Wouldn’t it be great if you could operate on four hours of sleep? You’d have an extra three to four hours a day to achieve your goals.
Scientists have been trying to figure out how people like marines and bohemians do it. And the studies are increasingly pointing in one direction: They are genetic “freaks.”
Four years ago, geneticist Ying-Hui Fu discovered a mutation — the DEC2 gene — which controls circadian rhythm. (That’s the internal clock that regulates the sleep-wake cycle.)
Lab tests done on mice and fruit flies since then have supported the hypothesis that DEC2 accounts for Hieu’s capacity to operate on just four hours of sleep.
“We’ve long believed that there was a genetic basis for this,” Paul Shaw, a neurobiologist at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, told Total Health Breakthroughs. “But it was only in the last few years that scientists have been able to ferret out which genes are responsible.”
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