Context and correction: This edited version preserves the 2016 essay’s affection for nighttime and its author credit, while correcting its scientific conclusions within the text. The sleep figures below have been checked against the 2009 paper. They are group averages, not a test of your intelligence or a reason to cut short your sleep. Added editorial guidance is distinguished from the source essay.
There’s an electricity in the moon. A pulse, a magic, an energy. A bewitching entrancement unlike that of the sun.
The moon is for things unseen, things done in the shadows and beneath the fog. Under bridges and beneath bed sheets — it’s for wild hearts and unconcerned minds. It’s where plans are made in dark alleyways and secrets revealed under the soft haze of light coming through the cracks of closed shutters.
In the essay’s romantic picture of the night, it is when restless people leave familiar places, young people test their independence, and lonely people look for comfort. Real nights can also be ordinary and peaceful: a conversation at the kitchen table, a favorite record, or a book you finally have time to open.
It’s when we fall in love — that passionate, all-consuming, purposeful love that always looks a little different in the light of day.
It’s by night that we see our true desires. We reflect on our moments of unhappiness and those yearnings that are momentarily blinded by the sun. It’s when we become poets and philosophers, martyrs and murderers.
It’s when we form regrets of days past and that profound hatred for those who hurt us. It’s when we choke on our tears through deep sobs that can only pour onto dark pillowcases.
The night is for passion. It’s for fanaticism, romance and trouble. It’s when your most tender, authentic and suppressed sides come out to play under the nonjudgmental eyes of the stars.
It’s for all those things you could never dream of doing by day, under the watchful eyes of the sun.
Enjoying the night does not establish greater intelligence than someone who prefers an early bedtime. The moon’s energy belongs to the imagery of this essay, not to a measured explanation of creativity. What feels freeing may simply be the opportunity to spend time on something you care about, away from the demands that fill your own day.
Early sleepers can experience reflection, emotion, and creative satisfaction too. The contrast here is between different personal routines, not between people with rich inner lives and people without them. A quiet morning may offer someone else the same welcome space that a late evening offers you.
According to “Psychology Today,” later sleep timing was associated with higher earlier test scores in the research it discussed. That is a report about averages across participants, not a finding that every late sleeper is smarter than every early sleeper.
In “Study Magazine,” that association became a much broader story about intelligence and lifestyle. The original paper was by Satoshi Kanazawa and Kaja Perina, published in 2009. Its age and observational design matter when interpreting a headline that sounds like timeless advice.
The authors proposed an evolutionary explanation involving the novelty of nocturnal activity. That proposal is a hypothesis offered to interpret their findings, rather than a direct observation of ancient people’s intelligence or a complete history of human nighttime activity.
It therefore does not follow that an “average brain” obeys convention while an inquisitive brain defies it. Consider two friends with the same evening preference: one must start work early, while the other has a flexible schedule. Their observed bedtimes could differ without telling you who is more curious.
The feeling of choosing your own hours can still be satisfying. It is worth describing that feeling directly instead of turning it into an unconscious test of independence or a ranking of people who organize their lives differently.
The following three groups were quoted in the earlier feature. Their times match the original paper after correcting the first weekend wake-up time from pm to am; the original analysis also included two intermediate score groups.
Reported average bedtimes and wake-up times, not recommended schedules. Participants were aged 18–28 when sleep habits were collected. The scores came from an earlier vocabulary-based measure standardized to an IQ scale.
Reported score below 75
Weekday: 11:41 pm -7:20 am
Weekend: 12:35 am–10:09 am
Reported score between 90 and 110
Weekday: 12:10 am -7:32 am
Weekend: 1:13 am -10:14 am
Reported score above 125
Weekday: 12:29 am -7:52 am
Weekend: 1:44 am -11:07 am
The quoted weekday bedtimes at the two ends are 11:41 pm and 12:29 am, a difference of 48 minutes. The earlier prose rounded them inconsistently. These averages cannot be used to identify an individual’s score from their bedtime, and the table gives no reason to move your bedtime to a supposedly smarter hour.
For a reader who enjoys late evenings, the appeal is easy to recognize: the messages slow down, the room becomes quiet, and a personal project finally gets attention. That is an experience worth celebrating without asking the data to prove that nighttime is the only real time for living.
