
A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep? (2014) - lelf
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/a-gene-makes-you-need-less-sleep
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watertom
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.

~~~
mengibar10
Although it sounds great that you do not need sleep I think you are missing a
big bonus of sleep, dreaming. Do you remember if you dreamt during that
straight 4 days of sleep?

~~~
chillfox
Dreaming is not a bonus for everyone.

Almost all of my dreams were nightmares and so for over a decade, I couldn't
sleep without the light on, at least once a month I couldn't fall asleep until
sunrise. I eventually decided that I would stop dreaming, and so I told myself
every evening and every morning that "I do not dream" until one day it was
true.

I need about 10 hours of sleep to feel refreshed and about a handful of times
a year I still have a dream or nightmare. I wish I could get by on only a few
hours of sleep a night.

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joshvm
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...](https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/03/410051/scientists-discover-how-
gene-mutation-reduces-need-sleep) \- this is the same research group as the
New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.

~~~
looeee
> 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.

~~~
tialaramex
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)

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MRD85
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
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).

~~~
remarkEon
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
I recently moved north. Without blackout curtains, I'm getting less sleep in
summer and am much more sleepy in winter.

~~~
remarkEon
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.

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est31
> 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.

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fapjacks
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!

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busymom0
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
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
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
I'm in nearly the same bucket as you.

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findthewords
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
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.

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iandanforth
Here's a follow up paper:

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6084759/)

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robbiemitchell
aka the Jocko gene

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FailMore
I have this 0_o

