Scientists Discover Gene for Those Who Need Less Sleep

Most of us need about eight or so hours of sleep a night to perform optimally during the day. But scientists have found a mother and daughter who naturally snooze just six nightly hours, waking up bright-eyed and bushy tailed. Sleep logs revealed the 44-year-old woman and her 69-year-old mother have been "natural short sleepers" for most of their lives. They both go to bed at about 10 p.m. and rise at 4 or 4:30 a.m.

While that might sound a lot like your schedule, there's a catch: Besides catching fewer Z's, the two family members are also very active. For instance, the mother travels internationally often and dances three or four times a week. "They really have shorter sleep requirements," said study researcher Ying-Hui Fu, a professor of neurology at the University of California at San Francisco, Mission Bay.

It turns out, the pair are genetically programmed for such abbreviated sleep. They both carry a genetic mutation to the gene DEC2 that Fu and her colleagues found is at least partly responsible for the sleep pattern and probably contributes to so-called sleep homeostasis (how much sleep we need).