Both white-collar workers and students have a deep understanding of Monday syndrome. On the weekends, you might lose some sleep from hanging out or staying up late, and on Mondays you have trouble concentrating, typos in emails, or even a dangerous situation while driving. It's clear that sleep deprivation reduces our cognitive performance. Still, insomnia hits us unfairly, with some people becoming "zombies" if they get less than eight hours of sleep, while others only get five to six hours a night. Why does insomnia affect people differently?
In 2017, researchers from the University of Washington asked 49 volunteers to take a computer-based test, of which 34 volunteers had gone without sleep for more than 38 hours in a row, compared with a control group of 15 volunteers who slept normally. In the first test, the volunteers did the same simple repetitive tasks from start to finish, and the sleep-deprived people didn't do it well, but got the job done. In the second test, the researchers stumbled them and reversed the rules of the test halfway through the test. The results showed that people who were resting normally had little difficulty changing their thinking patterns and completed their work, while those who were sleep deprived had little difficulty. Most of them are difficult to adapt to the changes in the rules.
However, the researchers found a peculiar phenomenon, that is, some volunteers who were sleep-deprived were hardly affected when the rules were changed. Why is this? The researchers examined the volunteers' genetic sequences and found that they commonly contained the DRD2 gene, which is associated with information processing and cognitive flexibility.
This isn't the first time researchers have found a link between genes and people's perception after sleep. We know that lack of sleep can cause a person to lose concentration. In a 2014 study, researchers found that if a person has a gene called DEC2, they can concentrate even if they lack sleep. As a result, people with the DEC2 gene generally recover from sleep deprivation faster than others.
The relationship between the DRD2 gene and sleep deprivation is undoubtedly another form of new discovery. The researchers also tested the volunteers for differences in attention span and found that people with the DRD2 gene did not perform better in attention span. That is, the cognitive skills controlled by the DEC2 gene and the DRD2 gene are not only different, but also unrelated.
It seems that insomnia is not terrible, as long as you have the DRD2 gene or the DEC2 gene, you can still work energetically, and if you have both genes at the same time, I am afraid you can become a sleepless workaholic. People like Premier Zhou who only sleep four or five hours a day and still work energetically may have these two or one of these genes in their bodies.
Scientists continue to study the different effects of sleep deprivation on people, and may give us new ways to address sleep deprivation, or at least help us determine who is best suited for long-term sleep-deprived jobs.
.jpeg)
