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Genetic Mutation Enables Less Sleep
reporter writes to tell us that researchers are claiming to have discovered a genetic mutation that allows people to manage with much less sleep. One of the researchers hopes that this could lead to artificially reducing the amount of sleep required in your average human. "Although the mutation has been identified in only two people, the power of the research stems from the fact that the shortened sleep effect was replicated in mouse and fruit-fly studies. As a result, the research now gives scientists a clearer sense of where to look for genetic traits linked to sleep patterns."
Maybe they'll find a genetic predisposition of attraction to LCD screens and avoidance of sunlight.
Mutation activated by Mountain Dew and Cheetos
love is just extroverted narcissism
The rise of the X-Men begins with those able to scheme and plot 24/7!
.... genetic mutation for less sheep. That could cause problems in alabama...
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
... Before we get Gustav Graves?
Someone better tell MI6.
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
I can see these things coming up: 1) Companies requiring genetic therapy to retroactively apply this mutation to you. 2) Extending the work day as the workers don't need as much sleep
Now we can look forward to 22 hour workdays. "You got your two hours of sleep you wuss!"
What distinguishes the two women in the study and other naturally short sleepers is that they go to bed at a normal time and wake up early without an alarm. The two women, one in her 70s and the other in her 40s, go to bed around 10 or 10:30 at night and wake up alert and energized around 4 or 4:30 in the morning, Dr. Fu said.
..the doctor's name!
Queue the Nightman references.
On second thought, is slitting my wrists an option?
And here I was thinking that the total life span of a fruit fly was even less than the average time a human sleeps per day...?
What exactly does "manage" mean? Does that mean you actually are more efficient and your body works just as well with less sleep? Or does it mean your brain functions better when tired... or that you don't actually GET tired? Or does it simply mean you can go longer before you burn out completely. Or whatever.
"Managing" and being "productive" are quite different... and subjective.
Anyone with access to the paper know if they analyzed the naturally short sleepers for lack of benefits from sleeping? An immune system deficiency? Metabolism rate? Increased food intake? Accelerated aging? Memory and learning issues? Biomass, muscle & organ development?
I'm not a biologist and I don't know what sleep durations are for other mammals but the scientist in me wonders why we settled out at eight hours a day if we are more vulnerable with our eyes closed. You would think it performs pretty important functions (or did perform) for the 5 percent of short sleepers not to collect more food and proliferate more efficiently and more frequently than the other 95% 8 hour sleepers. Perhaps in times of famine or disease this 5% are more susceptible and since we no longer have them they are freed from these shackles? Perhaps (since the two subjects noted were ages 40 and 70) this only becomes apparent with the onset of age that we never made it to back in the day? Any other ideas?
My work here is dung.
I wonder what their sleep patters were like when they were teenagers. When I was in high school, I needed at least 10 hours, and preferred 12. Now that I'm almost 40, I can easily operate on 3 or 4 hours, routinely get 6, and sleeping in on saturday is 8 or 9.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
"Genetic Mutation Enables Less Sheep"?
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
Yeah that's just what we need; a legitimate excuse for employers to work people more.
I came here to make a similar remark. A mutation like this would seem to be highly beneficial. Wouldn't you expect to see more of it in the population if it didn't have some downside to it?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Can we call it the Jolt Cola mutation?
They ... found a mother and daughter who were naturally short sleepers. The women routinely function on about 6 hours of sleep a night; the average person needs 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep.
âoeWhen they wake up in morning, they feel they have slept enough,â Dr. Fu said.
These women feel they've had enough sleep, but that doesn't mean that they are fully rested and recovered from their previous day's activities. While I don't have access to the journal article, I would be interested in seeing whether mice or flies with the homologous mutation have shorter life spans or other problems that accrue over longer periods of time.
Thai Ngoc or Hai Ngoc (born 1942) is a Vietnamese insomniac.
A great documentary about this subject was from the Horizon program, entitled The Secret Life of Your Bodyclock. One of the things that they stated was some peoples body clocks run on different cycles. I believe they had examples of a 32 hour "day" clock and a 22 hour one and the differences that this placed on the subjects.
The comment that i wanted to make was that there are probably lots of people who do not fit into the 24 hour lifestyle that we are forced into. The secret life of your bodyclock was very eye opening. They had all sorts of great stats on why you shouldn't exercise in the morning, that you should always consume alcohol between 6-8pm (local time) and a great section on why teenagers hate getting up. Its well worth the watch if you can find it somehow....
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
Maybe ol' Leonardo had this. I hear tell of him sleeping only in short bursts so he could have more time to do awesome shit.
