Early bird or night owl?
What your sleeping behavior reveals about your language talent
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There are morning people and night people. But what does that mean in terms of your language skills? A study recently found how your sleep patterns are related to your verbal skills.
Lark or Owl? Or something in between? People have different daily routines and usually adapt their sleep patterns to these. Still, most people have preferences when it comes to bedtime.
While some people discover their creativity in the evening and concentration suddenly runs at full speed, others prefer the early morning hours to do their thinking work. One thing can be said, however: for many, it is the quiet hours of the day when most people are still – or already – asleep. Because less distraction simply promises better concentration.
Up until now, it has been the case that night owls are the language talents among us
Earlier investigations of the Horne & Ostberg “Morningness-Eveningness-Questionnaire” (abbreviated: MEQ) showed that evening types with lower MEQ scores tend to have better verbal skills. The test works like this: The MEQ scores are used to determine whether the:the participant:in tends to be assigned to the morning type or the evening type or is on the spectrum in between.
For example, a medium to high score of 59 to 69 describes the participant as a moderate morning type, while a low MEQ score of between 16 and 30 means that the person is a definite evening type. The problem with the test: it does not take the age of the participants into account. Though that arguably has a bigger impact on communication skills as well, as Stuart Fogel, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Ottawa, found.
Morning people: growing language talents with age
The new study from the University of Ottawa Sleep Research Laboratory (Gibbings et al., 2022) recently examined how morning versus evening chronotype is related to human intelligence. Age seems to play a significant role in terms of language and writing skills. According to the study, morning people should develop better verbal skills than night owls. That could be one reason why many literary greats like Hemingway and Co. used the early morning hours to put their thoughts on paper.
Younger people, on the other hand, cope better with later bedtimes, which is why their creative phase is more in the evening. After puberty, that changes.
Our brain needs consistency
If you haven’t lost an early bird, don’t worry. Because language and writing skills as well as the ability to concentrate can also be boosted in other ways. Namely with consistency. “The human brain craves regularity,” Fogel said. A regulated daily routine with constant sleeping and waking times stabilizes the sleep-wake cycle, which in turn optimizes the ability to speak.
Sources: Psychology Today, Aaron Gibbings, Laura B. Ray, Dylan Smith, Nicholas van den Berg, Balmeet Toor, Valya Sergeeva, Jeremy Viczko, Adrian M. Owen, Stuart M. Fogel. “Does the Early Bird Really Get the Worm? How Chronotype Relates to Human Intelligence.” Current Research in Behavioral Sciences (First published: September 08, 2022) DOI: 10.1016/j.crbeha.2022.100083