Matthew Walker

And you can see that at the individual level.

You can see it in groups.

And then there was a great study again by Dr. Etty Ben-Simon that demonstrated this at a national level.

Because what she did was she looked at this wonderful manipulation of one hour of sleep that happens twice a year to 1.6 billion people.

It's called daylight savings time.

Spring, yeah, when you lose one hour of sleep opportunity, she looked at donations across the nation.

And sure enough, there was this big dent in donation giving in the Sleepy Monday and Tuesday after the clock change because of that sleep.

We become less willing to empathetically and sort of selflessly help other individuals.

And so to me, I think it's just a fascinating sort of area.

And then the other area I think is great, and I'm sorry I'm racing forward because I get so excited, but

There's work now looking at what we call genetic short sleepers.

And sort of idiots like me have been out there touting the importance of somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep.

And once you get less than that, and we'll perhaps speak about that, you see biological changes.

But there is a subset of individuals who, and we've identified at least two different genes.

One of them is what we call the DEC2 gene, the D-E-C-2 gene.

And it seems to allow individuals to sleep

about five hours, maybe even a little bit less, and show no impairment whatsoever.

Now, we haven't tracked these individuals across the lifespan to truly understand does it lead to a lower, I'm sorry, a higher mortality risk.

But so far, they don't implode like perhaps what I would do when you're limited to this anemic diet of five hours of sleep.

They hang in there just fine.