
Night owls have more mental stamina than those who awaken at the crack of dawn - soundsop
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/want-to-get-ahead-sleep-in/article1065333/
======
inovica
I've done both - spent time working early mornings and also into the night. I
found that working early in the morning I'm more productive per hour than I am
at night. I find nighttime working to be more creative though. The mornings
are good for me "getting things done" and by 9-10am all the planned work I had
was done

~~~
Maktab
My experience mirrors this. I get through a lot more work and admin in a given
day if I work from 7am-4pm, especially if there's a lot of drudgery involved.
In contrast, if I work from 9am-6pm or later I'm more likely to procrastinate
but I get a spurt of creativity that starts in the late afternoon and gets
amplified at night. So I try to structure my work day around that, using early
mornings to race through necessary but boring work and to tie up the remaining
loose ends from the day or night before while leaving particularly challenging
problems for later in the day or the evening. Not to mention that the feeling
of getting a bunch of tasks out of your way early in the morning usually acts
as a potent motivator for the rest of the day.

------
pygy
Here we go again...

People with nothing but their own anecdotal experience about the subject
trying to (and failing at) criticizing a scientific paper. No one has pulled
off a "correlation != causation", but most other usual suspects are already
there.

Disclaimer: 1) I work in neuroscience , but not in sleep research. This
(hopefully) makes me qualified to assess the seriousness of the methods, even
though I don't have much background in circadian rhythms. 2) I'm biased in
this case since I know personally the first author of the paper and some of
the other researchers involved (and they are among the smartest and more
conscientious people that I know of).

If there were any methodology error lay people would be able to spot in the
paper, it wouldn't have been published in any respected journal in the field
(and most people who commented here are lay people regarding (sleep) science).
This is Science Magazine... They have the best reviewers in the world ("best"
as in "smarter than you can probably imagine").

There are shortcomings inherent to this kind of study, of course. You cannot
control experimental parameters like you can in physics or chemistry. That's
why you have to 1) build your research on solid ground (i.e. solid results
already published and reproduced) and 2) be as careful as possible in
designing your protocol in order to have your bases covered. Schmidt et al.
used the gold standard, they're frankly out of reach of such "low hanging"
criticism.

</rant>

I enjoin you to have a look at the paper and the supporting material.

_

Full text: [http://www.innovatieforganiseren.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2009/...](http://www.innovatieforganiseren.nl/wp-
content/uploads/2009/04/516.pdf)

Supporting Online Material:
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/324/5926/516/DC1/1>

_

Here's the beginning of the latter:

_

1\. Material and methods

Subjects.

[Ethical committee disclaimer]. [All subjects] were screened for morningness
or eveningness according to their timing preferences as defined by two
questionnaires (MEQ (1) and MCTQ (2)). The two groups were matched according
to age, sex and educational level and did not differ in their anxiety and
depression levels as well as in sleep quality and day time sleepiness (all ps
> 0.1; Table S1). Morning and evening types significantly differed in their
scores on the two chronotype questionnaires (MEQ and MCTQ). Exclusion criteria
were reports of medical, psychiatric and sleep disorders, medication or drug
consumption, alcohol abuse, excessive caffeine consumption or physical
activity, shift work within the three past months, and transmeridian travel or
disturbances in the sleep-wake cycle within one month before the experiment.

Design and Procedures.

An overview of the study design is illustrated in Fig. 1 of the main text.
Individual times were scheduled according to each volunteer’s preferred sleep
and wake timing. Criteria for such timing preferences included sleep schedules
adopted on free days as assessed by the MCTQ (2) and after interviewing the
subject to ensure that the scheduled timing was as close as possible to the
schedule that he or she would spontaneously adopt. In a second step, the
screened subjects came to the sleep facility for a habituation night. After
this night, they were asked to follow the sleep schedule (± 30 minutes) they
would spontaneously adopt while free from any social and professional
constraints. Target bedtimes and wake times were determined for a sleep
duration of about 8 h (± 30 minutes). To assess the subjects’ compliance to
the selected rest-activity patterns, motor activity of the non-dominant arm
was recorded using actimeters the week prior to the experimental sessions
along with sleep-wake logs. After this week under actimetry recording,
subjects came to the sleep laboratory for 2 consecutive nights. The precise
schedule of each session was individually adapted according to the subject’s
habitual bedtime on the basis of the mean timing of the subject’s sleep
midpoint derived from actimetric data of the preceding week.

Subjects reported to the laboratory 7 hours before habitual lights off on day
1. After the hook-up of the electrodes, they continuously stayed under
controlled conditions in dim light (< 10 lux) in order to avoid the influence
of bright light on circadian rhythmicity parameters (3) and in the aim to
equalize pre-scan conditions between subjects. Subjective sleepiness (Visual
Analogue Scale (VAS) and Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS (4))) and objective
vigilance (a modified version of the PVT (5)) were assessed at hourly
intervals while awake. Furthermore, hourly collected saliva samples were
assayed for melatonin using a direct double-antibody radioimmunoassay
validated by gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy with an analytical at least
detectable dose of 0.65 pg/ml (6). Circadian phase was estimated by the
calculation of the mid-range crossing time of salivary melatonin (7, 8). For
each individual curve, the maximum value and the minimum value was averaged
(mid-range value pg/ml) and taken to determine the mid-range crossing time
(time of day, h) on the abscissa.

Polygraphic data (see below) were recorded during the nights preceding fMRI
sessions. After lights off, subjects were allowed to sleep for 8 hours. Then,
1.5 (morning session) and 10.5 (evening session) hours after wake up of
scheduled sleep timing, they underwent a fMRI session during the practice of
various cognitive tests, including the psychomotor vigilance task on which we
focus here. For half of the subjects, the morning session followed the first
experimental night and the evening session the second night, whereas for the
other half of the volunteers the morning session followed the second
experimental night and the evening session the first night. Subjects were
allowed to leave the facility between the two experimental nights. They stayed
in the laboratory under dim light conditions (<10 lux) for at least 4 hours
before the scanning sessions (see dashed line in Fig. 1). They wore protective
glasses avoiding excessive light input when going to the scanner room.

The order of selected cognitive tasks was counterbalanced across subjects and
sessions. Before the start of the experimental protocol, all subjects
underwent a short habituation scan session in order to familiarize them with
the noise and the body positions associated with the fMRI environment.

