We’ve all heard of night owls. They’re people who are most energetic in the evenings. Early birds, or larks, are the opposite. They’re most energetic in the mornings. New research indicates, however, that there are two more types of “birds”.
Researchers at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences asked 130 people to stay awake for 24 hours. The subjects filled out questionnaires about how awake they felt, their sleep patterns, and how well they had functioned during the previous week.
The results showed that among them were 29 “larks”, who showed higher energy levels at 9 a.m. than at 9 p.m. There were also 44 “owls”, who showed higher energy levels at night. The owls went to bed, on average, two hours later than the larks. Everyone else in the study went to sleep in between the lark and owl bedtimes.
The most interesting finding of the study, however, was that there were two other types of people. One type, represented by 32 people in the study, was lethargic in the mornings and evenings. There was another group of 25 people in the study who reported being energetic both in the morning and at night. The energetic people slept about a half-hour less overall than the other three groups.
This leads us to an important question, posed first by The Atlantic in an article about the findings:
The next big question is, obviously, what bird names to assign these two new groups. Lazy Bird and hummingbird? The albatross and the peregrine falcon? How many of these are already taken by indie bands?
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