sillysaurusx
today at 5:10 PM
> If an animal can't sleep it will eventually die.
That turns out to be un-settled science. No human has ever died from lack of sleep.
People point to “fatal familial insomnia” as a counterexample. But they die to the disease, not the lack of sleep.
In a series of controlled experiments, rats and fruit flies did die from lack of sleep. But no one has yet proven that it holds true for vertebrates except for rats.
In other words, it could be true that “among vertebrates, only rats die of sleep deprivation.”
So “if an animal can’t sleep, it will eventually die” is actually quite hard to prove, and depending on how you look at it, somewhat easy to disprove by the fact that rats and fruit flies were so difficult to kill from sleep depravation alone.
Personally I’m skeptical of the rat study too. Claude amends this:
> What they did not establish: the mechanism. On autopsy, “no anatomical cause of death was identified.” The rats showed weight loss despite eating more, body temperature problems, and skin lesions, but nothing that pointed to a clean cause. So no, they could not say a rat “died from sleep deprivation alone” in the sense of identifying what sleep loss did to the body to kill it. They showed a strong association under tight controls, not a proven causal pathway.
> No human has ever died from lack of sleep.
As far as I understand it, there is a disease that destroys your brain's ability to produce sleep. Once you have it, you suffer total, progressive insomnia and die within roughly 6–18 months. Scientists debate whether it's the underlying brain damage or the sleeplessness itself that causes death, but the two are inseparable in practice, and sleep deprivation is considered the leading candidate.
Separately, the longest anyone has stayed awake under controlled conditions was 11 days, which produced severe cognitive impairment, paranoia, and hallucinations; suggesting the body deteriorates rapidly without sleep.
It's probably not wise to state your original claim as established fact.
sillysaurusx
today at 5:20 PM
My second paragraph addresses that:
> People point to “fatal familial insomnia” as a counterexample. But they die to the disease, not the lack of sleep.
It’s a prion disease. It’s established fact that they don’t die from the lack of sleep.
Interesting that the scientific debate is settled, because you said so. Researchers who study prion diseases would probably be surprised to hear it.
sillysaurusx
today at 5:25 PM
Huh? Ask Claude or do some research on the topic if you don’t believe me. A prion disease killing you has nothing whatsoever to do with the lack of sleep. The insomnia is a side effect, not the cause.
Jeez. People here are really stretching to defend their false “we die without sleep” claim.
chris_wot
today at 5:36 PM
Provide some evidence to back up you assertions. Don't tell someone else to do it for you.
Bro is asking claude. He's not gonna do anything. Probably an astroturf bot for claude
HIV doesn't kill you, but it creates circumstances where other things will. Sleep is the same. You may not die from lack of sleep, but you die from the things it can cause. Effectively there's no difference.
sillysaurusx
today at 5:23 PM
I’m shocked by how careless everyone here is about their definitions, and their science. Sleep isn’t the same as HIV. It’s in fact so hard to kill something with a lack of sleep that it’s never once been observed in vertebrates outside of one specific rat study, and that rat study couldn’t conclusively identify sleep as the cause of death.
For something so incredibly difficult to do (die from lack of sleep) it’s frankly crazy that most people here are saying it like it’s fact.
A knife doesn't kill you, what kills you is the blood you lose after you get stabbed.
Lack of sleep doesn't kill you / does kill you in the same sense.
I'd probably kill myself after a couple of days without sleep. Would the lack of sleep be the cause of death or the cause of the cause of death?
selfsimilar
today at 5:41 PM
Bullets don’t kill you, it’s the bleeding that gets you. Wait, no, it’s not the bleeding since you could just put an IV in, it’s the loss of blood pressure. No wait, it’s not the loss of blood pressure since we can reattach severed limbs that have been at 0/0 for hours. It’s the lack of oxygen to the brain and other vital organs. Bullets definitely don’t kill you /s
They no longer accept world records for not sleeping because the record breakers have universally suffered lifelong cognitive damage.
We know more generally that people who get decreased amount of sleep suffer increased rates of physical and mental health issues.
It is not a very big leap from "causes permanent damage" to "enough permanent damage can cause death" and of course, keeping someone awake until they are hurt or killed is deeply unethical, so even if it could be proven in other species, you'd still be here arguing that 'they aren't humans".
ambicapter
today at 5:14 PM
So? You don't need a proven causal pathway to state that a glass heads towards the ground every time you brush it off a table.
sillysaurusx
today at 5:16 PM
Scientifically you do, otherwise you can’t claim that lack of sleep was the cause of death. It could be an artifact of how the experiment was run, or any number of other factors.
It’s not a small quibble to point out that the central argument (“animals need sleep or they’ll die”) may be mistaken.
refulgentis
today at 5:22 PM
It’s a bunch of Claude blather, and I love Claude. Just not worth copying over to HN, because the rush to get to a narrow answer to a narrow question elides the meaningful bits, ex. what does happen during sleep deprivation. Has a “not even wrong” air simply because you’re trying to get to true/false on a narrow question then pushing your research assistant to disavow what you’re quote unquote “skeptical” of.
sillysaurusx
today at 5:27 PM
This is little more than a fancy way of saying “Nu uh.” Such arguments are hardly convincing.