I was really interested in sleep stuff when I was in college. A bunch of friends and I started a club called the "8 Year Club". We figured out that if we could train ourselves to work with just 4 hours of sleep per night, we could gain back 8 years of extra "life". We were really excited about this and figured that if we could support each other, we'd be able to get through the tough part and make it a real habit in our lives. We stopped after about a week.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
The 2 people with the mutation work as a movie projectionist and a banquet waiter in a luxury hotel.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
We would need a sample set much larger then 2 to draw any meaningful conclusions. We'll probably have to wait fro the mouse studies to answer your questions.
Or maybe evolution isn't all its cracked up to be!
I have a co-worker who only needs 4 hours, He was actually studied in college for health issues, its amazing how much this guy can get done when only needs 4 hours sleep. Also beats the commute into work by coming in really early, while the rest of us are sleeping.
Myself, 9 is good for me. I'd love to be able to only need 4 and wake up wide awake and in good health.
As long as my boss doesnt make me work 16 hour days, sign me up.
That being said, I doubt that this mutation will, short of mandated breeding or genetic mangling, make it into the general populace. Genetic evolution, even microevolution, seems nearly impossible for the human race right now.
There was little benefit to being awake at night before artificial lighting and it costs calories to be awake instead of sleeping.
we called it the "Deadline Gene".
I regularly rely on less than 6 hours of sleep per night
with generally no impairment in waking function.
I've been like this my whole life.
Uh... perhaps it's simply that it's beneficial to sleep (and use less energy) whenever you're not doing anything else? We sleep for about 8 hours because in equatorial Africa, there's about 8 hours of darkness when us vision oriented fruit-and-vegetarians monkeys can't find anything to eat or screw - I mean, who likes waking up in the morning next to a half eaten poison pear, or worse yet, a fugly skank monkey?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Does it really give such a large benefit?
For countless generations humans have lived without the access to heating and lighting we have, while at the same time being highly reliant upon farming. I feel it's more a recent phenomenon that gives an advantage to those able to sleep less, with nighttime work, greater mental demends from work (as opposed to physical labour that puts you more at risk of injury at night) et al.
I don't really see much in the way of selective pressure in favour of sleeping less before the modern age.
Yeah, those thoughts were the first that came to mind. Sleep is a big deal for so many proven reasons and so many slightly understood reasons. But I guess one reason we'd sleep for so long would be to conserve energy in a more natural environment with limited food.
My wife's immune system seems to be ridiculously strong, but maybe it's partly due to the fact that she always gets plenty of sleep and if she starts feeling slightly sick she sleeps an extra couple of hours that night/day.
Regarding the vulnerable state of sleep aspect, I've often wondered if snoring kept some of the nasty animals away at night. Then again, even my cat snores sometimes and cats probably could hear a hair fall. And back to humans, I always wondered if the early risers helped protect the late sleepers, and late the bed types helped protect the ones that slept early.
I've personally noticed the opposite effect. When I was younger I could get by with 5 hours of sleep with no problem. Somewhere along the line I started requiring much more, and can now barely wake up if I don't get at least 7 hours. It would be nice if someone could just flip a genetic switch and make it so I can again only get by with 5 hours....assuming there aren't any nasty side affects that these women experience. The doctors say they seem healthy...but who knows in the long term.
We would need a sample set much larger then 2 to draw any meaningful conclusions.
We'll probably have to wait fro the mouse studies to answer your questions.
The mice are also studying this? Then is must be related to the ultimate question.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
You could ask the same question in regards to why we don't have sensory organs to detect in the Infrared spectrum like pit vipers do. It would certainly have been an evolutionary edge. The answer is probably that what we have developed is good enough.
Bah, if only people realised that sleep was an addictive habit and could be eliminated altogether through sheer willpower alone! My years of research provide 140% proof of that:
http://www.skytopia.com/project/articles/sleep.html
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
You would think it performs pretty important functions (or did perform) for the 5 percent of short sleepers not to collect more food and proliferate more efficiently and more frequently than the other 95% 8 hour sleepers.
I suspect that our current sleep requirements are the product of balancing a lot of trade-offs, and it might not be wise to tamper with it (any more than we already do with coffee and alarm clocks) until we know what more of those trade-offs are. I'm sure there's some dystopian fiction waiting to be written about engineering ourselves into a state where the species wouldn't be viable in the natural world any more.
Of course, I rather like the idea that laziness and/or the desire to sleep in has some underlying real benefit, so I'm biased towards caution when changing such things. :)
[b.belong('us') for b in bases if b.owner() == 'you']
... I have the power to control time - bedtime!
No side effects for women. Shrinking penis syndrome for men. Now who wants the new treatment?
