Hidden Brain - Eyes Wide Open: Part 1

Episode Date: November 7, 2017

Randy Gardner broke a world record in 1963, when he was only 17 years old. His feat? Going 11 days without sleeping. Randy, now 71, shares his wisdom about staying up past your bedtime — and why none of us should attempt to recreate his teenage stunt — on this week's Hidden Brain.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. In the early hours of the morning, when the air is heavy and the ticking clock runs slow, Randy Gardner would step out into his yard. He would stand beside the giant cactuses he planted and listen to the cars that whizzed by on Highway 54, which runs behind his home in San Diego. Standing in the moonlit shadows, he would call out in agony. But I would go out on the back yard at three in the morning and scream my head off like a wild animal. Many people are familiar with the suffering Randy experienced.

There's a lonely communion that binds those who plead with the gods at 3 o'clock in the morning. No one can help you, no one can make you feel better, no one can do anything. It's like you're going insane. But Randy also knew he was different from everyone else. Many years ago, as a rebellious teenager, he tempted those very same gods. His punishment, he understood, was payback. Thank you again. Have a lovely day. I was in San Diego recently for a conference. I had some downtime so I decided to visit someone I'd been wanting to meet for a long time. Hey! Are you Randy?

Yeah, I'm Randy Shankar. It's so nice to meet you. So nice to meet you. How are you? Randy Gardner greets me in the driveway of his home. He gives me a warm handshake and a smile. He's wearing a lemon colored shirt and sky blue shorts that set off his deep tent. He exudes Southern California charm. Man, you live in paradise.

Not well. It sits okay. Do you have bad weather events here? We have hotter than hell's shit. We're off bikes. Randy lives in a small green and white house surrounded by sandy brown stucco homes. The backyard is next to a noisy freeway.

Randy and his wife, Alona, share their place with a 13-year-old Bengal cat, George. Sorry, what I meant was Prince George. We did not spoil him, he came that way. Randy and Ilona are now retired, which means lots of time to focus on George and their hobbies. These are photographs that I took. The walls are covered with some of his favorite shots,

the golden gate in San Francisco, and stacked on the shelves are knick-knacks and toys. At one point in the cross space, I had over 500 puzzles. Oh my God. Our story really begins in 1963 when Randy moved to San Diego. He was 17. It was the last in a long line of childhood moves.

I'm the oldest of four siblings in a military family. And my father traveled around so we were in different places every two years we lived somewhere else. In every town they lived in, Randy entered the science fair. I was kind of a science nerd when I was young. When we came to this town, San Diego, I thought boy, it's a big city. If you wanted to win in San Diego, he'd have to pull out all the stops. So for 21's time and here from the skyline, it's since I don't have you.

To understand the project he came up with, it's important to know something about the time. Rock and Roll was changing radio and it wasn't just the songs that were gaining notice. It was the DJs playing them. The fabulous 40 of 1959. You're here for the year, aren't you? One of them was Peter Trip, a New York City DJ who hosted Your Hits of the Week on WMGM. The Rock's Rock's Rock's Rock, WMGM. Peter plays an important part in our story. He wanted to stand out in the disc jockey world, and so, in 1959, he came up with a stunt. He announced he was going to do a week-a-thon to raise money for charity. He would go eight days without sleeping and be beyond display the entire time. On January 20th, 1959, Peter began broadcasting from a small glass studio in the middle of

Times Square. Scientists were there to watch. For the next eight days, he hosted a show while fighting off sleep, preening it first, then yawning, eventually hallucinating. One thing he never did, sleep. Peter's Tant invited others. A few months later, a DJ and Honolulu, Tom Rounds, raised the stakes by going 260 hours, more than 10 days without sleep. Intentional sleep deprivation was apparently like the ice bucket challenge for DJs in the 1960s. 17-year-old Randy Gardner,

looking to make his mark on the science fair in a new city, wasn't impressed by these feats. Eight days without sleep, ten days without sleep, big deal, he thought. You don't need a lot of sleep. You don't need sleep. That was the thinking back in the 60s, and that's the thinking that I had. Randy decided to show up the showman. He decided he was going to go without sleep for 264 hours.

