alt Hacker News> 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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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.
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.