The Boy Who Stayed Awake For Eleven Days
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 8 January 2018
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
California high school student Randy Gardner set the world record for staying awake in 1964, going without sleep for over 264 hours. He was monitored by his school friend Bruce McAllister and Stanford University sleep scientist William Dement - they speak to Lucy Burns about their memories of the experiment.
Photo: Randy Gardner (in blindfold) describes scents offered to him by Bruce McAllister, while Joe Marciano Jr. takes notes, San Diego, California, 1964 (Don Cravens/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.7 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.5 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices. |
| 0:18.0 | What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | Hi and thanks for downloading Witness, the History Podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:41.0 | I'm Lucy Burns and today I'm taking you back to January the 8th |
| 0:45.0 | 1964 when a 17-year-old schoolboy called Randy Gardner performed a risky |
| 0:50.8 | experiment on himself when he set a world record by staying awake for 11 days and 25 minutes. |
| 0:58.0 | Don't try this at home. I actually read it in the newspaper. There was a story in the San Diego newspaper about |
| 1:10.9 | this boy who was going to try and break the record for staying awake. |
| 1:14.0 | So I immediately got in touch with him and I wanted to be involved and see how it worked out. |
| 1:19.0 | This is William DeMent of Stanford University in California. Today he's an emeritus professor, but in 1964 |
| 1:26.8 | he was just starting his research in the still new field of sleep science. The record attempt |
| 1:32.3 | he had read about had started as a project for school. |
| 1:35.2 | We were pretty creative kids. We were pretty cocky and we wanted to come up with a science |
| 1:39.7 | fair project. This is Bruce McAllister, one of the high school students who'd come up with the idea. |
| 1:45.6 | The first version of it was the effective sleeplessness on paranormal ability and then we realized that there was no way we could do that and so we decided simply on |
| 1:56.2 | the effective sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities performance on the basketball, whatever we could come up with. |
| 2:05.0 | Bruce and his friend Randy Gardner had decided they wanted to beat the world record for staying awake, |
| 2:11.0 | which at the time was held by a DJ in Honolulu who'd managed 260 hours or just |
... |
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