9 ms·

A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep? (2014)

104 points by lelf 7y ago

FailMore 7y ago
I have this 0_o
MRD85 7y ago
The people with this gene might sleep less but it doesn't really show what the long term health effects on the individuals are. 2 extra hours per day for life but dying 5 years earlier in your 80s might actually be a decent trade.
- farresito 7y ago
  I recall reading an AMA on Reddit (take that with a grain of salt) about a very short sleeper and he mentioned that he slept very deeply. I wonder if short sleepers sleep less hours but need to do so more profoundly and it just so happens that from an evolutionary perspective it's negative (for obvious reasons).
  - bigDICK 7y ago
    The body needs both NREM and REM sleep. REM happens later in the cycle.
  - remarkEon 7y ago
    This is an interesting thought. Perhaps our evolutionary ancestors who evolved in high latitude areas developed this trait given that those areas see much more sunlight (and thus longer days) in the summers. Conversely, I’m left wondering if their sleep patterns differ by season. I.e. they need less sleep in the summer, and dramatically more in the winter.
    - sethammons 7y ago
      I recently moved north. Without blackout curtains, I'm getting less sleep in summer and am much more sleepy in winter.
      - remarkEon 7y ago
        Yeah, I live in Seattle and have spent time in Alaska. I'm noticeably more productive in the summers. So much so that I've started planning sprints on projects around them.
  - carlmr 7y ago
    It may just be that for much of our history we couldn't do anything meaningful at night, so being up at night was mostly a waste of energy.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    Interesting thought! My wife sleeps much lighter and much longer compared to me. I sleep pretty hard, and sans alarms, tend around 7hrs sleep or less. She sleeps light, and will go 9+ hrs without an alarm or kids waking her up.
    - rubicon33 7y ago
      How does one know whether they are a "light" or "heavy" sleeper? Is it your propensity to be awoken by external stimuli that governs that label? How else would one know?
      - sethammons 7y ago
        Pretty much, yeah. Stuff wakes her up that I sleep right through
est31 7y ago
> Fu, a geneticist, analyzed their DNA and found one particular mutation in a gene known to regulate circadian rhythms that seemed to separate them from their sleep-deprived counterparts. She then inserted that mutation into mice genomes.The effect was clear: the animals with the mutation not only began to sleep less than their counterparts but continued functioning well even after six hours of sleep deprivation (a long time for a mouse). Those without the mutation showed the usual signs of deprivation. This is pretty cool as it means that at least some aspects of sleep deprivation are caused by dedicated circuitry. It's basically like pain, your body is doing it to yourself.
findthewords 7y ago
The pertinent gene in this article seems to be missing. I've gathered a text file with interesting genes from random science articles. If/when full genome testing (emphasis on full) becomes affordable, I can hopefully CTRL+F (search) my personal source code whenever and check which variants I have.
- rolleiflex 7y ago
  This is your lucky day, half of what you want (Ctrl+F) is already there in the form of Promethease (https://promethease.com https://promethease.com), and the other half, the data you stick into Promethease (full-genome sequencing), is about to drop below the $1000 barrier this year or the next.
busymom0 7y ago
As someone who used to be able to get away with 6 hours of sleep when I was young but now can't operate properly without 8 hours of sleep, does this mean my gene is somehow changing as I get older?
- farresito 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "get away", but the people we are talking about in this article legitimately can't sleep more than 6 hours. They naturally wake up after that just like you do after 8 or 9.
  - MPSimmons 7y ago
    I often wake up naturally at 6 hours. I'm just used to getting it, I think. There have been a few rare occasions, though, particularly after continued strenuous activity, that I've slept for 12. Normally, though, 8 hours is way too much for me. Since there's almost no chance I have this gene, I'm probably just shortchanging myself.
    - sethammons 7y ago
      I'm in nearly the same bucket as you.
- randallsquared 7y ago
  It’s the opposite for me. I typically wake after 5-6 hours, usually before an alarm if I set one. Whe I was young (until about 35 or so) I needed 8-9 hours every night to avoid grogginess. I do still sleep 8-9 hours on occasion.
fapjacks 7y ago