Reflection can happen after dark, on a morning walk, or during a lunch break. The useful part is making room to notice what the day has brought and what you want to do next. Night is one possible setting for that habit, not a requirement for it.
There is something appealing about an unclaimed hour. But fighting sleep simply to keep that hour is a different choice from arranging a later routine that still allows enough rest. The romantic mood of this essay should not turn tiredness into a badge of intelligence or commitment.
They Get Time To Daydream
All those dreams you can’t have during the day, when you’re snapped out of them by friends, family and work, are finally given time to run around.
Free to play in the open spaces of your mind, you can return to thoughts you set aside behind a desk or a mound of paperwork. For some writers, this feels like their most creative part of the day. That personal description leaves room for someone else to find the same freedom in the morning.
It’s by the nightfall that your most uninhibited and passionate sides are explored. It’s the time to unleash your innermost desires and allow yourself the freedom that’s masked behind the taunting exposure of sunlight.
A quiet evening can be a time to try a new idea: sketch a scene, practice an instrument, or write the first paragraph of something you have been putting off. Testing your creative range does not require breaking a rule or ignoring a sensible boundary.
It can be a time to explore thoughts that were crowded out earlier. Keep a notebook if that suits you, and revisit an idea when you feel rested. The opportunity for self-expression is the point; it is not a special ability that becomes available only after sunset.
A Feeling of Independence
Staying up late can feel like claiming a little independence from a busy schedule. Yet it is not inherently rebellious: for many people, working at night is an obligation. A romantic description of choosing your own hours should leave space for those very different circumstances.
In the academic paper, “Why night owls are more intelligent,” published in Personality and Individual Differences, the proposed explanation concerns evolutionary novelty. The title makes a strong claim, but neither a paper’s title nor the surrounding essay turns that explanation into a rule for judging a person you meet.
The authors’ hypothesis uses the phrase “acquire and espouse evolutionarily novel values and preferences than less intelligent individuals.” This quotation describes their proposed relationship between intelligence and preferences; it is not a demonstrated personality profile of every person who stays up late.
Inventing something, leading a group, or challenging an assumption calls for actions that can be examined on their own. A bedtime is not evidence that someone has done those things. If the feeling of independence helps you begin a worthwhile project, the project itself is the interesting story.
Curiosity can show up in a question you keep pursuing or an unfamiliar subject you decide to study. Those are more concrete examples than assuming curiosity from the time shown on a clock. They also give this essay’s enthusiasm somewhere useful to go.
An evening project might be a small experiment: try a new drawing technique, compare two explanations of a puzzle, or work through a piece of music. None requires proving that early sleepers are less adventurous. Enjoying your own routine does not need that comparison.
Room for Different Experiences
The essay imagines the night as a world of possibilities outside everyday routines. That is a literary mood, not a description of everyone who is awake. The same city also contains night-shift workers, caregivers, travelers, and people simply getting home.
Bars, rehearsal rooms, and late performances can create opportunities to meet people and hear new ideas. Poets and musicians may enjoy that atmosphere. The earlier reference to Esquire and sexual activity, however, does not establish a general connection between late hours, intelligence, and a healthy sex life.
The 2016 story also mentioned sex-toy purchases and later bedtimes. It did not supply enough methodological detail here to evaluate that comparison. Purchases, relationship satisfaction, and sexual activity are different measures; one should not stand in for the others or become a score for open-mindedness.
A sex-shop worker’s belief about intelligence and openness appeared in the 2016 account as an anecdote. An individual’s impression can be part of a story, but it is not a study establishing those links. There is no need to use it to make assumptions about readers or their relationships.
A new conversation or an unfamiliar performance can make an evening memorable. Someone else may find a similar sense of discovery at a daytime class or a morning market. What matters in this part of the essay is being receptive to an experience, not claiming exclusive access to it after dark.
Making Time Count
The early bird may get the worm, but the night owl gets the whole jar. While the early risers may get up to see the first worm crawl its way to the wet surface, the night owl gets to them before they burrow under.
Getting up early and staying up late can both create room for something important, depending on the rest of the schedule. Staying awake does not create additional hours in the day. The useful question is which hour you can protect without taking it from sleep you need.
