Night Learning is Better!

It is clear that a night owl will enjoy nightlife more than a morning lark. And if they are wise, they've got all the reasons, as a team led by the postgraduate student Martin Sale from the School of Molecular and Biomedical Science at the University of Adelaide has recently discovered: daytime affects your brain's capacity to learn and the human brain stores more information in the evening.

This discovery, pointing to the most efficient moment of the day for learning, could be applied for rehabilitation therapy, maximizing the degree and speed of recovery.

"Our research has several future applications. If the brains of stroke patients can be artificially stimulated to improve learning, they may be able to recover better and faster." said Sale.

The team employed a magnetic coil over the head to turn on nerve activity in the brain and connected it to a hand electrical stimulus. The researchers found that the brain's capacity to control hand movements was heavily connected with the time of the day. They found that the most significant changes occurred when the experiments took place in the evening, as compared with mornings.

"Such time-of-day variations in function are not unusual. Organisms are adapted to the continual change in light and dark during a 24 hour period to avoid predators and to reproduce faster. For example, the petals of many flowers only open during the day, while some organisms only reproduce at night. In humans, these rhythms are governed by a variety of hormones that control many bodily functions." explained Sale.

Still, being a night owl does not bring so many advantages, as this circadian rhythm has been connected to an increased exposure to insomnia, even when the subjects have the opportunity to compensate for their lack of night sleep by prolonging their time in bed to gain more sleep time.

Insomnia represents a sleep disorder characterized by difficulty in falling asleep or staying asleep, waking up too early, poor quality sleep and it affects about 30 % of adults. This sleep impairment affects a person's physical and emotional health, mental and work abilities.

Many researches have linked insomnia to severe health problems like a higher risk of depression, obesity, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.