Early to bed, early to rise might not make you all that wise........

......neither has it made me any more healthier, but I guess that has more to do with my eating habits and not my sleeping patterns. And if a Mullah Nasruddin tale is anything to go by, fat chance it will make you any wealthier.

There are loads of versions of the same story. Early to bed early to rise, early bird gets the worm, and so on. Aristotle and Benjamin Franklin were supporters of the practice. Religion too advocates it. But Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist at London School of Economics, suggests sleeping and waking up early is the practice of idiots. Well those aren't exactly his words. His theory goes something like this:

     "....the Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis suggests that less intelligent individuals have greater difficulty than more intelligent people with comprehending and dealing with evolutionarily novel entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment.  In contrast, general intelligence does not affect individuals’ ability to comprehend and deal with evolutionarily familiar entities and situations that existed in the ancestral environment."

It is this theory he applies to human sleeping patterns. His whole article is here. My understanding of it is below.

Artificial lighting in general is only a recent discovery. Night time before the invention of artificial light wasn't the best for mankind. The human eye does not see well in limited light, therefore our ancestors refrained from nocturnal activity. They preferred staying groups and away from wildlife. None ventured out at night for the fear of getting mauled by a tiger. Which is why man worked from sunrise to sunset, and did nothing at night. Except the Danes and the Finns. They were usually up practicing a socially accepted tradition called 'premarital sex'. Refraining from nocturnal activity is therefore what Kanazawa refers to as 'ancestral practices'.

And staying up late is what he describes as an 'evolutionary novelty'. Those ancestral conditions do not exist now. Fire, the light bulb and electricity are all now part of our lives. We have killed all the tigers and the ones that survive are caged and have gone mad. This negates the need of not doing anything at night. As Kanazawa puts it, nocturnal humans have adapted to changes in their environment, and therefore predicts intelligent individuals are more likely to stay up late than less intelligent individuals.

I'd love to justify staying up late night and making up the lost sleep during the day. But the truth is brains do work better early in the morning. Plus most of what he bases his theory on doesn't really sound right. What suits you guys better? Early mornings or late nights?????

Link List:

1. Are Night Owls more Intelligent than Morning Larks.

2. The Savanna Principle