New Delhi: Dr. Stuart Fogel’s research sheds light on how a person’s daily rhythm and level of activity during waking and sleeping are related to human intelligence. Dr. Fogel is a cognitive neuroscientist, professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Psychology and a researcher at the Royal Institute for Mental Health Research. Previous research indicates that evening types, or “owls,” have greater verbal intelligence, contradicting the adage “the early bird gets the worm.”
Still, “once you account for key factors, including bedtime and age, we found the opposite true, that morning types tend to have better verbal abilities,” says Stuart Fogel, director of the University of Ottawa Sleep Research Laboratory. “This result was surprising to us and indicates that it is far more complex than previously thought.”
By observing biological rhythms and everyday preferences, Fogel’s team was able to determine a person’s chronology—their morning or evening tendencies. The time of day when a person prefers to perform demanding tasks, such as intellectual or physical endeavors, is related to their chronology.
Young people tend to be the “evening type,” but older people and those who are more involved in their daily/nightly routines are probably the “morning type.” Mornings are important for young individuals, especially school-aged children and adolescents, whose schedule is determined by their morning type parents and their routines. It can be harmful to children.”
A lot of school start times are determined not by our chronology but by parents and work schedules, so school-aged kids pay the price because they’re the evening types who tend to work on morning type schedules. are forced to,” Fogel says.
“For example, math and science classes are usually scheduled early in the day because whatever morning tendencies they have will serve them well. But AM is not when they’re on an evening-type trend.” Reasons are at their best. Ultimately, they are deprived because the kind of schedule that is imposed on them is basically fighting against their biological clock every day.”
Volunteers from a wide age range were recruited for the study, and they were rigorously screened to rule out sleep problems and other confounding variables. They equipped volunteers with a monitoring system to measure their activity levels.
According to Fogel, determining the strength of a person’s rhythm—which fuels intelligence—and taking into account their age and actual sleep time is important to understand the findings of this microscopic study.
“Our brains really crave regularity and for us to be optimal in our own rhythms, sticking to that schedule and trying not to get caught up constantly,” Fogel said.
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