My nocturnally-biased suprachiasmatic nuclei

For at least 20 years now, I’ve known that I’m both happiest, and most productive, with a schedule where I am awake until the wee hours of the morning (between 2 and 4AM), and sleep until roughly the crack of noon. I haven’t been able to achieve that often, and its been more than four years now since I could even vaguely approximate it, but it’s what I naturally tend toward if nothing else is inhibiting or constraining my activity. (These days, even after more than four years on a Daddy schedule, I stupidly tend to still push for the wee hours, despite having to awaken 4 or 5 hours earlier than I would prefer–resulting in a highly caffeinated lifestyle, and a fairly constant feeling of being a bit depleted. And probably explaining why I catch every cold that goes around the day care.)

Well, apparently this might be a sign that I’m one of the creative people.

See, the brain has this thing called the suprachiasmatic nuclei, and depending on how yours is wired, there’s about a four hour spread in how your biological clock synchronizes with the time of day. “Morning people” synch ahead, and people like me synch behind. It seems to be primarily genetic.

Well, recent research has shown that the evening types score significantly higher on test of creative function than morning or “intermediate” people–and that this advantage continues as we age.

Maybe, he said, extrapolating wildly, the reason why you hear about the night owl lifestyles of musicians and writers isn’t because they don’t have things that make them get up–maybe it’s because the pool of successful artists tend to be made up of people who are more creative than average, and that the set of such people is biased heavily in favour of people who are biologically wired to be night owls.

Of course that’s not the only thing research has shown is positive about the night owls and late sleepers. Another study has shown that cortisol–the “stress hormone”–levels peak at around 7AM, and thus people who get up then are open to experiencing more stress and tension than people who sleep later.

Now, if I could just convince society and all the institutions I interact with to shift their schedules a few hours later, and then convince my daughter to sleep past 7AM…