~~~
jodrellblank
Here we go again...

People whose only involvement is friendship with the author defending said
author from comment from the peanut gallery and using arguments such as "you
probably don't know anything about this subject", "stop thinking and just
trust the publication", "don't criticise the reviewers, they're smarter than
you. Smarter than you can even imagine. How dare you think you have anything
worth saying?".

And of course, the brilliant: "You're failing therefore I'm looking down on
you, why not stop now?"

This is HN, not a peer reviewed science journal. Comment here is no real
threat anyway, and even if it was a real threat, if the paper is as solid as
you say then it wouldn't be affected anyway. Get down from your high horse and
let discussion happen. Some of us might even _make mistakes_ and _clarify our
understanding_ of some part in the process. (How dare we!)

~~~
pygy
I'm sorry I killed the discussion... and you have a point regarding my
patronizing tone. I should have refrained from replying to specific comments,
but it got on my nerves. Most of these are bordering the "not even wrong"
kind.

The usual behavior towards this kind of ignorance and arrogance is contempt. I
could have kept shut and let people make fools of themselves but, somehow, I
care about this place and the quality of the community, hence my reply.

I probably wouldn't have been as vehement hadn't I known (remotely for most of
them) some of the authors, hence the disclosure, but that's not the point.

The criticism below come from people who, by the fact of their comments,
displayed flagrant ignorance of the subject and of the scientific process, and
imagined they could criticize the paper on a technical ground when they are
clearly incompetent to do so. Hence the link to the original paper and the
information complement ==> "Please read the paper and make your opinion based
on it rather than on a simplified summary".

-

I know of course that there are smart people outside the academic world.
That's why I'm hanging around here. But the Science reviewers are the best
researchers in their fields, and, to get there, you need to be impressively
smart and knowledgeable. I hope you've had or will have the chance to hang
around with people in that "league", they are amazing. Assuming you can
outsmart them at reviewing a paper without having even read it is just dumb.

-

At last, I didn't see the comments here as threats to the paper it is solid,
and so are the people behind it. I wouldn't have written the comment if I had
a single doubt about it. The Cyclotron team routinely publishes papers in the
best journals (Science, Nature, PLOS, PNAS, the Lancet, to name a few).
They're badasses ;-)

~~~
9oliYQjP
You didn't kill the discussion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not
everyone's is necessarily informed. Pointing out that people who only have a
casual, indirect understanding of the material at hand should keep this in
mind when attempting to critique the paper is a perfectly valid, non-elitist,
thing to point out. Quite frankly, even if I were to read the paper, I
probably would not have enough understanding to make an informed opinion on
the subject. I can give a bunch of javadoc class descriptions to a
neurosurgeon. But that doesn't mean that she'll have the prerequisite
knowledge to make sense of it.

