Randy Gardner: The Teenager Who Stayed Awake for Eleven Days in 1964
- Daniel Holland
- 4 hours ago
- 8 min read
At the tail end of 1963, as the Beach Boys drifted from transistor radios and America struggled to make sense of the assassination of John F Kennedy, a quiet suburban house in San Diego became the centre of one of the most curious scientific spectacles of the twentieth century. Inside, a seventeen year old schoolboy was attempting something that many believed could kill him. He was trying not to sleep.
What followed was not a stunt in the modern sense, nor a reality television endurance challenge. It was a teenage science project that turned into a landmark moment in the history of sleep research, watched by doctors, reported nationwide, and debated for decades afterwards. The boy was Randy Gardner, and for eleven days and twenty five minutes he stayed awake.
This is the story of how it happened, what it revealed, and why its legacy remains unsettled more than sixty years later.
A Record Born in a Classroom
Randy Gardner was born around 1946 and grew up in San Diego, California. By 1963 he was a student at Point Loma High School, bright, athletic, and largely unremarkable in public terms. The idea that would define his life came not from a laboratory or a dare, but from the ordinary pressure faced by many teenagers in December. He and his friend Bruce McAllister needed a science fair project.
McAllister later recalled that the idea evolved quickly from teenage bravado into something more focused. “The first version of it was to explore the effect of sleeplessness on paranormal ability,” he said years later. “We realised there was no way we could do that and so we decided on the effect of sleep deprivation on cognitive abilities, performance on the basketball court. Whatever we could come up with.”
At the time, the world record for voluntary sleep deprivation stood at 260 hours, just under eleven days, set by a radio disc jockey in Honolulu named Tom Rounds. The boys decided they would try to beat it. They flipped a coin to decide who would stay awake. McAllister won the toss, and Gardner became the subject.
The plan, such as it was, reflected their age. McAllister tried to stay awake alongside Gardner to monitor him, a decision he later described with blunt honesty. “We were idiots, young idiots,” he said. “I stayed awake with him to monitor him and after three nights of sleeplessness myself I woke up tipped against the wall writing notes on the wall itself.”
A third friend, Joe Marciano Junior, was brought in to help. The experiment began during the Christmas holidays, when Gardner could avoid school and remain under constant observation.
What none of them fully appreciated was that the attempt was unfolding in a moment of genuine scientific uncertainty. In the early 1960s, sleep was still poorly understood. There were serious debates about whether prolonged sleep deprivation alone could cause death.
Enter The Scientists
Within days, the experiment caught the attention of the local press. A San Diego newspaper ran a story about the sleepless teenager, which was read by a young researcher at Stanford University named William Dement.
Dement was not yet the towering figure he would become, but he was already one of the few people in the world studying sleep as a biological process. “I was probably the only person on the planet at the time who had actually done sleep research,” he later said.
Alarmed and intrigued, Dement travelled to San Diego to observe the experiment firsthand. His arrival changed everything. Gardner’s parents, understandably anxious, were reassured that a qualified specialist was now involved. A formal monitoring regime was established, including regular cognitive tests and medical oversight.
Gardner’s health was also monitored by Lieutenant Commander John J Ross of the United States Navy, adding a second layer of professional scrutiny. Two teenage log keepers became part of an impromptu research team that would later be cited in scientific literature.
By the time Dement arrived, Gardner had already been awake for several days. At first, the effects seemed mild. He was tired but cheerful, engaged, and still able to perform physically demanding tasks.
“He was physically very fit,” Dement said. “So we could always get him going by playing basketball or going bowling. If he closed his eyes he would be immediately asleep.”
Night time was harder. Without stimulation, Gardner struggled to remain conscious. Friends walked him, talked to him, and kept him engaged in games. The experiment was constant vigilance.
Cognitive Cracks Begin to Show
As the days passed, subtle changes became harder to ignore. Gardner’s senses dulled. His sense of smell became overwhelming and unpleasant. McAllister remembered him pleading, “Don’t make me smell that, I can’t stand the smell.”
His concentration faltered. Memory lapses became more frequent. Mood swings emerged. According to Lieutenant Commander Ross, Gardner showed signs of paranoia and hallucinations, details that later became central to debates about the experiment’s interpretation.
One test became particularly well known. On the eleventh day, Gardner was asked to subtract seven repeatedly, starting from one hundred. He stopped at sixty five. When asked why, he replied that he had forgotten what he was doing.
Yet other abilities seemed oddly preserved, or even enhanced. Gardner continued to play basketball and, according to observers, sometimes played better than usual. Whether this was due to practice, adrenaline, or misinterpretation remains unclear.
Perhaps most famously, Dement reported that Gardner beat him at a game of pinball on the tenth day. That detail would later be cited by those arguing that sleep deprivation was less dangerous than previously believed.
This apparent contradiction lay at the heart of the controversy. Gardner could function, but not consistently. He was awake, but not entirely present.
A Nation Watches
As the experiment wore on, media attention grew. For a brief period, the story became the third most written about topic in the American national press, after the assassination of President Kennedy and a visit by the Beatles.
The tone of coverage often missed the seriousness of what was happening. McAllister later said the experiment was treated like a novelty, lumped in with what he called “telephone booth stuffing and goldfish swallowing”.
The teenagers saw it differently. They continued, carefully, with increasing fatigue and pressure. On the 8th of January, 1964, after eleven days and twenty five minutes awake, Gardner broke the world record. The total time was 264.4 hours.
The attempt ended not with sleep, but with a press conference outside Gardner’s parents’ home. He appeared alert, articulate, and remarkably composed.