Due to a well-placed line-break, I saw in the summary: "the shortened sleep effect was replicated in mouse and fruit." That really had me wondering how on Earth they tested this.
I wonder about the average level of sleep we get nowadays, how much we need as we age, sanity issues, and more.
At the moment, sleep deprivation can lead to some nasty psychological issues. It says that the mice "recovered quicker from periods of sleep deprivation compared with regular mice", but does that mean that they just jumped to work quicker and less sluggishly, how about mental health? I'm guessing it becomes a quality VS quantity issue. I know that when my allergies act up, I don't breathe as well, and even though I sleep slightly longer durations I feel less rested than less sleep with clear sinuses. The breathing issues would then cause sleep-apnea related issues.
Another thing I would like to see here is the "depth of sleep", such as REM, etc. If the gene actually modifies it so that the mice hit an optimal sleep depth more quickly, that might more sense. I've often found that if I consistently go without enough sleep I get sluggish, but sometimes if I really wear myself down, stay up really late, and then hit the sack when I'm just about ready to drop, I sleep *EXTREMELY* deeply and feel more rested on 3-4h of sleep than 7-8 hours. On people that get by very well on low sleep, I'd be willing to bet they measure a noticeably different EEG frequency (and possibly other factors such as blood-oxyen level), with a pattern more like a sharper curve towards deep sleep.
This would indicate a "quality" issue rather than a quantity. It would also make sense in an evolutionary sense. Yes, longer sleep means perhaps a longer duration of potential vulnerability, but a longer less-deep sleep be trading depth for recoverability.
E.G. if a large predator comes stomping up when you're at level 5/10 sleep, then you have a good chance of waking up and getting the f*** out of there even though you're out for approx 8h. Alternately, if you're out for a 3h super-nap, and at 9/10 depth for most of that, perhaps the potential for being gobbled up during that period is greatly increased?
Not necessarily. For a mutation to spread throughout the population it has to give its host a greater chance of breeding. People who sleep less may be able to achieve more in their lives, but it doesn't obviously follow that they will have more children. Even if they have 10% more children, on average, than people without the mutation, then it will take a very long time for this mutation to spread to the majority of the population (and that's assuming that the children all inherit the gene...).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I'll have a large with an extra dose of non-sleepy genes!
Have you been checked for Sleep Apnea. I seem to remember seeing results from a study that up to 40% of the worlds population might have it to some degree or another.
I have Mild Sleep Apnea which means I don't warrant an expensive C-PAP machine but I do wear an oral device to help keep my airway unrestricted. A friend of mine has Severe Sleep Apnea and he has to use a C-PAP or he'll sleep for 12+ hours and still be exhausted.
Even with my device I pretty much never wake up feeling refreshed though. It's always a drag to get out of bed and get going, unless there is something I am very excited about doing that day.
The genetic mutation is called children. Guarentees less sleep for the parents.
What about the psychological effects of this? If you dont sleep, you lose the benefit that dreams provide, where your mind can work through things and problems you may have in your waking life. If you dont sleep, or dont sleep enough, these problems never get worked out. We evolved this way for a reason and, unless they want to medicate people even more, could cause some serious psychological issues.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
It could be a recent mutation which has not had the opportunity to propagate substantially. (How many hours a day do primates sleep?)
I imagine something like this would, like most mutations, be regressive, and therefore take a fairly long time to reach critical/substantial momentum.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
Sleeping less doesn't increase your odds/ability to reproduce (at least, not significantly).
There is a mistaken idea about natural selection that it will always take any traits that are objectively "good". It doesn't. Only traits that can improve/reduce your ability to reproduce are affected. Any traits that don't affect the ability to reproduce tend to stick around forever, regardless of their perceived advantage/disadvantage.
O rly?
I see humans evolving into a "yellow race". A merging of black, white and asian into the new human. Humans also continue to grow taller, so I expect that trend to continue. Selective breeding will weed out the "fatties" eventually. Eventually (not that long) I think we will resemble the stereotypical alien, just with smaller eyes and a normal nose.
The other option I see for the future of the human race is that it will decline. We will get fatter, poorer, and dumber. The ghetto seems to spawn new life at an incredible rate. It is a proven fact that educated people have less children then their high school drop-out counterparts... We'll have to wait and see.
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We already know what the mutation is that allows some humans to feel refreshed on less hours of sleep than others... it's called leading a healthy lifestyle. Regular exercise and eating healthy, real food (not the food-like substances we buy off the store shelves in boxes), will solve so many health problems of today. Alas, that is exactly what the "food" manufacturing giants and the pharmaceutical companies DO NOT want people to figure out. That might cut into their profits.