Exactly 11 days. And when I said, well, let's go 11 days, I wasn't even thinking about any negative things. I was thinking, this really isn't that big of a deal. You know, when it's over, you catch up, you get your sleep, and you go right on by. Even as a teenager, Randy knew that he had a special skill that made him different. I'm a very determined person. When I get things under my crawl, I can't let it go until there's some kind of a solution. He recruited two of his friends, Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano, and asked them to help keep him awake.

If you're on your own, you're going to succumb. You're going to fall asleep. Christmas break was coming up and Randy and his friends decided it was the perfect time to break the world record for going without sleep. The first two days were easy. He stayed away from beds and tried to stand as much as he could. But on day three, I noticed that in the morning I was really nauseous and this went on for just about the entire rest of the experiment.

And that's when I stumbled on eating citrus for some reason. Tangerines or oranges seem to take the nausea away. So your friends, of course, were keeping tabs on you, but they weren't actually accompanying you in the experiment. So what happened? Was one of them, did you have a rotation system, or one of them was always up with you? That exactly was a rotation system,

where one would be with me and the other would be sleeping. Or if it was in the daytime, they'd both be with me. Soon, the stunt was attracting television reporters. And that was a good thing because that kept me awake. You know, you're dealing with these people and their cameras and their questions. Did you start to feel like your mental faculties were slipping? That it was harder to answer questions. It was harder to remember something to formulate a phrase or a sentence.

That happened pretty soon. That was that started maybe day four or five and it just kept going downhill. I mean it was crazy where you you couldn't remember things it was almost like an early Alzheimer's thing brought on by lack of sleep. The hardest hours must have indeed been the early hours of the morning that's often when our circadian rhythms are prompting us to be in the deepest sleep, you know, three, four, five o'clock in the morning. What did you do during those hours?

We just kept moving. We always were driving somewhere and driving somewhere and then walking. Most of it involved lots and lots of walking. I played a lot of basketball shooting the hoops. The early hours of the morning were hardest. Everything was closed, everyone was asleep. Randy remembers visiting the local jail. Why did he go to the jail?

I don't know. Maybe because it was open at three in the morning. We never close. A few days into the wakeathon, a sleep researcher from Stanford University showed up. His name, William Demand. Seriously. And he got a, he got a, he rented a car, a convertible,

and we drove around that. So we had a, we had a really good time when Dr. Dement came down. That, that really helped me because that was like a, a fresh of something different and new to keep me going. I understand that Dr. Dement also played a lot of games with you. He, besides sort of doing sort of psychological tests, he was actually, he actually played various, sort of sports with you, is that right? We, we did a lot of pinball.

How do you do? I did good. I think I beat him most of the time. Actually, Randy won all the time. Physically, I didn't have any problems. Not walking or throwing the basketball around or playing the pinball games. But the metal part is what went downhill.

The longer I stayed awake, the more irritable I got. I had a very short fuse on day 11. I remember snapping at reporters right before I was getting ready to go to sleep after 11 days, and they were asking me these questions over and over and over, and I was just, I was a brat. On January 8th 1964, Randy broke the world record for going without sleep. He'd gone 11 days, 264 hours without drifting off. There was only one way to celebrate. He was whisked off to a naval hospital so researchers could keep an eye on him and he went to sleep.

How long did you sleep? I slept just over 14 hours. I remember when I woke up I was groggy but not any groggy than a normal, normal person. And did you find that over the next several days or weeks you needed extra sleep? No, not at all. I went right back to the regular mode and everything was fine. Strange, isn't it? Randy's sleep project earned him and his friends first place in the 10th annual Greater San Diego Science Fair. It also ushered in a lifetime of fame.

a lifetime of fame. This is sound from the popular 1960s TV game show to tell the truth. The show brings together four celebrity panelists, the panelists face three people who all claim to be the same person. My name is Randy Gardner. My name is Randy Gardner. My name is Randy Gardner. The panelists have to guess which one is the real Randy. On the show, the real Randy Gardner is number two. Number two, how long did you sleep the minute you were through with the 11 days and nights? 14 hours and 43 minutes. He looks like Clark Kent. He wears dark, haundry glasses. His hair swoops to the left.

