Scientists Identify New Mutation That Enables Three-Hour Sleepers
- Reference: 0177355375
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/05/06/234231/scientists-identify-new-mutation-that-enables-three-hour-sleepers
- Source link:
When University of California, San Francisco scientists introduced the mutation to mice, the animals required 31 minutes less sleep daily. The modified enzyme showed highest activity in brain synapses, suggesting it might support brain homeostasis -- the resetting process thought to occur during sleep.
"These people, all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can," said Ying-Hui Fu, the study's co-author. This marks the fifth mutation across four genes identified in naturally short sleepers. Fu's team hopes these discoveries could eventually lead to treatments for sleep disorders by revealing how sleep regulation functions in humans.
[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01402-7
Perform at higher level (Score:5, Insightful)
"they can just perform at a higher level than we can"
Maybe, but for how long? There are few free lunches in biology, most things come at a price. I wouldn't be surprised if on average these people die younger and/or get more health issues as they age than the norm.
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Aren't all Presidents? They probably have one of the most stressful jobs in the world. Just look at how Obama aged in 8 years. You can't tell me they are always getting a good, proper amount of sleep every night without interruption.
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> Aren't all Presidents? They probably have one of the most stressful jobs in the world. Just look at how Obama aged in 8 years. You can't tell me they are always getting a good, proper amount of sleep every night without interruption.
Lots of people are, and I believe that you can learn/condition to do so. I spent most of my adult life in the military and law enforcement. Sleeping only a couple of hours is the norm and you get used to it. Is it healthy? I doubt it, but it is doable. I don't think it's a mutation as much as an adaptation to the situation.
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> "they can just perform at a higher level than we can"
> Maybe, but for how long? There are few free lunches in biology, most things come at a price. I wouldn't be surprised if on average these people die younger and/or get more health issues as they age than the norm.
I don't think it works like that in matters of sleep, or else we'd see that the people who need 12 hours of sleep a night would measurably live longer.
I'm one of the 5 hour a night sleepers. Standard practice for me is hit the hay at 2, then get up around 7. I don't use an alarm - I just wake up refreshed.
The exceptions are since I work problems in my sleep, if I figure something out in a dream, I wake right up, and the night is over for me.
Wife even jokes about it. I bolt up, she says "solved another
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"or else we'd see that the people who need 12 hours of sleep a night would measurably live longer."
Not necessarily. The law of diminishing returns kicks in with most things.
"I'm one of the 5 hour a night sleepers"
5 hours is 60% longer than 3 hours which probably makes a big difference.
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> "or else we'd see that the people who need 12 hours of sleep a night would measurably live longer."
> Not necessarily. The law of diminishing returns kicks in with most things.
> "I'm one of the 5 hour a night sleepers"
> 5 hours is 60% longer than 3 hours which probably makes a big difference.
It's a spectrum. I do know that if I sleep more than 5 hours, I feel like crap. I tried it once, after many lectures about how I was killing myself as an insomniac. Not again, I'll just go to bed when tired, and wake up when no longer tired. Insomniacs feel sleep deprived, I wake up ready to take on the day.
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So I've known people that can do this and at the very least they can make it into their 40s like this without any noticeable issues. It really is just a free four or five hours a day to them.
After 40 I'm not sure I lost track of them but the thing is once you hit 40 years old our corporate system is done with you. So honestly who cares?
What else does it switch on? (Score:2)
What else does this 'switch on'? I ask because Margaret Thatcher famously only slept for 4 hours a night. Politics aside, she was a tremendously successful person, but very publicly and very obviously went a bit crazy towards the end.
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She ended up with dementia and couldn't even remember that her husband had died. Lack of sleep of a long period of time a possible contributor to the condition?
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I did just read an article that mentions sleep is a way for the brain to shed waste proteins that build up in our brains over time. These same proteins have been linked to alzheimer's. It could be a link or it could be just happenstance.
Still, all the research done world wide on this is encouraging.
shirty job descriptions will soon require this as (Score:4, Interesting)
shirty job descriptions will soon require this as part of your 150 hour work week.
Interesting! (Score:2)
I've been telling people for years that I'm a 5 hour/night sleeper at most. Even then my brain works on problems. Also, I feel no ill effects from the shifts between DST and Standard time. Go to sleep when I'm tired, and wake up refreshed.
I've had plenty of people claiming I'm going to die because anything less than 8 is killing yourself. "Humans have to have at least 8 hours of sleep every night."