Who was that pointy-eared bastard?
Because from what I have seen, this is a non-circumventable rule.
Also I would recomment long-term checks (20 years minimum) for becoming crazy, dumbing down, other health issues, or just being less clear in the brain in the long term.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
A primitive human is highly unlikely to be ABLE to gather food after it gets dark, no matter how awake and alert he may be. Darkness is like that. Not to mention that there aren't many nocturnal big game species anywhere in the world even after fire had been discovered.
So, since you aren't gathering food very well, you're WASTING IT by being AWAKE, rather than in your 8 hours of hibernation.
Sure, at the very low latitudes, it might be beneficial, but for the majority of the human population, a shorter sleep period would probably be wasted.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I mean, most of us had some fantasies about having a Wolverine-like healing factor, the ability to fly, the ability to control the weather, or something cool like that.
/cry
Cant you just imagine the following:
Professor X: I know you think you are unique - that noone understands you - but we all have special powers. Come with us and we can teach you how to use your powers for good and to help your fellow mutant and mankind.
Insomnia: You mean there are others that only sleeping a few hours per day?
Professor X: Yes - you are not...wait. Jean...dont tell me we flew...
Jean Grey: I know Professor...I...I guess I got confused.
Professor X: Shut up and get on the plane. Kid - sorry - go back to staying up late and playing World of Warcraft until 3AM every night...and if we need you, we'll call you.
Insomnia: But...I thought I would get a suit and everything...
1331461 is only semiprime *sigh* Alas - I am just short of 1337.
What if, suddenly there were ppl with practically 33% more lifespan? More time every day to train sports, science, whatever - even work? No chance one of them attending chess games, olympic games or similar.
It would lead to them being outcasts as long as they were in minority.
'Once scientists, even the dim-witted social scientists, get muzzled, the Western Civilization is finished.' - oldhack
It's called Crystal Meth! Get a life and vacuum my whole house please.
It's not the advantage you think.
Lowered survivability in the long term offsets the superficial advantages.
I've never needed more than about 4 hours of sleep a night, my wife is a mess if she gets less than 8.
I can say from my field experiments, that some days (particularly where we both only get about 5-6 hours, but it's REALLY evident after several nights of short-sleep due to babies or whatever) she's far more likely to murder me.
Even if she doesn't kill me, the likelihood that my progeny will survive or that I'll get another chance to mate anytime soon is far, far lower...of course after 20 years together you get asymptotic numbers approaching zero ANYWAY but that's another post....
-Styopa
Anectdote:
A friend of mine feels fine on 5 hours a night, and can do that indefinitely. 6 is a really, really restful 9 to him. He can't even force himself to do 8 hours unless he's been up more than 24. Sounds about like the people in the study--no coffee or anything like that necessary, he simply doesn't need or even want more sleep than that.
Bastard gets so much done. It's amazing how much extra reading/video-game-playing/movie watching you can get done with an extra 2-3 hours every day, in the early morning or late at night when no-one's awake to bother you. Irritates his wife, though, because she wants him to go to sleep when she does (early), so his "bonus" time for the last year or so has shifted from being late at night to early in the morning. He just gets up way earlier than she does.
He's got a crazy-fast metabolism, and he's a bit on the short side (5'5" or so). No signs of his sleep patterns changing nor his metabolisms slowing yet, but he's only 24, so who knows. Smart as hell, as in top 2-3% of the population smart.
As a kid I usually only got in 7 per night, since I was usually up at 5 to watch early morning cartoons, plus it was the only time the Megaman and Darkstalkers cartoons played. Ever since starting university, I'm fine on 4-5 hours per night for months on end. The only thing that hampers that is, of course, hangovers. :)
Or it could be that they have other mutated/different genes that somehow circumvent these issues. The more genes you'd need to pass on, the harder it would be to pass it on and become the norm.
I suppose if they have kids, they would provide some answers if they consented to DNA testing and study.
I have left slashdot and am now on Soylent News. FUCK YOU DICE.
I'm not saying that I have the mutation, but I rarely need more than 6 hours of sleep each night.
That's not some self-imposed deprivation. It's just the way I'm wired and I've been that way my whole life.
My immune system seems to be great. I rarely get sick, even when others around me are dropping like flies from the flu or whatever bug is going around.
I have a highly suppressed metabolism. Too much so. I have to constantly live on a calorie starved diet and I have to get, at least, 90 minutes of vigorous exercise each day. If I don't, I put on weight quite fast.
I don't seem to have any signs of accelerated aging, in fact, most people guess I'm younger than I am.
My memory seems to be about average. Learning comes pretty easy... for stuff I'm interested in ;-)
I have a high muscle mass, but that may have more to do with my exercise regimen than anything else.
