If You Prefer Waking, Working at Night..Reconsider!

By: Yassmine ElSayed

CAIRO, March 2 (SEE) - People who prefer to stay up late and wake up well past sunrise now have another reason to change this attitude.

A new study finds that those have different patterns of brain activity compared with "morning larks," and these differences can make life more difficult for them if they're forced to stick to a typical 9-to-5 schedule.

When the researchers scanned the brains of people who were classified as either night owls or morning larks, they found that night owls had lower "brain connectivity" — a measure of how "in sync" different brain regions are with each other — compared with morning larks.

The study which was reported by livescience.com, stated that this lower brain connectivity in night owls was linked with poorer attention, slower reaction times and increased sleepiness throughout the hours of a typical workday, the researchers said.

The findings suggest a possible reason why night owls may have problems with attention and sleepiness when they try to conform to a typical 9-to-5 schedule — something that doesn't match their internal clock, the researchers said.

"This mismatch between a person's biological time and social time — which most of us have experienced in the form of jet lag — is a common issue for night owls trying to follow a normal working day," study lead author Elise Facer-Childs, of the Monash Institute for Cognitive and Clinical Neurosciences in Melbourne, Australia, said in a statement.

"Our study is the first to show a potential intrinsic neuronal mechanism behind why 'night owls' may face cognitive disadvantages when being forced to fit into these constraints," said Facer-Childs, who conducted the work while a researcher at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Human Brain Health in the United Kingdom.

The researchers note that they only found an association between reduced brain connectivity in night owls and worse task performance, and cannot prove that reduced brain connectivity actually caused worse performance on these tasks.