We should celebrate our specialties and the amount of narrow and deep
knowledge required to become experts in them instead of having our egos
tripped up because we can't have our intelligence validated in every single
domain.

~~~
pygy
I know a future neurosurgeon who, as a teen, used to code 3D demos in 80386
assembly... Including whipping on his own linear algebra routines, for the fun
of it...

That said, I agree with your point, and thank you for your support.

------
embeddedradical
although this may be true, the study is quite superficial. personally, my
issue with sleep has been that if you leave me alone in a dark room (like in
my bed), i'll come up with all sorts of ideas... also, distractions taper off
as the night progresses, and i'll be like 'k, this feature, then done' - but
then you realize you need another feature but you have all this information in
your head you need to get out -- and the details keep piling in. if you were
to jot down notes, you might as well have coded it and tried it out.... and
then you realize something else you can do. other nights, you go ah, this is
nice, and just know what the next step is and as long as it's somewhat
concrete, it's easy to sleep knowing you'll do it tomorrow.

generally, i find it easier to sleep if i've hit one of these plateaus, or if
i'm stuck, or if there's too many options of where to go from here; the answer
will be clearer tomorrow. It's when the answer is -almost- clear, just need to
try out a few things, that sleeping feels like trying to swim upstream.

i've tried to 'fix' my sleep so many times in life now, by which i mean be
consistent - and so far, no success. nothing too bad has happened to me,
either -- if i don't get enough sleep i know i'm sub-par but i feel capable of
at least being 'average' until i get home and get more sleep the next night.
on the other hand, i've taken vacation simply because i know if i don't solve
this ranking algorithm, i'm going to go insane - so i took three days off
(wed-fri, so i got weekend too), and worked through the day and night,
sleeping as fit until it was all good, and that itch in my head was resolved.

------
fauigerzigerk
I keep wondering what makes researchers doing that kind of work so confident
that they have captured all the relevant variables.

It may well be that being a night owl is not just genetic but acquired by
people who are unusually motivated to stay alert for longer times. Don't we
all know the feeling of not wanting to stop?

~~~
HoneyAndSilicon
Well, in my experience, the _average_ behavioral researcher isn't so much
"confident they have captured all the relevant variables"... as "confident
they have a research paradigm that will yield publishable data." —from a
recovering academic

As for "Don't we all know the feeling of not wanting to stop?"... maybe us on
HN.

But your comment raises a significant issue: those who _do_ readily get into
that "not wanting to stop" place are likely to end up working late _because_
of that engagement (and hence focus).

------
Mistone
working my regular job and doing a side startup has def made me embrace the
night-owl shift. I find that my first hour of night work, say 9-10, is less
productive then I'm able to pick up the pace from 10-1, at that point I have
to go to sleep or I'm wrecked the next day. Ideally, when I'm able to go 100%
on the startup, I would work from 8:30-5:30, come home chill with the fam,
then work 9ish-1ish. that way I get 6 hours sleep, have time to hang with kids
and still put in a solid 12-13 hours. funny that my dream is to be able to
work 13 hours a day, but its really about doing something I love and own, and
the crazy hours are a side result.

~~~
rokhayakebe
If you have a startup and a day job I urge you to secretly work on your
startup as much as you can while at your day job. This is wrong, but gotta do
what you have to do to do what you want to do.

------
awolf
"After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed reduced activity in
brain areas linked to attention span, compared with the night owls."

Yah fine... but this study says nothing about the quality or intensity of the
early birds vs. night owls.

10 hours is a pretty long period of time to stay focused. Instead they should
compare the mental efficiency of the two groups over a two hour period of
focused work.

~~~
pygy
> but this study says nothing about the quality or intensity of the early
> birds vs. night owls.

Yes it does. Sleep length was fixed at 8 hours, and they acquired
polysomnographic recordings of both nights spent at the lab and scored the
sleep quality. ==> No statistical difference.

They controlled most controllable parameters. Read the paper and the
supporting materials.

------
ivankirigin
Intensity and focus matter more than stamina.

The stamina that matters is over the course of months or years.

------
biohacker42
Why does this cheeky crap article have 52 freaking points? Oh sorry I'm
supposed to flag and shut up, not complain.

~~~
Goladus
The research is interesting, despite the crappiness of the article.

------
billswift
The claims in the article, including those specifically attributed to the
researchers, go far beyond anything justifiable by the research. The
"genetics" claim is especially unjustified.

Personally, I can and have slept and worked ANY schedule, as long as I can get
enough sleep. Creative work or intense studying though work best with a split
schedule, where I have two 3-5 hour sleeping shifts, so I am always fairly
fresh.

~~~
pygy
The genetic origin of the variation in circadian phenotypes are well
documented, and have been for a long time.

