Well, all I can say is that we night people would be a lot more cheerful and well-rested if society would stop waking us up with early afternoon phone calls.
Here's the Reuter's article.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
We night people are smarter than day people. Trust me on this one.
ReplyDeleteRemember when the Simpson family is staying up to catch the Mr. Plow commercial?
ReplyDeleteBart: Dad, who's watching TV at 3:17 AM?
Homer: Alcoholics, the unemployable, angry loners....
Steve, I'm in a highly technical field (software, okay, not that technical), and I can't even begin to be serious until afternoon. I work best after about 6pm, and I don't have a chance in Hell of doing anything productive before noon.
ReplyDeleteDoes seem to be more than random. Night People are smarter.
ReplyDeleteNight people do seem to dominate in technical fields. I am a physics grad student at one of the better schools in the country. ~30 people are employed in my group and only 4 are morning people, including myself and the secretary. Among the grad students in my cohort, I am the only morning person. Even when I get to the office (no labs in theory) an hour late, I am usually the first one in.
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I do have much in common with the night people described in the article. I hit puberty a bit earlier than my peers and I was very rebellious, being suspended a handful of times in 8th grade alone. I am not antisocial or impulsive though I am almost socially anhedonic.
Whoops, I was so sure the truth was the opposite that I misread the title and didn't even bother reading the article at first. Oh well. I've known my share of exceptions to this rule, myself included.
ReplyDeleteSteve,
ReplyDeleteI thought hi-achieving uber geeks like yourself would have the sleep patterns described in that book about the habits of effective people. You know, early to bed, early to rise. I mean staying up well past midnight is ok on occasion but you'll never get anything done adopting it as a permanent part of your lifestyle.
Can it be that your glory days are long past? You also might get a health check-up. I've heard the inability to keep a regular sleep pattern is often a sign of some underlying health problem - goes with a symptom cluster of irritability, halitosis and erectile dysfunction.
(I myself find it helpful to leave the tv blaring in the living room if I think I won't be able to sleep. I imagine the tv turns itself off sometime between 3 and 5 am but wouldn't know because I've been asleep for hours by then.)
I think anyone who has ever been in a graduate science program will agree that it's an environment where there are a lot of "night people."
ReplyDeleteI also went through puberty earlier than average and had "behaivoral problems"(ie not fitting into the feminized public school system).
Just checking: everyone here knows 'antisocial' means 'rebellious and not respecting the rights of others' and not 'introverted', right?
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, they've got a word for people who are rebellious but not malevolent. We're oppositional.
What appeals to antisocial people about the night is that fewer people are stirring. It's quiet. It feels like you're alone on a frontier.
ReplyDeleteI hate interruptions and like to think things all the way through. The less cluttered nighttime (when all those restless bounders with which the world is inundated are asleep or passed out in a drunken stupor) is ideal for doing this.
Anonymous at 7/25/2007 9:21AM:
ReplyDelete"the inability to keep a regular sleep pattern"
Who said anything about irregular sleep patterns?
Your comment betrays your morning person status.
Im a night person, if it werent for the demands of the morning person majority I would happily go to bed in the early morning and rise late morning/lunch time. Regularly.