People who are night owls could be sharper than morning people, a new study suggests. Those who are most active and alert in the evenings appear to perform better at cognitive tests. Advertisement Advertisement Sign up to our daily newsletter , get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more.
Researchers, led by academics from Imperial College London, said that various studies have examined sleep and cognitive abilities- in particular the length that someone sleeps – but little is known about sleep patterns, or chronotypes, and cognition. So they examined data on thousands of people taking part in the UK Biobank study to examine the “intricate relationships” between sleep duration, quality and chronotype – categorised in the study as “morningness,” “eveningness” or “intermediate” – where a person did not particularly align to either of the two. People taking part in the study underwent tests which examined their intelligence, reasoning skills, reaction times and memory.
The researchers analysed data on almost 27,000 people, comparing how well they performed on these tests to their self-reported sleep duration, sleep pattern and sleep quality. People who got between seven and nine hours of sleep each night appeared .
