Scientists find second ‘short sleep’ gene (2019) | Hacker News Reader

Scientists find second ‘short sleep’ gene (2019)

ucsf.edu

85 pointsfybs80 comments

If there is one genetic quirk that I am extremely envious of, it's definitely this one. From the article:

> But natural short sleepers actually seem to benefit from this quirk of their biology. Fu says researchers have found that short sleepers tend to be more optimistic, more energetic and better multitaskers. They also have a higher pain threshold, don’t suffer from jet lag and some researchers believe they may even live longer.

I'm the opposite, I guess I'd be categorized as a "long sleeper" - the "natural" length of my sleep is ~9 hours. I feel pretty chronically lethargic, and if I go under 8 hours for multiple nights in a row I feel completely awful and often end up getting sick.

There probably are downsides to this gene later in life. Evolution is always about tradeoffs.

That's not true - evolution is about the best genes for survivability and reproduction continuing to be passed along. The evolutionary perspective here wouldn't be that there are downsides to this, but rather that people with this mutation are better able to survive and reproduce, so we'd expect it to be passed onto more offspring over the generations.

Yes, this happens in the long run. In the short term, when a single gene has massive benefit, there must be some negative effect too, otherwise the entire population would quickly get that gene and that's not what we see here.

Obvious answer:

The benefit is real, but minor

I wouldn't say "minor." In real terms, I think it's a huge advantage in our current society. But it's just not strongly selected for.

There's not been nearly enough time for these genes to spread in modern society.

It's hard to imagine this gene was as beneficial as it might be today without cheap and effective night time lighting.

You are going to live long enough and be able to reproduce with about the same probability all other things equal whether you need 3 hours or 10 sleep nightly. There's very little evolutionary pressure even if you would massively and hugely prefer one of those over the other.

The kind of non-survival genetics that could be selected for in the modern world are those that make multiple women (nature can be pretty sexist) want to throw caution to the wind and have babies fathered by a man with some desirable attribute. I have no idea if this actually happens in reality with heritable genes. Eg do basketball players pass on a greater than average amount of their genetics (more children with more women) by virtue of being tall making them more sexually desirable to those who might become single mothers? Plausible, I guess, but could easily be utterly false. I don't know how you'd test it even in the absence of ethical concerns.

What's the negative effect of not having the gene for Huntington disease?

I don't know, but the gene for sickle cell is good for malaria.

Maybe the downside is that someone who sleeps less will also tend to wander during the night, which increased the risk of dying before the modern world.

I think that's down to risk management skills of an individual. It could also be the case that sleeping less means you're more aware of external threats and ambushes and you can be more productive.

Evolution happens through reproduction, which tends to happen earlier in life. So if some gene confers an advantage in early life but a disadvantage later on, it's likely the disadvantage won't stop it from spreading.

If it's not widespread, it's either not an advantage that "matters" or maybe it possibly has some negative interaction with other traits that matter for reproduction.

Humans have much longer lifespans than other animals, so it must be an advantage for our descendants to have us around. Presumably this is because of grandparents providing childcare.

On the flip side, I see longer sleep routine as an opportunity to dream more.

(Says one who needs 10 hours of sleep to function at normal performance :))

Surely there must be some downside to it.

If it weren't so, one would have expected this gene to spread across the human genepool millions of years ago.

There must be something that is overlooked.

Perhaps, optimism is not a good ticket to survival: I am quite optimistic that this larger, scary looking animal has no intention to eat me.

Used to be, boredom killed humans like curiosity kills cats

Turning off for 9 hours was a defense mechanism

That's a particularly implausible hypothesis.

Given all the very advantageous qualities this gene has to offer, there must be at leas some considerable downsides to it indeed.

Not necessarily. 1) It could be a relatively recent mutation. 2) It's probably not particularly important for sexual selection.

I would imagine short sleepers need more calories.

So they're less likely to be obese. Great. That makes me feel -so- much better about being a long sleeper. :P

Through most of human history, needing more calories meant you were the first to starve during a famine.

Its only recently that humans gained the ability to control the illumination and temperature of their work environment.

Sleeping less would have been of no advantage when you have 8hours+ of night for each 24 hour period anyway.

Without artificial lighting, the short sleeping gene is not that useful.

I am a long sleeper as well and I don’t see any downside to it!

It's like adding 1-2 hours to the commute, only worse because you can't listen to anything during that time and you have to do it on weekends, the days you WFH and during vacations too.

A recent podcast episode I watched had a doctor who said something that stuck with me: "when it comes to sleep, it's about the quality, not the quantity". A small amount of high-quality sleep gives you more actual rest than a large amount of lesser-quality sleep, they said.

Not sure how true it is, but it seems to line up with my life. I'm also a long sleeper who's still often lethargic during the day. But I find that some (legal) inhibitory substances can bring me into what feels like a much more restful sleep, and I wake up feeling very refreshed and energetic for the whole day. My eyelids feel less heavy, I feel like a fog is lifted, and I just feel better in every way.

I suspect my average sleep quality just isn't very good.

Me neither. I rarely had any good sleep that left me with a refreshed mind. Early morning is usually my worst time.

I am very interested to read about the evidence behind this. Do you remember the doctor's or podcast's name?

https://youtu.be/jhKZIq3SlYE?t=4436

Can't speak to the veracity of it, and might've paraphrased or misremembered a bit, but it definitely stayed with me.

> some (legal) inhibitory substances

Which substances?

THC-A

Phenibut. (Not recommended to be taken on a daily/frequent basis. It's a GABA analogue.)

So it's basically a research chemical benzo.

My advice to everyone is to stick to things like melatonin, pavlov conditioning like drinking camomile tea, and maybe some some weed.

The EV of playing with benzos and other addictive substances is negative.

