Do we reall NEED to sleep 8 hours a day?

New Scientist As alert as ever on just two hours' sleep - News:

"WHY do we have to spend a third of our lives sleeping? The discovery that fruit flies with a particular protein variant need only a third of the normal amount of sleep could provide part of the answer.

Surprisingly, sleep in flies and mammals shares many similarities; deprivation, for instance, leads to impaired performance. Chiara Cirelli's group at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been screening thousands of mutant fruit flies to identify the genes that affect slumber.

She discovered that one mutant, dubbed 'minisleep', rests only 4 hours a day, compared with 12 hours in normal flies (Nature, vol 434, p 1087). Despite the lack of sleep, minisleepers showed no signs of impairment. Their escape responses also remained almost as quick after 24 hours without sleep, unlike those of normal flies.

The minisleep mutation is in a gene called Shaker, which is also found in mammals, and there are a few reports of people who really do seem to get by on a couple of hours' sleep without any ill effects. Understanding how the protein variant works might lead to new kinds of drugs for keeping sleep-deprived people alert, the team speculates. There is a snag, though: minisleepers die young."

Pete's Points:

I am one of those people who seem to need less sleep than most. So I am much taken with the information in this article that perhaps the reason for my situation may well be as simple as the fact that my body manufactures a protein and that this may well be due to a different gene structure.

Of course I am NOT happy about this "dying young" bit. I suspect the author of the article merely mentioned it as a way of helping readers who are slugabeds with their penchant for sleeping in.

For those people who have always thought that I was weird - now is the chance for you to be in a position to gloat.

You now have your evidence.

I would of course argue that I am simply an early adaptation (along Darwinian lines) to the current environmental stimuli created by the management mantra that we simply have to do more with less!