You can work against your predispositions, but if you remove social
constraints, your natural pattern will quickly re-emerge.

Furthermore, your subjective assessment of your productivity along the day is
not really meaningful in this context.

~~~
Goladus
_Smug early birds take note: Night owls actually have more mental stamina than
those who awaken at the crack of dawn, according to new research.

"It's the late risers who have the advantage, and can outperform the early
birds," said Philippe Peigneux_

He's not actually talking about "performance" in a general, life-applicable
sort of way; rather he is talking about performance at specific mental tasks.
You wouldn't think that from the way the article is written, however.

------
scotch_drinker
Aren't we just comparing apples and oranges here? Is it really that
counterintuitive that people who get up at 5 AM tend to not be terribly
mentally acute at 3 PM? Is it counterintuitive that night owls would be more
mentally acute later in the day?

Let's see a study that measures the mental acuity of extreme morning people at
7AM and the mental acuity of extreme late risers at 2 PM. Better yet, let's
measure mental acuity of the two groups immediately upon waking. Surely that
must be just as significant as the study above.

Studying the mental performance of two groups when one group is seriously
disadvantaged (and if you think people who get up at 5 AM aren't disadvantaged
at 3 PM, I think you're not being honest) isn't particularly note-worthy if
you ask me.

~~~
pygy
The measurements were performed at time points relative to the natural rhythms
of the subjects i.e. respectively 1h30 and 10h30 after waking up according to
their natural rhythms. Have a look the methods and protocol linked above.

~~~
scotch_drinker
That's not what the article says. The article seems to draw its conclusions
entirely on this statement: "After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds
showed reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention span, compared with
the night owls."

I saw from your comments above that measurements were taken at two different
times. However, the article, not the study, is linked prominently on the front
page of HN and that's what I'm taking exception with. I have no doubt that the
study is rigorous and careful but the conclusions drawn and the tone taken by
the author of the article are sketchy at best.

On top of that, as you mention in a previous comment, the study is comparing
what the two groups can do in "their relative evenings". Again, this seems
like apples to oranges to me. Of course morning people are going to be less
effective in their evenings because, well, they are MORNING people.

I guess I would be interested in understanding what we hope to get from a
study like this. The article says people who are extreme in either direction
are genetically predisposed to their own personal direction. If we identify
that one group of people is better than the other based on their genetics,
what does this do for us, long term? That's something I'd be interested in
hearing about.

~~~
pygy
"After 10 hours of being awake" is correct actually.

For the behavioral part of the study, "In their relative evening, late risers
are more alert and can outperform early birds in a reaction time test assuming
they're allowed follow their natural sleep rhythm, whereas there are no such
differences in the morning" would be more accurate.

For the imaging one: "Ten hours after waking up early birds show patterns of
activation similar to those of sleep deprived people (1 night skipped). Late
owls show patterns associated with optimal concentration". The sleep pressure
in EB is also greater as demonstrated by the amount on slow wave sleep in the
first part of the night.

> Of course morning people are going to be less effective in their evenings
> because, well, they are MORNING people.

Not necessarily. In absolute time, it's obvious it will be the case, but why,
beforehand, would it be when you adjust the measurements to the sleep cycle?
At least it's not obvious for me. Read the detailed methods in my post above.
Furthermore, evening people are as performant as early people in their
relative morning. The only difference is in the relative evening where late
types are better.

I'm not sure it has much impact in terms of eugenics. The paper shows that
late people, who tend to be seen as slackers in general, actually perform
better (at some tasks) if they are free to follow their natural rhythm (up at
10+am, go to sleep at 2+ am), which is impossible to do for most of them in
the current socio-proffesionnal environment.

------
jacquesm
The only reasons I can come up with for pulling an all nighter is that a
deadline is near and that it is much more quiet at night. "Increased Mental
Stamina" is a metric I'm not familiar with, is that how many pushups your
brain can do ?

Mind you, I'm one of those 'night owls', but this quote from TFA is very
funny:

"Maintaining their natural schedules, the volunteers spent two consecutive
nights in sleep labs. After 10 hours of being awake, the early birds showed
reduced activity in brain areas linked to attention span, compared with the
night owls. The early risers also felt sleepier and tended to perform tasks
more slowly, compared with the night owls, when their level of alertness was
measured."

So, the night owls get to maintain their natural rhythms and spend their
nights in a sleep lab and so did the early risers ?

But for the night owls that makes the situation totally different than for the
early risers, after all, the early risers are going to be quite tired by that
time and they'd like to sleep, but being in a different environment they can't
or will not sleep as good as they normally would. The nightowls just hang out,
go home and sleep it off...

Or am I missing something here ?

