短睡一族是什么？

What would you do if you had 60 days of extra free time a year? Ask Abby Ross, a retired psychologist from Miami, Florida, a “short-sleeper”. She needs only four hours sleep a night, so has a lot of spare time to fill while the rest of the world is in the land of nod.

如果一年可以多出60天的空閑時(shí)間，你會(huì)做些什么呢?讓我們來(lái)問(wèn)問(wèn)艾比•羅絲好了。她來(lái)自弗洛里達(dá)州邁阿密市，是一名退休的心理學(xué)家，同時(shí)也是一位“短睡眠者”。她每晚只睡4個(gè)小時(shí)就足夠了，因此，世界上的其他人都在酣睡的時(shí)候，她卻多出了許多可以利用的時(shí)光。

Short-sleepers like Ross never feel lethargic, nor do they ever sleep in. They wake early – normally around four or five o’clock – raring to get on with their day. Margaret Thatcher may have been one – she famously said she needed just four hours a night, whereas Mariah Carey claims she needs 15.

像羅絲這樣的短睡眠者從來(lái)不會(huì)感到昏昏欲睡，也從來(lái)都沒(méi)有睡過(guò)頭的時(shí)候。他們醒的很早(一般情況下，四、五點(diǎn)就會(huì)醒)，迫不及待的開(kāi)始新一天的生活?，敻覃愄?bull;撒切爾就是其中一位。她表示每天只需四個(gè)小時(shí)的睡眠，而瑪利亞•凱利則宣稱自己需要睡15個(gè)小時(shí)。

In 2009, a woman came into Ying-Hui Fu’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco, complaining that she always woke up too early. At first, Fu thought the woman was an extreme morning lark – a person who goes to bed early and wakes early. However, the woman explained that she actually went to bed around midnight and woke at 4am feeling completely alert. It was the same for several members of her family, she said.

2009年，一個(gè)女人來(lái)到了傅映暉的實(shí)驗(yàn)室(位于舊金山的加利福尼亞大學(xué))，抱怨自己總是醒太早。起初，傅教授認(rèn)為她只是“極度早起的百靈鳥(niǎo)”，也就是早睡早起的典型。然而，這位女士解釋說(shuō)，實(shí)際上她總是午夜才去睡覺(jué)，早上4點(diǎn)就全然沒(méi)了睡意。她表示，自己的家族中也有幾位成員是同樣的情況。

Fu and her colleagues compared the genome of different family members. They discovered a tiny mutation in a gene called DEC2 that was present in those who were short-sleepers, but not in members of the family who had normal length sleep, nor in 250 unrelated volunteers.

傅教授與同事們比對(duì)了不同家庭成員的基因之后發(fā)現(xiàn)，短睡眠者身上所攜帶的DEC2基因上都會(huì)一個(gè)細(xì)小的突變，但是其他睡眠長(zhǎng)度正常的家庭成員則沒(méi)有這種突變，其他的250名無(wú)關(guān)自愿者亦然。