He soft-spoken and direct when answering questions. Most of the panelists figured out that this Randy was the real Randy. I know it's an avenue because he looks asleep. It's not too early, it's rather a dream. But number two, number two, number two. Over the next decade, Randy Gardner's life took different turns. He worked in horticulture, took a stab at photography, and finished up his career working as a stock trader. But whatever he did, his teenage accomplishment stayed with him. I'm some kind of a Bruce Springsteen in the sleep world.

It's a very strange feeling. The teenage stunt was the gift that kept on giving. But Randy was to find that they can be a downside to fame. When we come back, how it all went downhill. And everybody thought I was some kind of ass. of ass. Plenty of people have tried to do what Randy Gardner did, go days on end without sleeping. You can find clips of all their adventures on YouTube. It's Sunday afternoon right now and tonight's day one of going without sleep for the next week.

I'm about to stay up for three days. This is going to be the hardest challenge I've ever done. But if you're looking to set a new record for going without sleep... I'm quite struggling. I don't quite get it. You're out of luck. The Guinness Book of World Records has eliminated the category, citing the health dangers of severe sleep loss. And I think it's important to keep in mind, by the way,

this is UC Berkeley neuroscientist Matthew Walker, that Guinness does seem to deem it acceptable for a man, I believe it was Felix Baumgartner, to ascend to the very outer reaches of Earth's atmosphere in a capsule, in a spacesuit, get out of that capsule, and then free fall back down to earth, breaking the sound barrier with his body, traveling at well over 1000 kilometers per hour. That deemed as okay to do. Sleep deprivation, because of its deathly consequences no longer. So I hope that frames the disease-related risk that Guinness rightfully recognizes regarding insufficient sleep. Matthew Walker calls himself a sleep diplomat. He spent more than 20

years studying the topic, and he's written a book titled Why We Sleep. If your idea of being sleep deprived as days on end without enough rest, Matthew says, think again, even just the smallest amount of insufficient sleep we seek health consequences. And I think perhaps one of the best examples of that small perturbation is that one of the largest sleep experiments ever done. It's been performed on 1.6 billion people. It happens twice a year and it continues to happen. It's called daylight savings time. And in the spring when we lose an hour of sleep, we see a subsequent 24% increase in heart attacks.

In the fall, when we gain an hour of sleep opportunity, there is a 21% decrease in heart attacks. So that's how fragile our brain and bodies can be to even just the smallest fluctuations of sleep. So we don't have to go to the Randy Gardner extreme of 11 days, just one hour of sleep is all that it takes to show these types of demonstrable consequences in terms of ill health.

If you do the math, 11 days times 8 recommended hours of sleep a night, that's 88 hours of sleep that Randy missed. When he finally went to bed, he slept only 14 hours. The human brain is not capable of getting back all of the sleep that it has lost. So, sleep in this regard is not like the bank. You can't accumulate a debt and then pay it off at some later point in time. There isn't a credit system in the brain or the body. And we can ask by the way why? Why isn't there something like that? Wouldn't that be wonderful? And there is precedent there, that sells. So there were times in evolution when we would have feast and there were times when

there was famine. And we designed a system to come up and store that caloric credit, and so that we could spend it when there was a debt. There may be a reason our bodies don't do this. The right analogy to sleep might not be eating, but breathing. You can't say, I'll skip today and catch up on my breathing tomorrow. For a long time, Randy simply bathed in the celebrity that his stunt had brought him. He'd found a way to cheat sleep. Life was in the celebrity that his stunt had brought him. He'd found a way to cheat sleep.

Life was good for him and his wife, Ilona. The focus of our life is pretty much George. George the cat, that teenage Bengal. Randy and Ilona love George. I don't know much about cats, but apparently, Bengals have the personality of a dog. They fetch a cat that defaches. Are you serious? He doesn't do much anymore.

