In 1965, the Stanford group was involved in a sleep deprivation experiment that seriously undermined the notion that unduly prolonged wakefulness could lead to impairment, and particularly that psychosis would be the inevitable result. In January of that year, I chanced to read in the newspapers that a San Diego youth, Randy Gardner, had successfully completed about 80 hours of a planned 264-hour vigil in a high school science fair project aimed at establishing the world 's record for prolonged wakefulness. At that time the Guinness Book of World Records listed the record as 260 hours, although real documentation was lacking. Seeing an opportunity to study prolonged sleep deprivation again, I recruited my colleague, Dr. George Gulevich, now head of the Psychiatric Inpatient Service at Stanford, to accompany me to San Diego with a portable electroencephalograph. The boy's parents welcomed our professional assistance because they were anxious about the consequences of the experiment. Until that time the experiment had been conducted by Randy himself with two of his schoolmates. Although his friends admitted it was not easy to keep him awake in the middle of the night they testified that he had absolutely not been allowed to sleep. Our main concerns were to verify the lack of sleep and to supplement the inexperienced monitoring of the schoolboys. Randy who was seventeen was a slim boy in excellent physical condition. He was cooperative and friendly throughout although in the middle of the night when he grew drowsy and wanted to rest his eyes he would object strenuously because we would not allow him to close his lids for any prolonged period of time. As the vigil wore on and impressive durations accumulated, the nation's press and TV became more and more involved and the whole affair began to resemble a circus. This was certainly very stimulating to the young lad and probably aided him in his ability to remain awake. In general the daytime was relatively easy but at night we were driven to increasingly heroic measures to help Randy resist sleepiness and to bolster his flagging motivation. I have two very vivid memories from this study. The first is of spending several hours after 3 a.m. on the last night in a penny arcade where Randy and I competed in about one hundred games on a baseball machine. Randy won every game-which attests to his lack of physical or psychomotor impairment. The second is that having sacrificed a good deal of sleep myself I carelessly turned the car into a one-way street the wrong way and immediately attracted the attention of a policeman. Because of the unusual circumstances I forgot about the ticket until six months later when a warrant was issued for my arrest. It cost me $86 to redeem myself. At the end of the long vigil before going to bed Randy held a press conference in which the three major TV networks and reporters from papers all over the United States participated. Randy conducted himself in an absolutely impeccable fashion. Asked how he was able to stay awake for eleven days he answered lightly "It's just mind over matter". Dr. Laverne Johnson, a Stanford alumnus, had read about this experiment and had volunteered his laboratory at the San Diego Naval Hospital. There at 6:12 a.m. precisely 264 hours and 12 minutes after his alarm clock had awakened him eleven days earlier, Randy Gardner went to sleep. I must admit that I didn't have the faintest idea about how long he would stay asleep and I certainly didn't know what to tell the hordes of reporters who buzzed about demanding predictions. Randy slept for only fourteen hours and forty minutes and when he awoke he was essentially recovered. He was actually up and about at 10 p.m. and stayed awake without difficulty until the next night, which was about twenty-four hours. His second sleep after the long vigil was eight hours and seemed quite normal. He has since been followed by Dr. Johnson for whom he worked in the ensuing years and appears to be completely healthy and unaffected by the experiment except for whatever effect being a transient celebrity might have had on his psyche. Except for a few illusions--one or two minor hallucinatory experiences--Randy demonstrated no psychotic behavior during the entire vigil, no paranoid behavior, no serious emotional change. 

*This excerpt is taken from Dement, W. C. Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep, which was originally published as a volume in Portable Stanford series published by the Stanford Alumni Association. Copyright 1972 by William C. Dement.