Morning Person or Night Person? Your Hair Knows…

Okay, so the title of this post may have confused you a bit.  It may sound strange, but researchers have determined that by testing your hair, they can tell whether you’re a morning person or a night person.  This comes from a story found on NationalGeographic.com.   According to the article:

A tiny portion of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus controls the human body clock, and RNA strands—protein-building chains of molecules—process these signals throughout the body in 24-hour cycles.

RNA strands containing the clock genes are found throughout the body—including in white blood cells and the inside of the mouth—but human hair is easiest for scientists to test.

To test this, scientists at the Research Institute for Time Studies at Yamaguchi University in Japan pulled head and beard hairs from four test subjects at three-hour intervals for a full day.  Prior to the hair pulling, the test subjects had reported their preferred daily schedule and then lived that schedule for nine days.    When the researchers tested the genes in each sample of the subjects’ follicles, they found that body-clock gene activity peaked right after a subject had woken up, regardless of whether it was 6 a.m. or 10 a.m.

Click here to read more on this interesting finding at National Geographic’s website.