under such conditions? Oswald explained it as a peculiar response of the brain to extremely monotonous sensory stimulation. Instead of becoming aroused by the stimulation, the brain becomes habituated to it and shuts down. He likened it to the trance effect tribal dancing induces. You may have experienced the effect yourself if you’ve driven down a highway for an extended period. It may be the middle of the day and you may have the radio blasting, but the road just keeps rolling along, and your mind wanders off. Moments later you come to with a start, aware that you have zoned out. You may not think you were actually asleep, but from a practical point of view there isn’t much difference. As Oswald would put it, the presumptive ascending facilitation from your brain-stem reticular formation to your cerebral cortex was momentarily in decline.
So, to return to the airplane scenario, it’s not the noise and lights, per se, that prevent you from falling asleep. It’s the fact that they’re not monotonously rhythmic. Airlines could remedy this situation by installing vibrating seats, pulsing lights, and continuously looping baby screams. Passengers would soon be drifting off into dreamland, whether they wanted to or not. Electric shocks would, of course, be reserved for business class.
The cat freezes in place. It has seen its prey. Slowly it moves forward, sliding its forelimbs across the floor. It freezes again. And then—pounces. A vase crashes t the floor. A light switches on. “What was that? What’s going on?” a voice cries out. “Oh, it’s nothing,” another voice says. “It’s just the cat sleepwalking again.”
Do cats sleepwalk? Veterinarians report that children often ask them this question, and it does seem like a natural topic to be curious about. After all, humans sleepwalk. Why shouldn’t cats? The simple answer is, no, cats do not sleepwalk. However, occasionally, under certain circumstances, they can do something like it.
In 1965 a French neurophysiology researcher named Michel Jouvet was trying to pinpoint the parts of the brain responsible for inducing sleep. His investigative procedure consisted of damaging different parts of cats’ brains and noting what effect this had on the cats’ sleep. He had already learned that when he damaged a cluster of cells called the nuclei of the raphe, located in the brain stem, cats would barely sleep at all. They became insomniacs, shuffling around, unable to settle into their customary catnaps. This led to his conclusion that the nuclei of the raphe, which secrete the chemical serotonin, tell the brain to go to sleep.
His next experimental target was a part of the brain stem called the locus coeruleus. He operated on thirty-five cats, creating a lesion on this part of each of their brains.
Sleep, in a normal cat, follows a predictable pattern. First the cat will settle into a period of light sleep, during which it often curls up into a ball. Its brain waves exhibit a slow-wave pattern, but its muscles remain slightly tense. After about twenty minutes of this, the cat progresses into the dreaming stage of sleep, known as rapid-eye-movement (REM) or paradoxical sleep (PS)—“paradoxical” because the brain waves during this period are paradoxically as energetic as they are during wakefulness. During PS, the cat’s muscles go completely limp, except for occasional brief twitching motions in the paws, tail, and ears. If you own a cat, you’ve probably seen it twitch in this way, as though dreaming of chasing mice, or some other object of cat interest.
As Jouvet’s cats recovered from the surgery, they began to display strange sleep behavior. They would fall asleep normally enough, and nap through twenty minutes of light sleep, but things got weird when they proceeded into paradoxical sleep. Many of them would abruptly lift their heads and look around. They might even stand up. All the while, they appeared to be fast asleep—except that they were fully mobile.
Jouvet checked that the cats were really asleep. Although their eyes were open, their pupils were constricted and their nictitating membranes (the white membranes inside their eyes) were relaxed, as is typical during sleep. They didn’t respond to bright lights, nor react to pinching. In addition, their brain waves showed a pattern characteristic of dream activity.
For the next few minutes, the actions of these somnambulistic cats grew progressively more violent and erratic. They stalked around and showed signs of rage. They even leaped and pounced on nonexistent objects. The cats were, in essence, acting out their dreams, stalking imaginary prey. Jouvet reported that the behavior of the cats could “be so fierce as to make the experimenter recoil.”
If the cats pounced violently enough, they would jolt themselves awake. At which point, they would shake their heads sleepily, as if to say,
Where am I? What’s happening?
Jouvet eventually concluded that the locus coeruleus must be responsible for sending a signal to muscles telling them to remain paralyzed as the cat dreams. By making a lesion on this region, he had disrupted the signal. He called the phenomenon “paradoxical sleep without atonia” (
atonia
meaning paralysis, or lack of muscle tone).
The story of cats seemingly acting out their dreams doesn’t end there. The phenomenon turned out to be more complicated than Jouvet thought. (Anything having to do with brain research usually is more complicated than first appearances suggest.)
Other researchers were skeptical of Jouvet’s results. So during the 1970s Adrian Morrison of the University of Pennsylvania replicated Jouvet’s experiment. He succeeded in producing cats that stalked imaginary objects in their sleep, or savaged the towels on which they lay, thus confirming Jouvet’s basic claim. However, he disputed Jouvet’s interpretation that the cats were acting out their dreams. He discovered he could engineer a variety of eccentric sleep behaviors on demand, depending on the location of the lesion he made.
By making a relatively small lesion below the locus coeruleus, Morrison produced cats that simply lifted their heads and looked around during PS. A larger lesion caused predatory attack behavior. Still another type of lesion triggered behavior resembling sleepwalking. These cats would stand up and march forward in a straight line. They never deviated from their path, not even to sniff at an anesthetized rat placed directly in front of them. They simply stumbled
31
over it and continued onward until they ran into an immovable obstacle such as a wall.
Morrison also observed that the cats never exhibited certain types of behavior in their sleep. They never ate, drank, or engaged in sexual activity. He concluded that the lesions in the brain stem were not releasing
general
dream-related activity. Instead, they were causing the cats to act out
specific
kinds of behavior, such as aggression and locomotion.
It should be noted that the behavior of these cats was not analogous to sleepwalking in humans. People who sleepwalk typically do so during light sleep, not during the deeper, dreaming state of PS. However, there are cases of people who move violently and even run during PS. They’re suffering from REM Sleep Behavior Disorder, a condition discovered by clinicians Mark Mahowald, Carlos Schenck, and colleagues at the University of Minnesota, thanks to their knowledge of the experiments by Jouvet and Morrison. As with the cats, sufferers often go into attack mode during these episodes, which can be extremely dangerous both for them and for their partners. One man woke to find he was strangling his wife. He had been dreaming of killing a deer. (And you think you have it rough because your partner snores!)