All-in-all, it's not a bad problem to have. I have to make some sacrifices that I wish I didn't. When all my friends are going out to lunch every day, I'm in the gym. Also, about once or twice a month I suffer from insomnia; maybe getting only a couple of hours of sleep. When this happens, (sometimes, but not always) I notice a performance hit the next day. However, assuming I get my regular 6 hours the next night, I recover quickly.
People who sleep less may be able to achieve more in their lives, but it doesn't obviously follow that they will have more children.
If there are no negative side-effects, sleeping less would easily have advantages in survival against predators and war. Until the onset of civilization, death of a parent would almost certainly result in death of any young children.
Even if they have 10% more children, on average, than people without the mutation, then it will take a very long time for this mutation to spread to the majority of the population[...]
1.1 ** 8 = 2.1435, so it would take less than 8 generations, or about 160 years at a generation every 20 years. That is not a long time in evolutionary terms.
I have two in my house. Say hello to my 4 and a half year old and my 18 month old. I wonder what they'd pay to put them in a study?
If it ain't broke, DON'T fix it.
First we have some scientist doubling the lifespan of flies now they won't sleep? Why are they trying to create immortal sleepless flies? Please somebody stop them!
I, for one, won't welcome them...
There is a term called Polyphasic Sleep in which you sleep for something like 15-20 minutes at a time every 4 hours. Apparently it takes quite a long time to get adjusted to, but the idea is that you force your body to immediately enter REM sleep.
It sounds crazy, but maybe the people who have been able to adapt to a Polyphasic sleeping schedule (most notably, someone named Steve Pavlina) are the people are have this gene mutation already, thus requiring less sleep? I have certainly tried this polyphasic sleeping pattern, and I couldn't even get through a weekend without feeling sick all the time...
Nah, there aren't that many Scotsmen in Alabama. You do realize there is a reason that Dolly was cloned in Scotland, right?
Q: What is the difference between a Scotsman and Mick Jagger?
A: One sings Hey McCloud get offa my ewe!
Reply to That ||
They did not do any analysis of the humans who have the genetic mutation. They did an exhaustive amount of studies on the transgenic mice they created. I didn't bother to read it all as it seemed to be focused on proving that they actually slept less. Science doesn't move as fast as we'd like it to, nor are results as amazing as the news articles make them out to be.
This study is still pretty exciting, as they proved that a single point mutation can make you sleep less. The biochemical mechanism for this is still almost entirely unknown. 10 years from now maybe someone will have an idea about how to make it happen in real people. (and that would be a blockbuster drug!) It's still an incredibly long way away from 22 hour workdays and or mandatory gene therapy (since we can't even DO gene therapy effectively)
Being awake at night, and especially gathering food, puts you in competition with nocturnal animals. If you don't have a mutation to see better at night, or hear better, or something like that, it's probably going to expose to you more danger than you would get at night.
A species that can somehow spend 8 hours asleep without getting eaten won't find additional benefit from working at night. If we had more predators that liked eating sleeping people, it would be a quick and obvious benefit.
With only 2 people identified with the mutation, I wouldn't be willing to consider it a positive trait yet. We don't know what else this mutation may have changed for these people - if for example it were to reduce life expectancy in a significant manner I think I would prefer to sleep.
We need more individuals to study to determine the full effect of this mutation.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Maybe they simply live well-rounded lives and don't toss and turn all night worrying about the next day. Do they run themselves down every day? How are their dreams?
Point being, two genes in two people is an easy coincidence weighed against the vast sea of conditional variables that effect us all. For myself, if I spend a day doing relatively nothing I wake up somewhat naturally the next morning on 6 hours. If I go all day non-stop, then I can sleep for 12 hours.
If sleep is when our bodies recover, then do people with the mutation recover faster?
Interesting - your friend sounds an awful lot like me, though I'm a shade older (mid thirties). I'm 5'6, have a high metabolism, and wake up automatically at the 5.5 hour mark regardless of when I go to sleep. I've been this way since junior high school, possibly earlier. I never sleep more than six hours unless I've been up for at least 24 hours straight, and I've managed to stay awake for up to 74 hours previously. I don't drink anything caffeinated - no coffee, soda, tea, etc. I read about this study and these two women earlier today, and found myself wondering if that explains me.
As an anecdote, I can add that one unpleasant circumstantial side effect is to end up spending way more time alone than I prefer, simply because my friends all have daytime jobs (like mine) but need more sleep and so go to bed hours earlier. It gets old having no one awake for hanging out, talking, etc. It's also annoying that there aren't more 24-hour retail businesses to allow me to get shopping done at times that are convenient for me. :P
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
The story of Red-Eye, who battles evil by hoping they'll nod off before he does.