A night owl may finish a task in the evening that a morning person prefers to tackle after waking. Instead of ranking those choices, identify a modest goal for your available time. Finishing one page, one practice session, or one planned task is more concrete than trying to win an imaginary race between routines.
Because at night, there is dawn and a new day in front of you. But by morning, there’s just the bleakness of night and the daunting end of another day.
by Lauren Martin
Source: Elite Daily via Idealist4ever
Related:
- Social Anxiety, Intelligence and Empathy: Why the Claims Need Care
- People Who Talk To Themselves Aren’t Crazy, They’re Actually Geniuses
- 10 Traits Of A Person With High Emotional Intelligence
- 11 Traits Of People With High Emotional Intelligence
- These Are 15 Things People With High Emotional Intelligence Do
- Emotional Intelligence: Is It More Important than your IQ?
- Are You Emotionally Intelligent? Find Out Your EQ
- The 9 Types of Multiple Intelligences - Which "Smart" Are You?
- What's Your Dominant Intelligence?
- Is Your Brain Logical Or Creative?
- A Brain-Age Quiz and What Its Score Cannot Establish
- How Much Common Sense Do You Have?
- 10 Things That Have a Damaging Effect on the Brain
- Here's What Happens To Your Brain When You Nap
- Six Unhelpful Thought Patterns and Ways to Question Them
- Are You Thinking Powerfully?
- Sapiosexuality: Why Some of Us are Attracted Purely by Intelligence (backed by science, of course)
- From Darwin To Einstein: How Did Brilliant Minds Spend Their Everyday Lives?
- The 10 Most Famous Personalities Of The Last 6,000 Years
- Socrates Was One Of The Smartest People Ever Lived. Here Are 24 Out Of His Most Important Quotes That Everyone Needs To Read
- Your country's average IQ (and more rankings you didn't know)
A preference is not a test result
When someone says they work better at night, they are describing their experience. That statement does not measure IQ or establish how they compare with everyone who prefers mornings. Likewise, an anecdote about a famous person's routine cannot tell us what routine will suit another person.
What a research headline needs to explain
If a study reports a relationship between sleep timing and a cognitive test, look beyond the headline. Who took part? How was sleep measured? Which test did they complete? Were the results about group averages or predictions for individuals? Those questions determine what the study can actually support.
A further question is whether researchers observed existing habits or experimentally changed them. An association between two measurements does not, by itself, show that deliberately changing one will improve the other. “People with this preference scored differently” and “staying awake makes you smarter” are different claims.
Sleeping later and sleeping less are different choices
A person who goes to bed late and wakes late may have a different routine from someone who stays up late before an early shift. Treating both as the same habit hides a crucial distinction: how much sleep they actually get.
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute explains that sleep supports healthy brain function and that inadequate sleep can affect thinking, learning, reactions and work. That is a stronger reason to protect rest than to sacrifice it for a flattering headline.
A more useful question for your own routine
Instead of asking which bedtime looks smartest, ask when your obligations allow you to rest and when you tend to do your best work. An informal record of sleep and daytime alertness may give you a clearer description to discuss if you need help. It is not a cognitive test and should not be used to diagnose a sleep problem.
Morning and evening preferences do not need a winner. A routine that fits your responsibilities and leaves room for sufficient rest is more meaningful than an identity built around being awake when other people are asleep.
If the issue is repetitive worry rather than a preference for late hours, explore 10 Overthinking Habits to Notice Without Judging Yourself.
Source check: what the original research actually measured
The 2009 paper by Kanazawa and Perina used Add Health data and self-reported sleep times. Its labels “weekdays” and “weekends” distinguish days with scheduled obligations from days without a required wake-up time. In the adjusted analysis, the association with weekend wake-up time was not statistically significant. These details narrow what the familiar table can support.
Try a small routine experiment
Choose a task you already want to do, such as reading or practicing a skill. On days when your responsibilities permit it, notice whether a quiet morning or evening feels easier. Record what you completed and how rested you felt, rather than treating the clock as a score. If the later session only works by cutting your sleep short, that is an important difference to record—not proof that you need to push harder.
A truly beautiful post.
ReplyDelete