I think it's past the research chemical stage, but, yes, it's somewhat similar to benzodiazepines and I strongly recommend people not take it or any other GABAergic often. I'd very strongly recommend people not try to take phenibut to improve sleep.

This is why I was merely giving an anecdote of what it feels like when I'm very well-rested rather than suggesting a solution, and why I didn't want to name the substance in my anecdote. I'm still struggling with sleep quality. If I could just take a lot of phenibut all the time, I wouldn't have an issue, but I know I really shouldn't take it often, so I don't. (In part because I know I'd have an issue again once tolerance builds, in addition to some new issues.)

(Personally, weed makes it much, much harder for me to sleep.)

You should be careful with how you use melatonin, too, though: https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/10/melatonin-much-more-th..., https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/07/12/did-a-melatonin-patent...

Perhaps you're not giving 'weed' the credit it deserves.

[IMHO]I'm so sick of people who purposely down play the medical and therapeutic effects of cannabis. That's what it should be referred to, since in this country [US] 'weed' is a generic term that generally has been used to describe anything bad, unwanted or something not worth keeping. Which is completely different when we talk about medical grade high THC cannabis[in the US].

Stop thinking 'weed' is the same as taking a manufactured pharmaceutical pill. It's not, I don't have to site any references or link any sites to know the difference. If you feel differently, perhaps you'd be better off googling the differences to discover what millions of people have known for hundreds if not thousands if years. CANNABIS is a healing plant, full stop.

We can debate all day long about what plant may be better for this or that, but you're never going to convince me that 'weed' is not as effective for pain as a manufactured pharmaceutical pill.

Take care of your life, do as you see fit, I think there is a right strain and dosage for everyone to enjoy the benefits of cannabis.

Not all pharmaceutical drugs are bad, true, not all alcohol is bad, but if you take enough of it, it'll kill you.

Try Zinc if you haven't. Very deep sleeps.

Phenibut gives me terrible acidic dihareea and euphoria some 8 hours after taking it, I call it MDMA light.

Effects come 4 hours after taking it so anyone taking it for sleep needs to take the therapeutic dosage -- 150-300mg and not the 900mg recreational dosage and needs to take it a looong time before bed.

This is what they say but for me an hour and a half is fine.

Wow. I asked because I was curious if you were referencing phenibut. It gives me godlike sleeps. Obviously probably bad to use daily etc though. But melatonin etc don't even compete.

Weirdly, I tried ear plugs for sleeping a while back and I woke up feeling like a new person. It was amazing. Only stopped when I had kids. For anyone else reading maybe try earplugs.

Blackout blinds helped too.

Melatonin, benzos induce sleep but do not improve sleep quality for me.

Less stress, feeling content + antihistamines or alpha blockers (especially trazodone which has both) do induce much longer deep sleep and feeling refreshed and indeed total sleep duration has nothing to do with sleep quality.

Unfortunately, I believe antihistamines and alpha blockers are both associated with long-term negative health effects if used frequently. Very likely not as bad as daily benzo use, and melatonin is probably safest, but I believe it's not healthy to take any of those four on a regular basis.

It's tough to get a free lunch in the sleep department.

I know about the anti-colinergic scale and that first generation antihistamines are bad, but I use third generation antihistamines(levoceterizine), and I use sporadically.

But alpha blockers? I mean I don't use those anymore because trazobone and clonodine is antihipertensive and I don't want to mess with that, but I had no idea alpha blockers were bad for the brain.

I'm actually not sure about alpha blockers. I don't know if they're necessarily associated with long-term brain issues like anti-cholinergics are. According to Google, some alpha blockers may be associated with other long-term issues, though.

I imagine most of the advantages happen because they've taken over and structured the modern world to make long sleeping difficult.

Yeah man, definitely! Just imagine that you have 2 more hours than other people for EVERY DAY.

OK, I also figured out that sometimes those 2 extra hours are pretty useless if I couldn't figure out my goal in the world. But still a pretty good 2 hour :/

Do we know for sure it's just this one gene?

What if we engineered humans to have this gene, could we do more harm if in fact it's a combination of genes and we introduce just one of them?

If the gene sequence is short enough, this is probably the best gene to do a clinical trial on the human use of CRISPR-Cas9 because it’s one healthy people would be willing to risk their hide to splice in. It’s essentially as close as we can get to a real-world superpower.

> Using a technique known as optogenetics, in which cells are modified so they can be activated by light, the researchers focused light on neurons in the pons to stimulate those in which ADRB1 was expressed.

I feel like there's a Manchuria Candidate story waiting to written about this.

That's cool as hell.

It is cool, but having fiber optics poking out of your head is pretty conspicuous.

Chemogenetics (RASSLs/DREADDs)[0] and magnetogenetics[1] allow for more subtle activation. The interesting magnetogenetics results from the mid 2010s were not well-reproduced in the late 2010s, but the physical principle seems sound to me. I'm still hopeful that the technique will see successful application in mammals. Being able to turn the effect off quickly by stopping the external stimulation (vs. having to wait for drug metabolism/excretion in the case of chemogenetics) seems very useful.

Edit: the magnetoreceptors I read about in 2018 were naturally occurring in some turbid-water-dwelling fish. If they don't work well outside the chemical environment of the fish brain, it may be a while before a suitable alternative receptor can be discovered/engineered and used effectively in mammals.

Skepticism about the utility of magnetogenetics is definitely warranted, given how much RF pollution there is in our environment. If your patients have to live the rest of their lives in a shielded room (or wearing a helmet) to prevent unintentional stimulation, then it's not a very good therapy. It could still be useful for preclinical research where you have more control over your subjects' environment, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Receptor_activated_solely_by_a...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetogenetics