If you're one of the lucky few who can cope with going to bed at midnight and waking at six with no ill effects, there may be a medical explanation: scientists have recently discovered a rare gene called DEC2, whose carriers are able to cope with less sleep than the average person.
Doctors and researchers have always told us that we’ll make ourselves sick scraping by on less than eight hours of sleep each night. But if you’re one of the lucky few who can cope with going to bed at midnight and waking at six with no ill effects, there may be a medical explanation: scientists have recently discovered a rare gene called DEC2 that is related to sleep and its impact on the body. For carriers of the gene, such as a mother-and-daughter pair who took part in the study, it’s entirely possible to be fully active and alert each day on as little as six hours of sleep.
The study, from a University of California, San Francisco team led by Ying-Hui Fu, PhD, is a dramatic breakthrough in the study of sleep.
“This is the first time a gene has been found in humans that critically and dramatically controls sleep,” Medhi Tafti, PhD, a geneticist not involved in the study, told WebMD. “We now have evidence that a gene mutation can dramatically change the amount of sleep you get.”
With this newfound knowledge about the sleep gene, it’s entirely possible that many of our early, uberproductive geniuses were carriers of the DEC2 gene as well. Leonardi da Vinci was known for his habit of taking short power naps every 4 hours, rather than sleeping through the night, which reduced his total sleeping time to approximately two hours, giving him a full 22 hours each day to paint, invent, and take part in other genius pursuits. His method is now known as “polyphasic sleep,” and has been attempted with mixed success by thousands since. America’s most famous non-Presidential forefather, Benjamin Franklin, also stuck with a rigid sleep schedule, allowing himself up to seven hours of rest between 10 PM and 5 AM, reserving the remainder of his time for pondering the question, “what good will I do today?”, working, eating, more working, leisure activities, and finally answering the question, “what good have I done today?” (Take a look at his inspiring daily schedule to see how he got it all done.)
Now that the less-sleep gene has been isolated, some natural questions follow: can the gene be synthesized for use by those who don’t carry it, and more importantly, would that be safe? Early studies providing lab mice with a synthetic version of the gene would indicate yes on both counts, and the possibilities could be endless.
“Then probably we can act on this pathway and increase sleep or reduce sleep, or make sleep more intense, or improve recovery from sleep deprivation,” said Fu. “But that will be for the next decades, not this one.”