Paul Kern reportedly never slept for an astonishing 40 years after a bullet struck his head.
Most people need roughly eight hours of sleep nightly, yet Kern allegedly spent four decades without a single full night’s rest.
After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife — a chain of events that helped trigger World War One — Kern enlisted with Hungary’s elite shock troops.
He could not have known how the war would alter his life forever.
Shock troops led attacks and faced greater danger than many other units.
In 1951, while serving as a shock trooper, Kern suffered a gunshot wound to the head.
Witnesses say the bullet struck his right temple and knocked him unconscious, but it did not exit his skull; it remained lodged inside.
Medics rushed Kern to Lemberg hospital, where physicians warned he would likely die if the bullet stayed put.
They found damage to the frontal lobe, as the “control panel” of personality and communication.
Although doctors briefly roused him, that was the last time Kern slept.
For the next 40 years Kern reportedly never slept.
That claim sounds extraordinary; the experimental record for continuous wakefulness sits at about 11 days, per Scientific American.
Reports say Kern also did not feel the urge to sleep, and his wakefulness seemed to produce no obvious physical decline.
Medical research links severe sleep loss to memory problems, concentration issues, mood shifts, accidents, weakened immunity, diabetes risk, high blood pressure, and heart disease.
Because a human going decades without sleep defies understanding, doctors questioned Kern’s account.
Some clinicians suggested he might have taken extremely brief, unrecognized naps during the day.
Others suspected he fabricated the story entirely.
Kern reportedly enjoyed a long life despite the mystery.
He is said to have died aged 71 in 1955, leaving researchers puzzled.
Even in death, Paul Kern remains a scientific mystery.