Does how late you stay up say anything about your intelligence? That’s what Satoshi Kanazawa set out to find out with his study, which compares current adult sleep habits with their childhood IQ. The results were rather surprising (follow the link for the full article and more graphs).
An analysis of a large representative sample of young Americans confirms this prediction. Net of a large number of social and demographic factors, more intelligent children grow up to be more nocturnal as adults than less intelligent children. Compared to their less intelligent counterparts, more intelligent individuals go do bed later on weeknights (when they have to get up at a certain time the next day) and on weekend (when they don’t), and they wake up later on weekdays (but not on weekend, for which the positive effect of childhood intelligence on adult nocturnality is not statistically significant). For example, those with childhood IQ of less than 75 (“very dull”) go to bed around 23:41 on weeknight in early adulthood, whereas those with childhood IQ of over 125 (“very bright”) go to bed around 00:29.
The source of this information is not cited anywhere. I’d love to have this kind of excuse for why i don’t ever go to bed early, though!
May 17th, 2010 9:56 am
I’m guessing the person that did grammar and typo checking for that blurb above went to bed early then
May 18th, 2010 2:27 pm
ha, i didn’t read it quite that carefully (mostly looked at the graphs), but there is definitely some questionable grammar there!