Listening to Randy and Ilona, ooze with affection for George is very sweet. When I came to visit, Ilona was getting ready to take George to the vet. They're very meticulous about his health. That's partly because, a decade ago, there was another cat in Randy and Ilona's life. She died of a tongue cancer partly because a decade ago there was another cat in Randy and Ilona's life. She died of a tongue cancer and I was so upset that the vets didn't catch it that they

never looked in her mouth to find this tumor that they blamed every other thing and then she died and I was so racked with guilt which is stupid. You know I would never do that. Now you have to move forward. You can't go back. But I didn't then. And I think that's what triggered it. The it, Randy's referring to, is insomnia.

About 10 years ago, I stopped sleeping. I could not sleep. I would lay in bed for five, six hours sleep, maybe 15 minutes, that wake up again. And I kept thinking, well, this will change because it seems to me that eventually, if you don't get enough sleep, your body will just say, we're going to sleep,

but it never happened. The man who conquered sleep was now begging for a full-night rest. That's why I keep calling this some, some, some karmic payback for, you know, my body going, okay buddy, yeah, okay, 11 days without sleep and you know, damn well, you need sleep. Well, let's try this out for size. Randy says going without sleep changed him. And everybody thought I was some kind of ass.

What's wrong with Randy? What an asshole. There's all kinds of ways to go to sleep, they say. You know, watch television, read a book, and I'm thinking, you know, if you can't sleep in the first place, reading a book isn't going to put you to sleep. I got news for you. I don't know where they came up with that one. Read a book, watch TV. No, no, no. If you have that kind of a serious problem, you're done. Day in and day out, for years on end, Randy began to feel the way he'd felt at the end of his sleep stunt. Except this time, there were no TV cameras, no reporters, no prizes.

I was awful to be around. Everything upset me. It was like a continuation of what I did 50 years ago. We don't know what triggered Randy's insomnia, but this some anecdotal evidence that prolonged sleeplessness can really mess up the brain. Remember Peter Trip, the radio DJ who inspired Randy with his wakeathon? Here are psychiatrists Floyd Cornelison, who monitored Peter, speaking on the television series, Secrets of Sleep. The man I saw the first morning that he began this, when he was waving at everybody to the class winners

and smiling and laughing and joking with us, after the 200 hours had become a change in the visual. In the months that followed, trips seemed unable to recover his center of gravity. He fought with his boss and lost his job. He ended up as a salesman drifting from time to time across America. Those that knew him well were convinced that those eight days without sleep had left him permanently damaged.

So some of that might have been hyperbole. Still, Randy thinks what happened to Peter was real, and his age might have been a factor. That's why I don't think you can do this kind of thing unless you're 17 or in that age group. I know I couldn't do it now, and I wouldn't do it now, because I have more sense. After a decade of insomnia in his 60s, Randy finally made an uneasy piece with sleep. He's regained the ability to drift off, but only for about six hours a night,

and it's required sacrifice. I love drinking tea, and to this day I can't drink tea because I'm afraid I won't be able to sleep at night. You have to have sleep. It's as important as it's the big through. I call it the big three water food sleep. You got to have them all of them. Randy Gardner, the man who conquered sleep, now lives in mortal fear of going a night without it. On the next episode of Hidden Brain, we're going to dive deeper into the science of sleep with neuroscientist Matthew Walker. If we didn't need 8 hours of sleep and we could survive on six,

Mother Nature would have done away with 25% of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do. So if sleep does not provide a remarkable set of benefits, then it's the biggest mistake the evolutionary process processes ever made. This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Parts Shah and edited by Jenny Schmitt and Tara Boyle. Our team includes René Clar, René Cohen and Maggie Penman. For more Hidden Brain, please follow us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. If you like our show, tell your friends about us and make sure you're subscribed to the podcast so you don't miss a single episode.

Writing a review on iTunes or other podcast platforms also helps other people find the show. Thanks so much for making the time to do it. Our unsung hero this week is Susie Cummings. I spent two weeks trying to track down Randy Gardner, who might interviewed many years ago when I was working at the Washington Post. I couldn't find his phone number, so I reached out to Susie, and of course, in no time flat, she tracked down his number. That's what you do if you're a research librarian at NPR. Thanks Susie.

I'm Shankar Vitaantham, and this is NPR. I hope you sleep well tonight. I'll talk to you very soon. This is NPR. I hope you sleep well tonight. I'll talk to you very soon.