Sleep theories seem to range considerably but there is consensus that most people need, on average 8 hours. Some theorists hold that sleep and dreaming are processes that developed to, one the one hand, keep us still and hidden away from night time predators, and, OTOH, to consolidate recent critical experiences into long term memories. My own recent theory is that sleep is the brain's synchronization process. It's loosely stated the brain is widely distributed and massively parallel processed and that even a simple idea like 'apple' requires disparate brain modules to function synchronously. I think sleep and dreaming are the brains way to rehearse complex activities recently required in waking life. The brain in sleep is thus like a symphonic orchestra in rehearsal, especially in terms of dreaming. Although other sleep cycles seem to be necessary to body repair. Men, in recent readings, are thought to require much more deep sleep than women because it's in deep sleep that the male body effects repairs. Thus far I've not come across my idea that sleep and dreaming are synchronization and rehearsal events, but on /. I expect a fair, unbiased hearing. ;)
ideopath @ play
This is such a useful thing.
There are several known methods you can use, depending on your daily life. (work as a good example)
Polyphasic sleep teaches (read:forces) your body to adjust your sleeping patterns so that REM sleep is started pretty much the instant you sleep.
I'm not sure whether it has been tested in any labs or not, but i know that it personally works, as do thousands of others. (probably more)
But from what i know, most of the time you sleep is useless anyway. (despite the idiots who claim they KNOW it isn't, they don't know shit)
I done it for a while and it eventually got to the point where i never even needed to do it since i slept for such little time (3-4 hours usually)
Even though i don't require as much sleep, i tend to just stay in bed and think. (and go lucid, which since February has become so much easier to do)
11 years in the making (well, coming to 11), but it was so worth it.
Next time to the doctors... 25th of this month. Lets hope things are going alright.
Da Vinci done it, and he was one of the best minds we have had in our short history of this planet.
It is also apparently used by quite a few companies to improve their employees concentration.
How did you know about last Saturday morning?
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
...there's always caffeine.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Don't forget the night time predators and the reduced energy needs of the sleep period.
If someone who needs less sleep goes out to get a midnight snack and gets eaten, they will not contribute much to the gene pool.
Sleeping is generally safer than foraging for food, especially if you are in a group.
Genetically... the fugly skank monkey is a good bet. I mean, if the choice is to go home to your tree and masturbate to a crudely etched stick-figure-carving-with-boobies, versus possibly impregnating a skankmonkey... well, I can guess which behavior would be genetically advantageous, unless that fugly skankmonkey is carrying an STD or is likely to let the fruit of my loins starve to death or get eaten by hyenas.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Somebody watched Idiocracy, eh?
Same with me. I have periods of time where I can sleep easily and do just fine with 7 to 8 hours of sleep, and then others where I get really tired right before I go to bed, but as soon as I lay down my brain starts to wake up for some reason and I'm suddenly not tired. So I get back up (usually, else I lay there for 4 hours trying to will myself asleep) do some programming, or read some articles, watch some TV, or whatever and then go to sleep about four hours latter. The problem is this sets back my internal clock by about 4 hours and the rest of the world doesn't like that too much... I'm pretty sure it is stress related, but that's life right now.
They did something similar to this in the novel "Beggars in Spain". Good read. In the novel, the alteration/loss of this caused relative immortality and increased IQ.
In very high or low latitudes, shortened sleep requirements could absolutely be beneficial (as could seasonal sleep requirement variations, which are documented -- see SAD & related research).
Seasonal food gathering requirements could definitely give a genetic advantage to those requiring less sleep in the far north or extreme south..
I'd be curious to see if this gene is found more commonly among people who come from populations from near-arctic or -antarctic latitudes.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Humans also continue to grow taller, so I expect that trend to continue.
The only reason that trend will continue is because of aesthetic preferences in a given culture. Generally, the bigger a creature is, the harder it is to survive in the long run.
It's only 'beneficial' in the evolutionary sense if it increases your chance of having offspring. If you're bouncing around the house watching Slashdot at all hours of the night or doing some other 'useful' activity, it might not necessarily increase your chance of multiple progeny.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
1.1 ** 8 = 2.1435, so it would take less than 8 generations, or about 160 years at a generation every 20 years. That is not a long time in evolutionary terms.
