Maybe someone should pass this on to Lemmy who hasn’t slept since 1986.
"Not surprisingly, those who had eight hours of sleep hardly had any attention lapses and no cognitive declines over the 14 days of the study. What was interesting was that those in the four- and six-hour groups had P.V.T. results that declined steadily with almost each passing day. Though the four-hour subjects performed far worse, the six-hour group also consistently fell off-task. By the sixth day, 25 percent of the six-hour group was falling asleep at the computer. And at the end of the study, they were lapsing fives times as much as they did the first day. The six-hour subjects fared no better — steadily declining over the two weeks — on a test of working memory in which they had to remember numbers and symbols and substitute one for the other. The same was true for an addition-subtraction task that measures speed and accuracy. All told, by the end of two weeks, the six-hour sleepers were as impaired as those who, in another Dinges study, had been sleep-deprived for 24 hours straight — the cognitive equivalent of being legally drunk." (Click here for more)
Back in the day I once stayed awake for 8 days and nights - 4 or 5 days was frequent - and began to have telepathic conversations with my buddy who was doing the same. We could be in a noisy bar but on opposite sides of the room, talking very quietly so that the person next to us couldn't hear, and yet maintain a fluid comprehensible dialogue with each other. I also had lucid 'waking dreams' where I was ambulatory and spoke but was clearly also dreaming, so that I was found walking to the local shop to buy milk and chocolate at 4am believing it to be daylight. Too much of this would drive a person nuts but sleep deprivation forces the mind to do extraordinary things, not dissimilar to sensory deprivation (see the works of John C Lilly). the secret word is amphetamine!!!!
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