So it Ain't just me.
Re: Interesting! (Score:5, Interesting)
The eight hours thing is comparatively recent anyway. In centuries past it was the norm to go to bed much earlier than we do now, wake up around midnight for a couple of hours then go back to sleep until the sun came up. This "bi-phasic" sleep pattern became less common during the industrial age, when workers needed to get as much sleep as possible in a shorter time to free up more time for work.
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That's interesting, a lot of other mammals are crepsecular with two active periods per day with a napping siesta in the middle. We may well be wired a bit more for that.
Re: Interesting! (Score:2)
I myself wondered if it explained why older people often get up during the night. It's not necessarily that they need to pee; they've just reverted to a more natural sleeping pattern.
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Do you mean retired people or just old people in general? Retirees don't have such a strict schedule to adhere to. I know if I didn't have to care about a work schedule, I would sleep, eat, whatever when it suited me instead of what fit my schedule.
I'm sure you are aware that hundreds of years ago, people went to bed earlier (no light, oil to burn ain't cheap) but did often times get up in the middle of the night for a period of time and then back to bed. I don't know if everyone did this or just some peopl
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> The eight hours thing is comparatively recent anyway. In centuries past it was the norm to go to bed much earlier than we do now, wake up around midnight for a couple of hours then go back to sleep until the sun came up. This "bi-phasic" sleep pattern became less common during the industrial age, when workers needed to get as much sleep as possible in a shorter time to free up more time for work.
Don't people in South America still do something like that? the noon siesta?
Re: Interesting! (Score:2)
Not just South America, Spain too. But no, siesta happens during the day and is more about resting while it's too hot to work. What I was referring to is people breaking up their nightly sleep into two parts.
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Nope, definitely not just you. I get by just fine on around 5hrs per night as well and have done so for as long as I can remember, and there are plenty of other documented examples of people with this kind of wake/sleep cycle, including a few already mentioned in this discussion. I can't make myself sleep much more than that no matter how much I try unless I'm really ill, in which case I'll often essentially just shutdown until my body has sorted itself out.
The "at least 8 hours a night sleep" thing mi
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> So, now we have a new "mutation" that presumably somehow influences that complex balance of chemicals and results in requiring less sleep (in mice). Personally, I'd say it's more like a different combination of a vast number of potential biological tuning parameters, because like that bell curve no creature is ever going to be "pure" and we're all mutants. Babylon 5 even did a story on this falacy taken to its logical conclusion, and it did not end well for the [1]Ikarrans [fandom.com]...
+5 for working a Babylon 5 relation into the mix!
[1] https://babylon5.fandom.com/wiki/Ikarran
They tested it on mice (Score:2)
But mice are normally nocturnal anyway...
Study published in 2018 (Score:3, Informative)
In 2009, UC San Francisco neurology professor Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, discovered a mutation in the gene DEC2 in a family of natural short sleepers – people who go to bed at a normal time (11 p.m. to midnight) but wake up naturally at 5 in the morning. “These are not people who’ve trained themselves to wake up early. They’re born this way,” says Fu.
A new study in mice by Fu’s lab – published in PNAS on March 12, 2018 – reveals how the DEC2 mutation seen in human short-sleepers may allow them to survive and thrive on just a few hours of sleep.
[1]https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018... [ucsf.edu]
[1] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover-how-gene-mutation-reduces-need-sleep
Genetic engineering time (Score:2)
If there are no deleterious effects, this would be a prime target for germline genetic engineering. Requiring less sleep gives you more time to be awake and do things with your life. In a world of ubiquitous artificial lighting, there's no downside.
Be careful what you wish for... (Score:2)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] : genetic mods lead to a "sleepless" class of super-achievers, who start to question their responsibilities to the "sleepers", shenanigans ensue...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beggars_in_Spain
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Twas a silly story. I'd forgotten the author and the title.
We already have these people among us - those who need a fraction of the sleep that the average person does. The short-sleepers have failed to dominate the world and oppress the rest of us, so I'm not really afraid of their mutation causing issues if we artificially spread it around to the benefit of more people.
Even if all you do with it is sit on the couch watching television... it's extra hours every day of your life with potential to do someth
Did they map out Martha Stewart's genome? (Score:2)
I'm not a "fan" per say, but I read an article once about her and she only slept three ours at a time, but was ultra productive. As someone that struggles with productivity/focus and can't do very well with less than 6 hours of sleep, I was curious as to her secret. I guess, now we know.
