Although you may get a second wind with the rising of the sun, the longer you stay up, the more your condition deteriorates. "By the second night, oh, my goodness, it's extremely dramatic—beyond double what it was the first night," says David Dinges, a sleep expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "You fall massively off the cliff."
You don't need to pull an all-nighter, work 24-hour shifts or hold down a couple of jobs to know that at some point you just have to crash. All through the animal kingdom, sleep ranks right up there with food, water and sexual intercourse for the survival of the species. Everybody does it, from fruit flies to Homo sapiens. Yet despite its clear necessity and lots of investigation, scientists still don't know precisely what sleep is for.