People with nothing but their own anecdotal experience about the subject trying to (and failing at) criticizing a scientific paper. No one has pulled off a "correlation != causation", but most other usual suspects are already there.
Disclaimer: 1) I work in neuroscience , but not in sleep research. This (hopefully) makes me qualified to assess the seriousness of the methods, even though I don't have much background in circadian rhythms. 2) I'm biased in this case since I know personally the first author of the paper and some of the other researchers involved (and they are among the smartest and more conscientious people that I know of).
If there were any methodology error lay people would be able to spot in the paper, it wouldn't have been published in any respected journal in the field (and most people who commented here are lay people regarding (sleep) science). This is Science Magazine... They have the best reviewers in the world ("best" as in "smarter than you can probably imagine").
There are shortcomings inherent to this kind of study, of course. You cannot control experimental parameters like you can in physics or chemistry. That's why you have to 1) build your research on solid ground (i.e. solid results already published and reproduced) and 2) be as careful as possible in designing your protocol in order to have your bases covered. Schmidt et al. used the gold standard, they're frankly out of reach of such "low hanging" criticism.
</rant>
I enjoin you to have a look at the paper and the supporting material.
[Ethical committee disclaimer]. [All subjects] were screened for morningness or
eveningness according to their timing preferences as defined by two questionnaires
(MEQ (1) and MCTQ (2)). The two groups were matched according to age, sex and
educational level and did not differ in their anxiety and depression levels as well as in
sleep quality and day time sleepiness (all ps > 0.1; Table S1). Morning and evening
types significantly differed in their scores on the two chronotype questionnaires
(MEQ and MCTQ). Exclusion criteria were reports of medical, psychiatric and sleep
disorders, medication or drug consumption, alcohol abuse, excessive caffeine
consumption or physical activity, shift work within the three past months, and
transmeridian travel or disturbances in the sleep-wake cycle within one month before
the experiment.
Design and Procedures.
An overview of the study design is illustrated in Fig. 1 of the main text. Individual
times were scheduled according to each volunteer’s preferred sleep and wake timing.
Criteria for such timing preferences included sleep schedules adopted on free days as
assessed by the MCTQ (2) and after interviewing the subject to ensure that the
scheduled timing was as close as possible to the schedule that he or she would
spontaneously adopt. In a second step, the screened subjects came to the sleep facility
for a habituation night. After this night, they were asked to follow the sleep schedule
(± 30 minutes) they would spontaneously adopt while free from any social and
professional constraints. Target bedtimes and wake times were determined for a sleep
duration of about 8 h (± 30 minutes). To assess the subjects’ compliance to the
selected rest-activity patterns, motor activity of the non-dominant arm was recorded
using actimeters the week prior to the experimental sessions along with sleep-wake
logs. After this week under actimetry recording, subjects came to the sleep laboratory
for 2 consecutive nights. The precise schedule of each session was individually
adapted according to the subject’s habitual bedtime on the basis of the mean timing of
the subject’s sleep midpoint derived from actimetric data of the preceding week.
Subjects reported to the laboratory 7 hours before habitual lights off on day 1. After
the hook-up of the electrodes, they continuously stayed under controlled conditions in
dim light (< 10 lux) in order to avoid the influence of bright light on circadian
rhythmicity parameters (3) and in the aim to equalize pre-scan conditions between
subjects. Subjective sleepiness (Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Karolinska
Sleepiness Scale (KSS (4))) and objective vigilance (a modified version of the PVT
(5)) were assessed at hourly intervals while awake. Furthermore, hourly collected
saliva samples were assayed for melatonin using a direct double-antibody
radioimmunoassay validated by gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy with an
analytical at least detectable dose of 0.65 pg/ml (6). Circadian phase was estimated
by the calculation of the mid-range crossing time of salivary melatonin (7, 8). For
each individual curve, the maximum value and the minimum value was averaged
(mid-range value pg/ml) and taken to determine the mid-range crossing time (time of
day, h) on the abscissa.
Polygraphic data (see below) were recorded during the nights preceding fMRI
sessions. After lights off, subjects were allowed to sleep for 8 hours. Then, 1.5
(morning session) and 10.5 (evening session) hours after wake up of scheduled sleep
timing, they underwent a fMRI session during the practice of various cognitive tests,
including the psychomotor vigilance task on which we focus here. For half of the
subjects, the morning session followed the first experimental night and the evening
session the second night, whereas for the other half of the volunteers the morning
session followed the second experimental night and the evening session the first night.
Subjects were allowed to leave the facility between the two experimental nights. They
stayed in the laboratory under dim light conditions (<10 lux) for at least 4 hours
before the scanning sessions (see dashed line in Fig. 1). They wore protective glasses
avoiding excessive light input when going to the scanner room.
The order of selected cognitive tasks was counterbalanced across subjects and
sessions. Before the start of the experimental protocol, all subjects underwent a short
habituation scan session in order to familiarize them with the noise and the body
positions associated with the fMRI environment.
People whose only involvement is friendship with the author defending said author from comment from the peanut gallery and using arguments such as "you probably don't know anything about this subject", "stop thinking and just trust the publication", "don't criticise the reviewers, they're smarter than you. Smarter than you can even imagine. How dare you think you have anything worth saying?".
And of course, the brilliant: "You're failing therefore I'm looking down on you, why not stop now?"
This is HN, not a peer reviewed science journal. Comment here is no real threat anyway, and even if it was a real threat, if the paper is as solid as you say then it wouldn't be affected anyway. Get down from your high horse and let discussion happen. Some of us might even make mistakes and clarify our understanding of some part in the process. (How dare we!)
I'm sorry I killed the discussion... and you have a point regarding my patronizing tone. I should have refrained from replying to specific comments, but it got on my nerves. Most of these are bordering the "not even wrong" kind.
The usual behavior towards this kind of ignorance and arrogance is contempt. I could have kept shut and let people make fools of themselves but, somehow, I care about this place and the quality of the community, hence my reply.
I probably wouldn't have been as vehement hadn't I known (remotely for most of them) some of the authors, hence the disclosure, but that's not the point.
The criticism below come from people who, by the fact of their comments, displayed flagrant ignorance of the subject and of the scientific process, and imagined they could criticize the paper on a technical ground when they are clearly incompetent to do so. Hence the link to the original paper and the information complement ==> "Please read the paper and make your opinion based on it rather than on a simplified summary".
-
I know of course that there are smart people outside the academic world. That's why I'm hanging around here. But the Science reviewers are the best researchers in their fields, and, to get there, you need to be impressively smart and knowledgeable. I hope you've had or will have the chance to hang around with people in that "league", they are amazing. Assuming you can outsmart them at reviewing a paper without having even read it is just dumb.
-
At last, I didn't see the comments here as threats to the paper it is solid, and so are the people behind it. I wouldn't have written the comment if I had a single doubt about it. The Cyclotron team routinely publishes papers in the best journals (Science, Nature, PLOS, PNAS, the Lancet, to name a few). They're badasses ;-)
You didn't kill the discussion. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, but not everyone's is necessarily informed. Pointing out that people who only have a casual, indirect understanding of the material at hand should keep this in mind when attempting to critique the paper is a perfectly valid, non-elitist, thing to point out. Quite frankly, even if I were to read the paper, I probably would not have enough understanding to make an informed opinion on the subject. I can give a bunch of javadoc class descriptions to a neurosurgeon. But that doesn't mean that she'll have the prerequisite knowledge to make sense of it.
We should celebrate our specialties and the amount of narrow and deep knowledge required to become experts in them instead of having our egos tripped up because we can't have our intelligence validated in every single domain.
I know a future neurosurgeon who, as a teen, used to code 3D demos in 80386 assembly... Including whipping on his own linear algebra routines, for the fun of it...
That said, I agree with your point, and thank you for your support.
It's an inflammatory article. The opening sentence is blatantly antagonizing. It makes a broad generalization about what "mental stamina" means and presumes it is an unqualified Good Thing. There are days when I accomplish more mental work between the hours of 7 and 9 than the entire rest of the day. Sure, late in the day I run out of steam, but I don't really care.
The actual results of the test are not nearly so offensive to the "smug early birds" as you might think. The study controls for caffeine and physical activity, among many other things. There's a gap between what the study actually was testing, and the everyday semantics of the terms "early bird" and "night owl" which is glossed over by the article.
"In their relative evening, late risers are more alert and can outperform early birds in a reaction time test assuming they're allowed follow their natural sleep rhythm, whereas there are no such differences in the morning" would be a more accurate title...
The paper also gives insights relative to the neural processes involved.
Some do, some don't. Most people go back to their natural patterns during the holidays, though. The classification is based on forms asking questions in a context of freedom from external constraints.
I'm not very familiar with sleep research, but I'd guess that both types will underperform if their natural penchant is disturbed (by work hours, for example).
Edit: Here is the actual screening form (in French) used for the studies: http://www2.ulg.ac.be/crc/in/CIRCADIEN_ONLYweb.html ... Adapted from: Horne, J. A. and O. Ostberg (1976). "A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness-eveningness in human circadian rhythms." Int J Chronobiol 4(2): 97-110.
Extreme early and late subject are further "diagnosed" with more exhaustive tests.
I do want to make it clear I wasn't trying to attack the study so much as explain why people get upset and respond to something like this with anecdotal comments.
I'm not sure where your perceived disconnect between mental stamina and running out of steam is. (Additionally, could you say how mental stamina is a bad thing, ceteris paribus?)
Could you elaborate on your definitions for "early bird" and "night owl"? My everyday semantics align with the article.
My comment was mainly to point out the lack of context, and could have been clearer. But mental stamina may not be a good thing emotionally, that isn't really explored. The term mental stamina is fine, since that's what the study was about, but the first paragraph over-emphasizes the value judgment in order to antagonize and stimulate argument. So with an article like that, don't expect the responses to be intellectual.
Could you elaborate on your definitions for "early bird" and "night owl"? My everyday semantics align with the article.
An early bird, to me, is someone who likes getting up early and usually does. An early bird, according to the study, is someone whose natural circadian rhythm is shifted earlier in the day. A night owl, to me, is someone who regularly stays up late. According to the study, it's someone whose natural circadian rhythm is shifted later in the day.
In everyday use, night owls include people who stay up late and sleep late because they like getting hammered. In everyday use, early birds include people who force themselves out of bed at the crack of dawn with an alarm clock and a cup of coffee. In every day use, the terms apply to people who may spend significant portions of their day engaged in physical activity. None of those people fit the definitions used by the study (as I understand it, anyway)
a lot of the information you just shared is not in the article that was linked.
if had been then I would not have called it to be superficial. I mistakenly assumed with the tone of the article, that it would make as strong of a point that it could, and this article, presented very little information about all these additional constraints and steps you mentioned.
Now knowing about all these additional steps, I'm still left pondering - what if high energy people shifted their sleep patterns? I'm a night owl, and I'm generally a high energy kind of person, but if I was to shift my sleep so that I went to bed earlier and woke up earlier (although tough to pull off for me), maybe my energy would go with me, shifting to earlier in the day.
I think that would make a good follow up study: take those night owls and perhaps the early rises as well, and shift their sleep up and then do all these measurements again to see how it affected them. Did they drop in energy, or did their energy go with them through the transition (giving them time to adjust as well).
They give the name of the main authors (first and last), and the journal in which it has been published in the same paragraph, which is actually amazing in a vulgarization article...
Usually, you can be happy if they named one of the investigators. It's all about "scientists".
That said, it's true that the article itself is light on facts. The fact that the paper had been published in Science was a good hint, though.
I don't think that your "high energy" profile is related to your late profile.
Disrupting the natural sleep tendencies (usually) results in diminished energy. The early vs late type depends on a balance between the day/night light variations, and an internal clock that produces an internal sleep pressure.
I think that early people have an endogenous cycle shorter than 24 hours, and the opposite for the late type.
People with nothing but their own anecdotal experience about the subject trying to (and failing at) criticizing a scientific paper. No one has pulled off a "correlation != causation", but most other usual suspects are already there.
Disclaimer: 1) I work in neuroscience , but not in sleep research. This (hopefully) makes me qualified to assess the seriousness of the methods, even though I don't have much background in circadian rhythms. 2) I'm biased in this case since I know personally the first author of the paper and some of the other researchers involved (and they are among the smartest and more conscientious people that I know of).
If there were any methodology error lay people would be able to spot in the paper, it wouldn't have been published in any respected journal in the field (and most people who commented here are lay people regarding (sleep) science). This is Science Magazine... They have the best reviewers in the world ("best" as in "smarter than you can probably imagine").
