A Gene That Makes You Need Less Sleep? (2014)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
You should reach out to the sleep researchers, a drug to temporarily not need sleep without massive burn out after would be pretty cool!
I'm still young and healthy so I feel "fine" most of the time, even when I'm extremely sleep deprived, but I am a little worried what the effects of my sleep deprivation will be on my body and mind in the long run. Without Zaleplon I can't sleep. I could lay in bed for days and never fall asleep.
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.
Sleeping on weed tho is ALWAYS without dreams for me, but tomorrow I am foggy entire day.
Might not have that much remaining tolerance for pollen or fruits and vegetabes either.
When I go past three days without sleeping I start hallucinating and it becomes a psychedelic experience.
Throughout my 20s I would stay up for days writing code and studying things deep in a flow state, but after the third day I'd be useless. It was some of my most productive times, and I'm quite jealous of your natural ability.
In Ranger School, which is notorious for sleep deprivation, I would legitimately start hallucinating after being up for longer than 72 hours or so. Granted the physical demands are much higher, but I cannot for the life of me imagine purposely staying up for 11 days - even just doing nothing. At some point that’s going to throw your metabolic rates into a tantrum (at least, it would for a normal person) and you’d just pass out.
Reminds me of an old episode of The X-Files.
First off: sleep is highly, highly, highly evolutionarily conserved. Essentially every complex lifeform with an active metabolism either sleeps or it does something that resembles sleep. Sleep as a practice is never lost via mutation or other evolutionary change.
There are zero examples of a speciation causing an organism that sleeps to stop doing so, and zero examples of an organism that doesn't sleep that has a common ancestor who does. ("Sleep" is broadly interpreted.)
It's difficult to describe just iron this rule is. Sleep shares this with just a handful of other systems, largely consisting of fetal development genes and other systems in which a single genetic change kills the organism.
And, in our experience, that's because going without sleep also kills the organism. In humans, the one example we know of that causes total inability to sleep is Fatal Familial Insomnia, a genetic prion disorder with 100% mortality.
Second, people are very, very, very bad at assessing whether they have been asleep. I cannot tell you the number of people I have seen who were asleep-- verifiably asleep, because I was watching their brain waves in real-time-- who, when woken for some reason or another, report they never fell asleep. I've seen people sleep the entire night and claim they didn't sleep a wink.
Third, people who are sleep deprived cannot accurately assess their acute impairment, and this is worse with chronic deprivation, not only because of worsened cognitive function but because the person no longer has a healthy baseline in recent memory to compare to.
People assess whether they're functioning well by comparison to yesterday and last week and this month. If they were sleep deprived then as well, they report the differences between that time and now, if any, NOT the actual absolute value of their impairment.
Fourth, and finally, the causative correlations between sleep deprivation and impairment are super robust. The parent article is describing people who are less affected, but still experience profound impairment. It just happens that their impairment is small relative to others. While so-called "short sleepers"-- the actual technical term for the healthy 6 hours a nighters-- do in fact seem to do find with somewhat less sleep, they also experience impairment when getting less than their normal sleep time.
Obviously, I can't verify for certain that our parent comment is mistaken in their perception.
But what I can say quite comfortably is that if what they say is true, they are a walking Nobel Prize. What they describe is not considered unlikely, it's considered fundamentally impossible.
Mind, it wouldn't be the first time distinguished scientists advised us if was impossible, and turned out to be wrong, but this would really be closer to the scale of "general relativity is wrong" rather than "oops, eggs are good for you.
Parent commenter: if you read this, and if you genuinely believe your experience is as described, please contact William Dement, "Bill" Dement, at Stanford University...ASAP!
He is the grandfather of sleep medicine and conducted the first scientific sleep studies in the world. I can say with total confidence that if what you say is correct, he will either drop what he is researching and study you, or find a researcher who can. And if what you say is true you owe it to the world and posterity to be studied.
What are your nutritional needs if you aren't sleeping? Are you eating extra throughout the night when your basal metabolic rate would otherwise be slowed down until morning when sleeping?
You should really see a sleep specialist and do a sleep study cause of beta-amyloid build up linked to Alzheimer's disease:
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-sle...
"A mouse study suggests that sleep helps restore the brain by flushing out toxins that build up during waking hours. The results point to a potential new role for sleep in health and disease."
We were jealous of her, but she wished things were different.
I wonder if there is the other extreme. Are there people who need 20 hours of sleep to feel rested? I also agree with many of your respondents in hoping you'd have scientists study your condition.
> 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... - this is the same research group as the New Yorker article (Fu et al), but four years along.
That just means 'less than one in two hundred'. Which is not that rare.
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)
What a weird, pointless and almost information-less way to say < 0.5%.
How does one find out if he has the genes?
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.
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.
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.
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.