Ha! Ha freakin’ ha!
I got you now, all you weirdo “early birds”. Ha!
Night Owls Stay Alert Longer than Early Birds
The early bird may get the worm, but the night owl has more stamina, a new study suggests.
The differences come from the interactions between two regions of the brain, including one that is home to the master circadian clock.
(…)
The participants went to a sleep clinic, where they followed their normal sleep schedule. At 1.5 hours after waking up and again at 10.5 hours, they had to perform a task that required sustained attention.
The researchers found no difference in the attention levels of the two groups at 1.5 hours after waking, but the night owls were more focused than the early birds after 10.5 hours spent awake.
The difference was a result of the shift in the balance between the two mechanisms that control alertness: the light-triggered circadian signal and the buildup of the pressure to sleep through the day (called the homeostatic process), the researchers said. As the day wears on and the time since sleep becomes greater, the pressure to sleep mounts; at the same time, the continued daylight triggers the circadian signal that promotes wakefulness.
While researchers had thought that the two systems operated independently, the study found that “the two are always interacting together,” said study co-author Phillipe Peigneux.
I am confused, though, about the differences. Does this mean that the early birds are functioning less than they did at 1.5 hrs? Or does it mean they are functioning the same, but the night owls are functioning more than they did at 1.5hrs? If anyone gets the journal Science, I’d love a copy of that article.
Aha. Found this excerpt on the Science website of the article titled Homeostatic Sleep Pressure and Responses to Sustained Attention in the Suprachiasmatic Area (bolding of text is mine):
Throughout the day, cognitive performance is under the combined influence of circadian processes and homeostatic sleep pressure. Some people perform best in the morning, whereas others are more alert in the evening. These chronotypes provide a unique way to study the effects of sleep-wake regulation on the cerebral mechanisms supporting cognition. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging in extreme chronotypes, we found that maintaining attention in the evening was associated with higher activity in evening than morning chronotypes in a region of the locus coeruleus and in a suprachiasmatic area (SCA) including the circadian master clock. Activity in the SCA decreased with increasing homeostatic sleep pressure. This result shows the direct influence of the homeostatic and circadian interaction on the neural activity underpinning human behavior.