It's sort of a long-running joke in my family that the males only need about 6 hours of sleep. I wake up naturally after about six hours, feeling refreshed, if I've had an otherwise uneventful day. However I'm also sort of a lifelong night owl -- "sort of" because I have weird sleep patterns with a bias tending toward nocturnal, which I call the 26-hour day, since it sorta shifts up a couple hours every day -- but my dad and my brother both are otherwise pretty normal and have always been the same way, needing less sleep. Another interesting tidbit: I come from a long line of farmers -- perhaps a bit of a tautology -- and the males among my ancestors were supposedly renowned for never needing an alarm clock. This is something which is true for the males in my immediate family to this day. Of course, I set an alarm if I need to, but I often wake up before it goes off. I've just recently paid for long-read WGS from Full Genomes, so I'm excited to look into this!
- bigDICK 7y ago
  Without knowing you my question is how can we know that you won't benefit from 8 hours? The research suggests 8 hours is optimal. It also suggests that people who are sleep deprived have a new baseline and may not be aware that they once felt better and could again feel better with a lifestyle modification. As to not needing the alarm clock, I experience that as well. I would think that is actually quite common with training.
iandanforth 7y ago
Here's a follow up paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/
watertom 7y ago
Hmmm, I sleep on average 0-2 hours per day. I've been like this since the day I was born. I nearly destroyed my family because as a newborn I only slept 1 to 2 hours per day. I've gone as long 11 days without sleep. At least once per week I go 48 hours without sleeping. I once did a trade show setup it was a huge booth with a ton of computers we worked round the clock for 6 days. Everyone else worked in shifts, I stayed the entire 6 days working, i didn't sleep for 3 more days, and then I only got 3 hours sleep. Then went another 5 days without sleeping. The people I worked with always assumed that I was taking cat naps, or sleeping and not knowing it, but that during that show setup everyone realized that I actually don't' sleep, because there was someone with me at all times and I just kept working. I don't get sleepy, I don't get tired, I'm just awake, and my performance isn't diminished. The only time I sleep is if I'm really sick. I had a bad case of the flu one year and I slept for 4 days straight. I laid down Wednesday late afternoon and woke up Sunday morning. My wife said I never moved, and since I don't sleep she figured that it was probably really important that I stayed asleep.
- protomok 7y ago
  That’s incredible! I have a hard cut off around 6.5-7 hours of sleep, anything less and I have noticeable performance decrease - inability to concentrate , needing to re read lines of code multiple times, etc. You should reach out to the sleep researchers, a drug to temporarily not need sleep without massive burn out after would be pretty cool!
- nikkwong 7y ago
  Wow. I've heard of people needing as little as four hours but never something this extreme. So, what do you spend your time doing while the rest of us are dozing off? Are all your biological markers in line with that of someone who is otherwise healthy, blood pressure, the works?
- mlevental 7y ago
  really? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder...
- 7y ago
joshvm 7y ago
Reading Why We Sleep has made me somewhat skeptical about people claiming to not need sleep. A quote from the book: > We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III > Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep. Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” The gene described here is also called DEC2: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover-how-gene-mutation-reduces-need-sleep https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover... - this is the same research group as the New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.
- looeee 7y ago
  > expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” That just means 'less than one in two hundred'. Which is not that rare.
  - airza 7y ago
    no, because the original clause was talking about the number of people. the joke was that it was identical to the percentage. Extremely circuitous, but meaningful!
  - tialaramex 7y ago
    Also I would have no confidence in estimates of the population that don't involve either a systematic search, or a symptom we're unavoidably certain we'd spot. Humans who are 10 feet tall would stand out. Humans with XXX were unheard of until they found one by accident and then it turns out they weren't that rare but we'd never gone out of our way to look. (Having the wrong number of copies of most chromosomes causes something obvious and often fatal, but humans necessarily have 1 or 2 copies of X anyway and cope so 3 isn't that astonishing)
robbiemitchell 7y ago
aka the Jocko gene

