Spring Break
Column: In defense of the night owl
Cameron Johnson / UWire
Issue date: 6/23/08 Section: Opinion
Our night-owl culture is officially under attack. There's no denying it now. The evidence is solid. We can no longer pretend there isn't a problem. Reading, playing on the computer and drinking and smoking all night with friends does in fact have a negative impact on our academic performance. A new scientific finding illustrates unequivocally what we already knew or suspected intuitively: Night owls get lower grades.
Armed with the dull hypothesis, researchers at the University of North Texas split 824 students into two categories: the good (high GPAs) and the bad (low GPAs). In the survey, the good students mostly identified themselves as "morning people." The bad students griped about trouble staying focused and sleep irregularities such as difficulty falling asleep, sleepwalking, restless kicking … and most likely an inordinate fondness for potato chips and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Most of them fell asleep during the survey before they got that far, though.
That's not all. Last week, scientists elsewhere presented yet another attack on our sunlight-challenged, vampire-wannabe brethren.
At the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, politically correct and sensitive researchers presented their findings that "eveningness" was associated with the various sleep irregularities and disorders the bad students complained about in the academics performance study.
All this time, I thought it was a chicken/egg thing. My early morning urges to grab the shotgun when my ears are violated by the foul and discomforting notes of those insidious song birds is in fact a result of my staying up too late and not at all the inherently annoying reality of avian mate-selection itself or some sort of inborn sleep problem.
And still, that's not all. Two articles do not a coordinated attack make. There's more.
Just when I thought all this demagoguery was merely a blip on my media radar, Deepa Ranganathan, writing for the online magazine Slate, had the gall to suggest we can fix this problem. Ranganathan provides a litany of bizarre quackery, which we can embrace in order to realize our hidden inner morning person. He ridiculously suggests things like getting up and walking in the morning, time-management, keeping the lighting to a minimum in the evening, forcing yourself to get up earlier and wearing yellow-tinted glasses in the evening. He even has the nerve to conclude that getting up in the morning has an "allure."
Armed with the dull hypothesis, researchers at the University of North Texas split 824 students into two categories: the good (high GPAs) and the bad (low GPAs). In the survey, the good students mostly identified themselves as "morning people." The bad students griped about trouble staying focused and sleep irregularities such as difficulty falling asleep, sleepwalking, restless kicking … and most likely an inordinate fondness for potato chips and The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Most of them fell asleep during the survey before they got that far, though.
That's not all. Last week, scientists elsewhere presented yet another attack on our sunlight-challenged, vampire-wannabe brethren.
At the annual meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, politically correct and sensitive researchers presented their findings that "eveningness" was associated with the various sleep irregularities and disorders the bad students complained about in the academics performance study.
All this time, I thought it was a chicken/egg thing. My early morning urges to grab the shotgun when my ears are violated by the foul and discomforting notes of those insidious song birds is in fact a result of my staying up too late and not at all the inherently annoying reality of avian mate-selection itself or some sort of inborn sleep problem.
And still, that's not all. Two articles do not a coordinated attack make. There's more.
Just when I thought all this demagoguery was merely a blip on my media radar, Deepa Ranganathan, writing for the online magazine Slate, had the gall to suggest we can fix this problem. Ranganathan provides a litany of bizarre quackery, which we can embrace in order to realize our hidden inner morning person. He ridiculously suggests things like getting up and walking in the morning, time-management, keeping the lighting to a minimum in the evening, forcing yourself to get up earlier and wearing yellow-tinted glasses in the evening. He even has the nerve to conclude that getting up in the morning has an "allure."
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