Lack of sleep is very difficult for most people. Wakefulness torture was used in ancient Rome.
It was also used in the Middle Ages to force confessions to crimes that were not committed, to "drive out demons." It was also used at a later time in Germany, in the dungeons of the Gestapo, in the prisons of the USSR in the 30s of the XX century.
People sometimes deprived themselves of sleep for some noble purpose. For example, Gilgamesh, the hero of the epic of ancient Mesopotamia, had to stay awake for six days and six nights in order to become immortal. But sleep overcame him, and he remained among mortals. Those who tried to achieve deeper self-contemplation were also awake. In the monasteries of the Middle East, monks were not supposed to sleep more than 3-4 hours, since the evening service ended long after midnight, and the morning service began as early as 4 in the morning.
Many ascetic philosophers extolled the struggle with sleep because they viewed the time spent in sleep as wasted, wasted. To achieve their goal, they, for example, placed stones under their heads instead of pillows. A certain Peter from Alcantara, who during his rest put his head on a sharp stake, never slept more than an hour and a half a day, and so on for forty years. At the end of the 18th century, the German poet and mystic No-valis praised insomnia, believing that "the less we sleep, the more we approach perfection."
Sleep deprivation experiments provide a unique opportunity for modern researchers to gain insight into the secrets of sleep regulatory mechanisms and functions. They were first carried out in the 1880s by the Russian physiologist M. M. Manasseina on puppies. They were repeated several times later. The most remarkable was the world record set by 17-year-old California student Randy Gardner in 1965. Most of the time he spent in the company of two of his friends, all the time trying (with increasing difficulties) to keep him awake.
On the 4th-5th day, Randy became irritable and suspicious. He developed hallucinations and memory impairment. It is especially difficult to keep awake at night - he developed heaviness and pain in his eyelids, he began to lose interest in continuing the experiment. By the end of the experiment, the press and television fueled this interest in him, and 11 days after the start of the experiment, Randy held his last press conference, at which he was able to carve a lovely figurine out of wood.
When asked how he managed to set a new world record for lack of sleep, he replied: "It was the victory of spirit over matter." He did not sleep for 264 hours and 12 minutes and then fell into deep sleep in the sleep laboratory of the Naval Hospital in San Diego. Having slept for 14 hours and 40 minutes, he was practically healthy.
Randy Gardner lost almost 90 hours of sleep, but after the experiment, he slept only 7 hours longer than usual. Which sleep phases were responsible for this amazingly effective recovery? This question was answered back in 1959 while researching another record holder.
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One of the first record holders for the complete lack of sleep in the experiment was radio commentator from New York Peter Tripp. In 1959, he did not sleep for eight days - 201 hours. After the third sleepless day, nightmares and memory lapses began to haunt him. He mistook the ink stains and reflections of light on the desk for insects, and the studio seemed to him full of rabbits.
After a hundred hours without sleep, Tripp was on the verge of insanity. He forgot his name, his profession and the place where he is. It seemed to him that tongues of flame were bursting out of the drawers of the writing desk, and the doctor, who was wearing a corduroy suit, seemed to him covered with hairy caterpillars. He only got rid of his nightmares after sleeping for 13 hours straight. The total duration of REM sleep has tripled compared to the duration of normal sleep.
The duration of deep NREM sleep almost doubled in time - it was he who increased the intensity of sleep. When subjects were selectively deprived of REM sleep, during the recovery period the brain tried to make up for its previous absence. But this did not happen for everyone and, possibly, was associated with the personality characteristics of the subjects.
It is impossible to selectively deprive a person of slow-wave sleep - it takes too much of the sleep time.
When you read about people who have little or no need for sleep, it is hard to believe that it was "civilization stole from them 16 hours of sleep a day." It is known that Peter the Great, Faraday, Napoleon, Bekhterev and many other great and famous people slept only 4-5 hours a day, while maintaining a great capacity for work.
Margaret Thatcher, as prime minister, only slept 4 hours. Mstislav Rostropovich spends the same amount on sleep. The famous traveler Fyodor Konyukhov exceeded all wakefulness records in extreme conditions. During a round-the-world voyage of solo yachtsmen, they decided to conduct an experiment called “Sleep study,” the task of which was to determine the minimum sleep, without which a person will not be able to be in situations where full energy and maximum concentration of attention are required.
