ABSTRACT
Studies have investigated the effect of total and partial sleep deprivation in animals. Peter Tripp was a world famous New York disc jockey in the late 1950s. Randy Gardner was an ordinary schoolboy from San Diego. In a stunt that would later inspire Randy Gardner, Tripp decided to raise money for a charity by staying awake for 8 days and 8 hours. Although this was ostensibly a publicity stunt, some psychologists and medics were given the chance to study the effects that this might have on his behaviour. In the last few days of his stunt, Tripp's speech became slurred, he developed an even more acute paranoid psychosis and experienced further auditory and visual hallucinations. Initially, the 32-year-old Tripp seemed to cope extremely well without sleep. William Dement, one of the sleep researchers involved in monitoring the attempt, concluded that if people were not allowed rapid eye movement (REM) sleep they would become mentally unstable.