Nothing to cure here. Move along. (Score:5, Insightful)
As a society we have the tendency to measure everyone with the same scale. You sleep weird hours? Buzzer! Wrong! You sleep shorter hours? Buzzer! Wrong! Perhaps finding these genes will make some doctors realise that sometimes the weird way in which we function is not a disease at all. It's just the way we are.
Nothing to cure here. Move along.
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Perhaps finding these genes will make some doctors realise that sometimes the weird way in which we function is not a disease at all. It's just the way we are.
Sort of like people who aren't straight or gay. There's a wide spectrum of sexual identification. It's not a disease. It's just who they are.
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Being different does not mean you get out of having to conform if you want to belong to a society. Just because someone only needs to sleep 4 hours a night does mean everyone in the neighborhood should be just ok with them turning on a bunch of bright lights and running a lawn mower at 11:30PM.
Generalize that as you like
Re:Nothing to cure here. Move along. (Score:4, Insightful)
What does your comment have to do with someone's sexual orientation? Your comment is just about common courtesy.
Your comment is more like the punishment left handed people, such as Oppenheimer, received for centuries because they were different. They didn't conform so they were punished even though they had no control over which was their dominant hand.
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Translation: Hurry up and make being gay illegal or else I might accidentally suck a dick.
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> Perhaps finding these genes will make some doctors realise that sometimes the weird way in which we function is not a disease at all. It's just the way we are.
I'm one of the short sleepers. 5 hours is max for me. Any more than that, and I'm groggy most of the day.
> Sort of like people who aren't straight or gay. There's a wide spectrum of sexual identification. It's not a disease. It's just who they are.
I've said for decades before it was figured out. People don't choose who they are attracted to. They are just attracted to what they are attracted to.
It can get pretty specific. I'm attracted to tall slender women with long hair and legs, with Nordic typical faces. I know this because of the way my body reacts.
And if I might add to the mix, I think the body tells us. I have a very sensitive sense o
Nothing to bullshit anymore. Grow up. (Score:1)
> As a society we have the tendency to measure everyone with the same scale. You sleep weird hours? Buzzer! Wrong! You sleep shorter hours? Buzzer! Wrong! Perhaps finding these genes will make some doctors realise that sometimes the weird way in which we function is not a disease at all. It's just the way we are.
> Nothing to cure here. Move along.
You might be right. But if you are not, the evidence will be obvious. Especially at the medical level where abnormal defines problems far greater than “feelings”.
If you think we’re going to devolve this debate into some kind of “acceptance” argument, fat acceptance hasn’t done a fucking thing FOR obesity.
Re: Nothing to bullshit anymore. Grow up. (Score:2)
Don't twist my words, please, and no - I wasn't hoping for that kind of a debate.
I was simply trying to say that the world is not all 0 or 1, and some things that we may see as abnormal are actually healthy if evaluated in the context of a particular individual.
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Even that's wrong. Just about everything is a matter of trade-offs. Some we can control, some we can't, some we can, but really shouldn't as the cost is too high.
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I think they mean they want to help people for whom sleep is a problem, and knowing how people who can get by with a few hours a night do it may help them.
Or it may become a therapy you pretty much need to get to compete with everyone else doing 2 full time jobs.
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> As a society we have the tendency to measure everyone with the same scale. You sleep weird hours? Buzzer! Wrong! You sleep shorter hours? Buzzer! Wrong! Perhaps finding these genes will make some doctors realise that sometimes the weird way in which we function is not a disease at all. It's just the way we are.
> Nothing to cure here. Move along.
I'm a short sleeper. I use that to my advantage. It is an advantage, it's like having better than 20/20 vision, or a higher than average intelligence.
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You're not wrong but understanding the mechanisms better still can yield potential targets for people that might have legitimate medical problems. E.g. off the top of my head, if a person with chronic pain is unable to get quality sleep to the level they need, then understanding these processes could provide a drug to make sure what sleep they do manage to get is more productive for them. Of course, you're correct that the more lucrative market may be silicon valley CEO chowderheads that want to sleep les
So the problem I see (Score:3)
Is that if you've got somebody who can sleep 3 hours a day and be perfectly healthy that person gets an extra five productive working hours a day and suddenly we're all expected to work an extra 5 hours a day.
We take these borderline superhuman freaks of nature with literal genetic mutations and then we act like that's the norm and anyone who can't do that has something wrong with them and they're lazy and stupid and they just need to work harder.
The bar is always set to the highest level. For us an