Featured Image Credit: YouTube/Guinness World Records
Topics: Guinness World Records
Callum Jones
You'd be lying if you say that you've never looked at a Guinness World Record and thought 'yep, I could beat that'.
Perhaps right now you are looking at the one achieved by Pete Czerwinski, who managed to scoff six Creme Eggs in just a minute.
While that one may sound beatable to some chocoholics, this other other record appears a lot harder.
In fact, the Guinness World Records actually stopped monitoring the record in 1997 due to the obvious dangers surrounding it.
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The record in question is the longest time to stay awake, which was most recently held by Robert McDonald, who went 453 hours 40 minutes (18 days 21 hours 40 minutes) without sleeping in 1986.
After that, Guinness World Records stopped monitoring the record due to 'the inherent dangers associated with sleep deprivation'.
However, on their website, they did add that no one has beaten McDonald's record since, which is probably for the best that right now, no one is trying to break the dangerous record.
One of the main reasons for the Guinness World Records to stop motoring the record was thanks to two lads in the US, who came up with a rather wild idea for their school science project back in 1963.
For most people's wild science projects at school, you think about some interactive volcano made out of crafting materials, but Randy Gardner and his pal Bruce McAllister went the extra mile.
After struggling to come up with any good ideas, the pair decided they wanted to break the world record for the longest time spent awake.
At the time, the record was held by a DJ in Honolulu, who'd managed to stay up for close to 11 days straight.
The idea of the project was quite simple - to see how the brain would react when it is fully sleep deprived.
And it was a project Gardner and McAllister grew to regret in the years after.
"We were idiots, you know young idiots," McAllister told the BBC in 2018.
A coin was flipped and it was Gardner who would embark on the challenge of staying awake for as long as possible.
"I stayed awake with him to monitor him… and after three night of sleeplessness myself I woke up tipped against the wall writing notes on the wall itself," McAllister explained.
After enlisting sleep researcher William Dement from Stanford University, Gardner beat the record.
As a result of the extended time awake, Gardner reportedly experienced moodiness, concentration issues and short-term memory loss, as well as paranoia and hallucinations.
Brain scans also later found Gardner's brain had been "catnapping the entire time… parts of it would be asleep parts of it would be awake."
With the evident toll it took, perhaps best that the record was scrapped. Plenty of others to try and beat, eh.