Night Owls More Intelligent Than Morning Larks? New Study Suggests People Who Stay Up Late, Rise Late Are More Successful

If you've always been a night owl and have been fed the age-old idiom, "The early bird catches the worm," then know that you now have the perfect rebuttal: Science. Researchers at the University of Madrid have found that night owls are more intelligent and more successful! Consider this: Famous night owls include President Obama, Charles Darwin, Winston Churchill, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Keith Richards and Elvis Presley.

The study followed close to a thousand teenagers and the results were not what most would assume: Night owls out-performed morning birds in a wide array of qualities that have been linked to intelligence, including: inductive reasoning, conceptual thinking and analytical thinking. Now, it should be noted that early risers do best late risers in school, but late risers fair better in the workforce.

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"Evening types tend to be the more extrovert creative types, the poets, artists and inventors, while the morning types are the deducers, as often seen with civil servants and accountants," said Jim Horne, a professor of psychophysiology at Loughborough University, about the night owl study. "They will probably be good at cryptic crosswords, while morning types go for the more logical ones."

"We have looked at morning and evening types and we found that personalities tended to be different. Evening types were more social, more people-oriented. They will probably be good at cryptic crosswords, while morning types go for the more logical ones."

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Why is this the case? According to The Independent, "one theory to explain the extra brain power of night owls is that intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be nocturnal because in ancestral times any activities at night would have been novel and would, therefore, have been more likely to attract people with inquisitive minds."

And if you think this study is an isolated case, think again! Previous research looking into adults found that night owls are brighter, are able to think laterally and have larger mean incomes and were more likely than early birds to have a comfortable home, a non-manual job and access to a car.

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