Daily Science Dose

Finally, some scientific evidence that waking up early is just not that good for you.

As a life-long night owl that continues to try and switch her clock around to join the rest of the world on that early morning commute to school, work, or whatever it is we humans do early in the morning, I have to say it’s difficult for me. I find that when I do change my sleep schedule, and start rising at say 8 or 9 in the morning, but the time it rolls around to 11pm, I am falling asleep in my chair. Nothing stops it — caffeine, sugar, slaps to the face.

Not that that is all that strange, right? If I fall asleep at 11 or 12 at night, I will have ample time for 7 to 8 hours of sleep. However, a research team at the University of Liège in Belgium has found that those early risers are less alert later in the day that those that rise late and stay up throughout the night.

Um, duh. I could have told you that without the grant money.

No, but seriously, the experiment is not as simple as I just made it. Actually, what the researchers did was test both early risers and night owls at similar times throughout the day according to how long they have been awake. So testing was a few hours after waking, a few hours after that, and you get the point. And according to the data, the night owls stay more alert later into their day as compared to the early-to-bed-early-to-rise crowd.

Could this be the evidence I need to insist that I really do need to sleep in until 11am?

Unfortunately, it’s a man’s world, and men must be early risers. Because despite the late-risers superior alertness, this whole society seems to value getting an early start to the work day. I know that it all stems from our agrarian roots, but come on, we are not all farmers. What if we as a society just push the start of the work day back a few hours? Could we then evolve over time into a race of super-alert accountants, doctors and nuclear technicians?

Maybe I’ll just move to Spain.

sleep, night owls, early birds, sleep study, University of Liege

Yeah, when you take their cigarettes away…

No, but seriously, it seems that some bad behavior may not be because of crappy parenting — oh, wait. It is because of crappy parenting, namely smoking while pregnant. Some kids have a genetic variant that gets triggered by those prenatal smokes and those kids turn into bad kids.

A new study brought to us by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (a subset of the National Institutes of Health) has shown that exposure to smoke before birth raises the risks for behavioral problems in children and teens. The tobacco affects the monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) gene variant, which is associated with the monoamine oxidase enzyme. This enzyme happens to regulate those nice neurotransmitters like dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin. Something goes wrong in the regulating and well, you got yourself trouble, right here in River City.

And get this, the study shows that the increased risk for bad behavior is different for boys and girls. MAOA has another variant, -L, and if a boy has low MAOA-L activity, he is more likely to have disruptive behavior issues. Quite conversely for a girl — she is more likely to be bad if her MAOA-L is high-activity. The activity levels mean how much or little of the enzyme MAOA is being produced. Also, in girls, it seems that the high-risk girls are prone to reading emotional cues as aggressive, which in turn makes the girls lash back aggressively. And the more mothers smoked, the higher the risks for behavior problems.

The last National Survey on Drug Use and Health (2006-7) showed that 426,000 pregnant women aged 15-44 were current cigarette smokers. I hope those truth ads are helping reduce this number. But then again, if smoking while pregnant produces out-of-control teenage girls, maybe it’s not all bad — Ask Maury.

smoking, drugs, cigarettes, tobacco, prenatal, exposure, smoking while pregnant, monoamine oxidase A, MAOA, gene, enzyme, neurotransmitters, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, serotonin, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health

Or create…paint your room blue.

There really is science all around us. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the color of the room you are in or the background of that website you were just on before hitting this one is a rich study in perception and how we can be cognitively-steered by those primary colors of red and blue.

Maybe Matisse was in a blue studio when he painted this Red Room...

Studies in the past have looked at how color affects human cognition, and for the most part, many studies contradicted each other. And when studies contradict each other, it is difficult to reach a consensus among scientists and more studies are needed. In the case of blue versus red, some studies found that red fostered cognition (or perception) while others showed the opposite. What’s a researcher to do?

Break down cognition into more specific tasks, and then see how red affects them. And that is just what Rui (Juliet) Zhu, a consumer psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada did. She and a helpful grad student (the unsung heroes of science) tested undergrads (the unsung human lab rats of science) on different tasks using different colors as backgrounds on computer screens. Those tasks that involved careful concentration were more accurately completed when the background color was red.

However, more creative tasks, such as coming up with different uses of everyday items, saw better results when the background color was blue.

Wait, how do you judge “creativity”? Well, in the case of Zhu’s study, she put together a panel of students to decide what answers were more creative than other answers.

Zhu thinks the results reflect the different associations conjured by red and blue: Thanks to its connection to stop signs, red ink, and blood, red alerts us to danger and mistakes, signaling the need to be vigilant. Blue, on the other hand, may put people in a more creative mindset because of its more tranquil associations with sea and sky.

The practical implications of the study could be far-ranging, says Kathleen Vohs, a psychologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. For example, the researchers showed that volunteers who viewed two versions of a fake camera ad–one that featured detailed images of the camera’s features and accessories, and one that featured more creative photos (see picture)–rated the first ad more favorably when it appeared on a red background and the second one more favorably when it appeared on a blue background. — Science Magazine

So, wait, all of this research money is just to make advertising more effective? Yes, but no. The findings could be better utilized for color schemes in buildings. You know, interior decor really needs a good strong foundation in science…

Oh, I kid. Kind of. But my next question is…will pink make me only half-concentrate?

Another researcher, who I want to call Zhu’s Professor Wernstrum (for all you Futurama fans), says that though the research is interesting, he wonders if it is the color of the backgrounds on the computers used, or the brightness and saturation of said color that produces the results.

red, blue, color, perception, cognition, human, study, research, creativity, effects of color, interior decor, advertising, Futurama