It’s said that we need to sleep because a waste product called adenosine builds up in our brains while we’re awake. When we sleep the brain does this thing where adenosine gets flushed out by csf. Adenosine also makes us feel sleepy and can cause hallucinations if we’ve been awake for days. I looked up adenosine and it’s a cns depressant, like a sleeping pill is. I remember reading an old news article where a man from China stayed awake for 11 days to watch football and he died. If the adenosine levels in his brain were so high to kill him why didn’t he just pass out and sleep before he died if it’s a cns depressant?
After reading the comments, I’m also wondering how he stayed up for so long.
I speculating it could be some sort of drugs keeping him up.
China is a society that, like many Asian countries, have a very negative view of drugs due to British colonialism, so its possible that there was drug use involved and it was covered up to avoid losing “face” to the family.