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Carrion Luggage #1088686 added May 4, 2025 at 9:24am
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Owl See You Later
As I've noted before, I try to be skeptical of articles that confirm what I believe. Like this one from The Guardian.
One wonders if the study was conducted by night owls.
The idea that night owls who don’t go to bed until the early hours struggle to get anything done during the day may have to be revised.
Eh, getting anything done is overrated.
It turns out that staying up late could be good for our brain power as research suggests that people who identify as night owls could be sharper than those who go to bed early.
We're also funnier, better looking, and richer.
Seriously, though, the first thing I had to ask myself was this: Are we smarter because we stay up later, or do we stay up later because we're smarter? Or is there some factor that contributes to both, like, maybe, a willingness to go against the grain of society and do one's own thing, regardless of the schedule imposed upon us by cultural pressure?
Or, and I'm still being serious for once, do larks as a group score lower on these traits because some of them are actually owls who were pressured into their schedule by relentless society?
Researchers led by academics at Imperial College London studied data from the UK Biobank study on more than 26,000 people who had completed intelligence, reasoning, reaction time and memory tests.
They then examined how participants’ sleep duration, quality, and chronotype (which determines what time of day we feel most alert and productive) affected brain performance.
Well, now, they could have said up front that sleep duration and quality were also being considered as factors. I think it's pretty well-established that people who get a good and full night's sleep (whether it takes place technically at "night" or not) tend to do better with things like memory and reaction time.
From a purely speculative viewpoint, this brings me back to wondering if some larks aren't getting decent sleep because they should be owls. I can't think of a mechanism by which merely shifting one's sleep hours could help with cognition, unless one's sleep hours already should be other than what they are. In other words, I'd expect to see the reverse result in such a study if it were generally larks being forced into night owl mode, rather than the reality of the other way around.
I imagine we could get some data on that if they just studied people like late-shift workers or bartenders, people who need to follow an owl schedule even if their chronotype is more lark.
Going to bed late is strongly associated with creative types. Artists, authors and musicians known to be night owls include Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, James Joyce, Kanye West and Lady Gaga.
I also imagine way more musicians are owls just because they, too, can be forced into a stay-up-late schedule for work, whatever their natural chronotype. For writers, it's a different story (pun intended), because creative writers, at least, often set their own schedules. At any rate, I'm glad the article uses "strongly associated with" instead of implying causation in either direction.
...the study found that sleep duration is important for brain function, with those getting between seven and nine hours of shut-eye each night performing best in cognitive tests.
Which I was speculating about just a few minutes ago.
But some experts urged caution in interpreting the findings. Jacqui Hanley, head of research funding at Alzheimer’s Research UK, said: “Without a detailed picture of what is going on in the brain, we don’t know if being a ‘morning’ or ‘evening’ person affects memory and thinking, or if a decline in cognition is causing changes to sleeping patterns.”
Fair point, so my skepticism here is warranted for reasons I didn't even think of.
Jessica Chelekis, a senior lecturer in sustainability global value chains and sleep expert at Brunel University London, said there were “important limitations” to the study as the research did not account for education attainment, or include the time of day the cognitive tests were conducted in the results.
Hang on while I try to interpret "sustainability global value chains," which sounds to me more like a bunch of corporate buzzwords strung together haphazardly. Regardless of the value, or lack thereof, of that word salad, her note about limitations is important to account for.
The main value of the study was challenging stereotypes around sleep, she added.
And I think that's valid (maybe not "the main" but at least "a" value), because us owls are generally seen as lazy and unproductive.
Well, okay, I am lazy and unproductive, but that doesn't mean I'm not an outlier. |
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