There are shortcomings inherent to this kind of study, of course. You cannot control experimental parameters like you can in physics or chemistry. That's why you have to 1) build your research on solid ground (i.e. solid results already published and reproduced) and 2) be as careful as possible in designing your protocol in order to have your bases covered. Schmidt et al. used the gold standard, they're frankly out of reach of such "low hanging" criticism.
</rant>
I enjoin you to have a look at the paper and the supporting material.
_
Full text: http://www.innovatieforganiseren.nl/wp-content/uploads/2009/...
Supporting Online Material: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/data/324/5926/516/DC1/1
_
Here's the beginning of the latter:
_
1. Material and methods
Subjects.
[Ethical committee disclaimer]. [All subjects] were screened for morningness or eveningness according to their timing preferences as defined by two questionnaires (MEQ (1) and MCTQ (2)). The two groups were matched according to age, sex and educational level and did not differ in their anxiety and depression levels as well as in sleep quality and day time sleepiness (all ps > 0.1; Table S1). Morning and evening types significantly differed in their scores on the two chronotype questionnaires (MEQ and MCTQ). Exclusion criteria were reports of medical, psychiatric and sleep disorders, medication or drug consumption, alcohol abuse, excessive caffeine consumption or physical activity, shift work within the three past months, and transmeridian travel or disturbances in the sleep-wake cycle within one month before the experiment.
Design and Procedures.
An overview of the study design is illustrated in Fig. 1 of the main text. Individual times were scheduled according to each volunteer’s preferred sleep and wake timing. Criteria for such timing preferences included sleep schedules adopted on free days as assessed by the MCTQ (2) and after interviewing the subject to ensure that the scheduled timing was as close as possible to the schedule that he or she would spontaneously adopt. In a second step, the screened subjects came to the sleep facility for a habituation night. After this night, they were asked to follow the sleep schedule (± 30 minutes) they would spontaneously adopt while free from any social and professional constraints. Target bedtimes and wake times were determined for a sleep duration of about 8 h (± 30 minutes). To assess the subjects’ compliance to the selected rest-activity patterns, motor activity of the non-dominant arm was recorded using actimeters the week prior to the experimental sessions along with sleep-wake logs. After this week under actimetry recording, subjects came to the sleep laboratory for 2 consecutive nights. The precise schedule of each session was individually adapted according to the subject’s habitual bedtime on the basis of the mean timing of the subject’s sleep midpoint derived from actimetric data of the preceding week.
Subjects reported to the laboratory 7 hours before habitual lights off on day 1. After the hook-up of the electrodes, they continuously stayed under controlled conditions in dim light (< 10 lux) in order to avoid the influence of bright light on circadian rhythmicity parameters (3) and in the aim to equalize pre-scan conditions between subjects. Subjective sleepiness (Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) and Karolinska Sleepiness Scale (KSS (4))) and objective vigilance (a modified version of the PVT (5)) were assessed at hourly intervals while awake. Furthermore, hourly collected saliva samples were assayed for melatonin using a direct double-antibody radioimmunoassay validated by gas chromatography-mass spectroscopy with an analytical at least detectable dose of 0.65 pg/ml (6). Circadian phase was estimated by the calculation of the mid-range crossing time of salivary melatonin (7, 8). For each individual curve, the maximum value and the minimum value was averaged (mid-range value pg/ml) and taken to determine the mid-range crossing time (time of day, h) on the abscissa.
Polygraphic data (see below) were recorded during the nights preceding fMRI sessions. After lights off, subjects were allowed to sleep for 8 hours. Then, 1.5 (morning session) and 10.5 (evening session) hours after wake up of scheduled sleep timing, they underwent a fMRI session during the practice of various cognitive tests, including the psychomotor vigilance task on which we focus here. For half of the subjects, the morning session followed the first experimental night and the evening session the second night, whereas for the other half of the volunteers the morning session followed the second experimental night and the evening session the first night. Subjects were allowed to leave the facility between the two experimental nights. They stayed in the laboratory under dim light conditions (<10 lux) for at least 4 hours before the scanning sessions (see dashed line in Fig. 1). They wore protective glasses avoiding excessive light input when going to the scanner room.
The order of selected cognitive tasks was counterbalanced across subjects and sessions. Before the start of the experimental protocol, all subjects underwent a short habituation scan session in order to familiarize them with the noise and the body positions associated with the fMRI environment.