I'm not sure what you think the relevance of this equation is. Let's make the numbers easier and assume that the average person has 2 children, while a person with this mutation has 3 and, for the sake of example, they all inherit the mutation. If you begin with a population of 1,000,000 who do not have this mutation and one that does then at the end of one generation you will have 2,000,000 who don't and 3 who do. The next generation will have 4m who do and 9 who don't, and so on. After 8 generations, there will be 256m who do not have the mutation and 6,561 who do. In practice, the initial non-mutant population is much larger and the difference in average number of children is likely to be much smaller.
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I already don't get enough sleep, now the sleep I do get, you want to cut down even more...talk about being workaholics!
I wouldn't count on that. I know people who don't sleep at all, and will tell you they're doing fine. Except that everything about their attitude to life, their diet, their lifestyle, their health, and their general wellbeing says otherwise.
It might be sleeping for eight night-time hours kept you safe from predators with low-light adaptations. Only sleep for 6 hours, move around during 2 dark hours, get eaten and don't pass on your genes.
I used to be like these two women, I only needed a few hours of sleep and I didn't need an alarm clock to wake up. Now it can take me an hour after waking up before I can drag myself out of bed.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Oddly enough there is classic research (Hartmann and Brewer 1976) linking sleep pattern to political opinion: they looked at people who needed over 10 or under six hours of sleep and found the short sleeper worried less about the world, less about the consequence of their actions and valued hard work and productivity, and general had more right wing views, the long sleeper were more creative, less focused and more liberal on issues like welfare. The article claims Einstein as a architypical long sleeper and Edison as the opposite.
Due in part to Sleep Apnea, I never slept more than 5 hours. Since I got that fixed (some 10 years ago), I haven't slept any longer. For a good 20 years now I've not done more than 5 hours.
Screw genetics. A good dose of chocking every night will fix ya.
> walks around with a solid fucking gold staff while lamenting the world's poor?
Out of curiosity, does that mean you live in some kind of hovel, having taken a vow of poverty, or that you don't lament the world's poor?
Generally Speaking, creatures do not posess the ability to farm food, raise livestock, and drive their fat asses around in SUVs either.
In other words, doing what makes life worth living. I'd join you if I could.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
If you only live x years, then increasing the percentage of that time that you spend awake means that you basically live longer. Sleeping is existing, certainly, but I wouldn't call it living. If this doesn't shorten human life spans significantly.. then it's a very good thing.
I don't want to say this too many times, but sleep=repair, repair, repair; lots of genetic checks to do, and protein synthesis to undertake--which takes a long time in eukaryotes, and an unusually long time in human beings (we've got a lot going on and a lot of complexity to sort and manage).
Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
Hmm, maybe this mutation is enough of a net "good thing" to be noticeable as such, but not strong enough of an advantage to have significant evolutionary influence...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Is your point that a species needs a minimum size, allowing greater complexity, for this level of civilization/sophistication? If so, I think we've reached it, and don't benefit from increases in stature any more. If not, I'd like to know what your point is. Anyway it was nice talking to you.
I'm not a biologist and I don't know what sleep durations are for other mammals but the scientist in me wonders why we settled out at eight hours a day if we are more vulnerable with our eyes closed.
In think that the 8 hours of sleep goes back to the 8 hour workday, 8 hours of work, 8 hours of leisure, and 8 hours of sleep.
Perhaps (since the two subjects noted were ages 40 and 70) this only becomes apparent with the onset of age that we never made it to back in the day?
I grew up like that, even as a baby I was an insomniac. My mother used to say how she'd check on me in the crib and I'd be quite but wide awake. In high school I'd get 5 to 6 hours sleep. To make sure I was up on tyme and to wake up my sister she'd call the house from work at 5:45am, she started work at 5 herself. I'd be standing at the phone already ready to catch the bus when she did, and like these women I didn't use an alarm clock.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Back in the 1980's, Margaret Thatcher, the then Prime Minister of Great Britain took great pride in the fact that she only had 4 hours sleep/night and took cat-naps during the day. Now, she suffers from Alzheimers/dementia.
Going without a decent number of hours sleep is not something I would wish to risk.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
i read it as "less sheep". But the meaning was not lost because if you count sheep to fall asleep then less sleep=less sheep
Yes, longer sleep means perhaps a longer duration of potential vulnerability, but a longer less-deep sleep be trading depth for recoverability.
E.G. if a large predator comes stomping up when you're at level 5/10 sleep, then you have a good chance of waking up and getting the f*** out of there even though you're out for approx 8h. Alternately, if you're out for a 3h super-nap, and at 9/10 depth for most of that, perhaps the potential for being gobbled up during that period is greatly increased?