104 points by lelf 7y ago

I have this 0_o

The people with this gene might sleep less but it doesn't really show what the long term health effects on the individuals are. 2 extra hours per day for life but dying 5 years earlier in your 80s might actually be a decent trade.

farresito 7y ago
I recall reading an AMA on Reddit (take that with a grain of salt) about a very short sleeper and he mentioned that he slept very deeply. I wonder if short sleepers sleep less hours but need to do so more profoundly and it just so happens that from an evolutionary perspective it's negative (for obvious reasons).
- bigDICK 7y ago
  The body needs both NREM and REM sleep. REM happens later in the cycle.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  This is an interesting thought. Perhaps our evolutionary ancestors who evolved in high latitude areas developed this trait given that those areas see much more sunlight (and thus longer days) in the summers. Conversely, I’m left wondering if their sleep patterns differ by season. I.e. they need less sleep in the summer, and dramatically more in the winter.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    I recently moved north. Without blackout curtains, I'm getting less sleep in summer and am much more sleepy in winter.
    - remarkEon 7y ago
      Yeah, I live in Seattle and have spent time in Alaska. I'm noticeably more productive in the summers. So much so that I've started planning sprints on projects around them.
- carlmr 7y ago
  It may just be that for much of our history we couldn't do anything meaningful at night, so being up at night was mostly a waste of energy.
- sethammons 7y ago
  Interesting thought! My wife sleeps much lighter and much longer compared to me. I sleep pretty hard, and sans alarms, tend around 7hrs sleep or less. She sleeps light, and will go 9+ hrs without an alarm or kids waking her up.
  - rubicon33 7y ago
    How does one know whether they are a "light" or "heavy" sleeper? Is it your propensity to be awoken by external stimuli that governs that label? How else would one know?
    - sethammons 7y ago
      Pretty much, yeah. Stuff wakes her up that I sleep right through

est31 7y ago

> Fu, a geneticist, analyzed their DNA and found one particular mutation in a gene known to regulate circadian rhythms that seemed to separate them from their sleep-deprived counterparts. She then inserted that mutation into mice genomes.The effect was clear: the animals with the mutation not only began to sleep less than their counterparts but continued functioning well even after six hours of sleep deprivation (a long time for a mouse). Those without the mutation showed the usual signs of deprivation. This is pretty cool as it means that at least some aspects of sleep deprivation are caused by dedicated circuitry. It's basically like pain, your body is doing it to yourself.

findthewords 7y ago

The pertinent gene in this article seems to be missing. I've gathered a text file with interesting genes from random science articles. If/when full genome testing (emphasis on full) becomes affordable, I can hopefully CTRL+F (search) my personal source code whenever and check which variants I have.

rolleiflex 7y ago
This is your lucky day, half of what you want (Ctrl+F) is already there in the form of Promethease (https://promethease.com https://promethease.com), and the other half, the data you stick into Promethease (full-genome sequencing), is about to drop below the $1000 barrier this year or the next.

busymom0 7y ago

As someone who used to be able to get away with 6 hours of sleep when I was young but now can't operate properly without 8 hours of sleep, does this mean my gene is somehow changing as I get older?

farresito 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "get away", but the people we are talking about in this article legitimately can't sleep more than 6 hours. They naturally wake up after that just like you do after 8 or 9.
- MPSimmons 7y ago
  I often wake up naturally at 6 hours. I'm just used to getting it, I think. There have been a few rare occasions, though, particularly after continued strenuous activity, that I've slept for 12. Normally, though, 8 hours is way too much for me. Since there's almost no chance I have this gene, I'm probably just shortchanging myself.
  - sethammons 7y ago
    I'm in nearly the same bucket as you.
randallsquared 7y ago
It’s the opposite for me. I typically wake after 5-6 hours, usually before an alarm if I set one. Whe I was young (until about 35 or so) I needed 8-9 hours every night to avoid grogginess. I do still sleep 8-9 hours on occasion.

fapjacks 7y ago

It's sort of a long-running joke in my family that the males only need about 6 hours of sleep. I wake up naturally after about six hours, feeling refreshed, if I've had an otherwise uneventful day. However I'm also sort of a lifelong night owl -- "sort of" because I have weird sleep patterns with a bias tending toward nocturnal, which I call the 26-hour day, since it sorta shifts up a couple hours every day -- but my dad and my brother both are otherwise pretty normal and have always been the same way, needing less sleep. Another interesting tidbit: I come from a long line of farmers -- perhaps a bit of a tautology -- and the males among my ancestors were supposedly renowned for never needing an alarm clock. This is something which is true for the males in my immediate family to this day. Of course, I set an alarm if I need to, but I often wake up before it goes off. I've just recently paid for long-read WGS from Full Genomes, so I'm excited to look into this!

