> 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.

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dijit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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.

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famouswaffles an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Fatal Familial Insomnia is an incredibly rare prion disease that causes widespread neurological destruction. It's not remotely a normal brain that has chosen not to sleep. It's such a highly non-trivial deviation of the brain that only a few thousand on the entire planet suffer from it. At this point, quite a lot of things have already gone wrong in your brain.

There is quite literally no prion disease that isn't fatal.

Sleep does a lot of very important things that we probably wouldn't live long without, but it really is unclear to what extent sleep is necessary for them. If we had enough knowledge, could we trigger all the things sleep does without invoking sleep itself ? Perhaps sleep is just a very convenient mechanism.

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sillysaurusx 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

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dijit 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Interesting that the scientific debate is settled, because you said so. Researchers who study prion diseases would probably be surprised to hear it.

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sillysaurusx 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

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dijit 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Here's what Claude has to say about our exchange here.. since you asked.

> You're using absence of evidence as evidence of absence — which is a weak foundation when the evidence is genuinely hard to capture. You can't ethically deprive humans of sleep to death in a lab, and FFI affects only a handful of families worldwide.

> On the prion disease specifically: researchers haven't dismissed the role of sleep deprivation they've actively attempted to treat the insomnia in FFI patients on the hypothesis that it contributes to decline. That's not how a field behaves when it considers something a settled, irrelevant symptom.

> More broadly, "no human has ever died from lack of sleep" is an extraordinarily strong claim. To support it you'd need to rule out sleep deprivation as a factor in every candidate case and have a complete understanding of the mechanism. We have neither. The honest position is "we don't know" — not confident assertion in either direction.

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chris_wot 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Provide some evidence to back up you assertions. Don't tell someone else to do it for you.

	▲	sylos 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Bro is asking claude. He's not gonna do anything. Probably an astroturf bot for claude

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hajile 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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".

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burnte 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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sillysaurusx 3 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	burnte 5 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I’m shocked by how careless everyone here is about their definitions, and their science. Sleep isn’t the same as HIV. I do not believe this analogy really confused you. No one is saying they're the same and you're well aware of that. As to the factual nature of the argument, I'll let you argue with Harvard Brain Institute, as I have no interest in this debate. https://brain.harvard.edu/hbi_news/why-severe-sleep-deprivat...
	▲	bulbar 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	nkmnz 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		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 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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

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refulgentis 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		This is little more than a fancy way of saying “Nu uh.” Such arguments are hardly convincing.

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ambicapter 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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.