As a night owl myself, I look at those who are bright and chipper early
in the morning and think “why?” To me, being awake and functioning
before 10am is fairly difficult to comprehend. Even looking back on
my life, I have no idea how I managed to wake up, clean up, and drive
the 30 minutes into the city each day for four years in high school.
Yet others will look at me with puzzlement when I state my usual
bedtime—many of my Nobel Intent contributions have come from
after midnight.

A new study, carried out by a team of Belgian and Swiss researchers
and published in last week’s issue of Science, looked at the underlying cause of what makes one an early bird or
a night owl, and what effects this has on day-to-day life. The
study consisted of 31 participants, 16 morning people, and 15 night
owls—the night owls’ days were shifted an average of four hours
later
than those of the early birds. Each participant was instructed to go about
their lives, sticking to their bedtime/wake routines for a week
before they spent two days in a sleep lab. Once under the more controlled
conditions of the lab, researchers examined the participants’ brains
using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while the subjects
attempted a psychomotor vigilance task—a simple reaction time
test.

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