bigDICK 7y ago
Without knowing you my question is how can we know that you won't benefit from 8 hours? The research suggests 8 hours is optimal. It also suggests that people who are sleep deprived have a new baseline and may not be aware that they once felt better and could again feel better with a lifestyle modification. As to not needing the alarm clock, I experience that as well. I would think that is actually quite common with training.

iandanforth 7y ago

Here's a follow up paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/

watertom 7y ago

Hmmm, I sleep on average 0-2 hours per day. I've been like this since the day I was born. I nearly destroyed my family because as a newborn I only slept 1 to 2 hours per day. I've gone as long 11 days without sleep. At least once per week I go 48 hours without sleeping. I once did a trade show setup it was a huge booth with a ton of computers we worked round the clock for 6 days. Everyone else worked in shifts, I stayed the entire 6 days working, i didn't sleep for 3 more days, and then I only got 3 hours sleep. Then went another 5 days without sleeping. The people I worked with always assumed that I was taking cat naps, or sleeping and not knowing it, but that during that show setup everyone realized that I actually don't' sleep, because there was someone with me at all times and I just kept working. I don't get sleepy, I don't get tired, I'm just awake, and my performance isn't diminished. The only time I sleep is if I'm really sick. I had a bad case of the flu one year and I slept for 4 days straight. I laid down Wednesday late afternoon and woke up Sunday morning. My wife said I never moved, and since I don't sleep she figured that it was probably really important that I stayed asleep.

protomok 7y ago
That’s incredible! I have a hard cut off around 6.5-7 hours of sleep, anything less and I have noticeable performance decrease - inability to concentrate , needing to re read lines of code multiple times, etc. You should reach out to the sleep researchers, a drug to temporarily not need sleep without massive burn out after would be pretty cool!
nikkwong 7y ago
Wow. I've heard of people needing as little as four hours but never something this extreme. So, what do you spend your time doing while the rest of us are dozing off? Are all your biological markers in line with that of someone who is otherwise healthy, blood pressure, the works?
mlevental 7y ago
really? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Gardner_(record_holder...
7y ago

joshvm 7y ago

Reading Why We Sleep has made me somewhat skeptical about people claiming to not need sleep. A quote from the book: > We have, however, discovered a very rare collection of individuals who appear to be able to survive on six hours of sleep, and show minimal impairment—a sleepless elite, as it were. Give them hours and hours of sleep opportunity in the laboratory, with no alarms or wake-up calls, and still they naturally sleep this short amount and no more. Part of the explanation appears to lie in their genetics, specifically a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41.III > Scientists are now trying to understand what this gene does, and how it confers resilience to such little sleep. Having learned this, I imagine that some readers now believe that they are one of these individuals. That is very, very unlikely. The gene is remarkably rare, with but a soupçon of individuals in the world estimated to carry this anomaly. To impress this fact further, I quote one of my research colleagues, Dr. Thomas Roth at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, who once said, “The number of people who can survive on five hours of sleep or less without any impairment, expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” The gene described here is also called DEC2: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover-how-gene-mutation-reduces-need-sleep https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover... - this is the same research group as the New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.

looeee 7y ago
> expressed as a percent of the population, and rounded to a whole number, is zero.” That just means 'less than one in two hundred'. Which is not that rare.
- airza 7y ago
  no, because the original clause was talking about the number of people. the joke was that it was identical to the percentage. Extremely circuitous, but meaningful!
- tialaramex 7y ago
  Also I would have no confidence in estimates of the population that don't involve either a systematic search, or a symptom we're unavoidably certain we'd spot. Humans who are 10 feet tall would stand out. Humans with XXX were unheard of until they found one by accident and then it turns out they weren't that rare but we'd never gone out of our way to look. (Having the wrong number of copies of most chromosomes causes something obvious and often fatal, but humans necessarily have 1 or 2 copies of X anyway and cope so 3 isn't that astonishing)

robbiemitchell 7y ago

aka the Jocko gene