In 1964 Randy Gardner, a high school boy with a group of friends came up with an idea of breaking the world record for staying awake for as long as possible. The original purpose of their experiment was to examine whether people could gain paranormal abilities or skills as a consequence of not sleeping enough, but very soon boys resigned from it and decided to monitor the behaviour of a human deprived of sleep. In fact, Gardner had sacrificed his health to such a degree that he had been awake for 264 hours and at the same time he had broken the record set by a DJ from Honolulu who had kept his eyes open for over 10days! The results of this project helped to discover how humans' brain works and how dangerous the lack of sleep can be. Even though Randy turned out to be fine and extremely lucky, he started to suffer from insomnia.
Side note: His friend William Dement is now a Stanford University sleep scientist :)
I think what they did was completely irresponsible and stupid because we all know that a human can die just after 3 days without sleep, but the truth is they weren't aware of that. Actually, there always must be "the first time" to find out right? We should probably be grateful for the knowledge that we gained from their experiment, however I still believe it wasn't the brightest idea and I don't quite understand why their parents were ok with that??
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