Well, just because a person doesn't need as much sleep it doesn't mean they sleep deeper, they may or may not. Growing up I was both an insomniac and a light sleeper, I needed only 5 to 6 hours sleep but I could practically hear a pin drop, like those old Sprint commercials. I'd hear others get up to go to the bathroom, or my mom getting ready for work. Besides being alert while only getting a few hours sleep, I was also very hyperactive. I was given a prescription for that, but it wasn't refilled as it made things bad for me.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
This is terrible - it's only a matter of time before they start incorporating this gene into our food supply; sleepless tomatoes, sleepless grapes, sleepless chickens up at all hours of the night, making their meat tender and juicy with their insomnia
So, theres a genetic mutation that does opposite of that? That would explain a lot to me, and i could finally give to my boss the perfect excuse.
Beggars in Spain is an interesting sci-fi trilogy that begins with an exploration of what life would be like if you didn't need to sleep.
Education is the silver bullet.
Except primates are not all vegetarians. Many use sticks to dig out insects, chimpanzees hunt and use sticks to dig out termites to eat.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Don't believe it? Google for polyphasic sleep or Uberman sleep schedule.
Turns out you can live on 20 minute naps every four hours. Not that I'd want to try it: every four hours you have to stop *right then* and sleep.
I wonder if they did any tests to make sure the women don't have memory loss.
I wake up at 6 or 7am even on the weekends. I'd love to sleep in on the weekends, but I can't. I wake up, and that is it!
My wife's immune system seems to be ridiculously strong, but maybe it's partly due to the fact that she always gets plenty of sleep and if she starts feeling slightly sick she sleeps an extra couple of hours that night/day.
Though it's possible I doubt a lot of sleep is a cause of good health. Growing up I needed the least amount of sleep in my family yet I was the healthiest too. Even now my immune system is strong, while those around me get sick or catch a flu the most that I get is the sniffles or a stuffed nose. However I am now almost always tired.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Then is must be related to the ultimate question.
42 is the answer to what question?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
adapting to civilization is not good!
That's not what geneticists say. They say that the rate of human evolution has increased markedly. Of course, they have a hard time measuring periods shorter than a few thousand years, but that's long enough for the effects of city life to have shown up. And a few other things. Lots of evolution in the immune system and in the expression of neural proteins in the brain.
This doesn't mean that they know what it means. There's certainly a huge amount of hybridization going on. But this means that evolution isn't slowing down. And it seems as if most of it's happening in locations rather then between locations. (I.e., professions or social classes becoming specialized rather than countries or continents.)
Then again, remember the coarse filter being used. Anything within the last 200 years will be totally invisible.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
you probably need more resting time for your body than your mind.
This might be true of some but not all. Growing up I was both hyperactive and was refreshed after 5 or 6 hours sleep. This continued through my adulthood until I had an accident that left me with a disability. I enlisted in the Army in the infantry and only got 5 or 6 hours sleep while in. Later as a full-time student most days I was up and out of the door by 7, then 6am, and took an 8.6 mile ride to campus which took about half hour. I'd leave campus about 9 or 10pm to ride home again. And some of the classes I took were stage dance and martial arts. Later while working full-time in construction, specifically concrete work, I left home to ride my bike 45 minutes to the company yard by 5am. After at least 8 hours of work I again rode my bike home.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
I'm the previous anonymous coward. You're right that I botched the math, but I believe my point that the population would still be taken over by the mutation quickly in evolutionary terms is still correct.
Producing 10% more offspring (with the mutation, so really 20%+ more offspring) every generation of 20 years means the ratio of population with the mutation versus population without doubles every 160 years. After 3,200 years the ratio would then be over a million times whatever the original ratio of people with the mutation versus people without was, and, before civilization, I believe the total number of people on the planet may have been less than a million. So, at that rate, starting with a single individual, within a few thousand years, the mutation would become the majority wherever breeding patterns allowed (for example, not necessarily across geographic boundaries).
Since this has not happened, there must be a reason.
Sounds like a set up, in the end we will be available for more hours for work for the same annual salary.
At least the man with the computer is not a frigging git whereas the man with the staff is *A* git which condemn the usage of condom, and seem to wish for a more conservationist Christianity. Nuff said.
Ugh...no. I don't want Asians to be mixed with other races. My fellow Asians almost always feel the same way deep down.
"One of the researchers hopes that this could lead to artificially reducing the amount of sleep required in your average human."
Great, another non-problem close to being solved. Thanks science. All I need now is a 3rd arm so that I can work my Blackberry while typing on my laptop. Perhaps they can solve my pesky habit of taking "breaks from work".
How is it that all this technology and progress is enabling us to work even more? Wasn't all this crap supposed to make our lives easier and not harder? What will sleeping less accomplish exactly? Will it allow me to tweet more? Wonderful. Will it increase my happiness? I highly doubt it.
-- The unsig...