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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

> 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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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 we've only identified a few dozen families in the entire planet that 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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