While popular culture frequently portrays highly talented minds as night owls who work all night, recent research suggests otherwise.
A study conducted by a team of scientists from the University of Ottawa found the inverse of what previous studies had found, which is the notion that night owls have higher verbal IQ.
The study, which was published in Current Research in Behavioral Sciences, delves at the impact of a person’s everyday routine, rhythm, and activity patterns at different times of the day on intellect, not simply health.
Director of the University of Ottawa Sleep Research Laboratory, Stuart Fogel, revealed in a press release, that When essential parameters such as bedtime and age are taken into consideration, it was shown that, contrary to prior findings, early risers tend to have greater verbal skills. This result is unexpected and indicates that the situation is far more complicated than anticipated.
The specialists sought volunteers for the study and recorded their chronotypes, which is a person’s proclivity to be active in the morning or evening. They tracked each participant’s biological cycles as well as their daily preferences.
A chronotype indicates when a person prefers to pursue difficult or significant tasks during the day, which may include both intellectual and physical activity.
Younger folks are often ‘evening types,’ whereas elderly people prefer to work in the morning. This is odd given that the entire educational system is based on educating children and requiring energy from them in the morning.
According to Fogel, while deciding on the commencement time of the institute, schools do not take chronotypes into account. The timings are determined by the work shift patterns of the parents. So school-aged children suffer the price since they are evening people compelled to work on a morning timetable.
However, morning may not be the greatest time for youngsters who are typically night owls. Fogel feels that those youngsters are impaired because the schedule put on them is essentially battling against their biological clock on a daily basis.
The writers feel that establishing the stability of a person’s rhythm is critical since this is what they believe drives intellect. The human brain needs regularity, and the best way for it to be efficient in our own rhythms is to keep to that schedule rather than attempting to catch up all the time.
