The longer I stayed awake, the more my brain went haywire

EVE SIMMONS reveals what happened when she bravely took part in the experiment

IT’S 2.05am and I’m staring hopelessly at a pair of old, crinkly feet. Of the 20 ‘memorable’ images flashing up on screen, it’s the only one my brain has registered.

I’m midway through a memory test designed to measure the capacity of my sleep-deprived brain.

I’ve now been awake for a solid 20 hours which means, thankfully, there’s just 55 minutes left of my experiment.

It’s at about this point that signs of a genetic vulnerability would begin to show.

If I were a carrier of the genetic variety that makes you 12 times more likely to get dementia, I could even experience psychiatric disturbances such as hallucinations or panic attacks.

Thankfully none of the above has set in… yet.

I’m no scientist, but intuition tells me I’m not performing well in these tests.

For one, I’m distracted by the constant itch of 18 pin-sized electrodes dotted over my crown, chin and forehead.

They are monitoring my brainwaves, and attached to long wires that are held in place with an oily glue which has formed matted clumps in my hair, making it stick up.

As a journalist previewing the University of East Anglia’s sleep experiment, I’m only staying awake until 3am, unlike the real-life participants kept awake for two nights on the trot.

I didn’t think this would be difficult. In fact, I jumped at the chance to spend a night wide awake for the sake of science.

But without the usual distractions that might keep me up that late – at a party, for instance – it was torture. When

I arrived at 5pm, I did the first series of tests. These were to be repeated later in the night when sleep deprivation kicked in.

Words flashed up on a screen, some of which were nonsense, and I had to pick out the ‘non-words’ using a keyboard. I was shown one sequence of pictures, followed by another, and asked to say whether, the second time round, I’d seen any of them before.

Another test involved balancing on a platform with my eyes closed – which is harder than it sounds. I’m then asked to hover my hand over a button without touching it. At 5pm, I barely wobbled. But now, nine hours later, my legs were trembling, swaying sideways.

‘Be careful with this one,’ Professor Lazar, who runs the experiment, warns. ‘At your level of sleep deprivation,

there’s a risk of sudden fall and bone breakages.’

As his first-ever participant, I’m not filled with confidence by Dr Lazar’s words.

The sleepiness set in at 10pm, thanks to the dimmed, artificial light and cool 18C temperature in my ‘bedroom’, designed to make me feel sleepy. I was advised to keep my distance from the bed, and the large, ornate armchair wasn’t as comfortable as it looked.

I passed the time watching things on Netflix, struggling to keep my eyes open.

At about midnight, I began to imagine I could hear a whirring noise which disappeared when Dr Lazar returned for my final round of tests – it seems I was desperate for some human contact.

When the tests are over, at 2.50am, it’s time to tuck me in.

I leap under the duvet while research assistants plug my dangling wires into a hand-held monitor. The device will transmit my brain activity on to Dr Lazar’s computer screen.

According to my brain scan, it took precisely three-and-a-half minutes for me to fall asleep.

‘This is very quick, suggesting you were very tired,’ Dr Lazar explains the next morning.

He also tells me that a third of my sleep was the intensive, deep kind. This level is above average and considered a sign of exhaustion.

A week later, I’m given the results of my cognitive tests.

At 7.30pm, I’d scored 96 per cent on the memory tests, with only three errors.

At 2am this rocketed four-fold – I made 12 mistakes.

I chose not to have the Alzheimer’s gene test prior to the experiment. I really didn’t want to know either way.

But taking part did make me realise why I enjoy nothing more than an early night.