Being a person of a pretty fucked up sleeping schedule, I found these few tid-bits rather interesting.
CUDDY: Twenty-five-year-old female with sleep issues.
HOUSE: I’m guessing she’s — what’s the medical term? Upset.
These twenty-five-year-old females are usually completely
rational. They’re rocks, really. Uhh, my theory seems
to be supported by the fact that she swallowed a bottle
of sleeping pills. Get her a shrink. I need some
shuteye.
CUDDY: She’s a little bit more than upset. She hasn’t slept in
ten days.
HOUSE: She’s lying. Without REM sleep, your neurons stop
regenerating. The brain shuts down lobe by lobe. She’d
be insane after five days, dead by ten.
Oh, for shame, repeating widely circulated medical myths. The bit about
dying after ten days awake has been circulated since around the ’60s, I
think, and it’s untrue. The bit about insanity after five sleepless
days reportedly originated with a radio disc jockey in the late coherence degenerated during a widely publicized marathon stunt of
on-air wakefulness. However, controlled experiments yielded mixed
results.
In fact, Hannah seemed to be in great shape for someone who supposedly
hadn’t slept in ten days. She wasn’t beset by hallucinations. She
could speak fairly normally and remember what was said to her.
Source: World.std.com
Six years later, high school student Randy Gardner attempted to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the longest time awake — 260 hours. And after 11 days without sleep he suffered no hallucinations or paranoia and no psychotic symptoms.
Source: Pbs.org
His inability to sleep has not only made him famous, but also represents a miraculous phenomenon worthy of scientific study.Sixty-four-year-old Thai Ngoc, known as Hai Ngoc, said he could not sleep at night after getting a fever in 1973, and has counted infinite numbers of sheep during more than 11,700 consecutive sleepless nights.
Source: Unexplained-mysteries.com
When I have bouts of insomnia, sleeprite works great for me. You can get a free sample here.