Listen Up Night Owls – We've Got Great News About Your Intelligence Levels

Are you, like me, a bit of a night owl?

Do you come to life as the world around you settles into a slumber, finding that the quieter hours are the perfect time for your brain to relax?

The world isn’t really built for people like us, and self-declared night owls often have to adjust to the standard waking hours of everybody else. However, according to a new study, there’s one thing us night owls have going for us, and it’s that we tend to have higher cognitive scores. 

Oh yeah. Hoot hoot.

Night owls tend to score better on tests

Researchers at Imperial College London looked at data from over 26,000 people to find out how different aspects of sleep, including durations, patterns and quality, impacted mental sharpness and overall cognitive ability.

They used the extensive UK Biobank Database and analysed information on UK adults who had completed a number of cognitive tests, including  whether people described themselves as a ‘morning person’ or an ‘evening person’, referring to which time of the day they felt more alert and productive.

Imperial College London said: “The study found that sleeping between 7-9 hours a night was optimum for brain function, boosting cognitive functions such as memory, reasoning and speed of processing information.

“By contrast, sleeping for fewer than 7 hours or more than 9 hours had a clearly detrimental effect on brain function.”

They also found that ‘Owls’ — or adults who are naturally more active in the evening — performed better in tests than ‘Larks’, which are adults that perform better in the morning. 

Imperial College London added: “Evening types, or owls, scored about 13.5% higher than morning types in one group and 7.5% higher than morning types in another group.

“Intermediate sleepers – a mixture of both- also did better, scoring around 10.6% and 6.3% higher than morning types in the two groups. These differences were highly significant, meaning they are very unlikely to be due to chance.”

However, before you get too smug, Co-study leader Professor Daqing Ma from the Imperial’s Department of Surgery and Cancer, said: “We’ve found that sleep duration has a direct effect on brain function, and we believe that proactively managing sleep patterns is really important for boosting, and safeguarding, the way our brains work.”

So, getting a good 8 hour sleep is the most important thing overall.