At the start in the port of Charleston (South Carolina, USA), a special sensor with a microchip in the form of a wristwatch was attached to the hand of each yachtsman. After the first stage of the race, out of 16 yachts, 9 remained. Among them there are two of our vessels: Fedor Konyukhov and Viktor Yazykov. The length of the second stage of the Cape Town (South Africa) - Auckland (New Zealand) race is 7 thousand nautical miles. Yachtsmen slept no more than 5-6 hours a day, but no one could even come close to Konyukhov's record, who slept for 10-15 minutes every 2 hours throughout the regatta. In total, it took him 3-3.5 hours a day to sleep. After the trip, he was in good shape.
People are divided into those who remember their dreams and who do not. Among those who memorize, there are those who dream that they are not sleeping. They are considered to be suffering from false insomnia. There are many such cases, and one of the researchers of sleep pathology, Peter Hori, head of the Dartmouth Sleep Laboratory in Hanover (New Hampshire), spoke about the most difficult. One student from Dartmouth slept eight hours every night, but during all REM sleep he dreamed that he was awake. In the morning he got up completely shattered.
Another case. A 70-year-old woman turned to the laboratory, claiming that in her entire life she had not slept for more than 4 hours a night. It turned out that this woman's sleep is extraordinarily productive. Her brain reached stages 3 and 4 of slow wave sleep very quickly. Then, after about an hour and a half, the brain immediately entered REM sleep for a short period. Then again - deep slow sleep followed by fast sleep. And awakening. Since her brain “skipped” the preliminary stages 1 and 2 with lightning speed, she did not need more than 4 hours of sleep. She was perfectly healthy.
Sometimes a person does not sleep well for many years, although the reasons that caused him insomnia have long disappeared. This is "functionally autonomous" insomnia. At one time, for reasons of a psychological or organic nature, a person had difficulty falling asleep. As a result, the night became a torment for him, with its onset he was afraid not to fall asleep and did not fall asleep precisely because he was afraid. The bed, pillow, night light and other items of the bedroom were associated not with sleep, but with tension and fear. Such sufferers sleep well in unfamiliar surroundings.
There are many reasons that prevent falling asleep. They say how many heads - so many varieties of insomnia. Perhaps, he cannot sleep because the brain absorbs serotonin poorly, this "soporific nectar", and perhaps the process of serotonin formation from tryptophan, a substance contained in milk, cheese, meat, is disrupted. Having entered the human body with food, tryptophan is absorbed into the bloodstream and is converted into serotonin in the brain. Everyone knows that hunger interferes with falling asleep, and the well-fed tends to sleep. But if the hungry man managed to fall asleep, then the popular observation claims that whoever sleeps has lunch, since for a while sleep drowns out hunger …
It happens that in the period preceding the transition to slow sleep, there is an involuntary startle, "knees jump to the chin" and then the dream "flies away", and then cheered up by a startle cannot fall asleep for a long time.
Insomnia can be due to constant pain or psychological causes. "Small children don't let you sleep, but big ones won't let you fall asleep." Which parent of adult children does not know this? Or when the words of the poet A. N. Apukhtina:
Black thoughts, like flies, haunt me all night, They sting, sting and whirl over my poor head!
As soon as you chase one away, the other has sunk into your heart -
The whole life is remembered, so fruitlessly lived in dreams!
Then there is no choice but to resort to sleeping pills. And they, as a rule, suppress one or another phase of sleep (natural hypnotics have not yet been created).
Should we believe the reports of people not sleeping at all? If they do exist, then there are very few of them, only a few in the whole world. At one time, I had to read about two well-documented cases when people did not need sleep at all. One is an Italian peasant, the other is an Australian. They were tested in sleep laboratories and made sure they never really sleep.
There have also been reports of unique mathematical abilities in little or no sleep. For example, about the Belgian Georges Mazuis, who in 30 seconds extracted the forty-seventh root in his mind. This usually takes 10-12 hours. When he was 38 years old, he began to sleep poorly and occupied the night hours with math exercises. For the next 30 years, he slept 2 hours a day. He was a customs officer.
In the late 1960s, it was also reported about a Yugoslav peasant who suffered a craniocerebral injury in childhood, after which he stopped sleeping and showed great ability for mathematics.
The magazine "Russkaya Starina" in 1886 told about the close associate of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, who was awake all night long at her chambers in order to warn of danger in time. In the afternoon, 10-15 minutes of naps in a quiet corner restored his strength …