My mother-in-law has, for many years, been a chronic early bird. She usually seems to wake up reguarly between 3 and 5 a.m., seven days a week, and, well, that’s it, no chance of going back to sleep. While this has some advantages (she can get a lot of interesting stuff done early in the morning that way, and if she’s a house guest you know that not only will the dishes be cleaned when you get downstairs in the morning but Katherine will have someone to play with no matter how early she gets up), it still puts a crimp into her evenings.
And now we discover that she’s a mutant.
Middlebrook suffers from what is known as familial advanced sleep phase syndrome, or FASPS. Her body’s clock is out of sync with the sleep-wake rhythm most of the world lives by. She goes to bed each night between 5:30 and 7:30 p.m. and wakes in the wee hours of the morning.
“The net result is you can feel very isolated,” Middlebrook said. “Who wants to party at three in the morning? Nobody I know, and I’m not headed to the local bar to see who’s still there.” Instead, she quietly cleans the house, makes breakfast, or cuddles up with a book.
About three-tenths of a percent of the world’s population lives like this, including two of Middlebrook’s sisters, her daughter, and her mother. “Their whole clock is shifted,” said Ying-Hui Fu, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco
Fu and colleagues report in tomorrow’s issue of the science journal Nature on a newly discovered mutation to a single gene that they say causes FASPS.
Fortunately, Margie doesn’t seem to have inherited it …
(via BoingBoing)
Nice that she uses her mutant power for good instead of evil.
You mean there is someone I can call at 4am?
As long as it’s not me …