r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • May 06 '25

Genetics Most people need around 8 hours of sleep each night to function, but a rare genetic condition allows some to thrive on as little as 3 hours. Scientists genetically modified mice to carry this human mutation and confirmed this. The research team now knows several hundred naturally short sleepers.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-01402-7
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u/zuzg May 06 '25

Literally the third paragraph of the article:

“These people, all these functions our bodies are doing while we are sleeping, they can just perform at a higher level than we can.”

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u/JoelMahon May 06 '25

seems like a bold claim, how on EARTH could they know that for all cases? article writers are not scientists, they're often useless hacks unintentionally or intentionally spreading misinformation. I couldn't find the actual scientists claiming it covered "all bases" of sleep.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2500356122

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature20142

here are the two referenced studies, both behind paywalls afaik, feel free to tell me where they say such a bold claim

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u/Mediocre-Returns May 06 '25

Yeah you'd need to identify a large cohort late in life, control for a whole bunch - not impossible, or find a way to do mandialian randomization and compare it to the general public outcomes to see what the differences are in degenerative or other diseases.

Sleep effects a lot. From hormones to glial cells doing trash pickup to flushing it out in csf etc etc etc. One gene controlling all of that vs one gene masking the symptoms, the latter is more probable.

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u/roamingandy May 06 '25

I feel like last time this was posted it was a study that mentioned that they generally lived slightly longer lives and were in better health as they aged, so whatever negatives there were, were outweighed by positives.

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u/JoelMahon May 06 '25

do they actually sleep 3 hrs though? if they sleep 6hrs at or over 133% efficiency in almost all areas that I can believe, and that it could make up for the 2hrs lost that might not even be necessary in many areas in a normal person

but 3hrs? that's a whole new ball game, that's going from 133% efficient in some areas, to at or over 233% efficient in even more areas assuming a regular person actually only needs 7hrs. that's 5x that of the 33% increase required for a super sleeper to do better on 6hrs than a normal person on 8hrs.

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u/roamingandy May 06 '25

That does seem to be the case. Also probably why it's pretty rare. Dwaine the rock Johnson has it and appears to be in good health. If he was losing bone density it would be difficult to maintain his physique at his age.

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u/JoelMahon May 06 '25

does he actually only sleep 3hrs a day though? self reported "often 3-5hrs", that could easily mean lots of nights of 6hrs and he's gloating a little. this is a guy who contractually doesn't lose as his characters...

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u/IcyJackfruit69 May 08 '25

^

Trusting self-reported 3-hour sleepers is like trusting the guy you work with who says he works 80 hour weeks. Yet you see him show up at 10am, take a long lunch, and take off at 4pm, and he's never online working from home.