saving ink

Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably.

Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. And he has data showing that people with higher IQs are more likely to have values and preferences that just didn’t make sense for our ancestors to embrace. One of those is staying up late.

I don’t know about you guys, but I’m feeling very vindicated right now.