For an astonishing 11 days and 25 minutes, 17-year-old Randy Gardner didn't sleep for a high school science fair project in California in 1963, setting the world record for the longest someone has stayed awake. Other people have reportedly broken this record — Robert McDonald went 18 days and nearly 22 hours without sleeping in 1986 — but none were monitored as closely or by a doctor as Gardner was.
Guinness World Records doesn't cover this feat anymore; in 1997 they stopped accepting new submissions due to "inherent dangers associated with sleep deprivation."
