Sleep Deprivation In Neatorama, By Randy Gardner

Neatorama tells a story about an experiment that shows the effects of sleep deprivation. Traveling back to 1965 where a young 16 year old student still holds the record for the longest period of being awake. This student conducted an experiment that lasted 11 days or 264 hours. Randy Gardner spent every minute of these 11 days awake without any type of stimulate. So this means no caffeine to help keep him awake. This experiment was self-imposed. Randy Gardner experienced some of the discussed topics. These include problems with his long term memory as well as problems with his mental health. By the second day Gardner lacked focus and had complications with recognizing object even by touch. The third day he began to be negative in thoughts and his words. At one point in this experiment, Randy hallucinated that he was a black football player even though he was a not very muscular as well as being white. In 1959 there was a test on four puppies by keeping them awake for five days. The outcome of these puppies was death so there was a lot of questioning on what would happen to Randy. Eventually his memory was affected and could not remember even what he was

This experiment proves that we need sleep to carry out our daily functions. Also notice that Randy needed friends to help keep him awake, which also proves that our bodies will try to force us to sleep if it becomes unbearable. The information that can be obtained from this is that we need sleep to remember. This was shown by Randy’s incapability to remember even what he said or was talking about moments later. Also during this experiment Randy showed a lot of anger toward his friends who were helping him during the experiment. People usually don’t go completely without sleep for a long period of time, but humans are still sleep deprived over a long period of time and still have side