Not a gene per se, though it's no surprise a popular science outlet screws this up; given a working clock, they typically do only slightly better than chance at identifying the time of day.
From the cited paper [1], what actually makes the difference is having your two copies of a specific gene (one from each parent) differ from one another in a few specific, relatively common ways.
- not that many prion diseases among brain eating people surprisingly (but are statistics accurate? what if they develop later?)
- perhaps because our ancestors did it, human DNA has a gene that "protects" from prion diseases somehow. didn't know that could be a thing!