Study turns the tables on how staying up late affects the brain

Going to bed early is often considered essential for anyone who wants to be at their peak the next day, but a new study has shown that staying up late may be the better option.

The results reveal that those who prefer to stay up late and are more active and alert in the evening appear to perform better on cognitive tests than those who go to bed early and wake up early in the morning.

According to this study, the prevailing idea that people who don't go to bed until the early hours of the morning struggle to get anything done during the day may need to be reconsidered.

It turns out that staying up late may be good for our brain power, with findings suggesting that those who identify as "night owls" (or evening people, who tend to stay up late at night) could be smarter than those who go to bed early.

Researchers led by academics at Imperial College London studied data from the UK Biobank study of more than 26,000 people who completed tests of intelligence, reasoning, reaction time and memory.

They then examined how participants' sleep duration, quality, and chronotype (which determines what time of day we feel alert and productive) affected brain performance.

They found that those who stayed up late and those who were classified as "average" had "superior cognitive function," while "morning birds" (someone who typically wakes up early in the morning and goes to bed early in the evening) had the lowest scores.

Going to bed late is strongly associated with creative types. However, the study found that sleep duration is important for brain function, with those who get between seven and nine hours of sleep performing better on cognitive tests.

“While understanding and working with your natural sleep tendencies is essential, it is equally important to remember to get enough sleep, not too much or too little. This is crucial to keeping your brain healthy and functioning at its best,” said Dr Raha West, lead author and clinical research fellow in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London.

Professor Daqing Ma, co-lead author of the study and also from the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College, added: “We found that sleep duration has a direct impact on brain function, and we think that proactively managing sleep patterns is really important to enhance and protect the way our brains work.”

Some experts urged caution in interpreting the findings. “Without a detailed picture of what’s happening in the brain, we don’t know whether being a morning or evening person affects memory and thinking, or whether cognitive decline is caused by changes in sleep patterns,” said Jackie Hanley, head of research funding at Alzheimer’s Research UK.