“I wanted to prove that bad things didn’t happen if you went without sleep,” Gardner said. “I thought I can break that record and I don’t think it would be a negative experience.”
What Happened Day by Day
Days 1-2: The first couple of days were almost manageable. Randy felt pretty normal, just a bit tired, like after an all-nighter cramming for finals—doable, but definitely not ideal. There were some mood swings, irritability, and a little trouble focusing, but nothing too extreme.
Days 3-4: By this point, the wheels were starting to come off. Randy’s memory was shot; he’d lose track of his thoughts in the middle of a sentence, and even basic math felt like trying to solve rocket science. He began having weird visual disturbances, like mistaking one object for something completely different. It was clear his brain was fighting a losing battle, struggling to keep up with reality as sleep deprivation took its toll.
Days 5-7: This was when things really started to unravel. Randy’s cognitive abilities took a steep dive—he struggled to form coherent sentences and his speech became slurred. Hallucinations intensified, with him seeing things that weren’t there, such as imagining patterns and objects. His sense of reality was slipping, and his paranoia grew as he became more disoriented. It was as if he was trapped in a waking dream, unable to shake off the bizarre and distorted perceptions his sleep-deprived mind was conjuring up.
Days 8-11: By the final stretch, Randy was barely holding it together. His motor skills were completely off—he could hardly hold a pencil. His speech was slurred, his attention span was non-existent, and he was drifting in and out of reality. At this point, parts of his brain were essentially forcing themselves to “shut down” for a few seconds, leading to episodes known as microsleeps. His eyes were open, but his brain was desperately trying to sneak in a few moments of rest whenever it could.
Inside the sleeping brain
After the press conference, Gardner was taken to a naval hospital for observation. Rather than allowing him to sleep at home, researchers wanted to monitor his brain activity during recovery.
Gardner slept for fourteen hours and forty six minutes, waking naturally around 8.40 pm. He stayed awake for much of the following day, then slept for another ten and a half hours. Researchers noted a sharp increase in rapid eye movement sleep during the first recovery period, followed by a gradual return to normal patterns over subsequent nights.
Dement described it in detail. “His first night his percentage of REM state sleep skyrocketed. Then the next night it dropped until finally days later it returned to normal.”
Follow up recordings taken one, six, and ten weeks later reportedly showed no significant differences from baseline, although some later accounts note that detailed data from these follow ups were never fully published.
The most intriguing conclusion came from analysis conducted in Arizona, where Gardner’s brain recordings were sent. According to McAllister, the results suggested that Gardner’s brain had been “catnapping the entire time”.
Parts of his brain appeared to enter brief sleep states while others remained awake. This idea of localised sleep offered a possible explanation for why Gardner avoided catastrophic collapse.
For McAllister, the explanation made evolutionary sense. “He wasn’t the first human being or pre human being to have to stay awake for more than one night,” he said. “The idea that the brain could catnap while parts of it were awake made total sense.”
The Debate that Followed
Gardner’s experiment quickly entered scientific folklore. For some, it appeared to show that even extreme sleep deprivation did not cause lasting harm. Dement’s pinball anecdote became shorthand for resilience.
Others disagreed strongly. Lieutenant Commander Ross emphasised the cognitive and behavioural deterioration he observed, warning against simplistic conclusions.
The truth likely lay between these positions. Gardner did not die. He did not collapse into psychosis. But he did experience hallucinations, paranoia, and serious cognitive impairment. The fact that he recovered quickly did not mean the experience was harmless.
In the years that followed, others attempted to break Gardner’s record. Some reports claim that Toimi Silvo in Finland stayed awake for 276 hours in February 1964. In 1977, Maureen Weston of Peterborough in Cambridgeshire reportedly stayed awake for 449 hours during a rocking chair marathon, a record recognised by Guinness at the time.
By 1997, Guinness World Records stopped accepting sleep deprivation attempts entirely, citing concerns about participant safety. The final listed record was held by Robert McDonald at 453 hours and forty minutes.
More recent attempts, such as Tony Wright’s self documented effort in 2007, were undertaken under the mistaken belief that Gardner’s record still stood. Guinness no longer certifies such feats.
A Delayed Reckoning
For decades, Gardner appeared to have suffered no lasting consequences. He returned to school. He lived a normal life. His name remained attached to an extraordinary teenage experiment, but little more.
Then, in 2017, Gardner spoke publicly about a development that complicated the narrative. He reported experiencing severe insomnia beginning around 2007, more than forty years after the experiment.
Gardner believed his teenage sleep deprivation might be responsible. Whether this connection is causal remains unclear, but it reopened ethical questions about the experiment and its legacy.
What is clear is that Gardner’s case remains unique. It was extensively documented, medically supervised, and conducted at a moment when sleep science was still finding its footing. Modern ethics boards would never approve such an experiment today.
What the Sleepless Boy Taught Us
Randy Gardner did not set out to change science. He wanted a good science fair project and perhaps a line in the record books. Instead, he became a reference point in the study of sleep, cited in textbooks and lectures for decades.
His experiment showed that the human brain is more adaptable than once believed, capable of fragmenting sleep in ways that preserve basic function. It also demonstrated the real cognitive and psychological costs of prolonged wakefulness.
Most of all, it revealed how much was unknown. Sleep, something every human does every day, remained mysterious even as a teenager stayed awake for nearly two weeks under observation.
Looking back, Gardner’s story feels rooted in a specific time. A moment when teenagers could conduct world famous experiments in their parents’ homes. When science, media, and curiosity collided without the safeguards we now take for granted.
“It’s just mind over matter,” Gardner said in 1964. More than sixty years on, the full cost of that mindset remains open to interpretation.
