The 4 hour group scored 16 times as many. The 6 hour group scored 11 times as many errors. Subjects allowed 8 hours in bed, which seems ample, still scored 3-4 times as many errors on the tests after 14 days than did the unrestricted subjects. In unspecified testing, subjects were allowed either unrestricted sleep, or 8 hours of time in bed per day, or 6, or 4, or zero. The Pentagon report also describes results of a psychomotor vigilance test, which is where you react to a visual stimulus on a computer screen by pushing a button or doing some such thing. The importance of this to potential combat situations is clear, and from that perspective, it's entirely plausible (in fact, almost certain) that something like the Russian Sleep Experiment would have been tried. Caffeine, for example, was found to confer resistance to slowed performance on tests of reaction speed and mental acuity, even after three straight days (72 hours) of high intensity training with no sleep but other skills like marksmanship declined almost as much as for those who took no caffeine. It said that 86 different drugs have been tried (oh where would human experimentation be without the military?) with "a small number" showing promise. In 2008, the Pentagon released an independent study commissioned by their Office of Defense Research and Engineering, titled simply Human Performance. This allowed the Somalis to be ready to fight at any time and to remain active well past the time the Americans became fatigued. During the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993, American special forces battled Somali fighters who chewed khat, a plant that is a powerful stimulant. Most world powers would love to have supersoldiers who can be active 24/7 without a vulnerable period of daily sleep, so most of them have invested in experimentation. But fortunately we are saved by the patron saint of unethical human experimentation: the military. We're hampered by the fact that experiments like this are unethical and would be hard to conduct today, so there isn't a lot of research out there. What would happen to people if they were forcibly deprived of sleep for that long? Would they go crazy, attacking and eating each other like zombies? Let's open our books of medical research and see how close to the truth the Russian Sleep Experiment might be. The interesting part comes when we ask whether the story is plausible. Sometimes a creepy story is just a creepy story.īut that's not the interesting part. Despite this, there are always conspiracy minded people insistent that the story is true, or was leaked from some secret government lab but no matter how strong their desire that this be the case, nobody has ever turned up anything like that. It's a widely published fact that the Russian Sleep Experiment was a piece of fiction, posted anonymously in 2010 to Creepy Pasta, a website that showcases scary fictional tales. Those questioning whether or not this was a true story didn't have to do very much work. It quickly became apparent that what they were digesting was their own flesh that they had ripped off and eaten over the course of days. The digestive tract of all four could be seen to be working, digesting food. All the blood vessels and organs remained intact, they had just been taken out and laid on the floor, fanning out around the eviscerated but still living bodies of the subjects. While the heart, lungs and diaphragm remained in place, the skin and most of the muscles attached to the ribs had been ripped off, exposing the lungs through the ribcage. The abdominal organs below the ribcage of all four test subjects had been removed. The destruction of flesh and exposed bone on their finger tips indicated that the wounds were inflicted by hand. All four 'surviving' test subjects also had large portions of muscle and skin torn away from their bodies. There were chunks of meat from the dead test subject's thighs and chest stuffed into the drain in the center of the chamber. ![]() The food rations past day 5 had not been so much as touched. Might something as grotesque as the Russian Sleep Experiment truly be within the scope of human possibility?Īccording to the story, the researchers cleared the gas from the chamber and entered, finding one of the five men dead: Today we're going to look into the story, and into the facts of sleep deprivation. After fifteen days the researchers entered the chamber, and found the men - sleep deprived beyond any human experience - had committed horrors that could scarcely be conceived. ![]() The subjects were five political prisoners, placed into a sealed chamber and exposed to a gas which prevented them from sleeping. It has become a permanent fixture in the fabric of Internet lore: the Russian Sleep Experiment, an account of a horrific experiment said to have been conducted in the Soviet Union in the late 1940s.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |