Frederick August Moss’s 60 Hours Without Sleep Experiment

In the summer of 1925, Frederick August Moss set out to demonstrate that people could simply do without sleep. With a stopwatch, seven willing students and a distinctly 1920s belief in the value of productivity, he conducted one of the earliest sleep-deprivation experiments to capture public attention. The trial ran for only 60 hours, yet its cultural after-effects would endure for a century.

When staying awake became a scientific spectacle

Washington, summer 1925: seven George Washington University students entered a laboratory in the Foggy Bottom district knowing they would not sleep in a bed for the next two and a half days. Their psychology lecturer, Frederick August Moss, argued that sleep was largely learned behaviour and, more troublingly, an enormous drain on time.

To Moss, every hour spent asleep was an hour unavailable for work or invention. In an America being transformed by industrialisation, assembly lines, speed and illuminated city streets, the proposition seemed ambitious rather than absurd.

The experiment’s mission was stark: 60 hours awake, no naps, while their minds and reflexes were measured like machines on a factory floor.

His aim was to observe changes in concentration, memory and reasoning as exhaustion took hold. Moss set them a sequence of tasks that sounded straightforward on paper but became punishing after an entire night without rest: reaction-time tests, memory drills, logic exercises and precise driving challenges, including parking a car without touching the kerb.

The students relied on every available form of stimulation to remain awake. They debated ideas, drove through the Virginia countryside and arranged spontaneous baseball games. The event was equal parts scientific study, endurance contest and weekend challenge.

The women who turned a stunt into a career

One participant was Thelma Hunt, a 22-year-old psychology student. Another was her fellow student, Louise Omwake. Psychology, like much of science at the time, was dominated by men, but both women would later make significant contributions to the discipline.

Hunt went on to become an influential figure in educational psychology and assessment. Omwake became head of the psychology department at George Washington University. Taking part in Moss’s somewhat reckless study was not the defining event of either woman’s life, but it offered an early indication of their readiness to challenge limits.

What began as a weekend without sleep helped propel two young women towards long careers shaping how Americans understood learning and behaviour.

How 60 hours without sleep affected their brains

Moss recorded detailed observations throughout the experiment. As the hours accumulated, the students’ hands became shakier, their reactions grew slower and their memories faltered. Parking a car accurately began to demand intense focus. They remained upright and able to converse, but the sharper elements of their mental abilities became progressively dulled.

Moss interpreted the lack of an obvious physical breakdown as evidence that the body could be conditioned to operate on very little sleep. In his view, if people could endure 60 hours awake, they might also cope with routinely short nights through sufficient practice and determination.

Many other scientists disagreed. That same summer, Chicago researchers published results pointing towards the opposite conclusion. They found no harmless way to reduce sleep without damaging health. Their findings supported an emerging view that the brain requires rest to preserve its essential functions.

The 1925 standoff was clear: one camp framed sleep as a negotiable habit, the other as a non‑negotiable biological need.

From all-night endurance tests to brain waves

By the middle of the 20th century, Chicago laboratories were producing evidence with equipment Moss could scarcely have imagined. Nathaniel Kleitman, Eugene Aserinsky and their colleagues began monitoring brain waves and eye movements during sleep. Their research identified separate sleep stages, including REM sleep, in which eyes move rapidly behind closed eyelids while the brain remains highly active.

This research overturned the earlier idea that sleep was merely a period of shutdown. Instead, scientists found that the brain was sorting memories, restoring neural connections and rebalancing chemicals. The night came to resemble planned maintenance rather than idle time.

• Non-REM sleep: quieter, deeper stages associated with physical recovery and growth.
• REM sleep: vivid dreams, memory consolidation and emotional processing.
• Repeated cycles: lasting around 90 minutes each and recurring throughout the night.

Set against these discoveries, Moss’s belief that sleep could be “trained away” began to seem seriously outdated.

From heroic sleeplessness to a recognised health risk

A hundred years on, the 1925 study reflects the values of its age. America celebrated the indefatigable worker. Thomas Edison claimed to sleep only a few hours each night and portrayed extended rest as laziness. Moss’s experiment fitted comfortably into that worldview: if sleep were optional, more time could be devoted to labour, education and invention.

Contemporary research offers a very different account. Persistently insufficient sleep interferes with hormones that control appetite and blood sugar. It raises blood pressure, weakens immune responses and is linked with increased risks of depression, anxiety and cardiovascular disease. Severe sleep deprivation can impair driving in ways comparable to alcohol.

The supposed shortcut to productivity - shaving hours off the night - often leads straight to slower thinking, poorer decisions and higher medical bills.

Large epidemiological studies following millions of people have revealed another complication: individuals who habitually sleep far longer than average, substantially beyond eight or nine hours, also tend to have higher rates of illness and death. Sleep duration and health frequently follow a U-shaped pattern, with poorer outcomes at both the very short and very long extremes than in the middle.

Sleeping for long periods is unlikely to cause illness by itself. More often, it may indicate underlying problems, including sleep apnoea, metabolic disorders or chronic inflammatory conditions, which lead people to remain in bed longer.

What science now says about good sleep

Researchers today are less interested in extraordinary wakefulness than in regularity. The brain follows an internal clock shaped by exposure to light and daily routine. Keeping that clock consistent allows hormones, digestion and mood to follow a more stable rhythm.

Often described as “sleep hygiene”, these practices are now standard guidance in clinics and GP surgeries. They stand in marked contrast to the 1925 approach, which viewed sleep as an obstacle to overcome rather than a process deserving respect and support.

What being awake for 60 hours can really feel like

For anybody considering recreating the Moss experiment in an era of energy drinks and streaming platforms, the likely sequence is reasonably predictable. After about 16 to 18 hours without sleep, attention starts to deteriorate. Reactions take longer, while work requiring judgement or creativity feels more demanding.

By roughly 24 to 36 hours, moods become less stable. People may experience irritability, spikes of anxiety and reduced control over emotional responses. Microsleeps - involuntary lapses into sleep lasting a second or two - can begin to occur, even while the eyes are open. This is one reason why extreme fatigue on motorways is so hazardous.

Past 48 hours, concentration, memory and coordination often break down to a point that would be unacceptable in most safety‑critical jobs.

Hallucinations may develop, and even simple activities can become bewildering. Many people feel an overwhelming urge not merely to lie down, but to withdraw completely from sensory stimulation. However determined and closely supervised they were, Moss’s students would almost certainly have encountered at least some of these effects.

Key concepts behind sleep and sleeplessness

Several technical concepts clarify what Moss was actually disrupting. One is “sleep pressure”: the accumulation of adenosine and other brain chemicals that produces an increasingly powerful need for sleep the longer someone remains awake. Caffeine partly works by blocking adenosine receptors, temporarily disguising that pressure without eliminating it.

Another is “circadian rhythm”, the approximately 24-hour internal cycle governed by light and darkness. It influences when we feel alert or sleepy, when body temperature reaches its highest point and when hormones such as melatonin increase. Moss’s experiment forced students to resist both pressures simultaneously: mounting sleep pressure and a body clock signalling that nighttime was for rest.

Considering these two forces together also shows why rapid solutions rarely succeed. One lengthy lie-in cannot completely compensate for a week of 5 a.m. alarms and late-night emails. Brain and body benefit from consistent routines, rather than occasional days of recovery.

Viewed this way, the 1925 weekend in Foggy Bottom was not proof that people can abandon sleep. It was more like an early stress test of a system that was poorly understood at the time. The students made it through 60 hours. Once scientific knowledge advanced, the idea that sleep is optional did not survive nearly as well.