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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
.... 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!"
On second thought, is slitting my wrists an option?
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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.
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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
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.
It is rather disturbing.
Of course you know what will happen. They'll make it so people need less sleep so they can work longer.
Not like they'll be allowed to spend their new awake time on leisure. "Hurray! We can now work people an extra 20 hours a week!"
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!
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I tried a similar experiment in college. Wanted to see how long I could go without any sleep whatsoever. Well, it was exams week and I had four tough classes, so that contributed to the urgency of the experiment. I've never needed a LOT of sleep anyway, so I wanted to see how long I could sustain a constant waking state.
Anyway, what I discovered at the time was that I could function pretty well for about 5 days with no sleep. As long as I got plenty of water and ate well (healthy foods, no "quick burn" sugars, etc), I felt reasonably functional. Easily functional enough to do well on my exams and manage the 1/2 hour drive back and forth between school and work. If I ate sugary crap or had even a little caffeine, it helped in the short term but the sugar crash and/or caffeine letdown was really rough.
I found that concentrating on something really helped. While driving, I'd examine the cars around me and count random attributes about them, or review what I was studying in my head by doing random math problems with the license plate numbers, or whatever. Studying dry material was hard, but I'd take frequent short breaks and draw or read for short periods.
However, as the days progressed, even an intense focus on things had a gradually decreasing effect. The night after exams, I managed to get through my work shift at my second job but even doing everything I could to be focusing on something interesting, I found my thought processes wandering. After work, I went home and slept 24 hours straight, and had a mild headache and a kind of "hangover" feeling for about 2 days.
Today, 20+ years later, I don't know how well I'd fare on the experiment. I routinely get about 6 hours of sleep (fall asleep around 1AM, wake up at 7), with occasional nights in the 7-9 hour range (maybe once a week. if I can manage to fall asleep earlier than 1AM, which is rare). I am relatively functional with as little as 3 hours of sleep for a night or two, but I'm much better off with 6.
I seem to go through "cycles" every couple of months where I can only manage to fall asleep late (1:30AM or so), then later and later until I'm down to 2-3 hours, then I "crash" to 9 hours for a night, then reset to about 6 for a while, then after some time it starts getting shorter again. When the insomnia cycle start hitting, I find myself depressed and unmotivated, then it gets really bad immediately after the "crash", then I get my equilibrium once I reestablish the 6-hour cycle again.
I have had to do "all nighters" recently and I don't feel a profound lack of sleep, but I don't know if I could maintain it for anything longer than a night or two any more and still feel functional.
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The story of Red-Eye, who battles evil by hoping they'll nod off before he does.
To the people in extreme poverty, I doubt there is much difference between a guy that walks with a gold stick and other that is able to pay and use for a computer, all the material inside (including some gold sticks) , and also the internet connection + infrastructure... Well, it is a blessing we just live reasonably this allows to both ignore the poor AND criticize the rich for not helping the poor, how lucky we are.
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