Night owls are more creative
Do your best work at night? Take solace as new research suggests that night owls are more likely to be creative thinkers.
Scientists can't yet fully explain why evening types appear to be more creative, but they suggest it could be an adaptation to living outside the norm.
"Being in a situation which diverges from conventional habit, nocturnal types often experience this situation, may encourage the development of a non-conventional spirit and of the ability to find alternative and original solutions," says Professor Marina Giampietro, lead author of a study to be published in the February 2007 issue of the journal Personality and Individual Differences.
The Italian researchers, from the Department of Psychology at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan, studied 120 men and women of varying ages.
A self-report questionnaire evaluated degrees of morning and evening dispositions. In fact, true morning and evening-oriented people are actually rare, since most of us fall somewhere in between.
Once the subjects were categorised into either morning, evening or intermediate types, they underwent three tests designed to measure creative thinking.
During the first activity, test subjects were asked to draw and title a picture based on an image shown by the researchers.
For the second activity, called incomplete shapes, test subjects added lines to create pictures out of straight and curved lines. They then were asked to give their pictures a title.
The final test was similar, only this time the individuals were presented with 30 pairs of vertical lines.
Scientists scored each completed activity on originality, elaboration, fluidity and flexibility factors.
Evening types aced each test based on these criteria, while morning and intermediate type people struggled to get scores over 50.
The researchers also discovered that age didn't curtail creativity.
"Our study supports the notion that creative characteristics persist in aged people," the scientists write.
Night owl? Blame your brain
Hans Van Dongen, associate research professor at the Sleep and Performance Research Center at Washington State University, helped to discover the biological explanation behind morning and evening types.
He and his colleagues found that a small group of brain cells, called suprachiasmatic nuclei, emit signals to the body that synchronise the time of day.
This biological clock runs two hours ahead in morning types and two hours later in evening types.
Morning and evening-oriented people may follow other schedules, due to work, school and other demands, but their preferred schedule is more in sync with this internal clock, which may be partly determined by genetics.
Van Dongen says that the finding about creativity and evening types is "certainly novel, and one I would not have expected on biological grounds".
He suggests that the observed differences in creativity might have to do with the fact that evening people also tend to be more extroverted than morning and intermediate types.
"One could reasonably envision a link between the personality trait of extroversion and the finding of creativity," Van Dongen says.