Randy Gardner's 11 Days Awake, and the Pinball Game That Hid the Symptoms

On the tenth day of his attempt, a 17-year-old from San Diego sat down at a pinball machine opposite William Dement, the Stanford sleep researcher who had come to watch. Randy Gardner played well and, in Dement’s telling, won. For sixty years that afternoon has been offered as proof that going without sleep does less damage than people fear.

Randy Gardner stayed awake for 264.4 hours (11 days and 25 minutes) between December 1963 and January 1964, passing Tom Rounds’ earlier 260-hour mark. The Navy doctor monitoring him, Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross, recorded moodiness, memory lapses, hallucinations and paranoia as the days passed, and on day 11 Gardner abandoned a simple counting task at 65, saying he could not remember what he was doing. After sleeping 14 hours and 46 minutes he was reported to be back to normal, with no obvious lasting harm.

Who was watching

Gardner’s classmates Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano Jr. kept a log. Dement attended. Ross had been called in by Gardner’s parents. LIFE ran a story in 1964, and at a press conference at the end Gardner said, “I wanted to prove that bad things didn’t happen if you went without sleep.”

Dement’s pinball anecdote and Ross’s observations do not agree. The anecdote is vivid and fits in a sentence; Ross’s record runs to eleven days of small, grim entries. A one-liner travels further than a log.

The Navy log, day by day

Coren’s summary of Ross’s observations in Psychiatric Times, drawing on Ross (1965), runs like this:

• Day 2: trouble focusing his eyes and recognizing objects by touch.
• Day 3: moodiness and trouble with tongue twisters.
• Day 4: irritability, memory lapses, a first hallucination in which a street sign looked like a person, then a delusion that he was a famous football player.
• Day 6: slowed speech and difficulty naming everyday objects.
• Day 9: fragmented thinking and unfinished sentences.
• Day 10: paranoia about a radio host he believed was trying to make him look foolish.
• Day 11: flat expression, slurred speech without intonation, and a serial-sevens test (count down from 100 by sevens) stopped at 65 after five subtractions.

Against that list the pinball game looks different. A well-practiced, fast, rewarding task can survive when the abilities beneath it are failing. The failures in Ross’s record come on tasks that need sustained attention and working memory, which is what serial sevens is built to probe. The clinical paper on the case is Gulevich, Dement and Johnson (1966, Archives of General Psychiatry).

The other famous wakeathon

Peter Tripp, a disc jockey at New York’s WMGM, stayed awake about 200 hours in 1959 (Wikipedia gives 201) in a glass booth in Times Square, raising money for the March of Dimes. By the fourth day he could not finish simple attention tests. He took spots on a table for insects and complained of spiders and cobwebs on his shoes. On the last day he mistook a neurologist’s dark suit for an undertaker’s, decided he was about to be buried alive, and ran half-dressed down a hallway with doctors behind him. For the final 66 hours, observers gave him drugs to keep him awake.

Tripp’s story drifted into the scandal pages, and Gardner’s into a footnote people half-remember as “he was fine.” In 2017 Gardner told WBUR that serious insomnia began around 2007 and that he blamed the study. Causation is unprovable from here, and it breaks the tidy ending in which nothing happened.

Why the pinball game still gets quoted

It has the shape of nearly every claim that someone is fine on four hours: one confident performance on a favorite task. Genuine natural short sleepers do exist, but they are rare and genetically distinct. For everyone else, the evidence worth asking about is what went wrong on the dull tasks, and how soon microsleeps began to appear.