Hanging out in the TV lounge Photo:Chris Hildreth

I have seen the future, and it is heavily caffeinated. This warm fall night, the Wednesday after a stretched-out election, is looking like an endless evening for me--even as it's barely beginning for students.

At my fueling station, the Bryan Center's smoothie bar, I request the "Energy Booster." The cashier tells me, "A lot of people ask for the Energy Booster, but that's just a supplement." So I give her a fuller order, a smoothie decorously dubbed "Peachy Pineapple," which is advertised as containing some indecipherable minerals, an array of potent-sounding vitamins, and--topping the ingredients list--caffeine.

I am out to prove a theory--that Duke is inculcating its students into a lifestyle of sleep deprivation. All of us went through the experience of dorm revelry at odd hours, of a major study project propelling an all-nighter. Now, has the occasional sleep interruption become the expected sleep routine?

Sleeplessness is "a caricature of the expectations" of super-achieving students, says Larry Moneta, vice president for student affairs. They are programmed to be busy, he says, and sleep isn't an important item on their achievement agendas. A new book, Numbers, offers the finding that the average museum visitor spent ten seconds in front of a painting in 1987, and spent just three seconds a decade later. That statistic of a culture on the run speaks to this generation.

Theirs are lives without pause; they are hyperactive and hyper-linked. As high-school students, 80 percent of them, by current estimates, spent evenings and weekends in organized activities. In college, their date books show meetings extending through ten o'clock or eleven o'clock at night, or later. One freshman tells me about a review session for a math course at one o'clock in the morning. Last year's senior class included 334 students with double majors. According to registrar Bruce Cunningham, 418 students set to graduate this spring have declared second or third majors--though, when graduation comes around, he says, it's likely that some of those students won't fulfill their intentions.

Jim Clack, director of counseling and psychological services (CAPS), cites studies showing that, in the last dozen years, the number of sleep-deprived college students across the country has doubled. That's despite the phenomenon of "power napping," which, in the Duke context, has students catching up on their sleep in places like Perkins Library, the Bryan Center, and the East Campus-West Campus bus. There's no one-size-fits-all prescription for how much sleep a student will need, though most people seem to need between seven and nine hours. "Students arrive at Duke, and one really interesting thing happens," Clack says. "They start going to bed at two o'clock and three o'clock in the morning; they start to become sleep deprived right away."

They reach their sleepy states owing to familiar and not-so-familiar factors. Many of them never shared a bedroom at home, so they have a hard time dealing with the distractions of a noisy hall or even a roommate with different sleeping habits. These students have been raised to be good rules-followers, and finally they feel freed up from the rules-bound routine of high school. They're keen on plugging into a social network. Thanks to the Internet and the cell phone, that social network stretches across space and time; it is elastic and inexhaustible.

The pervasiveness of sleep deprivation across Duke is fairly recent, says history professor Peter Wood. Wood, who has taught at Duke thirty years, talks about an "epidemic" of sleeplessness. "It's in the category with binge drinking and bulimia. It's taken us a long time to recognize this, because, obviously, its effects aren't as public and dramatic," he says. "The funny thing about sleep deprivation is that you can actually go to class and keep your eyes open and take notes and even answer yes-or-no questions. But in terms of having a vigorous discussion, where you're responding impromptu to people's comments and observations, that becomes much tougher."

If you ask students--as I asked sixteen of them in a journalism seminar--late-night life is pretty tough, or pretty long. From this informal sleep survey, I learned that the average amount of sleep they had had the previous night was six hours. Several reported four hours. Most went to bed between two and three o'clock in the morning. Some were awake until 4:30 or later. What's the longest that they'd gone without sleep? The most extreme response was, "Five days, all in Lilly Library during exam week last spring, writing a thirty-page term paper and two eight-page papers, and studying for a three-hour exam." One student pointed to four sleepless days, "aided by Adderral." Another, close behind, answered, "Three days--big mistake."

It seems clear how these students stay awake. In the survey, all of them said they consume caffeine-laden drinks, mostly coffee and Diet Cokes--up to eight a day. For several weeks this fall, Alpine Bagels, a food franchise in the West Campus Union, displayed table tents promoting Red Bull, a super-caffeinated drink. The slogan: "Nobody ever wishes they'd slept more during college."